Nicene Christianity: The Future for a New Ecumenism.

Nicene Christianity: The Future for a New Ecumenism Edited by Christopher R. Seitz Brazos, $18.99, 250 pp.

Nicene Christianity is a collection of essays, written by an ecumenical group of theologians, and drawn from papers delivered at a 2001 conference on the Creed at the Episcopal Cathedral of Charleston, South Carolina. The tone of the essays is resolutely orthodox (with the lowercase o), which is to say that the authors root themselves in the biblical and patristic sources as a bulwark against what they see as corrosive forces eating away at their respective communions. They also rightly insist that the practice of theology "can go wrong if it takes place apart from the life and practice of the church."

This is not to say these authors have only antiquarian interests. Yes, the Council of Nicea--the first ecumenical council--was centrally concerned with Arianism. It is also true, as Colin Gunton makes clear in his essay, that Arianism is a perennial Christian heresy. To reinforce the point, Alan Torrance writes that a loss of the belief that Christ is of "one substance" (homoousion) with the Father is not to lose a dubious metaphysical concept, but to jettison an anchor that keeps the low Christologies from lapsing into various forms of sentimental special pleading. It is also true that the reaction against Arianism diminished interest in the humanity of Christ--an imbalance that constantly needs correction.

Gnosticism is another persistent temptation. The Gnostic impulse shows up in curious ways. Carl Braaten's essay on the Resurrection makes a simple but vigorous point: You cannot deny the Resurrection of Christ and call yourself a Christian. He asks those who do to be honest enough not to teach Christian theology, or, worse, stay on in some hierarchical position. While reading Braaten, I could not but think of the problem of history (did the Resurrection happen?) and of the body (was Jesus raised as a person?). Both history and corporeality are stumbling blocks for the Gnostic temper. Another writer, John Webster, puts it succinctly: "The church's confession of the bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the antidote to Gnosticism in its modern guise," even though, as Webster notes, to assert that belief does not relieve one of thinking about, putting forward warrants for, and generally meditating upon such fundamental claims.

I cannot comment on all the essays, but I would like to single out three. Douglas Farrow's article on the Holy Spirit does an excellent job of discussing the addition of the filioque to the Western Creed--a major bone of contention between the churches of the West and the East. Vigen Guroian's beautiful meditation on the resurrection of the dead is a poetic and profoundly theological rendering of that doctrine, illustrating the power of the Orthodox capacity (Guroian is an Armenian theologian) for stating old truths in vigorous contemporary language. Finally, Ephraim Radner issues salutary warnings about the difficulty of uttering creedal statements in a church that is not well ordered. Radner insists that creeds do not exist "out there" platonically. Rather, they derive from the experience of a believing community, are located within the discipline of the church, and have their roots in liturgical life. Creeds are not simply free-floating "mission statements."

Nicene Christianity is a robust treatment of Christian doctrine that takes the historic creeds seriously. Of course, not all the contributions are of high quality (the essay on creation, by one of the two Catholic contributors, seemed perfunctory). I also lament the absence of an index, and would have liked a brief bibliography of basic writings on the creed.

Lawrence S. Cunningham is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.