Very useful for preaching! ( )

Authoritative, beautifully written and persuasively argued, this book challenges positions taken up by both liberals and conservatives, eloquently demonstrating that faith is a dynamic process not a static set of rules. It will be welcomed by members of every church community, students, clergy and lay people.

Luke Timothy Johnson masterfully shows how the Nicene creed was formed, the meaning of each line (especially those estranged to modern minds), and lifts up how the creed holds the middle by both offending the extremes. He then challenges the creed reader to see it as a rule of faith and guide to reading scripture and theology as one of the many tools the church at its disposal. ( )

Every now and again I pick up a book that has me gasping in raptures of delight, paragraph after paragraph after paragraph. My reviews probably reflect the fact that i am predisposed to buying books that I expect to find rewarding: some exceed my hopes, and The Creed is one. All the more fool I for taking so many years to get around to reading it!

On almost every page I wanted to shout my amens from the roof top. LT Johnson has always hung tenaciously to an orthodox but not conservative or narrow faith, and this is no exception. Working from the premise that the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed sets 'boundaries not barriers' (amen!) he works line by line through its affirmations, interpreting them for a thoroughly contemporary world, finding in them boundaries to give faith shape, but simultaneously permissions to engage intellectual and spiritual and indeed robust active missiological exploration of their implications. I could give example after example, but the review would approach the book in length. Suffice it to say he finds only in the filioque a short-coming in the creed. In all its other machinations he finds challenge, encouragement, and affirmation of a credible, challenging, extending faith that will not be limited by the myopia of post-Enlightment reason.

I cannot agree with the previous reviewer that Johnson's extrapolations from the creedal text for questions of the ordination of women are in any way a divergence from the main game. The subject appears, tangentially, only twice, and Johnson makes no more than a simple plea for ecclesiastical justice.

Johnson refuses to bestow on his Roman Catholic tradition any claims to superiority over other traditions, and indeed when addressing pneumatological questions affords the charismatic/pentecostal tradition integrity that I confess I for one have long been reluctant to grant it. As a result of his affirmation I am forced to review my own negativity, rather than to assume the tradition's inferiority! That can only be a good outcome from a truly ecumenical scholar's efforts (even if the non-liturgical traditions pay little enough attention to the creed).

This is an outstanding work that should be in the library of every faith community, and on the reading list of ever priest and pastor. ( )

Aside from a rather intemperate outburst towards the end of the book against Church teaching on the reservation of ordination to men, this is a very good review of the origin and role of the various historic creeds in Christian life.