Every Sunday many Catholics mumble their way through the recitation of what we believe. Doesn't the Creed deserve to be proclaimed with a little more gusto?

I imagine that for an awful lot of Catholics, reciting the Creed is something like a break in the action of the liturgy-a kind of pause between the two major sections of the Mass. As those overly familiar formulas slip past their lips, many Mass-goers are probably allowing their minds to drift, or they are fumbling for the envelope in anticipation of the collection. But this is a shame. For the Creed is integral to the liturgy and expressive of the community's deepest identity. Having heard the Word of God in the readings and the homily, the people, through the Creed, state their faith; they declare what they stand for and, in principle, what they are willing to die for.

When he was a university theologian, our present pope said that reciting the Creed is a subversive act, for when we affirm the quality of our faith in the one God, we are saying implicitly that no country, no culture, no president, no political party, no worldly power is of final importance. We state the still-dangerous truth that the God revealed in scripture and in Jesus Christ is the one true God. Four basic beliefs are articulated in the Creed: in God the Father Almighty, in the Lord Jesus Christ, in the Holy Spirit, and in the church. Let us shed some light on this ancient expression of Catholic faith, revealing its still transforming and, yes, subversive power.

We believe in God the Father Almighty
That Catholic Christians believe in God seems banal enough, but we have to remember that there are an awful lot of ideas about God at play in our culture. The Methodist theologian Stanley Hauerwas has commented that, when someone says, "God bless you" to him, he responds, "Which one?" We believe in a very specific God, "the Father Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen."

To get at the uniqueness of this belief, let's contrast it with two views of God that are very ancient and altogether contemporary. The first is pantheism, the conviction that God is identified with the whole of nature, that "God" is another name for the universe taken as a totality. For an American example of this theology, consult Ralph Waldo Emerson's Harvard address of 1831, in which he urges his listeners to unite themselves to the "oversoul," the spiritual energy that suffuses the world. When this idea trickled down to the popular level and mixed in with elements of Eastern religion, it became the spirituality of the New Age.

In order to see the most influential and accessible version of this pantheist mysticism, turn to the Star Wars films of George Lucas. Lucas admitted that these films were intended to express the thoughts of Joseph Campbell, the comparative mythologist and historian of religions. In his famous interview with Bill Moyers, Campbell said that he did not believe in a personal God but in "the zoom of energy" that runs through all things. Lucas quite effectively translated this notion into the "Force" that plays such a central role in the Star Wars saga.

Another widespread contemporary view of God is deism. According to this doctrine, God is a supreme being-hovering somewhere above the world-who established the laws of nature, set things in motion, and then more or less retired, leaving the universe to its own devices. This understanding of God, prominent in the 18th century, was espoused by many of the Founding Fathers of our country. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and Thomas Paine were more or less deist in their convictions. Because it turns God into a distant spectator, deism opens up an arena that is essentially untouched by God. The contemporary influence of deism can be seen, therefore, in our tendency to set religion off as a private dimension, separate from the economic, political, social, and cultural realms.

But both of these understandings of God are opposed to biblical faith and incompatible with the Creed. God the Creator is neither a force nor an energy nor an oversoul within nature. If such realities exist, they would be impressive creatures, but not God the Creator.

Speaking the words of Yahweh, Isaiah the prophet says, "As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my thoughts above your thoughts and my ways above your ways" (55:9). All forms of pantheism run counter to this biblical insistence on God's otherness to the world.

At the same time, precisely as creator, God cannot be distant from the world, for God continually brings it into existence. This is why the same Isaiah who spoke of God's otherness can insist that God has "carved us in the palm of his hand" (49:15). It is of this unavoidable God that Psalm 139 speaks: "O Lord, you search me and you know me. You know my resting and my rising...before ever a thought is on my lips, you know it, Lord, through and through." Therefore, all forms of deism run counter to the biblical understanding.

Why does this matter? It matters, above all, because neither the pantheist nor the deist God can truly be a God of love. To love is to will the good of the other as other. The "Force" is fundamentally the same as the universe and hence cannot stand, in any meaningful sense, as "other" to the world. On the other hand, the supreme being of deism is so far from the world that he couldn't possibly muster enough energy to want the world's good. Only the God described in the Bible and affirmed in the Creed is both far enough and close enough to be a God of love.