The Comma

Words to Know

Creed — an official summary of required belief, recited together.

Orthodox — holding the officially correct beliefs.

Doctrine — an official teaching of a church.

This one you can check in about ninety seconds, and I think it is the most damaging single object in the whole history of what was done to me.

Say the creed, whichever one your church uses.

They have names and origins, and you should have them.

One is the Apostles’ Creed, the short one. The apostles did not write it. It grew out of the questions a person was asked at baptism in Rome, and reached the form you recite in about the eighth century.

The other is the Nicene Creed, the long one. That one has a date, a place and a reason. Bishops wrote it at a town called Nicaea in the year 325, at a meeting an emperor called and paid for, and they finished it at a second meeting at Constantinople in 381. I will tell you about that first meeting in the next lesson. ¹

Start either one. It begins with God and creation. Then it gets to me.

It works carefully through my relationship to the Father, using words borrowed from Greek philosophy: of one substance with the Father, begotten not made.

Now, those particular words are in there for a reason, and I am not going to score a cheap point by pretending they are just fog.

A preacher in Egypt named Arius had been teaching that I was made: that God made me first, before everything else, and that there was a time before I existed. In his teaching I was the greatest of all created things, but still created.

His bishop said no. Not made. Of the same stuff as God. Always there.

The whole eastern church fought about it, congregation by congregation, for years.

The creed is what the winning side wrote down so the losing side could not slip through it. Every clause in that section is a door being shut. Begotten, not made is a door shut in one specific man’s face.

So it is perfectly fair to say the creed was never trying to be a summary of my life. It is the peace treaty at the end of one particular argument about what I am made of.

Fine. Now look at what happened to that treaty.

It became the definition of a Christian.

It is what you stand up and recite. It is what a person is asked to affirm in order to be counted in.

An answer to one narrow question about my substance turned into the whole statement of what I am for.

Now read the next lines of the creed.

Then: born of the Virgin Mary.

And then, immediately: suffered under Pontius Pilate.

Between those two lines there is a comma.

My entire life is in that comma.

Every word I said. Every meal. The scales and the sandals and the debts. The square at dawn. The year of the Lord’s favor. The man who went away sad. The widow’s coin. The table with the wrong people at it. My brother. My mother’s song.

All of it — thirty-odd years — is reduced to a punctuation mark between the circumstances of my birth and the name of the official who signed off on my death.

Centuries of argument produced that summary, and it does not contain one thing I taught.

Not a single instruction. Nothing about the poor. Nothing about debt, nothing about the table, nothing about the last being first.

Go and check that against what I actually said. Do not take my word for one line of it.

Go, sell what you have and give it to the poor (Mark 10:21).

Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors (Matthew 6:12).

When you give a dinner, do not invite your friends — invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind (Luke 14:12–14).

The last will be first, and the first last (Matthew 20:16).

Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven — but the one who does the will of my Father (Matthew 7:21).

Now try putting any one of those lines into the creed.

It will not go in. It is not the same kind of sentence. One kind tells you what to believe. The other kind tells you what to do tomorrow morning.

The creed tells you what I was, in philosophical terms. It tells you what happened to me, in legal terms.

It says nothing whatsoever about what I asked people to do.

And there is a reason for that, and it is worse than carelessness.

Think about what a creed is for.

A creed is a test. You hand it to a man, he says yes or no, and you find out which side he is on.

Feeding people does not work as a test. It takes years. You cannot do it in a doorway. Anyone can claim it and nobody can measure it.

A sentence about substance works perfectly. You say it or you do not. It can be checked in ten seconds, by anybody, on the spot — including by a government official who knows nothing about God and cares less.

So the moment the real question became who is in and who is out, the answer had to be something sayable.

And the moment the test of a Christian is a sentence, what I asked people to do is no longer what a Christian is.

By the time that creed was written, what I asked people to do was no longer the point.

Here is the consequence, and it is not small.

You can be a perfectly orthodox Christian. You can believe every line of that creed, with a whole heart, for eighty years — and never once be required to consider anything I actually said.

That is not a flaw in the design. That is the design.

Check It Yourself

Look up: the creed your church says. It is probably printed in the back of the hymnal, or you can find it on your phone in five seconds.

You will find: it goes from my birth straight to my death. Mark with your finger where my life would go.

The Short Version

• The creeds jump from my birth to my death with nothing in between.
• The Nicene Creed was written at Nicaea in 325 to settle one argument — whether I was made or not made — and it does that job well.
• Then that answer to one narrow question became the whole definition of a Christian.
• Not one thing I taught appears in either creed, because a creed has to be sayable in ten seconds and feeding people is not.
• A person can affirm the whole creed and never encounter my teaching.

Think About It

1. If you had to write a one-paragraph summary of my life, what would you put in the middle?
2. Why might a large institution prefer a summary with nothing to do in it?