There was an online hullaballoo last week about the “sparkle creed” at a very progressive Lutheran church outside Minneapolis. Offered as a substitute for more traditional creeds, the clergywoman cited God as “nonbinary,” having “two dads”.
A Fox News segment reported on the sparkle creed as a “crisis” for Christianity. But no one needs to worry that Christian orthodoxy is seriously threatened by sparkle theology.
The cleric at Edina Community Lutheran Church cited her belief in the “rainbow spirit who shatters our image of one white light and refracts it into a rainbow of gorgeous diversity.” What does that mean? Likely neither she nor the congregation that stood to join her could really explain.
The church’s website highlights the congregation’s advocacy for “LGBTQIA+, inclusion, racial justice and ecofaith.” It also cites immigration and “reproductive justice.” And it highlights misdeeds towards native peoples:
We acknowledge that Edina Community Lutheran Church is located on the traditional, ancestral and contemporary lands of the Dakhóta Oyáte*, the Dakota nation. Treaties developed through exploitation and violence were broken. Tribes were forced to exist on ever smaller amounts of land.
Acknowledging this painful history, we as a congregation confess our complicity in the theft of Native land and acknowledge that we have not yet honored our treaties. We further confess that Christians and Christian churches have benefited from this land theft. We commit to being active advocates for justice for Native People and to truth telling that leads to healing.
Do any native people attend Edina Community Lutheran Church? Most churches with native people tend to be more traditional and more focused on traditional Christian work, not the activism preferred by some white liberal Protestant churches. And the overall project of theological deconstruction almost entirely belongs to white progressives in fast declining Mainline Protestant denominations.
Theological progressives often herald their latest favorite fads as representing the inevitable future. And some dour traditionalists gladly collaborate in this prediction. After all, isn’t the world, and the church, constantly degenerating to ever new depths of depravity? And nothing can be done but complain!
But in truth, the progressive Protestant project of North America and Northwestern Europe is fast concluding. It abandoned orthodoxy early in the 20th century in favor of a cold modernism that rejected supernaturalism in favor of stern moral reform. That focus on science and rationality gave way to postmodern self-discovery and deconstruction, with obsession over self-identity, including race and ethnicity, but most especially of late sexuality and gender. One hundred years ago “God” was a metaphor for implementing egalitarian social justice. Now “God” is a projection for anxiety over self-actualization.
The audience for these trends was never sustainably large. Liberal Protestantism around the world began shrinking 60 or more years ago. Few regular people were interested in sermons about how Christ’s Resurrection was not really physical but poetic. Even fewer have time for a sexually confused “nonbinary” deity who’s busily apologizing for 1,000 years of Western Civilization. Most regular people harken to religion when it speaks to their basic spiritual needs about who they are, what they should do, and where they are going. Christianity typically thrives when it offers salvation, morality, and hope in a personal, active deity. Esoteric religious movements appeal to special niches of activists and intellectuals focused on specific contemporary situations. Such movements never represent the future. They don’t even represent the past. But they will always be with us in some form, even if in small numbers, experimenting, reacting, deconstructing, striving for ever new levels of self-knowledge.
There will always be “sparkle creeds” trying to displace more traditional creeds like the Nicene and Apostles Creed. Supposedly those ancient creeds are restrictive impositions, demanding that we believe what we really logically can’t. But they have endured for millennia because they claim a transcendent permanence outside of ourselves. Before we were, God is. We can’t define Him. He reveals Himself to us and defines us. Christ was not confused about His maleness. He had “two dads” who were/are God the Father and His stepfather Joseph. Importantly, He was birthed by a mother. The Virgin Mary was not confused about her gender. She was a woman and will always be the blessed mother of Jesus Christ. And He will always be the eternally begotten Son of the Father. We look with awe to these assertions surrounded by majesty and mystery. Many reject their claims, but these claims offer compelling cosmic insights that no version of a sparkle creed can ever approximate. In a few years, nobody will recall the sparkle creed. In one thousand years, millions still will recite the Nicene and Apostles Creeds.
The traditional creeds also offer what sparkle does not: redemption. Sparkle congregations must strive and agonize over thousands of years of injustice, for which there is no real remedy but constant apologies to which nobody is really listening. No member of the Dakota tribe, dead or alive, cares about the pleas for forgiveness from a Lutheran congregation. No BLM sign or march will compensate for slavery or segregation.
In contrast, the historic creeds offer a definitive gift: “For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, he suffered death and was buried, and rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.” And “His kingdom will have no end.”
No amount of sparkle will ever compete with that claim.
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