The very first thing we do as Christians is believe and speak.

The two go together like the deity and humanity of Christ. And so the very first words of the creed are “We believe,” and they are meant to be spoken aloud in public assembly by the body of Christ. The creed is emphatically a public thing, because God is a very public God and, indeed, a God who is a public challenge to all the other gods that litter the public square.

Our culture takes it for granted (at least for the present) that there is only one God. Of course, there’s no particular reason why that should go on being the case. Where our ancestors believed in one God as a matter of reason and revelation, the average American believes in one God as a matter of custom and unthinking cultural inertia.

It should not be any surprise at all when (not if) some popular movement arises to try to revive polytheism just as popular movements have already tried to promote atheism. When such movements arise, the Church will go on saying what God’s people have said since Moses: The Lord is one.

Polytheism is really just an attempt to chop little godlets out of the one true God.

It takes this or that favorite aspect of the divine nature and pretends that’s all there is to God. Falsehood and false gods nearly always are born when a truth gets ripped out of the whole Truth and taken in isolation.

Because of our tendency to rip truth out of the weave of revelation, one of the functions of the creed is to help us rightly order our knowledge of God. Jesus’ ultimate revelation to us is that God is not so much Master, Lord, King, Ground of Being, Author of Creation, or Ruler of Time and Space as he is “my Father and your Father.”

All these other titles have their place. But the supreme revelation remains that God is Father.

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