My Creed Revisited

Some time ago I decided that I would write Franklin's Creed. It was this:

My Creed

The world revealed to the senses is not the whole of the world. The self revealed to the senses is not the whole of the self. The world did not come to be from nothing. Rather it had a cause that stands outside it. The cause is single, not multiple. The cause is God. The self did not come from nothing. It did not come from blind physical processes unwatched and not chosen. Rather the self was made by another and greater self. It was made by God. God wishes that we love both him and one another for eternity. But in our present state this is impossible. We live in a state of spiritual infancy, and our purpose in this life and in the life after is to learn to love perfectly. All are immortal. All will fulfill their purpose. The opportunity for spiritual growth does not end when we die. Rather it persists for so long as we fall short of perfection. Perhaps I will be perfected in this life. Perhaps my perfection will require the life-age of the universe. But no matter how long it takes, it will happen. Christ was perfect love made flesh. He came not to pay a price, but rather to evince love, give hope, and form a body of followers in which love might grow. Scripture is a human record of God's relation to the world of his creation and as such is subject to the very errors that plague all human work. Scripture is not inerrant. Scripture answers in us a felt need for guidance in our moral quest. We know that its ethic of love answers to our most fundamental need. Its sole authority rests in this.

I would like now to make a pair of revisions. The first concerns my talk of spiritual infancy. I suspect that it is inadequate. A few months ago, I had a minor religious experience. In it I became convinced that the whole of creation was radically transformed - ruined I should say - by the Fall. While this does not contradict my prior view that we humans now exist in a state of spiritual infancy - a child, while still a child, may still rebel and do harm both to himself and to those around him - it yet transforms that prior view.

Here is my proposed revision:

We came into the world as spiritual children, and while still children rebelled against God and thus ruined both our perfect, albeit infant, nature and the world in which we live. Both we and the world now bear the unmistakable signs of our rebellion.

Moreover, this revision requires that we rethink the work of Christ. I think now that in my Creed I trivialized that work. Christ was no mere teacher. He was no mere founder of the Church. Rather in a way that as present I only dimly understand, he came so that he might put right the damage we did to ourselves and to the Fall. Christ's work is not merely pedagogical or organizational. It is rather ontological. By His life, and His death, he reaches into the innermost recesses of our being, and the being of the world, and thus effects a transformation that could not be effected in any other way. In the original creed, what I say suggests that Christ could carry out his purpose and yet only act upon us externally. That's wrong. Christ has to, as it were, cut into the soul, remove what's ruined so that what's good might flourish. Christ isn't so much a teacher as a surgeon, or perhaps we should say that he wasn't only a teacher but was a surgeon too.

So, then, a second correction to the Creed is needed.

Christ was perfect love made flesh. He came not to pay a price, but rather to evince love, give hope, and form a body of followers in which love might grow. By his work, and by that work alone, our ruined natures, and the ruined world around us, are made whole again.