NEWS

Scholar calls creed “world’s true story”
by Richard N. Ostling

Although few ponder the routine act, many millions of American Christians do something radical when they recite the creed, says New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson.

In a country that praises individualism, worshippers are expressing solidarity with a community’s collective wisdom rather than personal opinions, Johnson explains.

And in a culture that prizes novelty, they are reciting a formula that originated 1,788 years ago (for the Apostles’ Creed, often used by Protestants) or 1,678 years ago (for the similar but longer Nicene Creed, part of Roman Catholic and Orthodox worship).

Johnson, a one-time Benedictine monk, is now a lay Catholic teaching in Atlanta at Emory University’s Methodist-related seminary. His latest book, The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why It Matters (Doubleday), provides analysis of the creeds’ role and a phrase-by-phrase commentary on the Nicene version.

Adding a bit of autobiography, Johnson says fellow academics show little regard for the intellect of people like himself who adhere to fixed formulas of faith and are especially offended by Christianity’s creeds.

Yet he says “life in the world is not possible without some form of creed.” Even researchers in the “hard” sciences know “they cannot demonstrate their basic premises but must accept them on faith.”

To Johnson, the Christian creed offers “the world’s true story,” not some “alternative view,” or “Christian opinion” or truth for this or that individual, but truth for everyone. Nowhere else, he writes, “is such an alternative vision of the world and of humanity so clearly stated.”

Against liberal theologians, Johnson insists Jesus’ divinity was not a later belief the creeds tacked onto Christianity but an element in people’s earliest attempts to comprehend Jesus. He also says the creeds explain the teachings in the New Testament rather than adding anything to them.

Johnson sees the creeds as defining what is central for all Christians, thus providing a corrective against both Christianity’s extreme left and extreme right.

He argues against those conservative Protestants who reject creeds in favor of following the “Bible alone,” and against liberal Protestants who don’t want to be hemmed in by doctrinal requirements.

In Johnson’s opinion, fundamentalists take marginal concepts such as the literal inspiration and “inerrancy” (factual perfection) of the Bible and make them essentials, then turn sectarian and exclude those who disagree.

The left’s mistake, Johnson continues, is to make the faith too open and boundless in its inclusion, offering little sense of what is required of a believer and leaving the church unable to answer the simple question, “What does it mean to be a Christian?”

Conservatives compound problems, he feels, by identifying Christianity with a political ideology that ignores economic justice, while liberals are equally rigid in demanding that Christians follow the latest demands of the political left.

Creed history
The earliest Christian creed, it’s often said, was the New Testament’s simple statement, “Jesus is Lord.” Those words were more radical than might be apparent because they asserted Jesus’ divinity by using a title Jews applied only to God. More developed statements of faith appear in the New Testament and during the subsequent century.

The Apostles’ Creed originated in a question-and-answer format, probably used for baptism rituals, found in the “Apostolic Tradition” by Hippolytus. The Nicene Creed was developed by 318 bishops at the first ecumenical council at Nicea (in present-day Turkey) and refined at a synod in Constantinople (today’s Istanbul) decades later.

In A.D. 589, a council at Toledo, Spain, decided the creed would say that within the triune God, the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son,” adding the phrase “and the Son.” The popes adopted the innovation without agreement by Eastern Christians, laying ground for the great and tragic Catholic-Orthodox schism centuries later.

Richard N. Ostling, a religion writer for the Associated Press, was formerly a senior correspondent for Time magazine and was the religion writer for many years. Reprinted with permission of the Associated Press.

 

Good News prepares for Pittsburgh,
celebrates Renew book, honors the Snyders

The Good News board of directors, meeting at the Adam’s Mark Hotel in Columbus, Ohio, January 28-30, 2004, finalized plans for the 2004 General Conference, celebrated the Renew Network’s publishing of Inspiring Models For Effective Women’s Ministry, and presented the fourth annual Edmund W. Robb, Jr. United Methodist Renewal Award to Rev. Robert and Mrs. Peg Snyder.

Good News will once again take a team of 35-40 persons to work on site at General Conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, this April 27-May 7. Our legislative priorities include strengthening United Methodist identity, leadership, and mission by nurturing spiritual vitality consistent with our doctrinal standards, by fostering accountability through our polity and administrative processes and engaging the culture by “spreading Scriptural holiness” in the church and nation.

The legislative team will once again be led by Dr. Scott Field, chairperson of the Good News board and senior minister of the Wheatland-Salem UM Church in Naperville, Illinois. “Certainly the Scriptures are clear that the Christian community is grounded in and nurtured by a common confession of faith and doctrinal understanding,” he said. “This is essential to Christian identity. Contending for the ‘faith once delivered to the saints’ is not a hobby for cranky conservatives, but is foundational to maintaining the identity of the Christian community.”

Good News also celebrated the recent publication of a new study and ministry resource for UM women, Inspiring Models for Effective Women’s Ministry. It is now available from Renew along with an 80-page resource packet. “It is our anticipation,” said Renew President L. Faye Short, “that the resources in this book and packet will be used of God toward inviting the women of our churches to respond to that ‘upward call of God in Christ Jesus’ (Phil. 3:14).” The resource can be obtained by calling the Renew office at (706) 778-4812.

Good News also honored the Rev. Robert D. Snyder and his wife, Peg, with the Fourth Annual Edmund W. Robb, Jr. United Methodist Renewal Award. Snyder served numerous significant appointments in the East Ohio Conference during his time of active ministry. He was a co-founder of the East Ohio Evangelical Fellowship, a Lifetime Honorary member of the Good News board, and chaired three national Good News convocations. Bob’s wife, Peg, was committed throughout their ministry to service in the annual conference. She served for 10 years on the Conference Personnel Committee, and for 10 years on the Women’s Division’s Youth School, as well as service on the Conference Commission on the Status and Role of Women.

“Bob and Peg Snyder are a remarkable team, a couple of great integrity who have given incredible service in the East Ohio Conference for more than 50 years,” said James V. Heidinger II, Good News’ president and publisher, and long-time colleague of the Snyders in East Ohio. “Bob was a delegate three times to General Conference (’84, ’88, and ’92) and worked with our Good News team at the last two, even though retired. And whether it was at General Conference or chairing Good News convocations, his wife, Peg, was right there serving and leading in her own dedicated way.”

In other actions, Good News commended long-time board member, Rev. Riley Case, for his soon-to-be-published book, Evangelical and Methodist: A Populist History, which will be out this March by Abingdon Press. The book details the formation of the populist and evangelical constituency within Methodism, and focuses much attention on the history of the Good News ministry. Case is a retired clergy member of the North Indiana Conference.

Good News also presented plaques to five Lifetime Honorary Board Members: Mrs. Carolyn Elias of Arkansas, Rev. William Hines of Ohio, Rev. John Grenfell of Michigan, Rev. Riley Case of Indiana, and Rev. Budd Sprague of Ohio.

 

Freud and C.S. Lewis to debate on PBS
By John Boudreau

Does God really exist?
Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis placed the question at the forefront of their musings, discussing them at length in books and other writings.

For more than 25 years, Dr. Armand Nicholi has taught a popular course at Harvard University in which students deconstruct the lives and arguments of Freud, one of the 20th century’s chief spokesmen for atheism, and Lewis, who came to faith at age 31.

Nicholi’s research led to a surprisingly successful book, The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life (Free Press, $15). More than 75,000 copies have been printed, and it is the basis of a PBS series that will air this fall.

“Everybody is preoccupied with this issue at some level,” Nicholi said. “People often don’t allow themselves to think about it unless they wake up at 3 a.m. and they think about the meaning of their lives.”

There is no evidence that Freud and Lewis ever met, Nicholi said. But, he adds, had such a meeting occurred, “I think they would have really had a great relationship. They would have respected each other’s minds.”

Nicholi, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry, never intended to teach such a class. But 30 years ago he was asked to create a course on the writings of Freud. After students asked for someone to counter Freud’s “sustained attack” on faith, he struggled to find a person of the psychoanalyst’s stature. He remembered reading a book by the Oxford professor Lewis, The Problem of Pain, during his surgical internship.

“I was confronted with suffering for the first time—people who were struggling with a fatal illness, children who were dying. I wondered how anyone on earth—or in heaven—who had the power to prevent this would not do so,” he recalls. “I thought of leaving medicine.”

The book did not answer all Nicholi’s questions. But, he said, it was “very, very helpful.”

As he researched Lewis, he was struck by how closely his life paralleled that of Freud. Both men knew physical and emotional suffering, were leaders in their respective fields and seemed consumed with the question of God.

“Freud raises a question; Lewis attempts to answer it,” Nicholi said. “It was as though they were arguing at a podium.”

Freud was born in 1856. He grew up in a devoutly Jewish family and attended Hebrew school, but abandoned faith as a teen. He experienced the virulent anti-Semitism in early 20th-century Europe.

“He said that when he went to the University of Vienna, he was made to feel inferior because he was a Jew,” Nicholi said. “Many of his ideas and concepts were rejected because he was Jewish. It hurt him deeply.”

While Freud declared his lack of belief early, he felt compelled to argue against the existence of God all of his life, up until his death in 1939. Freud believed faith in a heavenly God is simply a way for people as adults to find a substitute for parents. And it provides comfort in the face of life’s brutal vicissitudes and the sense of helplessness people experience when thinking about mortality.

“He says, ‘What is this? A father in the sky that looks after you and blesses you if you do well and punishes you if you do bad? And you don’t really die? All of this is exactly as we’d wish it would be,’”  Nicholi said.

“He felt if you base your life on a false premise, that can only lead in the long run to disillusionment and bitter disappointment,” Nicholi said.

Lewis once declared religion as nonsense, as well. “Christianity was mainly associated for me with ugly architecture, ugly music, and bad poetry,” he once wrote. “No word in my vocabulary expressed deeper hatred than the word Interference. But Christianity placed at the center what seemed to me a transcendental Interferer.”

Like Freud, Lewis, born in England in 1898, suffered from depression and struggled with close relationships. At 9, his mother died.

“As a little boy, he had heard if you prayed hard enough, your prayer would be answered. He just prayed that his mother would not die and she did die,” Nicholi said.

Lewis, too, embraced atheism as an adolescent. He survived the horrors of the trenches during World War I; he was injured as friends perished. Eventually, he established his academic career as a literary scholar.

He found himself drawn to Christians for friendship. In 1925, a much-admired intellectual and atheist admitted to Lewis one evening after dinner that substantial evidence actually supported the Gospels as history. “He was very bothered by that,” Nicholi said.

Lewis, well-versed in mythology, read the New Testament for the first time—in Greek. He noticed that, unlike the great myths of literature, the story of Jesus was not a beautifully crafted tale; rather, it was one written by uneducated Jews who wrote what they saw, or what they were told. During one late-night talk with H.V.V. Dyson and J.R.R. Tolkien, his devout friends argued that the previous myths of a god coming to Earth to save humanity were actually “signposts” pointing to the story of Jesus. The New Testament myth, they argued, was the one myth that was true.

Shortly after that discussion — during a motorcycle ride to a zoo — Lewis accepted Jesus as his Lord and savior and became perhaps England’s “most dejected and reluctant convert.”

Following his transformation, Lewis experienced immense literary success, including the popular Chronicles of Narnia, allegories of the Christian faith, and The Screwtape Letters.

Lewis used his writing skills to counter Freud’s arguments, which he once embraced. He noted the biblical perspective of life includes substantial pain and despair—not much to wish for. And it calls for believers to abandon their will for God’s will.

He believed a power existed outside the universe, a power that humans intuitively know exists.

“He says, ‘We don’t have a need for something that doesn’t exist. We have a need for water, and there is water. We have a need for food, and there is food. We have a need for sex, and there is sex. We have a need for God, and there is God,’ “ Nicholi said.

Freud and Lewis agreed on this: The question of God is a central issue for humanity.

“Here is a door behind which, according to some people, the secret of the universe is waiting for you,” Lewis wrote. “Either that’s true or it isn’t. If it isn’t, then what the door really conceals is simply the greatest fraud on record.”

The series based on Nicholi’s book will be called The Question of God, and will air on PBS stations in early fall.

John Boudreau writes for Knight-Ridder Tribune News. © 2004, Knight Ridder/ Tribune Media Services. Reprinted with permission.

 

Remembering Virginia Law Shell (1923-2004)
By James V. Heidinger II

One of United Methodism’s remarkable Christian laywomen died on January 12 after a lengthy illness. Virginia Law Shell served United Methodism on the mission field in Africa, was the denomination’s Director of Family Worship, and a columnist for Good News magazine before she died at her home in Lake Junaluska, North Carolina.

After graduating from Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky, Virginia Williams and her new husband, Burleigh Law, were accepted as lay missionaries by the Methodist Board of Missions and left to serve for 15 years as missionaries in the Congo. While there, they built a modern hospital in Wembo Nyama. In 1964, during the Congolese rebel uprising, Virginia’s husband, Burleigh, was martyred when he flew his plane into Wembo Nyama to rescue five missionaries being held under house arrest by the rebels.

Virginia was left with three children—David, Paul, and Margaret (all of whom have grown up to serve on the foreign mission field)—to care for. In 1969, she moved to the United Methodist Board of Evangelism in Nashville as Director of Family Worship, the first woman professional on that board. There she developed the Marriage Enrichment program, which has made thousands of marriages effective and brought thousands of persons to a Christian commitment.

In 1972, Virginia met Donald Shell, an executive with the General Electric Company. They were married the following year. While living in Potomac, Maryland, she activated her Marriage Enrichment program locally, seeing tangible results in changed lives and strengthened marriages. She also helped establish the Emmaus Walk program in that area.

Virginia was elected to the board of directors of Good News in 1974. In 1980, only three months prior to General Conference, the board asked Virginia to coordinate the Good News legislative effort. Willing to do so if husband Don would help, they took the assignment and led our General Conference ministry from 1980 through 1992. This may well have been one of the wisest decisions a Good News board ever made.

At the 1992 conference, they not only led Good News’ team in Louisville, but also trained Scott and Lynda Field to assume leadership of that program, which they continue to lead today.

In addition to this significant contribution to Good News ministry, Virginia also wrote a column for Good News magazine for more than eight years. A gifted writer, Virginia authored two widely distributed books—Appointment Congo, and As Far As I Can Step. 

In addition to all this, Don and Virginia were natural leaders within the Good News family. Together, they chaired three national Good News Convocations during the 20 years they lived at Lake Junaluska, each well planned and strongly attended. (Don also served as Good News board chairman for four years.)

In light of these many and significant contributions, Good News elected both Don and Virginia as Lifetime Honorary Board Members. Then, in 2001, the board presented Don and Virginia with the First Annual Edmund W. Robb, Jr. United Methodist Renewal Award, given in recognition of their outstanding contributions to renewal in the church.

The memorial service at her home church, Long’s Chapel UM Church, celebrated Virginia’s life. Several of us were given the priviledge to share from different chapters of her life and ministry: childhood friend, Dr. Wesley Grace, on her early years; retired missionary, Rev. Joe Davis, on her ministry in Africa; former General Secretary of the World Methodist Council, Dr. Joe Hale, on her work with the Board of Evangelism; and Rev. Rob Fuquay, pastor at Long’s Chapel, on her ministry and involvement in her local church during the final years of her life. As the president and publisher of Good News, I was honored to share about her leadership with our ministry. Retired Bishop, Ed Tullis, Don and Virginia’s Sunday School teacher for almost 20 years, gave the Invocation to a sanctuary filled with family, friends, and admirers from the church and surrounding community. They came to celebrate Virginia’s life of leadership, her winsome witness for Christ, and the extraordinary impact her life had upon so many.

Memorials may be made to:

Shell-Law Scholarship Fund,
Asbury Theological Seminary
204 N. Lexington Avenue,
Wilmore, KY 40390,

or

Virginia Shell Memorial Fund, Long’s Chapel UMC,
P.O. Box 459,
Lake Junaluska, NC 28745.

James V. Heidinger II is the president and publisher of Good News.

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