Sun 9:30a Class; 10:30a Worship; 11:35a Communion
Bible Bites
A Creed Screed
If any entity understands the rationale behind a creed (from the Lat. credō, "I believe"), it's Roman Catholicism. From the 1908 edition of The Catholic Encyclopedia comes this:
A creed is a summary of the principal articles of faith professed by a church or a community of believers. . . . To preserve unity of belief, the first requisite was to have the belief itself quite clearly stated. The creed, therefore, is fundamentally an authoritative declaration of the truths that are to be believed. . . . As these formulas preserve intact the faith once delivered to the saints, they are also an effectual means of warding off the incessant attacks of error.
Simply put, the purpose of a creed — whether the Nicene, Luther's Catechism, the Augsburg Confession, etc. — is to spell out what one must believe in order to be right with God. True believers agree with the creed; the heretics are those who don't.
Unwritten creeds are as real as written ones. Recently, a brother in Christ told me that what I believe on a certain subject contradicts "what we (emp. mine) teach as scripture." When I asked whom he meant by we, he replied, "the traditional position that many of us hold." Listen, traditional positions held by many can be as creedal as anything concocted by a denominational synod.
Here's where I'm going with this: I have a serious problem with creeds, written or not, for at least two reasons: their insufficiency and their audacity.
Insufficiency: No one denies that right belief is important, but it takes more than believing right to be right (Jas. 2.19). In his first epistle, John pulls together the principal parameters for being right with God (1 Jn. 5.13), and they are three: belief, obedience, and love; of these, the greatest is love (1 Cor. 13). Read the Sermon on the Mount — the constitution of Christianity — and see for yourself how Christ grounds discipleship on belief, obedience, and love. Anyone who thinks discipleship is determined solely on the basis of what one believes, apparently doesn't believe what Christ says about discipleship. (Robert Law's The Tests of Life is unexcelled in outlining John's discussion of obedience, love, and belief in his first epistle. His analysis has been followed by many commentators since, including Erdman and Stott.)
Audacity: The aim of a creed is to clearly state what must be believed, and therein lies the rub, for not all of God's word is clear—Scripture contains a great deal of ambiguity (this point is so obvious that I'll not pause to offer examples). If the Bible spelled out everything to the nth degree, no creed would ever have been written. But rather than respecting Biblical ambiguity, creeds replace Divine indefiniteness with human interpretation, and then elevate the interpretation to the level of revelation; a creed is an authoritative declaration of truth (see excerpt above). Interpreting Scripture is a necessity, but thinking that our interpretation equals Scripture is a calamity — an act of arrogance that God condemns (e.g., Mk. 7.1–13, Col. 2.20–23).
A great deal more could be said about creeds. Historically, for instance, it was the creed makers—the self-appointed guardians of the faith — who did the most to corrupt the faith.
But if you still think we need a creed to weed out the heretics among us, maybe you'll like what the Scottish preacher John Watson wrote, "Imagine a body of Christians who should take their stand on the Sermon of Jesus, and conceive their creed on His lines. . . . 'I believe in the Fatherhood of God; I believe in the words of Jesus; I believe in the clean heart; I believe in the service of love; I believe in the unworldly life; I believe in the Beatitudes; I promise to trust God and follow Christ; to forgive my enemies and to seek after the righteousness of God.'"
For me, though, when someone asks what I believe, I'm content to hand them my New Testament.
— In The Prairie Papers, #134
