I Feel the Need…for Creeds
From this morning’s “Speaking of Faith“, where the subject was “The Need for Creeds.” The story is at 19:54 on the podcast. Jarislov Pelikan has been discussing the importance of creeds for Christianity (who has the greatest abundance of them, over and above Judaism and Islam). He makes reference to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s address to students at the Harvard Divinity School, in which Emerson says “You must be yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Spirit and sing it out.” The problem with this continual creation of new creeds, Pelikan says, is that
You do it and then you do it a little bit more and you have to teach your children something and the best you can do is to teach them what you have. You do that for several generations and all of the sudden, there you have a new creed. The only alternative to tradition is bad tradition.
This got me thinking about how natural it is that the Principles and Purposes of UUism have become creedlike. For a while there’s been a lot of discussion of revising them, re-evaluating how they’re used, and so on. I don’t think the term “creed” has to be scary. Any creed Unitarian Universalists would use as a way of bringing disparate beliefs together would, naturally, be continually under revision. And a creed doesn’t have to be contrary to the foundational idea of covenant. (Historically, they go together.)
Still, against Pelikan’s interpretation of Emerson above, I disagree that continual revision of creeds leads, inevitably, to “bad tradition.” I think that the alternative to a credal religion isn’t a non-credal religion, but instead it is a credal religion unaware of its conflicting creeds. What we need is more explicit theology.
Pelikan makes the point that tolerance under the Golden Age of Islam allowed Maimonides to write his book, A Guide for the Perplexed. While I’m not advocating for a state religion, I do think that it is possible for religious tolerance and freedom of intellectual investigation to occur within a society which largely agrees to a set of core beliefs. Those beliefs simply need to have within them the space for dissent.
Of course, the situation is more complex than a return to some kind of golden age–Islam saw Judaism as monotheistic, so the exploration of thinkers like Maimonides were of the one true god. This was a sort of inclusivism, the kind which Catholics espouse when they talk about “anonymous Christians.” I don’t think that UUs want to go down that route, which ultimately dismisses the reality of any difference between my (true) beliefs and your (anonymously true) beliefs.