The Psychology of Christianity: Part 1, The Bigger Tent

Just this week I (along with my co-author Andrea Haugen) submitted a chapter for a coming APA handbook on psychology and spirituality. My chapter was to present an overview of the Christian faith, noting its theological distinctives while simultaneously reviewing the empirical literature related to Christian belief and practice. (Others are writing chapters on the other world religions.)

This was an interesting job as it involved trying to view the entire Christian faith through the lens of psychology. My first task in this chapter was to specify the Christian faith. Who are Christians? And what do they believe?

Current estimates indicate that 32-33% of the world population is Christian, around 1.9 to 2.1 billion souls. Most of these are in Europe (531 million), followed by Latin America (511 million), Africa (389 million), and North America (381 million).

As far as the shape of the Christian communion is concerned, the four major branches of Christianity are Catholic (1.1 billion adherents, or 52.4% of Christians), Protestant (375 million, or 17.9%), Orthodox (219 million, or 10.4%), and Anglican (79 million, or 3.8%).

What do these Christians believe? Answering this question was the first task of the chapter, deciding how to specify the Christian faith, theologically speaking. I made a predictable decision and decided to use either the Apostles' or Nicene Creed:

The Apostles' Creed
I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.
He was conceived by the power of Holy Spirit
and born of the Virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again.
He ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church;
the communion of saints;
the forgiveness of sins;
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting.
Amen.

Nicene Creed
We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.

For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.

For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come.
Amen.

Which creed should I pick? If I was to go with the creed that is considered to be the guiding doctrinal statement of the faith I should go with the Nicene Creed, as it is considered the gold standard of orthodoxy. The reason for this, as many of you know, is that the lack of specificity in the Apostles' Creed makes it prone to heresy (then and now). The Apostles' Creed, in various forms, was the earlier of the two creeds, and was used primarily as a baptismal confession. Thus it begins with the individualized "I believe." But this simple baptismal confession proved to lack the theological specificity needed to stamp out the various heresies that were beginning to plague the early church. A more theologically rich and specific creed was needed that would unite the Christian communion, thus the Nicene refrain "We believe."

You can see the fingerprints of heresy all over the surface of the Nicene Creed. For example, at the time of the Nicene councils the Marcion heresy contended that there were two gods. One god, the god of the Old Testament, created this sorry world, and a second nicer god, the one proclaimed by Jesus Christ, who was seeking to rescue us from this world (and its reigning deity). Motivated by theodicy concerns Marcionism has some psychological appeal (just crack God in half leaving his good parts on one side and his bad parts on the other side). In contrast to this God-cracking, the Nicene Creed makes a bolder and more difficult (from a theodicy stance) theological move:

We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.

Basically, no God cracking allowed. There is one God and God, as unfortunate as this seems at times, created everything. And, as you can see, these additional theological details (e.g., moving from "I believe in God" to "I believe in one God") makes the Nicene Creed longer and theologically more complex than the Apostles' Creed.

This trend continues and intensifies in the second, Christological sections of the creeds. In the Apostles' Creed Jesus is simply called things like "son," Lord," and "judge." This gave followers of Arius some wiggle room to deny the full divinity and preexistence of Jesus, believing instead that God "adopted" the man Jesus and made him divine. In response to this Christological wiggle room the Nicene Creed goes to great lengths to secure the preexistent divinity of Jesus:

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.

And the theological fun continues in the third sections of the creeds where we consider the third person of the Christian Trinity, the Holy Spirit. For example, consider the filioque controversy. The Apostles' Creed simply has "I believe in the Holy Spirit." The Nicene Creed, as always, goes into a lot more detail:

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.

The filioque controversy was a part of the rift between Roman Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy. Filioque is Latin for "and from the Son." The original text of the Nicene Creed did not include filioque. The difference with and without the filioque:

Original Text:
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father.

Filioque Text (emphasis added):
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son.

The filioque began to be added a few hundred years after the Nicene consensus. Eventually, the filioque was adopted by Rome in 1014, causing a rift between the Western and Eastern churches. The tensions involved in this controversy were both theological and political/national in nature. People still debate the issue.

The point in all this is that the Nicene Creed, while theologically authoritative relative to the Apostles' Creed, is a lot more complex, metaphysically speaking. All this made me hesitant to use the Nicene Creed in my chapter. Conversely, the terseness and generality of the Apostles' Creed made it attractive given my purposes. Namely, the lack of metaphysical specificity within the Apostles' Creed makes it a more general statement of faith. Crudely put, both heretics and the orthodox can subscribe to the Apostles' Creed. Which makes it, theologically speaking, a bigger tent. Given my task of surveying "Christianity," in all its heterogeneity, a bigger tent was preferred.

So I went with the Apostles' Creed, opting for its terse simplicity and lack of metaphysical specificity. In short, the very aspects of the Apostles' Creed that made it such a headache during the Nicene deliberations made it ideal for my chapter on Christianity. I needed the biggest tent I could find, to group as many people as possible under the label "Christian." Admittedly, this still leaves out a lot of the people. For example, there are people who would self-identify as "Christian" but who, while being followers of Jesus, might be agnostics or atheists. However, I had a chapter to write that was to be built around Christian belief. One has to start somewhere...