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Gerald O. West, Professor Emeritus in the School of Religion, Philosophy, and Classics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He works with the UKZN-based Ujamaa Centre for Community Development and Research.in International Review of Mission, Volume 113, Issue 2, 2024, pp.297-310
Abstract
The year 2025 offers the church an opportunity to reflect on the Nicene Creed in dialogue with Mark 10:17-22. This Bible study–based dialogue invites us all – particularly those who have been marginalized by political, economic, and ecclesial systems of oppression – to be instructed by Jesus on the mechanisms of systemic economic oppression. Even the Nicene Creed can learn from Jesus if we incorporate into each of its four sections the voices of the marginalized who have, through contextual Bible study work, offered the church revised forms of the Nicene Creed.
Introduction
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
was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and 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
who with the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified
who 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.1
This article imagines these ordinary South Africans, still living under colonial apartheid in 1988, participating in the Council of Nicaea in 325, using their understandings of Mark 10:17-22 to make their theological contribution to how the life, ministry, and mission of Jesus should be defined. This article also offers contemporary Christians the opportunity to use the anniversary commemoration of the Nicene Creed to participate in revising the creed so that it is inclusive of systemic analysis and systemic action for transformation. In her recent detailed article on “The Theology of the Council of Nicaea,” Rebecca Lyman situates the Council of Nicaea within the major theological contestations of the time: “One of the major theological conflicts among the early communities was defining Christian divinity and life as revealed and practised through the central saving work and teaching of Jesus in the light of the Jewish inheritance of monotheism.”2 What if we were to commemorate the Nicene Creed by including references in it to the systemic analysis and action of “the central saving work and teaching of Jesus”?
Lyman and others have offered us nuanced and detailed accounts of “the history of the origins of the Nicene controversy,” which, in the formulation of Lyman, “remains challenging to reconstruct because of the destruction of sources, the polemical distortions of opponents, and the complex alliances and interchanges shaped by the new political legitimacy of Christians within the Roman Empire.”3 My focus is on the finished product, the Nicene Creed, and how ordinary African Christians and others commemorating 1,700 years since the Nicene Creed (325–2025) might add their voices to this familiar component of their liturgical lives through contextual Bible study (CBS).
The next section of my article focuses on liturgical renewal, reflecting on the capacity of CBS to contribute to liturgical renewal.
Engaging Liturgy
CBS has a long history as a participatory form of Bible study.4 There are many ways of describing CBS, and the Ujamaa Centre for Community Development and Research has analyzed and represented this participatory Bible rereading process in various ways.5 Here, I want to emphasize how CBS recognizes and engages with the detail of biblical text. An emphasis on biblical textual detail acknowledges the contribution of biblical studies to CBS methodology as well as the contribution of ordinary readers, hearers, and users of the Bible as they relentlessly reread a particular biblical text, discerning detail that has the potential to transform their incipient, embodied, lived theologies into local forms of prophetic theology.
I use the term “prophetic theology” in the way it is used in the South African Kairos Document, particularly in how the revised second edition (1986) describes the movement from “people's theology” to “prophetic theology,”6 recognizing that ordinary people already have incipient, embodied, lived forms of theology, even if they are inchoate.7 CBS, the Ujamaa Centre argues, enables this movement, facilitating a rereading of biblical text which discerns neglected textual detail. The biblical detail neglected by institutional forms of Christianity often has resources that those the institutional church has marginalized recognize as useful to their own local theologies of life. This is the work of CBS, facilitating the rereading of biblical text to enable ordinary readers, hearers, and users of the Bible to discern potentially transformative sacred resources from scripture.
As part of its process, CBS often invites participants to construct a liturgical resource that incorporates the transformative biblical detail they have discerned. Institutional church liturgy is often part of the marginalizing theological process for, for example, those living with HIV, those who are unemployed, those who live with disability, or those who embody queer sexualities. By formulating their own local theological liturgical resources, participants affirm their faithful dignity and agency. We encourage them to offer their liturgical compositions to their local churches, hoping that their theological voices might contribute to the public liturgical life of the church.8
Among the CBSs we have used that encourage a liturgical contribution is one among local African Anglicans in which we invited them to engage directly with the eucharistic “Prayer of Humble Access,” rereading one of its constituent texts, Mark 7:24-30.9 We invited participants to edit the “Prayer of Humble Access,” being specific about what they would retain and what they would delete. The CBS participants had no theological scruples about this task and constructed creative and contextual liturgical revisions that were faithful to the detail of Mark 7:24-30.
In the next section of my article, I focus on another text from Mark and its potential capacity to offer neglected detail to contemporary contextual10 revisions of the Nicene Creed.
Mark and Empire
While Mark's gospel precedes the Council of Nicaea (325 CE), Mark's contestation with empire has made no discernible contribution to the Nicene Creed. Yet, the Council of Nicaea was convened, funded, opened, and contributed to by Emperor Constantine I.11 Empire indelibly shaped this first ecumenical council, lending it “imperial authority.”12 Among the many biblical texts used to give content and shape to the Nicene Creed,13 none of Mark's texts resisting empire are used.
I do not want to overstate Mark's contestation with the Roman empire. While a significant number of scholars understand Mark's gospel as overtly resisting the Roman empire in general and the Roman colonization of Palestine in particular,14 other scholars are more circumspect.15 What is clear is that much of Mark should be read within the context of empire. As Hans Leander succinctly states, “Being composed and initially circulated during the heyday of Flavian Rome, with its story enacted in an unruly region on the eastern outskirts of Rome's empire – then known as Palestine or Judea – the Gospel of Mark has empire inscribed in its fibres.”16
The Ujamaa Centre has from its inception in the late 1980s turned to Mark's gospel for biblical resources to resist settler-colonial-apartheid and its aftermath. Much of our earliest work, whether in resisting apartheid as racial capitalism17 or in resisting gender-based violence,18 for example, engaged with the detail of Mark's gospel. In the next section of my article, I focus on a particular text from Mark's gospel, Mark 10:17-22, which formed the basis for one of our very earliest CBSs.
Mark 10:17-22
the Church's comminatory and virulent condemnation of oppression, exploitation and injustice has seldom, it seems, etched the scars of the silent crucified Christ on the soul of the [Church] hierarchy as a whole. Thus the life stories of the marginalized have not permeated and penetrated the purple [bishops] and involved a shift in the whole Church “from protest to resistance.”20
Draper and I established a project within the various Anglican congregations in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, inviting ordinary Anglicans of diverse races, across racially segregated congregations, to participate in the emerging praxis of CBS.21 We turned to Mark's gospel because we recognized Mark's overtly economic and political emphasis, resisting both the economic oppression of the Roman empire and local Judaean elites.22 We chose Mark 10:17-22 because we ourselves were grappling with what appeared to be an implicit systemic economic analysis by Jesus. Mark tends to make the reader work hard to understand his resisting representation of the life, ministry, and mission of Jesus,23 and Mark 10:17-22 seemed like an appropriate opportunity to grapple with the message of Mark's Jesus.
Mark 10:17-22 begins with an unidentified person and the immediacy of three consecutive participles: “And he [Jesus] was going out into the way, running up and falling on his knees he said to him [Jesus]” (10:17a).24 This dramatic beginning to the narrative is then contrasted with an extensive dialogue between this man and Jesus. Jesus is enigmatic, singling out five of the Ten Commandments, adding another “commandment,” and then confronting this man, when he claims to have kept the commandments, with three imperatives: “go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor” (10:21). The connection between Jesus’ invocation of the (emended) commandments and his own commands to the man are not clear. What is clear is that when this man hears the commands of Jesus, “he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions” (10:22). The man understands the theological logic of Jesus; he understands how Jesus connects these two sets of commandments. What we hoped our CBS would do was to facilitate ordinary Anglicans’ rereading of this puzzling biblical text within their racially different yet related contexts of South Africa in the late 1980s.
Our somewhat awkward early attempt at constructing CBS questions nevertheless did facilitate deeply engaged conversation and a grappling with this difficult biblical text. The core of the CBS offered a set of questions on “The wealthy man,” “The commandments,” “The challenge,” “The poor,” and “Today,” but we also included a set of questions on the wider literary-narrative context of this textual unit and Matthew's version of the story.25 What emerged, more clearly in some groups (notably the Black Anglican groups) than others, was that Jesus was impelling the man to recognize that though he may have kept the commandments at a personal level, his “many possessions” (or “much property”)26 were a direct consequence of systemic economic injustice. His wealth was systemically related to the poverty of others. They were poor because he was rich. Exploitative economic systems of Roman colonial and local Judahite elite extraction27 were being identified and resisted by Jesus.
By selecting only certain of the commandments, and by amending by adding a commandment, Jesus guides the man and the reader. Jesus selects the “horizontal” commandments that govern social-economic-political relations in society through which God is served in concrete social relations. By introducing the commandment “You shall not defraud” (10:19), Jesus seems to be substituting his version for the commandment he omits: “You shall not covet.” The socio-economic analysis of Jesus seems to be that coveting leads to defrauding, and that the reason the man is unable to obey the commands of Jesus to sell his possessions and to give the proceeds to the poor is that he still covets what he has gained through defrauding the vulnerable.28
For the CBS participants, the slow rereading of this text, probing the connections between these two sets of commandments, enabled them to discern textual detail that resonated with the South African colonial-apartheid system. While individual white South Africans may not have murdered or committed adultery, stolen or borne false witness, or defrauded, or dishonoured father and mother, they benefited economically from a settler-colonial-apartheid economic and political system. This system sanctioned the state-based murder of Blacks, forced Black men to leave their homes and migrate to single-sex, mine-based hostels, and stole the land of Blacks. This system operated a racially biased juridical system that protected the economic and political interests of whites, defrauded Blacks through multiple forms of systemic economic exploitation, dishonoured the ancestors of Blacks, and forcefully separated Black workers from their fathers and mothers. While the man with extensive property in Mark 10 and white South Africans may not be guilty of individual sin, they are guilty of systemic sin. They have participated in and been beneficiaries of structural sin.29
What had been an enigmatic biblical text took on a remarkably clarity when placed alongside the apartheid system. Jesus was exposing the economic systems of both Roman colonialism and local Judahite city-temple elites.30 Biblical text and South African context mutually interpreted each other, enabling context-based appropriation of the resisting life, ministry, and mission of Jesus. This particular early example of CBS demonstrated this biblical text's remarkable capacity to “speak” to a particular contemporary context. We have since reworked the CBS to engage with other related contexts, which I will reflect on in the next section of my article.
Reworking Mark 10:17-22
Given the capacity of this CBS for the potential “revelation” of contemporary contextual systems of oppression, we continued to use this CBS in the early 1990s in the ongoing struggle against apartheid as a system of racial capitalism. We adapted the CBS by concentrating on the core questions as indicated above, resulting in a more focused CBS.31 We had begun by then to discern the kind of shape a CBS should take. We deliberately excluded the comparative dimension of the CBS, allowing Mark's version to stand in its own right, distinct from Matthew's version. This became our CBS practice, enabling each biblical text to have its own integrity and minimizing the tendency of participants to jump from one biblical text to another in an attempt to harmonize different (and divergent) biblical theological perspectives. The Ujamaa Centre's understanding of scripture is that it is a site of struggle, re-presenting contending ideological and theological perspectives,32 so it was important to focus on the detail of a single biblical text.
An invitation by the United Reformed Church in England, Scotland, and Wales in 2022 to provide them with a CBS that engaged overtly with white racism prompted us to rework the Mark 10:17-22 CBS. We then used this version of the CBS (with minor modifications) in 2024 when invited by the Black leadership of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa to offer a CBS on race in the post-apartheid South African context. I facilitated this version of the CBS and recognized its enduring capacity to engage with recognizing and resisting interlocking systems of oppression.33 It is this version of the CBS that I suggest may be of use in facilitating ordinary African engagement with the Nicene Creed.
Contextual Bible study on Mark 10:17-22: Recognizing and Resisting Systemic Sin
In plenary:
- Listen to a dramatic reading of Mark 10:17-22 in which participants take the roles of each of the characters and the narrator.
- Who are the characters in this text and what do you know about them?
In small groups:
- Jesus engages with this man by asking him to reflect on a specific set of the Ten Commandments. What do these specific commandments have in common? Furthermore, Jesus adds a commandment: “Do not defraud.” What does this commandment add to the others Jesus has selected?
- When the man claims to have kept these commandments, Jesus challenges him to go deeper in his analysis. How does Jesus challenge him?
- Jesus is inviting the man to do careful social analysis. What is the link in the social analysis of Jesus when he links these commandments and the challenge to “sell all you possess and give to the poor”?
- Jesus seems to be inviting the man to see his wealth differently. Reread verse 22 in a number of different translations (and in the Greek, if possible). Why, in Jesus’ analysis, is the man wealthy? Why, in Jesus’ analysis, are the poor poor? In summary, how does Jesus understand the systemic relationships between wealth and poverty, between the rich and the poor?
- Why does Jesus insist on a two-step process of systemic restitution (verse 21): “sell (exchange/barter) all you possess (hold) and give to the poor”?
[Report back to plenary.]
In small groups:
- Why is it so difficult to recognize the systems that benefit us? What are the systems that benefit us? Try to be specific.
- How do we recognize, resist, and betray the systems that benefit us?
- Notice how Jesus refuses to compromise on wealth generated by systemic exploitation (10:21, 23). The unjust system must be identified and resisted. Identify one system which benefits you and develop an action plan to resist it.
[Report back to plenary.]
This CBS follows the typical pattern of a CBS (indicated by the divisions), moving from a local community's initial engagement with the biblical text (questions 1–2), to a slow and careful rereading of the detail of the text (questions 3–7), to appropriations of the biblical text for contemporary contextual transformation (questions 8–10).34 As indicated, we have used CBS resources in other CBSs both to engage with liturgy and to construct liturgy. As we come in 2025 to commemorate the Nicene Creed (325), how might we imagine an engagement between this CBS and the Nicene Creed? This is the focus of the final section of my article.
Mark 10:17-22 and the Nicene Creed
As the church commemorates 1,700 years since the construction of the Nicene Creed (325) in 2025, this is an opportunity for communities of faith, particularly those who have been marginalized by their churches because they are HIV-positive, or unemployed, or disabled, or LGBTIQA+, to make their own contributions to the Nicene Creed.
My suggestion for this significant anniversary is to bring the Nicene Creed into dialogue with Mark 10:17-22. The significance of Mark 10:17-22, as we have seen, is that it insists on right practice (and not only right belief). There is little of right practice in the Nicene Creed. The question in Mark 10:17, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” using the verb ποιέω (to do, to make, to practise), indicates that the man recognizes that serving God requires forms of godly practice. This is perhaps why Jesus takes the time to engage in an extensive dialogue with him, facilitating an understanding of the kind of practice God requires. Jesus insists that it is only the recognition and rejection of systemic economic sin through restitution that enables a life of faithful following.
The early church was of course committed to both faithful practices and beliefs.35 However, the emphasis of the Council of Nicaea, as with many of the antecedent confessions and creeds,36 was on faithful belief. Without minimizing what was accomplished both theologically and ecumenically through the Nicene Creed, we should lament the absence of creedal theological and ecumenical attention to faithful practice at this pivotal time in church history.
The Council of Nicaea was constituted by the emperor, Constantine I, and his imperial officials and more than two hundred bishops and their retinues.37 Perhaps we should not be surprised that a creed constructed by an emperor and his bishops has little to offer by way of systemic social analysis and systemic social theological response. We should remember Lyman's analysis. Setting the historical and theological (though not the sociological) scene of the Council of Nicaea, Lyman states, “One of the major theological conflicts among the early communities was defining Christian divinity and life as revealed and practised through the central saving work and teaching of Jesus in the light of the Jewish inheritance of monotheism.”38 She places the emphasis on the final phrase, with the early church grappling theologically with “the nature of God.”39 However, what if we placed the emphasis on the phrase “practised through the central saving work and teaching of Jesus?” Mark 10:17-22 has this emphasis.
Contextual Bible Study on the Nicene Creed
In plenary:
- Listen to a reading of the Nicene Creed as found in your faith tradition. Invite four participants to each read a section of the Creed: “We believe in one God …,” “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ …,” “We believe in the Holy Spirit …,” and “We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church ….”
- How would you summarize the overall focus of the Creed?
In small groups:
- Summarize your understanding of the Mark 10:17-22 CBS.
- Input: This year (2025) we celebrate 1,700 years since the Nicene Creed. In 325, the Council of Nicaea met to debate key concerns in the life of the Church. The Council of Nicaea was made up of the Roman emperor, Constantine, his imperial officials, and more than two hundred bishops and their attendants. If your community had been invited to attend the Council of Nicaea, what would you have added to the Nicene Creed? Be specific.
- Reread Mark 10:17-22. Using your understanding of Mark 10:17-22, add a sentence to each of the sections of the Nicene Creed that makes the Creed more relevant to your context.
[Report back to plenary.]
In plenary:
- As a plenary, construct a revised version of the Nicene Creed that combines the versions of each small group.
In small groups:
- What can you do to introduce your revised version of the Nicene Creed to your local church?
[Report back to plenary.]
This CBS follows the format of a typical CBS, beginning with the Nicene Creed itself and inviting participants to reflect on the creed (questions 1–2). As with the Mark 10:17-22 CBS, these questions are done in plenary, with all participants present, enabling the group as a whole to take ownership of the CBS. The Nicene CBS then constructs a dialogue between the Mark CBS and the Nicene CBS (questions 3–6). As with the Mark CBS, most of the Nicene CBS is done in small groups, enabling each participant to have the opportunity to participate. After each set of small-group questions, each small group reports back to the plenary, enabling the participants to learn from each other. The Nicene CBS concludes with action (question 7), following the same see–judge–act format of the Mark CBS.40
Just as Jesus insists that the rich man act by recognizing and resisting the economic systems that had made him wealthy and by making restitution, so the Nicene Creed CBS – in dialogue with the Mark 10:17-22 CBS – summons forms of revision that include systemic social economic analysis and systemic social economic transformative action: “Come, follow me” (Mark 10:21).
Conclusion
Jesus worked on the margins of the synagogue, the temple, and the Roman Empire with those who had been marginalized by the intersecting systems of oppression perpetrated by the synagogue, the temple, and the Roman empire. Mark's gospel is particularly attentive to each of these sites of oppression. In Mark 3:1-6, Jesus stands with the man with the withered hand over against those who have marginalized him in the synagogue; in Mark 11:27–13:2, Jesus stands with the poor widow who has been exploited economically by the Jerusalem temple; in Mark 12:13-17, Jesus stands with the people (verse 12) who are economically exploited by both the temple leadership and the Roman empire. In Mark 10:17-22, Jesus instructs those who would follow him in the mechanisms of systemic economic oppression. The wealthy man who had amassed extensive property slowly comes to understand the systemic nature of his wealth. But he is unwilling to resist the economic systems of exploitation that have benefited him. Even the disciples (verse 24) are “amazed” by the analysis of Jesus.
Systems of oppression are difficult to identify if we are the beneficiaries of them. Yet, Jesus requires us to recognize, resist, and make restitution if we are to follow him, standing not with the wealthy man but with the poor. Standing with the poor will enable us to see interlocking systems of oppression more clearly.
The year 2025 offers the church an opportunity to reflect on the Nicene Creed in dialogue with Mark 10:17-22. This Bible study–based dialogue invites us all – particularly those who have been marginalized by political, economic, and ecclesial systems of oppression – to be instructed by Jesus in the mechanisms of systemic economic oppression. Even the Nicene Creed can learn from Jesus by incorporating into each of its four sections the voices of the marginalized who have. through CBS work. offered the church revised forms of the Nicene Creed.
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