BETWEEN October 1977 and May 1980, Metropolitan Anthony Bloom gave a series of 39 talks on the Nicene Creed at the Russian Orthodox cathedral in London. Recorded and transcribed — he always spoke without notes — they totalled some 300,000 words. John Binns, who, as a student, had become an admirer of Metropolitan Anthony, has worked on the text for some years to produce this book. As he says in his Preface, he has shortened it and adapted the language from a spoken to a written style, and selected and arranged the material. The book contains roughly 80,000 words.
In the Orthodox Divine Liturgy, the Nicene Creed is recited immediately before the eucharistic prayer. It is preceded by a diaconal proclamation, “The doors, the doors, in wisdom let us attend.” This is in origin a command to close the church doors in order to exclude those not yet baptised. But Metropolitan Anthony cites Maximus the Confessor’s comment that in preparing to celebrate the eucharist we must close the doors of history and enter into the age to come. The deacon then says “Peace be with you all,” meaning the peace of God which passes understanding. Finally, he exhorts the congregation: “Let us love one another so that with one mind we may acknowledge the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, the Trinity consubstantial and undivided.”
The God in whom we proclaim our faith is the God of love, whom we can know only if we learn to love our neighbour. The creed, Metropolitan Anthony says, “is not only a statement of intellectual conviction; it is new life.”
A 16th-century Byzantine icon of the First Council of Nicaea, held in 325
That conviction shapes the content of his lectures. Referring to the deacon’s proclamation, he concludes his introduction: “We say ‘The doors, the doors’, and enter into a realm where history has a beginning in God, and a goal and an end in God. Its centre is in the Incarnation, which is its total, final and glorious meaning. We enter into a realm where all things have already happened in Christ and are also happening in us in the economy and process of salvation.
“It is with this sense that beyond the visible there is the invisible, that in these words of the Creed so clear and simple there is this unfathomable depth of the divine presence, which will be understood only within the Church, in the context of God present and active in our midst and within us, that we can approach the reading, the proclaiming and the living of the Creed”.
Metropolitan Anthony claimed not to be a theologian in the academic sense. But he was a theologian in the sense of the desert monk Evagrius’s famous definition: “A theologian is one who prays, and one who prays is a theologian.” He did, of course, draw on the Eastern Christian patristic tradition, which sometimes differs from the Western. But, as Rowan Williams points out in his foreword, Metropolitan Anthony drew, too, on modern theologians such as Vladimir Lossky and George Florovsky, as well as on novelists and artists.
Binns is to be congratulated on making available in condensed form Father Anthony’s exposition of the historic Christian faith embodied in the Creed, not just as an intellectual doctrinal statement, but as a guide for Christian praying and living.
Canon Hugh Wybrew was formerly Vicar of St Mary Magdalen’s, Oxford.
Living the Christian Creed: Theology as encounter
Metropolitan Anthony Bloom
John Binns, editor
DLT £24.99
(978-1-915412-73-7)
Church Times Bookshop £22.49