Augustinian scholars like William Harmless and Michael Glowaski successfully situate Augustine’s approach to spiritual formation by evaluating his preaching to catechumens. We can go further, though, in assessing Augustine’s aims and practices for spiritual formation by understanding how the creed provides not only “the basic guardrails within which we theologize (Stephen Wellum, God the Son Incarnate) but also the structure for forming a Christian social imaginary. I argue that Augustine’s preaching on the creed (symbolon) aims to form a Christian spiritual imaginary that provides the structure for interpreting Scripture and living the Christian life. Just as Charles Taylor defines a social imaginary as “the ways people imagine their social existence” (A Secular Age, 172), I similarly define a spiritual imaginary as the ways people imagine their spiritual existence. The creed, for Augustine, provides the structure for such a spiritual imaginary.
I demonstrate Augustine’s approach to the formative role of the creed in three steps. First, I describe Augustine’s approach to forming the imagination as discovering through Scripture that “one thing is seen, another is to be understood” (serm. 272.1). The intermediary function of the imagination is to visualize images and liken one thing to another. Second, I argue Augustine’s sermons to the catechumens on the creed does not merely offer doctrinal basics but anticipates the creed’s formative function throughout the Christian life. Similar to the Shema in the Old Testament Jewish faith, Augustine says that the creed is “what you must always retain in mind and heart, what you should recite in bed, think about in the streets, and not forget over your meals” (serm. 215.1). Finally, I closely evaluate s. 398 to illustrate how the creed for Augustine offers (1) a narrative framework for orienting a catechumen’s perception of reality, (2) a communal identity marker that must be received and recited within the church, and (3) as an interpretive rule for Scripture. Tracing these three aspects in s. 398 confirm the creed’s role in structing a Christian spiritual imaginary. I conclude by considering one brief implication from Augustine’s view of the creed’s formative role for the church today.