Creeds: How Irrevocable?

"Terrible equivocation . . . pious religious jargon . . . long-winded double-talk . . ." With these epithets an Episcopal minister defied the rules of his church and sprayed scorn upon his bishops' attempt to guide their faithful.

The Rev. Edward O. Miller, 45, of Manhattan's prestigious St. George's Church on East 16th Street announced from his pulpit last week that he refused to read the 4,000-word pastoral letter prepared by the Episcopal House of Bishops at its meeting in Dallas last month. Canon law demands that within one month after it has been received, a pastoral letter must be read in each of the denomination's 7,500 parishes. But the "sheer mediocrity" of the "ecclesiastical jargon," protested Protestant Miller, made it necessary for him to disobey.

In Dallas the House of Bishops had reaffirmed the two ancient and fundamental creeds of the church, the Apostles' Creed (whose roots lie in the 2nd century) and the 4th century Nicene Creed, as being proclamations of "a gift whose kind and nature does not in itself change from generation to generation."

The old creeds were formulated to combat certain early heresies, said Miller, but "we are no longer surrounded by Arians, Appollinarians, Patripassians and Eutychians . . .* Today's challenge for more precise etymological definitions of our faith comes from materialism, secularism and Communism. Imposed creedal orthodoxy will not suffice. I love the creeds. I recite them, and I think I have overcome honestly the intellectual obstacles they raise. But when anyone tries to tell an Episcopalian that he is unequivocally -- which means without variety of interpretation -- committed to a particular creed. I can only remind him of the wisdom of Alfred North Whitehead who said, 'Religions commit suicide when they find their imperatives in their dogmas.' "

At week's end, after Miller's fighting words, everything was quiet; all through the House of Bishops, not a creature was stirring-- not even a Patripassian.

*The Arians (4th century) viewed Christ the Son as inferior to God the Father, because created by Him; Appollinarians (4th century) believed that Christ was a union of a perfect divine nature and an incomplete humane nature; the Patripassians (3rd century) held that since the Father and the Son are manifestations of an unknowable God, it logically follows that the Father died on the cross; the Eutychians (sth century) maintained that Christ did not have two separate natures--divine and human--but that the two were so blended as to constitute one.

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