The first of a series of posts about religious creeds and confessions.
Creeds as we know them do not occur in Scripture. They began to appear toward the end of the first century and the beginning of the second century of the common era. Gradually, creeds adopted a standard trinitarian form and became more complex as the need arose to defend theological orthodoxy against heretical doctrines.
None of the churches I attended as a child affirmed a creed or confession. The Bible was our rule of faith: it was read daily, studied regularly, memorised, discussed and debated. It enriched our worship and prayers. It showed us how to order the church and how to live according to the way of Jesus. It inspired evangelism and mission.
But the formulation of the Bible’s teaching in creeds and confessions, and their promulgation in the church and beyond, was foreign to my experience.
Those churches so valued their independence that they held no confidence in post-biblical doctrinal traditions or formularies. Of course, they possessed doctrinal and liturgical traditions. Theologically, they were trinitarian, Protestant, evangelical, and anti-Calvinist. They took doctrinal orthodoxy seriously, and their capacity for analysis, discrimination and judgment was admirable. But academic theology and theologians were generally considered untrustworthy and potentially dangerous to personal faith and Christian vocation.
I had been taught that the King James Version (KJV) was the only trustworthy version of the Bible in English. But some versions of the KJV came with detailed marginal notes. I avoided products such as the Scofield Reference Bible and the Ryrie Study Bible,which “rightly divided the word of truth” for dispensationalists, but I avidly read the notes in Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible and followed the threads in The Thompson Chain Reference Bible.
I had a thirst for knowledge, an intellectual curiosity, and a growing capacity for critical thinking. I had Christian friends who shared my living faith in Christ but whose theological framework was very different from mine. I was beginning to hold reservations about the hermeneutics and implications of the dispensational theology that implicitly informed my church’s understanding of the Bible and the mission of God. I wanted answers to questions about big ideas such as the relationship between justification and sanctification, the nature of the church, and the presumed conflict between science and faith.
The Bible only is the religion of Protestants.
William Chillingworth, 1638
When I was about 19 years old, I asked the most senior elder of my church to recommend a book on theology. “We don’t go in for theology,” he replied. “We have the Bible.” His comment echoed the popular adage, “no creed but the Bible,” and the words of Anglican divine William Chillingworth (1602-1644), who stated, “the Bible only is the religion of Protestants.”[1]
My elder friend’s faith in Scripture was not misplaced; he had proved the trustworthiness and usefulness of Scripture in many different contexts. He had no reason to read books about theology. To his credit, he offered me the use of his religious library, which included many late nineteenth-century biblical commentaries and devotional books. But was he right in staking his faith on Scripture alone, effectively shunning the insights of two thousand years of Christian scholarship, deliberation and wisdom?
On reflection, I believe most opposition to the use of creeds and confessions in personal religion, and in the life of the church, arises from three fears:
- fear of corruption of biblical truth by extra-biblical authority: the notion that a creed may come to possess such binding authority that it effectively takes the unique place of Scripture as the primary source of doctrine and praxis. A creed or confession of faith may be extended to include clauses that are not clearly drawn from Scripture and would not have passed muster by the community of faith that agreed upon the original words.
- fear of coercion of Christians to affirm credal statements. At some times, and in some places, this fear has been real and not imagined. As a test of orthodoxy, or as a tool to suppress doctrinal diversity, it is more efficient to require the affirmation of a credal statement than to require the affirmation of Scripture as the supreme rule of faith.
- fear of criticism by others who are, or who appear to be, intellectually superior. As Carl Trueman puts it, those who claim to have “no creed but the Bible” should really say, “I have a creed but I am not going to write it down, so you cannot critique it; and I am going to identify my creed so closely with the Bible that I am not going to be able to critique it either.”[2]
These fears are understandable, which begs the question: is there a place for creeds in the life of the church today? And, if so, how does a community of faith ensure that creeds and confessions of faith are a blessing and not a hindrance to Christian faith and praxis today? Subsequent posts will explore these issues.
Dr Rod Benson is Research Support Officer at Moore Theological College, Sydney. He previously pastored four Baptist churches in Queensland and NSW, and served for 12 years as an ethicist with the Tinsley Institute at Morling College. The next column in this series on creeds is available here.
References:
[1] William Chillingworth, The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation. Vol. 2 (1638; repr. London: H. G. Boan, 1846), 410.
[2] Carl R. Trueman, The Creedal Imperative (Wheaton: Crossway, 2012), 160.
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