3.0 The Orthodoxy of Orthodoxy
\n3.1\tDefining \u201cOrthodoxy\u201d
\nPerhaps the best place to begin is with a two-line, inelegant poem I wrote some time ago when I was reading Dante:
\nHe who fashions the story,
\nassigns to each a glory.
\nOur understanding of Church history has been shaped by the orthodox theologians who wrote the story, people like Athanasius and the Creeds and the Reformers and whichever little stars you approve of since the Reformers. This fact must be admitted, for there is no way to deny it: the story we tell is the story the Church has told us to tell. We may capture it in our own little rendition, but the story we tell is an old, old story.
\nIn our zeal we may want to claim some sort of independence from the Church traditions and go straight to the Bible, but we cannot escape the creeds: we are a product of the creeds. Evangelical Christology is Nicean and Chalcedonian in essence (no pun intended).
\nBaptists may have a \u201ctrail of blood\u201d to find the first Baptist, and Lutherans may tell the story of a corrupted theology under the hands of Roman Catholic power-mongers, and the Anabaptists may complain until they die (which they will) that Constantine ruined the purity of the gospel \u2013 but however you trace the story, we Evangelicals tell the story of orthodoxy. And that story is that at Nicea, in 325 AD, the Church set out a creed that parted theological waters: those who were on the Lord\u2019s side embraced Nicea and those who didn\u2019t sided with oddballs like Arius. Orthodoxy means the \u201cclassic creeds.\u201d
\n3.2\tProvidence
\nIf we pursue the wisdom of the creeds, it will mean that the first defense of orthodoxy begins by trusting that the God of history has guided his people into all truth through the Paraclete. In other words, it is to have a robust pneumatology and ecclesiology and a bibliology that follows from both. Pagels and Ehrman would argue that faith claims have no part in historiography; but both would then have to admit that if you bracket something out of the scope of one\u2019s vision then you will envision only what is within the brackets. This issue of bracketing, which I can\u2019t indulge here, is more significant than most realize. Back to the Holy Spirit.
\nIt is instinctual for us to appeal to John 16:13: \u201cWhen the Holy Spirit comes he will guide you into all truth.\u201d One who has struggled with this verse is the English Evangelical, Stephen Holmes, of King\u2019s College London, and he concludes on this text the following:<\/p>\n
Just so, in theological work, the promise that the Holy Spirit will guide us into all truth does not announce an overcoming of all problems or a final solution to every question, but instead an assurance where the truth or relevance of the gospel is at stake that God will not abandon us but will work providentially through the messiness of very human arguments and decisions to ensure that the decisions taken are not disastrous. [and he calls this]\u2026 a relative, dependent and partial authority, but authority nonetheless.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Two pages later he observes:<\/p>\n
I find it difficult to envisage a situation in which there could be sufficient evidence to doubt the Nicene Creed\u2026. Its authority comes [not] only from the recognition that it is a remarkably successful repetition of central truths found already in the Bible, but because of that it has genuine authority as a privileged interpretation of Scripture, against which other claimed interpretations may be measured and tested\u2026. That the Creed says x is sufficient reason to assert that x is true, theologically.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Evangelicals are nervous about applying that very promise to anything outside the New Testament itself. Unless John 16:13 applies only to John\u2019s own writings, then there is a case to be made, and I see it made in Andreas K\u00f6stenberger\u2019s new John commentary, that this text refers to the ongoing providential sovereignty of the Holy Spirit in guiding the Church into the appropriation of God\u2019s truth. And, if that is the case, then there is nothing more applicable, even for non-creedal types like most of us, than the historic, ecumenical consensual creeds of the early Church. And, assuming we are alike, the great insights of the Reformation.
\n3.3\tEvangelicals and the Ecumenical Creeds
\nThis leads me to say something about the problem historic orthodoxy presents for Evangelicals. Permit me an indictment: Evangelicals, I am sorry to say, do not embrace a robust enough ecclesiology to deal with theological challenges. No part of the ancient creeds \u2013 from Nicea 325 to Nicea 787 \u2013 is more difficult to accept for Evangelicals than the word \u201ccatholic.\u201d But, we do relish the term \u201capostolic.\u201d I am concerned about the former as long as we don\u2019t neglect the latter. I am concerned we join in on the \u201cnew ecumenism\u201d and that we repudiate the \u201cold ecumenism\u201d of the WCC and NCC and the like. If you want to read something good on this, read Oden\u2019s The Rebirth of Orthodoxy<\/em>, or the splendid sections in Robert Webber\u2019s Ancient-Future Faith<\/em>, or even Russ Reno\u2019s new book In the Ruins of the Church<\/em>. But there are simply too many issues to get into this deeply, so I wish to offer the following four observations.
\nFirst, we Evangelicals are the heirs of not just the Reformation, but also the Radical Reformation, whether we admit it or not. We are uniformly committed to powerful theologies of Luther and Calvin about justification by faith; but we tend to be decidedly low-church; we are radically opposed to State-based churches; and we are famously opposed to anything like reciting the historic (or non-historic) creeds in public worship; we tend toward separationism and (at times) the sectarian. These tendencies are a blending of the impulses of both Luther (and Calvin) with the impulses of the Radical Reformers and especially their low-church successors. And, it should be observed, Calvin himself was much more committed to the classic creeds and to church tradition than were the Radical Reformers.
\nTrotting alongside this low-church version of the Reformation is pietism, which anchors plenty (and probably too much) into personal experience and conviction, and makes such pietists nervous about too much intellectualism, and tends to get lathered up in nervousness about what Flannery O\u2019Connor called those \u201ctheological interleckchuals,\u201d though I can\u2019t recall just where she said it.
\nSecond, however much we are nervous about the historic creeds, Evangelicals believe the substance of the historic creeds, and if you try disagreeing with their major ideas, you will quickly learn that, though we do not recite the Creeds, it is to them that we first run for clarification in central theological matters. The reason for this paradox \u2013 of believing in and not believing in the creeds \u2013 is simple: Evangelicals, because we tend to be low-church, don\u2019t have an ecclesiological apparatus that permits it to invest theological authority in creedal councils. A word of wisdom from Booth Tarkington might relieve my pressure: \u201cA dog believes in war, but he is convinced that there are times when it is moral to run.\u201d I think we might consider the wisdom of the dog. We may say we believe in fighting it out each and every time, but in the end the wisdom of the dog is to run to the Creeds.
\nLet me say one more thing, and it is perhaps either uncharitable or a trifle cynical. Sometimes I wonder why it is that we Evangelicals know so little about the early church, say from 100AD to 300AD. If truth be told, and here I broach the cynical, from 100AD to 1500AD. I suspect, if we are talking about the first three hundred years that the major reason we don\u2019t know about this period is because it simply doesn\u2019t fit what we believe. Anyone who reads these people \u2013 people like Clement of Alexandria or Origen or (even at times) Athanasius or Gregory of Nyssa \u2013 will find much to agree with, and some things to disagree with. But, the fact is, that it is they who gave shape to the Creeds that we really do in fact hold to and to which we run, with the dog, whenever the situation demands it. I\u2019m sorry if this sounds either uncharitable to us or even a tad cynical; I don\u2019t say it for any other reason than that I want to hurt our feelings.
\nThird, the reason for this, again, is also quite simple but nonetheless fundamental to Evangelical identity: as Protestants, we affirm sola Scriptura. Even though our commitment to this can be radical (and admittedly somewhat annoying when half-baked ideas get served regularly from Evangelical pulpits), it nonetheless shapes our identity. So, in being radically committed to sola Scriptura we de-value the ecumenical creeds and throw ourselves constantly onto the rushing waters of historical changes and individual pastoral skill.
\nAt this point let me adapt something humorous from Walter Bagehot, that great Victorian who chased away lots of silly political ideas. I will subsititute \u201cEvangelical\u201d for his \u201cEnglishman\u201d to make my point. \u201cTell an Evangelical that a building is without use and he will stare; that it is illiberal, and he will survey it; that it teaches Aristotle, and he will seem perplexed; that it don\u2019t teach science, and he won\u2019t mind; but only hint that it is the Pope, and he will arise and burn it to the ground.\u201d So committed are we to sola Scriptura.
\nIn speaking of sola Scriptura I wish to appeal to my colleague, Dr. Bradley Nassif, who is both Eastern Orthodox and Evangelical \u2013 which is no easy road to walk. In his new book, Three Views on Eastern Orthodoxy and Evangelicalism<\/em>, Brad calls Evangelicals to task. He asks us to consider again what the Reformers meant by sola Scriptura and what we mean by it. We can either choose the method of the Radical Reformation, which I think most Evangelicals today do choose, or we can choose the Magisterial Reformers, which I think we think we choose. Let me explain: the Radical Reformation put the Bible in the hands of the individual\u2019s conscience and thereby spawned Pietism. Individuals become directly accountable to God for determining what to believe. The Reformers, however, saw the creeds as valuable guides and gave to them fundamental respect, even if they shied away from them as \u201cauthoritative.\u201d Tradition was valuable as long it was not abused.
\nThe key issue, as I see it, may be this: who will have final authority is a necessary correlation to the question of what will have final authority? That is, the what is clearly the Bible: it has final authority. But, who interprets the Bible? Is it the individual or is the catholic body, whichever \u201ccatholic\u201d body one dwells in. I chase this question down with this one: Was it individuals who decided which books were to be included in the canon?
\nIn other words, sola Scriptura<\/em> is always set in the context of communio sanctorum<\/em>, the communion of the saints. The question thus becomes not if we will embrace the confessional tradition, but which tradition will we embrace, or better yet, which tradition will embrace us.
\nYou may be aware that in the past two decades numerous Protestant pastors have converted either to Roman Catholicism or to Eastern Orthodoxy, but you are probably not aware that I subjected this \u201cconversion\u201d trend \u2013 and I\u2019ve been told that more than 700 Protestant pastors have turned to Rome \u2013 to an analysis in order to seek out the \u201ccrisis\u201d that provoked such conversions. If there is any one thing at the bottom of it all, is the problem created by too many Bible readers offering too many interpretations that have too little of connection to the historic interpretations of the Scriptures. I am not suggesting that we cross the Tiber or the Bosporus, but that we realize the tohu va-bohu <\/em>that is created when we turn the Bible loose from its historic interpretations.
\nAnd, now the slider: as Evangelicals we need to admit more readily the role of the Church in \u201cdeciding\u201d what was canonical. I am fully aware that we are treading on dangerous identity turfs here, but the facts are simple: what we read as canonical is read as authoritative because its inherent authority is inspired and its recognition is ecclesial. If we think God led the Church to embrace, however self-authenticating, the 27 books, perhaps we can also be led to re-consider the Church\u2019s creedal interpretation of those 27 books \u2013 as embodied in the ecumenical creeds. I first became convinced of the Church\u2019s role in canonizing when I read F.F. Bruce\u2019s article in the 25th Anniversary volume of the Evangelical Theological Society as a first-semester student at TEDS. What, I have been led to ask since then, prevented the Plymouth Brethren F.F. Bruce from seeing the same providential process in the ecumenical creeds?
\nIt is an irony that far too often Evangelicals adore the canonical process but disdain the creedal process, adore the produce but despise the process. I now quote Brad Nassif, who after citing the extremes of what the Radical Reformers could lead to, says: \u201cThe irony of this disdain is that Evangelicals rely on the church\u2019s authoritative charismatic judgment on the colossal issue of canonicity but not on its consensual agreement on fundamental matters of historic interpretation\u2026 To accept the books of the canon is also to accept the ongoing Spirit-led authority of the church\u2019s tradition, which recognizes, interprets, worships, and corrects itself by the witness of Holy Scripture.\u201d
\nFourth, my final point comes full circle: because of these things, we Evangelicals do not have an adequate ecclesiology to respond potently to heresies. It means that individuals will have to make up their own minds and ask their pastors or ask their local churches to render judgment or, and this is better, the entire denomination will have to form a council for its churches and render a judgment. But, as is the case with Evangelicals and low-church types, there is an inherent nervousness about letting some \u201cbody\u201d make a binding decision. Peter Toon expressed the horns of this dilemma wonderfully:<\/p>\nBeginning with the belief in the authority of Scripture, the sola scriptura, the Protestant must interpret the sola so as not to exclude the development of doctrine in the Church [whether development in content or clarification] and the giving of a secondary authority to confessions of faith.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I\u2019m appealing, the way a mouse does before a lion, for Evangelicals to enlargen the latter end of this process and reconsider its relationship to both the orthodox creeds and to the powerful processes that were established in such creeds. This little heresy of mine can be called orthodoxy. If we do this, and if we recognize that there is a drama played on different stages in different locations to different tunes, we will come to terms with three things: (1) the authority of the canon, (2) the sacredness of the creeds, and (3) the need to engage each culture with that canon in light of those creeds.
\nI see only two live options for us: either we embrace canon and creed as a singular moment when God was at work through his Spirit in the history of the Church, or we relativize both canon and creed and throw everything back on history or individual conscience. Evangelicals, as I read us, have taken a third option, and it seems inherently inconsistent: we have opted for divine providence in the canonical process but not a divine providence in the creedal process. When I think about our problems here, I feel like Booth Tarkington\u2019s bug who fell into an ink-well and was then fished out; his comment about it was that the bug was \u201calive but discouraged.\u201d
\nDiscouraged maybe; but at least we should consider the creedal process itself.
\n3.4\tEvangelicals and Creedal Process
\nHow did that process take place? To begin with, we are not completely sure. But, in the Fifth Century a fellow named Vincent of L\u00e9rins, recognizing that Holy Scripture by itself wasn\u2019t able to settle all issues easily and clearly, studied how the Church was to come to terms with new teachings that seemed to stretch or even deny theological tradition. His solution, sketched most recently in my first example, Thomas Oden\u2019s book, The Rebirth of Orthodoxy<\/em>, was that the Church needs to settle down into the theological nest of what has been believed (1) everywhere, (2) always, and (3) by all. Of course, if we think of this Vincentian Canon in terms of absolute uniformity, we\u2019ll not find much that passes muster. But, if we think with reasonable humility, it is not hard to come to terms with what we might call a \u201cconsensual orthodoxy\u201d or what Thomas Oden calls \u201cpaleo-orthodoxy.\u201d
\nThere is more serious grappling in another example, the former Wheaton professor, Robert Webber. Ever on the prowl, Webber is calling this turn to the ancients the \u201cAncient-Future Faith.\u201d Essentially, Webber seeks ancient paradigms of thinking and worshipping that meet the issues and needs of the postmodern generation. Few agree with Webber completely; scores have come under his influence, and for good reason. He is one of those Evangelicals who have for a long time called the Evangelical Church back to \u201ccommon roots\u201d and its historic footings. There is a vision here that can energize. I have been personally rejuvenated by the Eastern Church and recently read Alexander Schmemann\u2019s For the Life of the World <\/em>and the interaction of the immaterial. His is a vision that can help all of us.
\nMy final example is perhaps the most profound of all: radical orthodoxy. Stemming from Cambridge, from scholars like John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock who think theological liberalism has permitted modernity to dictate the \u201crules of the game,\u201d and determined to develop a radically consistent orthodox perception of the world, from theology to economics to politics to culture, this \u201csensibility\u201d is calling Christians of various persuasions, Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Evangelical, to radicalize the Faith. Radical orthodoxy critiques modernity, abandons the division of the secular from the sacred, understands all of the created order as \u201csuspended\u201d from its Creator, renews the value of the sacraments and the aesthetic, and relentlessly calls for a cultural transformation. [Note: I need to do more work on radical orthodoxy.]
\nWe could give other examples but, the issue is not examples: the issue is that Christians are learning today that there is something enormously valuable and valid in appealing to the historic faith of the Church embodied in the creeds as instances of God\u2019s Spirit working in the Church to guide the Church into all truth.
\nI can\u2019t resist another example. In their recent book called One Faith<\/em>, J.I. Packer (an Anglican) and Thomas Oden (a Methodist) have traced the central doctrines of the (Evangelical) Christian faith and have provided support for a given doctrine, say substitutionary atonement, from various Evangelical doctrinal statements (including that of the EFCA). In so doing, they provide what might be called a consensual Evangelical set of doctrines. The small book falls short of an \u201cEvangelical creed,\u201d but a creed could be shaped from such materials \u2013 if you could fool some Evangelical council into thinking they were doing something else!
\n3.5\tEvangelicals, Sola Scriptura, and Story
\nMy final thought is this: as Protestants, we want everything tested by Scripture. You knew that somehow I\u2019d zigzag my way back to the normal. We must admit, even if we don\u2019t want to, that our Evangelical faith is essentially that of the historic creeds as filtered through the great Reformers and, as I said, the little stars who followed them. But, when we render judgment about doctrine our concern is first of all to be biblically-based in what we judge and how we judge. We tend to believe the creeds because we think they put together the NT evidence accurately, not because some authorities said this is what we are to believe. We will test those creeds by the facts of the NT, revise them if we think they are less than or other than what that NT teaches. But the simple fact is this: we have done this and we have found them nearly universally acceptable. And those creeds have shaped our faith in the form of a story.
\nThe NT itself encourages us to think of our faith in terms of a narrative, of a story, of the drama of redemption. I shall now put on the table two arguments that lead to the \u201corthodoxy of orthodoxy,\u201d one from C.H. Dodd and the other from my book, Jesus and His Death: Historiography, the Historical Jesus, and Atonement Theory<\/em> (Baylor, 2005). I don\u2019t think what I am proposing here is foundationalism so much as it is the simple belief that the gospel story itself is its own power, and needs proclamation in the face of our culture more than it needs apologetical defense.
\nC.H. Dodd, that half-forgotten colossus of twentieth-century biblical scholarship, wrote The Apostolic Preaching and Its Developments<\/em> in 1936. It is rarely read today and is a pity, because it reminds us of something very important in the early churches: they had a \u201cstory to tell.\u201d Dodd famously examined the earliest Christian preaching and distilled from the NT evidence a narrative framework of the \u201cgospel\u201d of the earliest churches. This might be called the \u201cgospel tradition\u201d and it evidently formed the basis of not only early Christian preaching but also the early Christian creeds. Dodd saw seven elements: (1) prophetic fulfillment and the inauguration of the New Age in Christ; (2) born of the seed of David; (3) died according to Scriptures to deliver us; (4) buried; (5) rose on the third day; (6) exalted as Lord over all; (7) coming again as Judge and Savior.
\nIf one combines this with the Pastoral Epistles interest in the \u201capostolic deposit\u201d(e.g., 1 Tim. 4:6: \u201cbrought up in the truths of the faith and of the good teaching\u201d), one is not far from seeing an apostolic development of a narrative shape of the gospel, a creed if you will, as the formative way to articulate the faith. As Evangelicals, we will stand firm with the NT articulations of such narratives, but we will also readily admit that what began with the apostles continued into the early Church and found definitive expression in the orthodox, ecumenical creeds.
\nLet me now offer a second argument. It comes from postmodernist concerns with historiography and my understanding of history. As a result of Richard Rorty, many philosophers, historians, English professors, and some theologians, have opted for what is called the \u201clinguistic turn.\u201d In essence, this is the idea that \u201cmeaning is made by the reader\/interpreter\u201d rather than \u201cdiscovered by the interpreter\u201d from discernible facts and evidence \u201cout there.\u201d Meaning is made by language, as each person interprets what he or she sees and experiences and, inside the noggin\u2019, develops a story that makes sense of it all (or a story that doesn\u2019t make sense of it all). When historians get hold of this and start tossing things around the room, then history takes on a new shape. For, no longer does it matter \u201cif something happened\u201d or \u201cif one\u2019s story is more accurate than another\u2019s,\u201d but instead what happens is that individual historians create meaning for themselves and all we have is the exercise of power through the stories we tell. This is a simplistic summary of what is very complex, and even at times a bit interesting, but it is enough for me to make my point.
\nWhich is that the Gospel narratives are \u201cstories\u201d that take \u201cdiscrete events\u201d and \u201cput them together\u201d in order to \u201ctell a story.\u201d If you grant me this, I will grant you this: the story of Jesus that the Church has told is the story now found in the Four Gospels. This, my friend, is the one and only Christian story and this story has shaped our identity and will continue to do so. Any other story, whether told by the Gnostic who told the story of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas, or the story of Elaine Pagels or Bart Ehrman \u2013 and both of them spin their own story, or the story of The DaVinci Code<\/em>, is only Christian to the degree it conforms to the story of the Four Gospels. To the degree that it does not conform to that story \u2013 and their stories simply don\u2019t \u2013 it ceases to be Christian and becomes either sub-Christian or heresy.
\nNow to a three-pronged conclusion.
\n4.0 Conclusion: Gospel by Niggle
\nWhen I have time, I like to read books written well and about important topics and,
\nif I can control the dice, with plenty of wit. Indolent reading, reading from one author to another, in a reverie at times, in the search of pleasure and joy and truth, is what I am most fitted for. As Samuel Johnson once put it, \u201cthe most general and prevalent reason [for this kind of] study, is the impossibility of finding another amusement equally cheap or constant.\u201d I sample three pieces of such reading to close our time.
\nI begin with Aeschylus. One of the deepest legends of the classical world is that of the immortal Prometheus, a Titan. In one of those eras when Zeus was at odds with humans and depriving them of pleasure, Prometheus pinched a spark of fire from heaven and took it to humans for their good. Well, Prometheus also happened to know the secret of the marriage of Thetis. Zeus desired her so he punished Prometheus by chaining him to a crag where an eagle fed on his liver daily, only for it to grow back every night. When Oceanus comes to get Prometheus to back down to Zeus, Prometheus refuses. He refuses the offers of others as well, and is eventually doomed to the abyss. Prometheus embodies those who fight the gods, who refuse to give in to Zeus.
\nIt is Promethean of Elaine Pagels and Bart Ehrman to fight the orthodox gods that are so clearly articulated in the creeds of the Christian Church. They think they have, like Prometheus, stolen a spark so they can \u201cinform\u201d the world of what is hidden but it is they who are re-opening Pandora\u2019s jar of heresies. Prometheus, contrary to the imaginations of countless scholars like Ayn Rand since, was never released because he had usurped an authority that was not his.
\nThis story no doubt inspired C.S. Lewis\u2019s character in his first published work, the epic ballad Dymer<\/em>. Dymer had been worked on by the educational system to get him to conform for nineteen years, but one day in class, he came to his senses and suddenly laughs aloud.
\n\u2026From his lips
\nBroke yet again the idiot-like guffaw.
\nHe felt the spirit in his finger-tips,
\nThen swinging his right arm \u2013 a wide ellipse
\nYet lazily \u2013 he struck the lecturer\u2019s head.
\nThe old man tittered, lurched and dropt down dead.
\n(I, 7-10)
\nDymer runs from the school house.
\n\u2026 He felt his city dress
\nAn insult to that April cheerfulness.
\n\u2026 And forthwith in the open field
\nHe stripped away that prison of sad stuff\u2026
\nAnd once he cried aloud, \u2018O world, O day,
\nLet, let me,\u2019 \u2013 and then found no prayer to say.
\nLike Dymer, the heretics and those who defend them have struck the lecturer and, though thinking him dead, they find he has been raised from the dead. They may bracket themselves out of all their past, but someday they discover that they can no longer pray for God does not succumb to our brackets.
\nWhich leads me now, finally, to Tolkien\u2019s little man named Niggle. Instead of thinking our task as teachers and preachers of the gospel to be that of Prometheus or Dymer, we need to realize our task is to be a Niggle. Niggle was a little man who painted leaves but, because he was so sensitive to the needs of others around him, he seemed never to get his masterpiece done. This work began with a leaf, turned into a tree of some proportions that led its viewers into a forest on the edge of the mountains. Niggle, as I say, was unable to finish his task because he served his neighbor, Mr. and Mrs. Parish. Not that he didn\u2019t curse them at times under his breath. But, one day the Driver came and took him off to purgatory where Niggle got his act all cleaned up. Soon the Second Voice, who surely must be the Son of God, called him to the next stage where he found his leaf and his tree and his forest and his mountain in pristine reality. What Niggle had dreamed of on earth, and what he was able only to approximate in his art, was fully realized when the Second Voice took him to what he had dreamed for.
\nNiggle was a dreamer who painted leaves. Ours is not to defy the gods or to take down the teachers of our tradition; ours is, like Niggle, to live out the gifts we have been given. Even if it is painting leaves, even if we are little people. Niggle\u2019s little dream world became, according to the Second Voice, Niggle\u2019s Parish where people came to be refreshed. The Second Voice, in fact, says that \u201cit is the best introduction to the Mountains.\u201d
\nSomeday, so the Bible tells us, we shall get to the Mountain and see Him as he really is. And, when we do, we will know that our efforts to preach and teach the orthodox faith were not in vain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"3.0 The Orthodoxy of Orthodoxy 3.1 Defining \u201cOrthodoxy\u201d Perhaps the best place to begin is with a two-line, inelegant poem I wrote some time ago when I was reading Dante: He who fashions the story, assigns to each a glory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":298,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theology"],"yoast_head":"\n
The Gospel of Niggle 3 - Jesus Creed<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/2006\/05\/the-gospel-of-niggle-3.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Gospel of Niggle 3 - Jesus Creed\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"3.0 The Orthodoxy of Orthodoxy 3.1 Defining \u201cOrthodoxy\u201d Perhaps the best place to begin is with a two-line, inelegant poem I wrote some time ago when I was reading Dante: He who fashions the story, assigns to each a glory.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/2006\/05\/the-gospel-of-niggle-3.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Jesus Creed\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2006-05-31T05:20:09+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"xscot mcknight\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"The Gospel of Niggle 3 - 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