The absence of the creeds of the church in Sunday worship (certainly in many Protestant churches) bears witness to a priority of cosmology over Christology. Modern congregations balk at saying the dreaded words:
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.
So, to save us from a crisis of conscience the words are removed with the inevitable result that worship is given free reign to be a spiritual exercise that loses its impact on our daily and fleshly lives.
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The creed does not compromise, just as his going was a bodily going so also his coming again will be a bodily coming. The return of Christ is not about the triumph of the Spirit of Christ over the entire world, a triumph of his ideas or his teaching but a real coming in the flesh. Again our cosmology is confronted, are not the bones of Jesus somewhere in Palestine? But again, unless we learn to hold our cosmology and our theology together, even though they seem incompatible, we lose the whole game. Christianity becomes privatised, spiritualised and Gnostic. Does this not describe the church of our day?
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