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The Making of the Creeds
By Frances M. Young
London, SCM Press, 1991. 128 pp. $10.95.

Frances Young, the Cadbury Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham, wrote this readable book at the invitation of SCM Press to produce an updated version of Alan Richardson's classic Creeds in the Making. Her aim is to help especially those persons who are "unsure whether they are inside or outside the church [to] understand what Christianity in its classical form is all about." Anyone familiar with her already published titles, ranging from the academically oriented From Nicaea to Chalcedon: A Guide to the Literature and its Background to the existentially immediate Face to Face: A Narrative Essay in the Theology of Suffering, knows she will succeed. In fact, the lived Christianity that manifests itself in Face to Face (a book that in my opinion stands alone with the late Austin Farrer's God Almighty and Ills Unlimited as a testament of faith grappling with the intractable, inherently illogical problem of evil), which simply had to be a most painful result of Francis Young's own exercise of Christian hope, is one central reason The Making of the Creeds rings so true. Francis Young does not write about Christianity from a distance. The other

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reason the book works is, of course, Professor Young's scholarship, which she earlier demonstrated in From Nicaea to Chalcedon.

Examples of Francis Young's accessible scholarship abound as she moves from her introductory chapter, in which she explains how her book differs in "perspective and shape" from Richardson's ("bewailing the 'Hellenization of Christianity' no longer seems appropriate") to her next chapter, in which she explains how and why the creeds were made (not as " 'tests of orthodoxy' but as summaries of faith taught to new Christians by their local bishops, summaries that were traditional to each local church and which in detail varied from place to place"), on through her chapters on God the Creator, God our Lord Jesus Christ, God the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, and "For us and our Salvation." In this last chapter, Young convincingly explains that, far from being esoteric, theological mind games, the credal disputes over christology and the doctrine of the Trinity were, in fact, "fired by concern that the gospel of salvation be safeguarded. At the heart of the life of the church was the belief that salvation was being realised, and at the heart of early Christian theology was a sense of the sacramental and spiritual reality of that salvation." Perhaps it is not too much to suggest that those contemporary academic theologians who dismiss the creeds as "incomprehensible .. . contradictory and philosophically primitive," as the current Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford has done, might rethink the nature of the documents they are playing around with. The Making of the Creeds is not just for lay folk.

I have said that examples of her easy-to-comprehend scholarship are laced throughout her book. Let me mention four. The first is her one-page primer on the classical terminology of the Trinity:

"ingenerate," "generated," "proceeding...... paternity," "sonship," "sanctifying power"; all these terms are introduced in Young's clarification of how Christians can begin to think of a God who " remains beyond definition, beyond our language and categories, in principle incomprehensible because he is infinite." A crucial part of this understanding of a triune God lies in grasping conceptually how it can be that the "whole Trinity is Creator, Saviour, Sanctifier, all three identified with the activities of each and none having a distinct operation of his own." All this even while each Person is really distinct from the others. Far from "primitive," it is astonishing that fourth-century theologians could not only take on such problems as their religion presented them but could even argue diverse views and arrive, finally in A.D. 381, at a consensus, almost seventy years later at Chalcedon to formulate an analytical understanding of trinitarian doctrine. Some present thinkers, Young remarks, see in all this more than "incoherence, suggesting that the [Trinitarian] problems arise from 'outdated substance language.' People [today] look for some 'dynamic' categories within which to grapple with the issues, or suggest that we should start all over again and reject the formulations agreed

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in a completely different cultural and philosophical setting." She doesn't name names, although I have suggested one; a listing of today's Christian "process" philosophers and theologians would suggest others.

The second example I would cite of clarity in The Making of the Creeds is Young's treatment of the homoiousios (similar in substance) versus homoousios (of the same substance) debate between the Eastern and Western churches. She explains in one paragraph the difference the word makes; the surrounding paragraphs give the reader a clear understanding of what, politically as well as doctrinally, was at stake. The whole book is like that; we want to know who thought what and why, so that by the time we get to her treatment of Chalcedon, where we are told the story of "the acceptance of the creed universally known as Nicene and used in liturgies both Eastern and Western," we feel ourselves caught up in the debates to such an extent that we find ourselves passing theological judgements of our own. For my part, I emerged at the end of The Making of The Creeds as an Athanasian Christian.

Thirdly, there is the author's treatment, throughout the book, of gnosticism, without the elimination of which "Christianity would have become a mystical escapism"-a reason, incidentally, why feminist theologians today who welcome gnostic literature make a sad mistake. The "gnostic position was hostile to a proper affirmation of the bodily and therefore feminine identity." Tied to this is Young's adverse criticism of the view, popularized (although Young does not make this point) by process thinkers such as Hartshorne and by Grace Jantzen in her book God's World, God's Body, that the world emanated from God's own being. This, too, is gnostic, and, to theologians such as Irenaeus and Tertillian (and Young), "totally unacceptable."

Fourth, and finally, there is Young's exposition of the theology of the Holy Spirit: "[T]he final clause of the creed links with the Holy Spirit, the one holy catholic and apostolic church, along with baptism for the remission of sins, the resurrection and eternal life. This expresses the Spirit's 'sphere of activity.' Though the whole Trinity is involved, it is the 'proper' work of the Spirit to effect salvation through the church and the sacraments." Contrary to much loose talk today about the Spirit's being at work in isolated individuals or even within certain individual church communities in isolation from the church as a whole, the Spirit, Young reminds her readers, is the one who fills the form of the church understood as the Body of Christ.

Throughout The Making of the Creeds it is clear that Francis Young is terribly saddened by the division in the church between the East and West. Too often, it was something non-religious, non-theological even, that led to and fostered that split. Her unwritten plea is that the time has surely come to make amends. Moreover, it is clear that she has approached her task of explaining the making of the creeds the way Athanasius approached the mystery of the Christ, not as a theologian-

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although she is that-"but as a believing soul in need of a Saviour." Meditation, she writes, "is more than a teasing of the mind: it enables an imaginative grasp of what is involved in knowing and understanding one who is . .. the living transcendent God of biblical and Christian tradition." One is certain that it was such meditating that prompted and illuminated Francis Young's scholarship in this book. C. S. Lewis wrote, "I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await many others." It does for those who read The Making of the Creeds.

John Underwood Lewis
Cardiff Law School
Cardiff, UK