Source: Times UK
Credo by Geoffrey Rowell
THE poet W. H. Auden wrote about Sigmund Freud: “He wasn’t clever at all: he merely told the unhappy Present to recite the Past like a poetry lesson till sooner or later it faltered at the line where long ago the accusations had begun.”
Being helped to tell our stories and to know the baggage we carry around, shaped by frustrations and failures, can set us free, enabling us, as Auden went on, “to approach the Future as a friend without a wardrobe of excuses, without a set mask of rectitude”. We are free to be who we are.
What is true of each one of us is also true of places and peoples. The ways in which they tell their story express and establish their identity. At Gori in Georgia, the birthplace of Stalin, the story of the local boy made good is celebrated in a museum which makes no reference to the appalling deportations and massacres for which he was responsible.
The Christian Church finds and expresses its identity in telling a story; first of all of the people of God providentially guided through exodus and exile. And then the story of Jesus Christ creating the story of the new people of God, a community whose identity is given by the Spirit of the Risen Christ, universal and no longer defined by race. Eusebius of Caesarea (c 275-339), who wrote the first history of the Church, sees a providential pattern in its growth from the small knot of original Disciples to its recognition by the Roman Emperor, Constantine.
Running as a thread through Eusebius’s history is the faith and order of the Church, its apostolic teaching and its apostolic structure.
The Church does not invent itself in every generation. It proclaims a revealed and given faith, and its ordered apostolic ministry is both handed down and responsible for teaching and preaching and interpreting the Gospel — the good news — of salvation. It is to be in the world but not of it.
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