The Christian Creed; or, What it is Blasphemy to Deny — Themes and Context

A Rhetoric of Legal and Scriptural Juxtaposition

Besant structures her argument by pairing legal statutes with biblical passages, forcing the reader to confront the creed's demands as enforceable law. She lists required beliefs—divine authority of Scripture, the Trinity, the truth of Christianity—then immediately tests them against the Bible's own words. For instance, she notes the contradiction between believing in one God (Statute of Will. III) and Exodus 18:11, where "the Lord is greater than all gods." Her method is cumulative: each contradiction is presented as a logical trap, with the refrain "it is blasphemy to deny" underscoring the absurdity of compelled belief. The tone is that of a barrister cross-examining a hostile witness, using the opponent's own texts to dismantle their case.

Anthropomorphism and the Invisible God

Besant repeatedly highlights the tension between theological claims of God's invisibility and the anthropomorphic depictions in Exodus. She cites 1 Timothy 6:16—God dwells "in the light which no man can approach unto"—alongside Exodus 24:9-10, where Moses, Aaron, and seventy elders "saw the God of Israel." She points out that God is said to be everywhere, yet Moses goes "backwards and forwards" between the people and God, and the Lord "descends" onto Mount Sinai. These contradictions, she argues, force believers to accept mutually exclusive statements as true. Her critique is precise: she does not deny the possibility of divine mystery, but insists that the creed's demand for literal belief in contradictory accounts is intellectually untenable.

Moral Critique of Divinely Sanctioned Laws

Besant turns to the moral implications of the laws given on Sinai, quoting Exodus 21 to argue that they sanction slavery and treat women as property. She notes that a Hebrew slave's wife and children remain the master's property after the slave's release, and that a man may sell his daughter as a concubine. The allowance for beating a slave to death, provided the slave survives "a day or two," is presented as evidence that the law values the slave only as "his money." Besant's language is deliberately provocative: she calls these "revolting and immoral" commands. Her argument is not merely theological but ethical, challenging the reader to reconcile such laws with the claim of divine authority and moral perfection.

Besant's pamphlet is best read as a legal brief against enforced belief, where each scriptural citation is evidence in a case for free thought. Readers should attend to her use of irony—the gap between what the creed demands and what the Bible actually says—and her insistence on applying the same standards of consistency to religious texts that one would to any other document. The work is a product of its time, the late 19th-century freethought movement, but its central question—what right has any institution to compel belief under threat of punishment—remains pressing.

Reading Besant’s fierce dismantling of the creed, I remembered sitting in a cold pew as a child, the vicar’s voice softening every hard question. That same gentle ache came back while leafing through Plain Parochial Sermons, preached in the Parish Church of Bolton-le-Moors — Reading Notes, where belief felt like a quiet hearth, not a locked door.