A Personal Creed of Faith, Doubt, and the Long Memory of the Church

What I Believe

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

My little country church in South Dakota has its audio-visual booth in a side annex just past the wall beside the pulpit. The annex holds about 36 folding chairs that serve as overflow from the sanctuary on the Sundays we need them, and the booth sits right alongside those chairs, open to the main worship hall next door. When people look over from their pews, what they see is the 14- and 16-year-old girls I have trained as my technicians, working the gear on their own. I am almost never in the booth during the service. I stand in the back of the main worship hall listening to how the room sounds, and then I walk through the rest of the building, the fellowship hall, the narthex, the bathrooms, to check that every remote speaker sounds the way it should.

I do this for two reasons. One, I have ADHD, and I cannot sit still. Two, I have autism, and I cannot leave well enough alone when sound is in the room with me. I will hear a speaker three decibels louder from the other side of the building and find the wall volume control, turning it back to the proper level. That is who I am in this sanctuary. I am the one who trained the girls to run the booth without me, and then I roam the building making sure every pew hears the gospel clearly.

I love my church family. I love the people who raised me in my childhood congregation, Pioneer Lutheran Church in White, South Dakota. I love the people in my adult congregation, Springdale Lutheran Church in rural Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where my children attended and were confirmed. My attendance at the liturgy itself, I will admit, has slipped. A lot. When I do end up with my eyes closed in a pew listening, I find myself with my head in my hand, trying not to shake it at the words.

This is my creed. It is honest and incomplete. It belongs to me. I owe it to the people who have loved me through my faith, my doubt, and everything in between to write it down plainly.

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Raised Lutheran

I was baptized at five weeks old in the sanctuary of First Lutheran Church in my birthplace of Albert Lea, Minnesota, where my mother grew up. That was not an accident of paternal calendar logistics. That is the practice of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. ELCA parents typically bring their infants to the baptismal font within the first weeks of a child’s life, a tradition ELCA theologian Martin E. Marty traces back to the earliest decades of the Christian movement, when infant baptism appears to have replaced Jewish circumcision as the rite of initiation (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, n.d.).

I was confirmed at thirteen, five weeks before my fourteenth birthday. That, again, was not a random number. Confirmation in the ELCA and its predecessor bodies has landed most commonly in seventh through ninth grade for many generations, with most students taking the catechism at about age twelve and affirming their baptism around age fourteen (Confirmation (Lutheran Church), 2025). My class was on the younger end of that range, but well within it.

I never left. I have been a member of the same two Lutheran communities for most of my life, and I still volunteer on the audio-visual team. When the pastor preaches, the livestream works. I am still there making it work. The doors are open. The Wi-Fi is connected. The camera rolls. If I show up late or rarely, the sanctuary still has my name on its rolls, and in the live stream credits, and my hand on its equipment.

The Skeptic in the Pew

My skepticism is not aimed at God. It is aimed at what human beings have done with God.

I believe in something larger than myself. I cannot tell you with confidence who or what that something is. I am not sure the creator is a bearded patriarch seated on a throne, or a maternal presence, or a shared consciousness older than language, or, for that matter, an advanced civilization with terraforming capabilities older than our solar system. I am at peace saying I do not know. What I do know is that the miracle of life on this planet is real. Some force set conditions so finely tuned that I exist to write this sentence and you exist to read it. That force, whatever it is, has my reverence.

This is, I suspect, closer to the way the ancient writers themselves held the question than the way modern pulpits answer it. When Moses asked for God’s name in Exodus 3:14, the answer he received was “I AM WHO I AM” (New International Version, 2011, Exodus 3:14). That is not a definition. It is a reminder that the question is bigger than any human vocabulary.

Jesus

I believe in Jesus of Nazareth. I believe he was a real man who walked real roads in the first century and had a strong, lasting impact on those around him. I am unsure of his virgin birth, unsure of his divinity, yet completely enraptured with his teachings and his care for his fellow humans.

I do not believe he was a long-haired, blue-eyed European in pristine linen. That picture is a medieval and early modern artistic invention, shaped heavily by representations of Roman and Greek gods such as Zeus rather than by historical record (History.com Editors, 2019).

Joan E. Taylor, professor of Christian Origins and Second Temple Judaism at King’s College London, assembled a composite portrait from skeletal remains, period clothing, and early texts. Her conclusion was straightforward: Jesus stood about five feet five inches tall, with olive-brown skin, brown eyes, and dark brown to black hair. He most likely wore his hair short and had a trimmed beard (Taylor, 2018; Winston, 2018).

The older Book of Revelation description, written by someone who claimed to have seen a vision of the risen Christ, contains the phrase “the hair on his head was white like wool, as white as snow” (Rev. 1:14, NIV). Biblical scholars read this as a reference to divine eternity borrowed from Daniel 7:9, not as a physical description of the man from Galilee (New International Version, 2011, Revelation 1:14). I read it two ways. I read the first-century man as brown, short, and ordinary-looking. I read the visionary figure of Revelation as the glorified Christ of metaphor, whose “wool” hair is a statement about his eternity, not his barber.

Either way, the man was not white. The man was not tall. The man was brown. He changed the world.

The First Christians

I believe the original followers of Jesus were kind, brave, pious people who took his teachings seriously. They loved their neighbors. They cared for people experiencing poverty. They refused to deny him, even when the Roman state demanded it.

The historical record backs that up. Between the reign of Nero in the first century and the Edict of Milan in 313 CE, Christians faced periodic state persecution (Uggerud, 2023). The last and most violent wave, the Great Persecution under Diocletian from 303 to 311 CE, ordered the razing of churches, the burning of sacred texts, and the imprisonment or execution of believers (Diocletianic Persecution, 2026).

Modern historians estimate that roughly three thousand to three thousand five hundred Christians were put to death under the imperial edicts of the Diocletianic persecution alone (List of Christians martyred during the reign of Diocletian, 2025). These were ordinary people who died rather than burn a pinch of incense to the emperor’s image. Their names are remembered still: Agnes of Rome, Felix and Adauctus, and the martyrs of Palestine chronicled by Eusebius. Whatever their later veneration came to look like, the first generations who carried the name Christian paid for it with their lives.

Then Constantine Happened

In 312 CE, the Roman emperor Constantine defeated his rival Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. The following year, together with his co-emperor Licinius, he issued the Edict of Milan, which granted Christians the legal right to practice their religion without state persecution (Uggerud, 2023). Ending the killing of Christians was a mercy, and I will not pretend otherwise.

What followed was not.

In 325 CE, Constantine convened what is remembered as the First Council of Nicaea. More than two hundred bishops from across the Roman Empire gathered at his order to settle, among other things, the theological dispute over Arius of Alexandria’s teaching on the nature of Christ. The council, under imperial sponsorship, produced the original Nicene Creed and declared Arianism a heresy. Constantine presided over the opening session. He was still an unbaptized catechumen, and he would not be baptized until his deathbed in 337 CE (First Council of Nicaea, 2026; Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d.).

The Rev. Dr. Kathleen M. Griffin, in research presented at the World Council of Churches Ecumenical Institute at Bossey, argues that Constantine’s convocation of the council was less about theological unity and more about securing imperial stability. Her framing is blunt: creed, sword, and empire. Constantine used Christianity as a tool of political consolidation, turning it into an imperial religion that bound religious leaders to imperial authority (World Council of Churches, 2025).

He kept the pagan title pontifex maximus and continued to honor Roman deities in his communications with Western provinces, depending on the audience. He did what rulers do. He kept his options open.

By 380 CE, under Theodosius I, Gratian, and Valentinian II, the Edict of Thessalonica made Nicene Christianity the state church of the Roman Empire. Competing Christian creeds, such as Arianism, were condemned as heresies of “foolish madmen,” and their punishment was authorized by imperial law (Edict of Thessalonica, 2026; Lyons, 2021). Pagans, within a generation, would be criminalized. The faith that had refused to bow to Caesar had become the faith that wielded his sword.

That is the turn. That is the co-opting.

I want to be careful here. Popular myths go further than the historical record supports. Constantine did not personally choose which books belong in the Bible. The Council of Nicaea did not vote on the biblical canon. That claim comes from a late ninth-century manuscript called the Synodicon Vetus, popularized in the eighteenth century by Voltaire, and revived in our own time by the novelist Dan Brown (Wilson, 2023; Meade, 2021). The canon of the New Testament took centuries to settle and was not finalized in Roman Catholic practice until the Council of Trent in 1546.

The real problem is subtler, and to my mind worse. What Constantine set in motion was not a single edit to a single manuscript. It was a thousand-year marriage of church and state in which every new ruler, every new bishop, every new scribe had a hand in what came down to us.

The Long Corruption

Bart D. Ehrman, James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has spent his career reconstructing the text of the New Testament from the surviving Greek manuscripts. His finding, laid out in Misquoting Jesus, is that for almost fifteen centuries the New Testament was hand-copied by scribes whose work was shaped by the theological and political pressures of their day (Ehrman, 2005).

Some of these changes were due to tired eyes and poor lighting. Some were deliberate. Ehrman documents cases in which scribes adjusted readings to downplay the role of women in the early church, to harmonize contradictions among the four gospels, and to push back against teachings later labeled heretical (Misquoting Jesus, 2025).

Two of the most famous passages in the New Testament, the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 7:53–8:11 and the longer ending of the Gospel of Mark, were most likely not part of the earliest texts (Misquoting Jesus, 2025). Both were added later. Both are still read from pulpits every Sunday as though the evangelist himself wrote them.

I am not saying the Bible is a forgery. I am saying the Bible is a long, human document that human hands have edited for nearly two thousand years. The earliest Christians did not have it. The modern church reads it as though it had fallen from the sky in shrink wrap. That gap matters.

The text is one problem. The doctrine is another. The teaching that Jesus is co-eternal with the Father, the doctrine of the Trinity in its fully developed form, was hammered out in the theological politics of the fourth century at Nicaea and Constantinople, not dictated by Jesus on a Galilean hillside (History.co.uk, n.d.). What I hear recited at the altar every Sunday as the Nicene Creed is a fourth-century Roman imperial document as much as it is a statement of faith.

Where That Leaves Me

I still believe in God. Maybe not the all-knowing, all-seeing god that we imagined as children, but.. yeah, there was someone or something.

I still believe in Jesus. A man, maybe not born of a virgin, maybe not divine, but definitely special.

I still love my little country church, and I will still show up on Sundays to keep the sound right and the livestream on the air for the members who cannot be there in person. The people in that sanctuary are my people. The gospel those old hymns carry is worth more than the imperial edict that layered over it.

Nevertheless, I am not going to sit quietly when someone tells me the book in the pew has not been touched by human hands. I am not going to pretend the man from Nazareth looked like a Central European model. I am not going to pretend the fourth-century imperial takeover of the Christian movement did not change it, when every serious historian of the period says it did.

The teachings of Jesus still cut. Love your neighbor. Love your enemy. Sell what you have and give to the poor. Do not make a show of your prayer. Forgive seventy times seven. Blessed are the merciful. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those who mourn.

Those words have survived every council, every scribe, every empire. They are still there in the text. They are still as hard to obey as they ever were. That, in the end, is what I believe.