The Search for a Symbol

"A New Creed" and The United Church of Canada

William R. H. Haughton

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781666726626
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

"A New Creed" is, by all accounts, a dominant feature of The United Church of Canada. Since its initial writing in 1968, it has come to be a primary symbol of the denomination in the ancient Christian (baptismal) sense of the word and also in the modern. The Search for a Symbol reveals the fascinating and largely untold story of "A New Creed's" origins. It also engages in an unprecedented historical, literary, and theological analysis of the creed's text. This book offers the provocative argument that though "A New Creed" should continue to have a place in the life and liturgy of Canada's largest Protestant church, it does not take full advantage of the possible benefits that can come from healthy practices of creedal confession--namely teaching people about the biblical story of salvation as well as connecting them in relationship with God and one another. For these purposes, the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds are shown to be better confessional options, and readily available ones within The United Church's tradition.

1

The 1960s and the Appearance of “A New Creed”

Introduction

Renowned United Church historian Phyllis D. Airhart once said that “A New Creed” “sounds sort of ’60s-ish to me.”33 Her comment was remarkably intuitive, but in what sense? Given that this distinctive confession is so unlike anything that preceded it, in The United Church or elsewhere, questions surrounding the occasion of its appearance are important to consider. As is widely known, the sixties was a period of significant social upheaval that marked a cultural turning point in the twentieth century. This was true not only for mainstream Christian denominations like The United Church of Canada but for Western societies at large. Though North Americans had sought a return to normalcy following the Second World War—certainly a better and more affluent normalcy—any sense of contentment or consensus that had been achieved in the aftermath of V-E Day or V-J Day was fragmented by the 1960s. Worldviews and assumptions having evolved or taken great leaps, some individuals became impatient for society to change as rapidly and as thoroughly as they had done personally. Some of the enduring images of the decade—from the civil rights struggle of the United States and mass protests against the Vietnam War to the sexual revolution and the emergence of a rock-and-roll drug culture—represented social developments that would have been unthinkable just a generation earlier. It will be the purpose of the following few pages to demonstrate briefly in what ways this dramatically changing cultural context suggested to many the need for commensurate adaptation on the part of the church. Some in The United Church felt the times specifically necessitated a change in the form and content of their denomination’s creed. The confessional transformation embodied by “A New Creed” was precipitated by such feelings and made more viable in the midst of a radically unsettled community.

Defining the Sixties

When we speak of the historical significance of the 1960s, we are not just talking about ten years as counted according to the Gregorian calendar. Rather, the sixties refers to a period of cultural revolution throughout the West. The era not only seemed full of significant events for those who experienced them but has since been acknowledged as such by historians. One of the challenges of assessing this period is the utterly massive body of evidence at hand. Arthur Marwick’s influential book The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States stretches to over fifteen hundred pages. In some ways, it is a very detailed work. In other ways it is, by necessity, highly selective and superficial. The 1960s occurred at a period in human history when burgeoning technologies allowed for unprecedented levels of human communication, as well as the preservation of vast amounts of information across several media, both new and old. In practical terms, there is an overwhelming amount of data that needs to be considered.

Another challenge in assessing the events of the sixties is the task of choosing appropriate start and end dates for this cultural revolution, which did not begin precisely on 1 January 1960 or end on 31 December 1969. The aforementioned Arthur Marwick made his most notable contribution in suggesting the idea of a long sixties from 1958 to 1974. He argues the sixties really began culturally with a new affluence that empowered teenagers economically and drove corporate interests to pursue teens with the development of an adolescent rock-and-roll culture. This accumulation of financial and social currency greatly emboldened the baby boom generation and increased the significance of their responses to events in the world around them. The end of the era came with the winding down of the Vietnam War and the resignation of Richard M. Nixon from the American presidency. While the long sixties concept has been well received, the selection of different dates by other historians symbolizes the challenge of assigning precise beginnings and endings.34

Arthur Marwick took his inspiration for the idea of the long sixties from fellow British scholar Eric Hobsbawm and his influential work The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991.35 I find Hobsbawm’s delineation of this era more convincing, from the triggering of the First World War in 1914 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. There seems to me a thematic continuity within the geopolitics of this short twentieth century and a clear way to distinguish that period from events both before and after. While I agree that there was also an era we can call the sixties, and that the idea of a long sixties is helpful, I am not sure it is quite as easy to demarcate a cultural revolution in that era as it is with the international political turmoil of the short twentieth century. One could conceivably suggest the beginning of a very long 1960s at 1914. This is not to deny the significant impacts of the sixties but to name a particular challenge in assessing them.

Secularization

Of particular interest to the history of The United Church in general and its writing of “A New Creed” in particular is the difficult issue of secularization. It is widely agreed that over the last hundred or more years, the West has secularized. During this period, religious institutions have been disengaged publically and private faith has waned. It is also acknowledged that the cultural developments of the sixties played an important role in this still ongoing story of secularization in Western societies. Precise understandings of the causes, nature, and timing of the long-term secularizing trend, however, remain remarkably mysterious.

Prominent Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor did a helpful job of framing the challenge.36 While we might sense that religion has waned in both the public and private spheres in the West, he argues, closer examination reveals many exceptions that call into question this general assumption. In Britain, private piety is not prevalent but there remains a prominent role for religious institutions in public life. In the United States, by contrast, there is no state church, but religious belief among individuals remains fairly common. Rather than considering secularization as a linear trend, in isolation, Taylor prefers to suggest that what has been happening in the West is rather a process of pluralization. “The shift to secularity,” he writes, is “a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.”37

The emphasis on pluralism within the discussion of secularization is a helpful one. It offers a more rounded consideration of the issue whi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The 1960s and the Appearance of “A New Creed”
• Chapter 2: The Text of “A New Creed”
• Chapter 3: “A New Creed” in the Liturgy of The United Church
• Chapter 4: “A New Creed” in the Nonliturgical Literature of The United Church
• Chapter 5: A Close Reading of “A New Creed”
• Chapter 6: Moving Forward
• Conclusion
• Bibliography