Real or imagined crises are often the catalyst for the formulation, promulgation and revision of creeds and confessions. During the brief period during which the New Testament writings were being composed, a “trinitarian” confessional pattern emerged that shaped later credal formularies.
There are indications of this pattern in use by the early churches in, for example, Matthew 28:19, and 2 Corinthians 13:14. Theologian Geoffrey Bromiley suggests that “creeds quickly became trinitarian, or were so from the outset,” in response to a growing consensus regarding the true nature and person of Jesus.[1]
With few exceptions, the consensus endured. The Roman Catholic Church has declared all the ecumenical creeds to be infallible. The Eastern Orthodox Churches affirm the decrees of the seven ecumenical councils from the First Council of Nicaea (325 CE) to the Second Nicaean Council (787 CE). The Eastern Churches famously rejected the Western Church’s addition of the term filioqueto the Nicaean Creed.
The Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century accepted the Apostles’ Creed and the decrees of the first four ecumenical councils “by virtue of their agreement with Scripture.” Martin Luther said of the Apostles’ Creed, Christian truth could not possibly be put into a shorter and clearer statement.”[2] Commenting on the formulas of the ecumenical councils, John Calvin said, “I venerate them from my heart, and would have all of them held in due honour.”[3]
The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England of 1562 claim to have a twofold purpose: “for the avoiding of diversities of opinions, and for the establishing of consent touching true religion.”[4] That is, they sought to establish doctrinal consensus within the old-but-new community of faith identifying as the Church of England.
Others took a more radical approach to the authority of church tradition. Early Anabaptists, faced with sometimes violent opposition from both Roman Catholic and Protestant ecclesiastical authorities, held that “God’s commandment does not consist in the letter, but in the power which the Spirit gives.”[5] Anabaptist leader Menno Simons argued that all spiritual claims must be measured by the life and words of Christ rather than by what the creeds or contemporary church authorities claimed.[6]
Among Protestant churches, covenants increasingly supplanted creeds to become the primary mode of formulating and establishing common belief. Some churches today have gone a step further, claiming to have “no creed but the Bible,” as I have discussed elsewhere. Jeffrey Gros notes that the preaching, worship and hymnody of such churches “discloses both fundamental affirmations and often tests of orthodoxy which are no less specific and not necessarily any more biblical than those of churches affirming the Nicene Creed.”[7]
Similarly, commenting on the reception of the Nicene Creed, theologian Gerald Bray writes that “non-liturgical churches have not made much use of this Creed, to their great loss, but all of them accept its doctrine. More than any other document, the ‘Nicene’ Creed remains for all Christians the touchstone and guarantee of orthodox, biblical belief.”[8]
To read Part 2 of this article, click here.
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.
References
[1] Geoffrey Bromiley, “Creed, creeds,” in Daniel J. Treier & Walter A. Elwell (eds), Evangelical Dictionary of Theology (third edn; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017), 222.
[2] Luther, Works, 37:360.
[3] Calvin, Institutes, IV.ix.1.
[4] Preface to the Thirty-Nine Articles.
[5] Hans Hut (d.1527), quoted in Arnold Snyder, From Anabaptist Seed: The Historic Core of Anabaptist-Related Identity (Kitchener, Ontario: Pandora Press, 1999), 12.
[6] Snyder, ibid., 13.
[7] Jeffrey Gros, “Creeds,” in Nicolas Lossky (ed.), Dictionary of the Ecumenical Movement (second edn; Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2002), 276.
[8] Gerald Bray, Creeds, Councils and Christ: Did the Early Christians Misrepresent Jesus? (1984; Fearn, Ross-Shire, Scotland: Christian Focus Publications,2009), 117.
Image source: World History Encyclopedia.
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