By Alex Fogleman
I was immediately interested in seeing a new book on the Apostles’ Creed by Trevor Hart. Hart is one of the leading theologians in the conversation on the role of arts and theology. Having taught theology for 30 years, mainly at the University of St. Andrews, where co-founded the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts with Jeremy Begbie, he’s now a Rector of Saint Andrew's Episcopal Church in St Andrews, Scotland.
Many of Hart’s previous writings have focused especially on the role of the imagination. Book titles include: Making Good: Creation, Creativity and Artistry; Theatrical Theology: Explorations in Performing the Faith; Between the Image and the Word: Theological Engagements with Imagination, Language and Literature; Patterns of Promise: Art, Imagination and Christian Hope; Faithful Performances: Enacting Christian Tradition.
He describes his overall project on imagination and the arts as a recognition of the ways in which “the capacities and contributions of human imagining are concentrated identifiably in the practices and products of human artistry, but … that the imaginative dimensions of our humanity range far more widely in ways that are both distinct from and continuous with the artistic and 'creative' imagination.”
The importance of the imagination is often under-appreciated in credal catechesis, but that is precisely the chief contribution of Hart’s book on the Apostles’ Creed. Originating in a series of sermons given during Lent and Easter of 2018, the writing develops the image of the Apostle’s Creed as a “script” for the Christian life—notes for the Christian’s “performance” of the drama of human life. (This is clearer in the book’s original title: Confession as Performance: The Apostles' Creed and the Drama of Human Life.)
As a “script,” the creed provides Christians, Hart proposes, a way of understanding not only the “internal” coherence of the doctrines of the faith but also its “external coherence”—its “integrity relative to the wider set of beliefs we and our fellow citizens of late modernity typically hold concerning all sorts of things, most of which fall identifiably beyond the range of concern of either Scripture or creeds and about which, therefore, they do not presume to tell us anything at all” (xiv). As Christians seek a way of understanding and articulating the congruence of faith and life, the creed—and Hart’s depiction of it—helps us understand God’s world in a much broader sense than the short words of the creed might suggest.
The creed, though, hardly seems like a script at all. It’s a series of short phrases—containing a broadly narratival pattern, perhaps, but otherwise far from containing an artistic vision of the world. Such a view, however, would misunderstand the way the creed has in fact, throughout history, actually functioned within Christian communities. Hart at one point provides this perceptive juxtaposition of the creed with the kind of formulaic text one mind on a corporate PowerPoint like:
Ironically, it is a format that, in a technological age which increasingly breeds dependency and gradually atrophies rather than enhances our natural skills (of imagination, among others), might well find itself subjected to that essentially nonnarrative, unpoetic, and generally unimaginative approach to visual communication known and bemoaned by mind-numbed audiences the world over as “death by PowerPoint.” But bullet pointed though it may be, the Apostles’ Creed is nonetheless a power-packed summary designed precisely to capture our imagination and, far from shutting it down or rendering it otiose, to send it into paroxysms of visualization, curiosity, and exploration, and its brevity and clarity make this particular creed far more useful in practical terms than some others. (5)
Were we today to understand the creed as “a power-packed summary designed precisely to capture our imagination and, far from shutting it down or rendering it otiose, to send it into paroxysms of visualization, curiosity, and exploration,” I would dare say we would be on our way to a much more robust practice of catechesis.
Understanding why it is important to render the creed in this dramatico-imaginative way relates to the way that the creed helps “bring to life” the Christian actor. Appealing to the language of “speech act” and “performative utternaces,” Hart explains the way credal faith manifests in the believer’s life:
This matters a good deal because “saying the creed” is not just a recitation but what philosophers of language like to call a “performative utterance” or “speech act”—an act of saying, that is to say, that rather than reporting or describing some state of affairs actually does something as we say it. … Saying the creed, with its threefold iteration “I believe . . . ,” is without question a performative utterance in this sense. These are not empty words to be toyed with, therefore, or ones that we can sit loosely to as we say them. In the context of worship or witness, they are words charged with meaning and power, and in uttering them, we are doing something—taking a stand, declaring our allegiance, identifying ourselves as belonging to Christ, professing personal commitment and promising personal faithfulness, and rehearsing an outline of faith’s imaginative and ideational content, all in front of anyone who cares to look or listen. (8)
This is not, we should add, merely an individual performance, but one that belongs to the whole church and to the whole of history. The creed, in other words—and our “performance” of it—draws us into the larger scope of God’s work in salvation history.
Christianity is not a set of timeless “religious” truths about the cosmos but an awkward insistence that the world itself is a stage on which a divine drama has been played out in history. It is a drama traces of which should show up on any radar sensitive enough to register the “facts” of the matter and which embeds those facts within a story of God’s action and human response and answers some of the perennial questions of human existence in the world: Who are we? Who are we called to be? Where are we headed? (13)
There is much in Hart’s book that is well worth engaging. The individual chapters take up each tenet of the creed and show how it can be lived on in the Christian life, particularly in light of the contexts, habits, and institutions that shape the culture in which we find ourselves. Hart’s call for re-envisioning the creed as way of expanding rather than shutting down our imaginative capacities is one that I hope all catechists will take up with gusto.