Loving the creed, loving God

It is said that there are two types of conversationalists. One leaves you thinking how interesting they are; the other leaves you thinking how interesting you are. The trick to being a good conversationalist is to be the second sort. So too, I think, with teachers. One sort of teacher leaves you thinking how smart they are. The other leaves you thinking how smart you are—or more accurately, how much more you now know about a topic.

By this standard, Ben Myers is a great teacher. I finished his book on the Apostles’ Creed fascinated not with him but with the God revealed in scripture—so fascinated that I wanted to teach others what I’d learned. This is the perfect book for a class of newcomers to church, antagonists of the faith, or longtime believers. It fits well in a college or seminary classroom, on your grandmother’s bedside table, or in your teenager’s reading app.

This small book was originally a series of sermons preached by Myers (who is Anglican) at a congregation belonging to the Uniting Church in Australia. “The sermons were long, and the book is short,” he writes. Hemingway could be proud of a sentence that unostentatious and punchy. Myers never says more than he needs to, nor does he get bogged down in academic fights. He points to God, and he manages to get us to look not at his finger but in the direction it points.