Explainer
Belief
Creed
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Hold or cut the golden thread?

There's a ‘mysteriously beautiful’ vision threaded through our world, writes Stephen Cottrell. In an extract from his Dear England book, the Archbishop of York considers the Beatitudes.

Stephen Cottrell

Stephen Cottrell is Primate of England and Archbishop of York. He has authored 20 books.

A CGI render of a grid of golden lines receding into the perspective
The golden thread.
Joshua Sortino on Unsplash.

The heart of Jesus’ teaching is found in the longest teaching passage in the Gospels, it is known as the Sermon on the Mount. 

It begins with a mysteriously beautiful passage known as the Beatitudes. 

Here Jesus sets out a series of maxims that at first sight seem to be his equivalent of the Ten Commandments. Like Moses, the Old Testament prophet who received the latter, when Jesus receives the Beatitudes he has gone up a mountain. 

And like Moses he has a series of short, pithy things to say that will then need a lifetime to work out. 

However, the Beatitudes are not a moral code. They are not things you can either do or not do. They are attitudes to which we can aspire. Rather than describing the moral life, a code by which we can justly live alongside each other in society, they describe what it looks like to 'go the second mile’. They describe what perfect love in action looks like. 

Here they are: 

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. 

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. 

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. 

Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. 

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. 

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. 

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 

I don't propose to spend ages unpacking these. But alongside the Ten Commandments themselves, the Lord's Prayer and the Creed, the Beatitudes have become one of the central documents of the Church. 

Living by them is the work of a lifetime. 

They are the centre of Jesus' teaching. Their meaning, however, isn't always self-evident. Like his stories, they need inhabiting. 

They are very challenging. It isn't easy to be merciful. It isn't easy to make peace. Especially if the likely outcome is the persecution we usually make efforts to avoid. Not that there is anything good about persecution. As we know, mockery and ridicule hurt. How much more hurtful is it to be hunted down because of your witness to peace? Nevertheless, it is witnesses to peace that Jesus is recruiting here. His own life, and everything that he teaches, led this way: to the peace that is beyond the world's understanding and is about a wholeness and totality of giving and receiving love. 

Jesus is inviting us to live with a different set of attitudes. And he does not baulk from acknowledging that these attitudes will bring us into conflict with the carefully protected interests of those who secure power and influence for themselves at the expense of peace. They exchange it for what is little more than a truce. At best, an absence of war, what we live in our jealously guarded siloes and forcibly protect our borders, repelling intruders and stamping on those who even dream differently. 

In our own society, thankfully, we enjoy freedoms of speech and action. This means that we rarely meet with much opposition beyond people's unreflective apathy or polished disdain. But these freedoms we enjoy should not be taken for granted. They have been hard won. They could easily be lost. Especially if we fail to see where they have come from; precisely this realisation of the dignity and worth of every person and our responsibilities to each other that arose through Christ. 

Unfortunately, these things that underpin what is best in our society are not self-evidently the best. We've got so used to them that we easily imagine they are. But actually, we don't observe them in the world around us. Nature, for instance, is not democratic. Nor particularly caring. The weakest usually die first. The fittest survive. Nor is it much different in human communities. Our history - always written by those who win - is one bloody story of conquest after another. 

Empires rise and fall, and there is very little to suggest that there might be another kingdom where a different set of values prevails, and where the king turns out to be the servant of all. But that is precisely the Christian narrative. It is a golden thread running through human history. In every age it can either be held on to, or cut away; left to our own devices, especially when our backs are to the wall, we find that the human compass is usually set towards self-preservation. Our empires and systems are usually designed to keep others out. Or at least in their place, so that they can serve us. In this so-called ‘real world’, shepherds do not go in search of one lost sheep, as Jesus suggested God does, in one of his parables. That would be uneconomic. Like the rest of us, they play a percentages game, and for the sake of the ninety-nine, we accept the loss of the one. The strongest and the wiliest prevail. That's just how it is, we say. If we can help the weak, we will. But if we can't, or if it affects us badly, we won't and we don't. 

This is why the world needs a set of values - and a story - that will save us from ourselves, and our worst instincts. This is why we need a set of values that are rooted in a tradition whose stories and whose very heart are, gloriously, the life and teaching of a person who is himself the revelation of God's love and purposes for the world he made and loves - who even laid down his life to search out those who are lost: the very image of the invisible God. More than that: someone who loves us and knows what it is like to be us, who has experienced from the inside just what it is like to inhabit a divided and compromised world. 

Therefore, the Beatitudes are a set of values and attitudes by which we can inhabit the world differently and through which we can begin to see what matters in the world and what must be done. 

 

Dear England: Finding Hope, Taking Heart and Changing the World is published by Hodder & Stoughton.  

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Explainer
Belief
Creed
4 min read

Seeing the world through different eyes

Can 'dull words' signpost to something beyond? Explore how creeds help imagine life.

Alister McGrath

Alister McGrath retired as Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University in 2022.

A set of low concrere blocks in the shape of a map's viewpoint symbol sit beside a lake.
'Viewpoint': a sculpture near Needs Hill on the north side of Kielder Water.
Oliver Dixon, via Wikimedia Commons.

Why are the Creeds so dull?  To many, they have the intellectual depth and emotional appeal of hastily written shopping lists. Their leaden and impenetrable statements seemed to point to a cold, dead orthodoxy which has nothing to say to a fast-changing world. During my own phase as an atheist, I saw the creeds as top-down authoritarian attempts to trap people within a narrow and restrictive view of the world. I objected to being told what to think; I wanted to find things out for myself. 

My outlook on life changed while I was a student at Oxford University in the early 1970s, as I began to appreciate for the first time the intellectual and imaginative appeal of Christianity. The Creeds themselves had nothing to do with this transition, which came about through conversations with intelligent and reflective Christians. This helped me grasp the vision of what lay at the heart of Christianity – something that could not be reduced to words or slogans, but which gave birth to a new way of living and acting. This seemed to be a million miles away from the arcane declarations of the Creeds. But as time passed, I began to see the Creeds in a new way. Let me explain.

The way we imagine the world – whether socially, morally, politically or religiously – needs to be expressed.

Back in the 1980s, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor introduced his idea of “articulation”. Every attempt to live a good life or develop a viable moral system depends on a set of background assumptions which need to be identified and put into words. “Articulation” is about the “bringing to light of that which is unspoken but presupposed”. Taylor’s point is that we need to put into words the grander vision of reality which shapes the way we think and live, despite the obvious inability of words to do justice or fully express this vision. The way we imagine the world – whether socially, morally, politically or religiously – needs to be expressed; yet that very act of expression both diminishes and restricts that vision, precisely because it is a rich imaginative reality that cannot be reduced to words.

It is this vision of faith which engages, inspires and motivates believers, not its verbal articulation in the Creeds.

The Creeds are thus an articulation of the core vision of faith. (The Apostles’ Creed is thought to have emerged gradually within Christian communities, particularly in Rome, apparently in response to the need for brief personal articulations of faith at baptism.) It is this vision of faith which engages, inspires and motivates believers, not its verbal articulation in the Creeds. If this vision is to be effectively expressed in words, it will use the language of poetry, capable of engaging the imagination and emotions. Perhaps this helps us understand why some of the Church’s best-loved theologians were poets (think of John Donne, or George Herbert). We need verbal articulations of faith, yet too easily misunderstand these as defining the essence of faith when they are actually signposts to its core vision.

Thinking of Creeds in this way allows us to see them as expressing frameworks of exploration and discovery. Rather than presenting us with a set of verbal formulae as “givens”, the Creeds point to a rich landscape that we can explore, identifying its landmarks that deserve our attention. They are like guidebooks, telling us what to look out for – and thus countering our natural tendency to limit ourselves to the familiar by pointing out what we have yet to discover.

Yet the Creeds are not themselves the agents of discovery. If the Christian faith can be compared to a landscape, then its best guides are those who live there, having internalized its features and incorporated them into their lives. There is a necessary and proper synergy between the statements of the Creeds and the personal experiences of Christians. The Creeds map the landscape of faith; yet individual Christian believers are best placed to explain and unpack its features, and the difference that this makes to their lives. The primary witnesses to the vitality of faith are thus ordinary Christians, who can connect the landmarks of faith with their personal journeys of discovery and living out their faith.

At times, those personal narratives may express the excitement of a new way of seeing the world; at others, they may concern how faith enables individuals to cope with uncertainty, trauma, loneliness, and death. The Creeds cannot (and do not) make those connections; they can, however, provide a framework for exploring and understanding how faith changes lives and shapes personal worlds, in dialogue with those who have made those discoveries, and can express them in their own words and ways. The Creeds cannot tell anyone what it means – or feels like – to believe in God. Yet they make room for individual believers to tell their stories, amplifying and embodying the terse and otherwise opaque creedal statements.

The Creeds, at first sight, at least, may indeed be dull – but their significance lies in the landscape to which they point. Far from trying to limit us, they are seeking to expand our vision by pointing to a greater reality that lies behind and beneath them.

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