The Sparkle Creed

Recently I came across a video of a woman minister reciting what she called “the Sparkle Creed”.  When I informed my wife of this in a spirit of jollification, she suggested that it might have originated in the Babylon Bee—i.e. that it was intended as a satire, and that I was misinterpreting it as a real liturgical creed.  It turns out that she was wrong (a rarity in our house); the Sparkle Creed is a real creed and is recited liturgically in church groups that resonate with its theology, such as the one co-pastored by Anna Helgen at the Edina Community Lutheran Church in St. Edina, Minnesota (see inset for photo).

The Sparkle Creed reads:

I believe in the non-binary God whose pronouns are plural.

I believe in Jesus Christ, their child, who wore a fabulous tunic and had two dads and saw everyone as a sibling-child of God.

I believe in the rainbow Spirit, who shatters our image of one white light and refracts it into a rainbow of gorgeous diversity.

I believe in the church of everyday saints as numerous, creative, and resilient as patches on the AIDS quilt, whose feet are grounded in mud and whose eyes gaze at the stars in wonder.

I believe in the call to each of us that love is love is love, so beloved, let us love.

I believe, glorious God.  Help my unbelief.  Amen.

This Creed was originally penned in 2021 by the “queer minister Rev. Rachel Small-Stokes”, pastor of Immanuel United Church of Christ in Louisville, Kentucky.  Its use has caught on.

I will not spend time on the keyboard to demonstrate its blasphemous nature and how it differs dramatically from the faith of the Orthodox Church (or the faith of any church that values Scripture).  If the reader values Orthodoxy enough to be reading this blog, I take this as a given.  But I would like to examine here the question of how any group that calls itself a church has come to use such a creed, and what any group that values divine approval can do to safeguard itself against such insanity.

The long road downward in the West began with the Reformation.  With the best of pious intentions the Reformers threw out the consensus patrum as the lens through which they read Scripture so that Christian antiquity was effectively stripped of its authority.  The tragedy and the irony of it all is that they did not intend to make such a break with Christian antiquity.  Indeed, they thought that they were returning to the views of Christian antiquity and were only throwing out the Pope and a load of papal accretions recently attached to the ancient Faith.  (Many also thought that the end of the world was more or less at hand, which added an air of apocalypticism to the whole movement.). But on some level the Reformers knew that their movement involved a repudiation of much of the Christian past.  That was why they referred to their movement as “the new learning” in contrast to “the old learning”.

Take, for example, their universal repudiation of the Eucharist as a sacrifice.  From their familiarity with the Fathers they knew that all the Fathers and the entire Church from the earliest days regarded the Eucharist as sacrificial.   They also knew that Christian antiquity regarded the Eucharist as being the true Body and Blood of Christ.  But despite this, all the Reformers (Luther excepted) hotly repudiated the Eucharistic Real Presence, and all of them (Luther included) railed against the notion of the Eucharist as a sacrifice.

The consensus patrum was therefore junked and Christian antiquity stripped of any real authority.  If the Fathers agreed with Luther and Calvin, their patristic views could be allowed to stand.  If they disagreed with Luther and Calvin, they were quietly set aside.  The Fathers therefore might serve the Reformers as a source and support, but could not function as an actual authority.  This was not considered momentous at the time, for it was believed that the Bible’s meaning was sufficiently clear that anyone could understand it apart from resorting to the consensus patrum.  (History would give the lie to this naïve view soon enough.)

Then came the (badly mis-named) Enlightenment, with its exaltation of Reason as the supreme principle and its vociferous attack upon the authority of Scripture.  Since the authority of Christian antiquity had been rejected, there was no bulwark to surround and reinforce the Scripture, and the tsunami of liberal thought quickly swept away much Christian doctrine in a flood of skepticism.  The flood began soon enough—the radical Biblical critic Reimarus died in 1768.

The significance of the rejection of Christian antiquity (aka “Holy Tradition”) was that the Church’s ultimate authority, the Bible, was now left without a lens of interpretation.  The Fathers had functioned in the Church as that lens, and therefore as a true authority, but their consensus was no longer regarded as binding.  The truth of Scripture was now up for grabs.

Some groups, such as the conservative Reformed churches, substituted the works of Calvin and the Westminster Confession for the Fathers, so that Calvin and the Westminster Confession became the new lens through which Scripture was read.  For those churches that regarded such works as authoritative and definitive, they became effectively the new authority, the new Fathers, and it was this that gave those Reformed churches some safety from the liberal flood.  But churches which did not make such a move—churches such as the mass of Anglicans, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Congregationalists—did not enjoy such safety.  When the flood came in the centuries succeeding the Enlightenment, much of their Christian truth was swept away.

Christian antiquity as an interpretive lens thus functions as a kind of auto-immune system in the body of the Church.  When a disease sweeps through society, the Church retaining that Tradition will be immune to it.  If there is no such immune system functioning, then the church body will catch whatever disease happens to be around at the time.

It is easy to demonstrate this.  After the Enlightenment exalted the place of Reason, belief in miracles was becoming problematic, if not absolutely passé.  These things were therefore rejected by many.  If memory serves, people as diverse as Thomas Jefferson and William Barclay caught the disease and rejected the miracles of Christ, finding other ways to interpret the Scriptures that narrated them.

Some churches which rejected the necessity of believing in the miraculous had the honesty to update their creeds.  Thus the United Church of Canada produced their “new Creed” in 1968, which began, “Man is not alone, he lives in God’s world” (quickly and quietly updated to “We are not alone, we live in God’s world).  It famously omitted any reference to Christ’s divinity or His virgin birth or His Resurrection, only referring to Him as “the Word made flesh” (whatever that meant), and saying that we were called to “proclaim Jesus, crucified and risen”, again without saying what “risen” actually meant.  Many interpreted it as merely meaning that His message was immortal or that His “spirit” lives on.

The “social Gospel” (as it was called) was still in the air, and so about half the new Creed talked about what the Church did in society—namely that it was called “to be the Church, to celebrate God’s presence, to live with respect in Creation, to love and serve others, and seek justice and resist evil”.  The Creed had begun to sparkle—i.e. to reflect whatever trends were current in secular society.

We could cite other examples of the churches catching whatever disease happened to be around.  In the 1960s feminism began its long cultural surge with what was then called “Women’s Lib”.  Soon enough the churches began to accept the ordination of women as an obvious and irresistible fact.  Christian antiquity had long declared that this was impossible, but Christian antiquity’s authority had been banished from those churches.  As women could have any job they wanted in society, so now they could have any job they wanted in the churches.  Women’s ordination was in.

Soon enough acceptance of homosexual lifestyle was the New Thing in secular culture, and so of course the churches accepted that too.

Alas, the erosion of Christian culture in the West is now occurring at lightning speed, and so the Gay Pride parade was scarcely over when Transgenderism took its place as the next New Thing.  Predictably the churches are accepting Transgenderism as well, since whatever disease we find in society will soon enough find its place in the churches too.

That is why we now have the Sparkle Creed.  Transgenderism rejects the notion of binary sexuality with its corresponding pronouns, and so God the Father has been transmogrified into “the non-binary God whose pronouns are plural”.  In our culture where gay and lesbian couples now adopt and raise children, we also must find a place to declare that Jesus “had two dads”, as well as of course references to the rainbow, “diversity” and AIDS.

Even asinine and meaningless slogans find their place in the Sparkle Creed:  homosexual unions have been justified with the slogan “love is love”, and so the new creed adds “love is love is love”.  In what may be described as a faint glimmer of self-awareness, the author of the Creed seems to admit that she really does not believe the Christian faith at all, and so it concludes with an echo of the Biblical “I believe; help my unbelief”.

What’s next is anyone’s guess, but what is certain is that the Sparkle Creed is not the end of the liberal line for the disease of the secular erosion of Christian culture is far from over. My crystal ball is still in the repair shop, so certainty about the next thing or the next Creed is hardly possible.  But it will certainly be more sparkly.  If the 1991 Canberra meeting of the World Council of Churches (a useless organization if ever there was one) is any indication, it will involve a return to animism, worshipping nature with its trees, rocks, and mountains.  We will see.  But whatever novelty comes down the road and whatever disease seeps into society, it is a sure thing that the liberal churches will opt in.  Their creeds will continue to sparkle.