Desiring the Kingdom (): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Cultural Liturgies Book 1)

by James K. A. Smith

First, the Apostles’ Creed functions like the church’s pledge of allegiance.[85] Recited weekly, in unison, the Creed is a declaration—the positive affirmation that is the correlate of the renunciations we made in baptism. In it we confess our allegiance to a “foreign” king, the triune God. In that sense, if worship is like a renewal-of-vows ceremony, each week is also a citizenship-renewal ceremony. When we pledge that Jesus is Lord—not Caesar, not the emperor, not the president or prime minister, not the chairman of the Federal Reserve—we are engaged in a political act (recalling that our baptism constitutes us as a new polis and that the Creed was a baptismal document).[86] This is the pledge of those whose “citizenship is in heaven” (Phil. 3:20)—which is not citizenship in some otherworldly, ethereal kingdom but rather citizenship in an earthly kingdom that is coming.