Christian Creeds, relevance for today?

Discussion about the relevance of Creeds for today’s world.
"I would, however, lend more importance than you to the creeds of the faith. They give us the essence of what we can know of the mystery of God, the basic mysteries of the faith: the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Eucharist, etc. I know that you're not dismissing all of that out of hand, of course; I guess it's a matter of accentuation.
"Where I agree completely with you is that these creeds are sterile if they're only intellectual concepts and are not translated into a life lived according to the teaching of Christ." –A Catholic Bishop friend.

I respect this point of view and agree that Doctrine, or Right Teaching is necessary and useful. They will always be part of my faith tradition.
But consider.
The "life lived according to the teaching of Jesus" in the Gospels is NOT part of the creeds.
Nicene: "he came down from heaven by the power of the Holy Spirit. Became Incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man...
(Now note that the gospel teaching is omitted for the next verse is)
. . .For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate. "
Notice that Jesus’ actual human life as portrayed in the gospels is skipped. Wow! The Creeds are not about Jesus teaching essentially, but about our belief in the redemption and atonement of Jesus' life and death.
His gospel teaching, Beatitudes, parables, compassion for the outsider, the real challenges to our ego and human blindness is OMITTED.
The implication is "Believe these concepts" and you are part of the Christian community to be saved. I suggest this is easily a hidden idolatry, "Believe and be saved."
Where is the challenge to our radical renewal that the gospel parables and Jesus actual message in the Beatitudes present? The Creeds have been proposed as giving us the Certainty of Salvation. Is it possible that they only open the door?
Consider also (#2) how the Creeds were early and continuously used to discriminate, judge and abuse others, to assume that this One View of the Revelation of This Mystery we call God is superior to any other view and must be imposed on all others. We have used our Certainty about the Creeds combined with the power of state imposed church doctrine to separate, kill and torture many, countless, untold numbers.
If the Creeds are absolutely necessary for today’s world where is the message about the compassion of Jesus for the Outsider, his hospitality for the marginalized, clearly stated (as his actual life, example and teaching do portray) in any of the creeds?
Is Jesus actual teaching and example necessary for the global village in which we live today, with neighbors who are Muslim, Hebrew, varying Protestant cousins, Buddhists, etc. ?
We shall not know it from the Creeds.
Also, where is the respect for the earth itself, and all of creation, which we are destroying today, fundamentalist and corporate believing Christians assisting, to be found in those Creeds developed 1700 years ago, for a very different world than ours?

Now my experience is far different from most Catholics and most Catholic authority for the past forty years. I have been in the trenches, working mostly in interfaith settings, where the value of other Wisdom traditions is respected and honored.
Let me tell you a paradox. Where doctrinal teaching and conceptual structure is less, that is, less credal concepts, and the incentive is on personal listening to the Light within, then the commitment to personal change and social involvement to assist this change seems far greater.
Go to a Society of Friends (Quaker) meeting and then listen to the projects being announced and recruited for among members afterwards. 80% of the gathering will be so engaged. Now maybe the Friends simply attract that kind of person, who is more internally committed, or maybe they support it better.

But if I am being led by the Spirit to some new community undertaking, like increasing awareness of the absurdity of our Kentucky Penal Code developed 30 years ago to deal with the explosion of addiction in our society (so that we are simply incarcerating addicts by the truckload and recidivism (because all the correctional monies are being spent on warehousing alone) means that 2 out of 3 are back in jail within three years, that is, if I have some community activist project that means I am caring for my community in the way I believe Jesus would care, I am not going to some Catholic church gathering to promote or recruit concerned persons, but rather to groups like the small Society of Friends.

What does that say about the openness to the prophetical challenges to care for others at personal cost? Here is what it tells me, after some forty years. The more doctrinal certainly there is (which I find, by the way, most prominent among my U. Of Notre Dame graduate friends) the less openness there is the prophetical challenges of transforming our world so that it is a better place for all our children.
I will always value creeds as part of my own faith tradition. But truth without beauty, without wonder and awe and deep personal challenge, does not speak to the
imagination--the human heart today does not move us.
For many or even most today, the Creeds do not have that revelance. However the radical challenges of Jesus teaching, in his parables and Beatitudes and his welcoming of the Stranger (Whatsoever you do to the least of my brethren you do to me. Matthew 25)–everything about Jesus life that the Creeds leave out-- do have that potency. Still.

I mean this post for discussion purposes, not that anyone should or ought to accept my views. We took the Creeds and used them historically to divide and judge others as further from this mystery we call God than were we ourselves. That is the human and historical tendency. It is a hidden idolatry of concepts, a heresy of nominalism, which I propose, along with many others in liberation and feminist and Black theology, may be one root cause of lack of transformation found among Christians and many Catholics.
Only when the Creeds were aligned with the power of the state under the Emperor Constantine, did actual persecution of the Jews begin (carried on, with endorsement by Christian authority for 15 centuries, with every sort of abuse, so that the Nazi Holocaust was only the culmination and industrialization of what Christians had been doing piecemeal to Jews for all that time.). Creeds have been used often to exclude, even the Orthodox Tradition, for many centuries. They drip with the blood and abuse of many. We should be aware of how the Creeds have been used by our forefathers in the faith.
Last example: Reciting the Creeds for 1600 years, I propose, did nothing to awake the churches to the inhumanity of slavery. The first religious society to awaken to that abuse and to risk rejection and persecution for their beliefs may have been the Quakers, who believed only that the Light was within each of us and that each of us had access to that Light.
I have been blessed to bring some ten persons into prison ministry this past year and helped create a large community-wide effort to expand awareness and help in transitioning offenders to jobs, housing, etc., which is beginning to bear real fruit. I never needed to talk about the Creed or even about Jesus to any of them.
Is it not good for us to discuss and even argue about what is the essence of what we can know about the mystery of God to be found in Jesus? Can that Mystery be found conclusively and absolutely in Creeds developed for a faith community of 1600 years ago, or can we see more clearly today what the Gospel summons us into and toward? Does not the community of faith today have the gift of the Spirit to understand even more fully the message of Jesus for our world? Our context is very different and we have the power (and the obligation) to understand the challenge of Jesus' Gospel summons more clearly for our world.
Namaste. Discussion, please?
Paschal