The Story of Creeds and Confessions

Tracing the Development of the Christian Faith

Fairbairn, Donald, Reeves, Ryan M.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781493418183
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Histoire du Christianisme

Creeds and confessions throughout Christian history provide a unique vantage point from which to study the Christian faith. To this end, Donald Fairbairn and Ryan Reeves construct a story that captures both the central importance of creeds and confessions over the centuries and their unrealized potential to introduce readers to the overall sweep of church history. The book features texts of classic creeds and confessions as well as informational sidebars.

1
Beginning the Story

At the very heart of the Christian faith lies not an ethical system (as important as that is), nor a set of commandments (although there are many of those), nor even a set of doctrines (although they, too, are very important), but a name. Peter tells the Jewish leaders, “There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). Following Jesus’s command, new Christians are baptized “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 28:19). Indeed, by calling ourselves Christians, we are naming ourselves after Christ, our Lord. The most important thing about us is not what we do, or even what we believe per se, but to whom we belong as shown by the one whose name we bear.

Furthermore, the one to whom we belong is also the one in whom we believe. Paul writes to the Romans, “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom. 10:9). This simple statement includes a fact that we believe—God raised Jesus from the dead—but even more fundamental is its confession of who this Jesus whom God raised from the dead was. He was and is the Lord. Therefore, at the most basic level, being Christian involves confessing who Jesus Christ is in relation to God, affirming that we belong to him because we bear his name, and believing the fundamental truths of his history—his incarnation, life, death, and resurrection. What we do grows out of what we confess, which grows out of the one to whom we belong and in whom we believe, the one by whose name we are called. As a result, throughout Christian history, believers have sought to articulate in summary statements—creeds and confessions—the one in whom we believe, what we believe about him and ourselves, and what the implications of our faith in him are. The story of creeds and confessions is an account of these efforts on the part of Christians. As such, this story is an integral part of the story of Christianity more generally.

Why Should We Care about Creeds and Confessions from the Past?

Before we even begin such a story, however, we as twenty-first-century Christians in the West need to acknowledge that we have a problem. Creeds and confessions contain language that doesn’t come from the Bible. Many of us proudly—and correctly—affirm our allegiance to Scripture alone as the ultimate authority for our faith. Why then should we use any language other than the Bible’s own words to describe that faith? And not only do creeds and confessions come from elsewhere than the Bible, but they also are other people’s articulations of our faith. Why would we want to dredge up dusty language from the distant past rather than speak of Jesus ourselves, in our own way?

These are good questions, and taken together they drive stakes into the ground to delineate two major features of Western (especially American) Protestant Christianity: biblicism and individualism. “I have no creed but the Bible,” we often say. This statement carries with it good intentions to stick to the Bible and avoid the blind adoption of merely human ideas. We have elevated to iconic status the rugged individual who questions authority wherever he or she finds it. An ideal man or woman of faith, we insist, is a critical thinker, an unsubmissive student, who questions the ideas of the past and engages directly (and perhaps exclusively) with the Bible in order to deepen his or her faith. Our romantic model is the frontier woman or man reading the Bible alone—one person reading only one book—grasping its truth and speaking of Jesus using the words of Scripture. With such a model before us, what need do we have of creeds or confessions—or of a book that tells their story?

To address this issue, we need to go back to the assertion with which we began this chapter. Christianity is about a name. As Christians, we proclaim the name of the person to whom we belong, in whom we believe. Our life revolves around the joyous task of knowing this person whom we name and of speaking about him. Indeed, knowing and speaking are closely related. We have to get to know someone in order to know that person. We have to learn to speak in order to talk. When we first come to know Jesus, we know something about him, and we can say something. We may be prone to misplace our words, to speak haltingly or without confidence, or to speak too confidently without balance or accuracy. But we can speak of him—there is no Christian who has nothing to say about Jesus. However, to speak well of Jesus, we have to get to know him—through his Word, through prayer, through fellowship with other believers.

Do we need creeds or confessions? Or is the Bible all we need? [© Baker Publishing Group and Dr. James C. Martin. Sola Scriptura.]

Getting to know Christ is akin to getting to know one’s husband or wife. Any who have married can confess that they did not marry the person they thought they did. The ecstasy of the honeymoon doesn’t change the fact that you wake up with a virtual stranger. You may be one flesh, but you are hardly one heart, one mind—at least not yet. And now that stranger is never going away! Our faith follows a similar path. We accept the embrace of Christ and the covenant in his blood; we are washed, anointed, and brimming with the joy of his peace. But we hardly know him—how could we? We were just recently rebels, far off, forsaking his gospel and forging our own way in this world. How can we really know him at the very beginning of Christian life? Over time, though, we get to know him as we get to know a spouse, and we can speak of him with an intimacy similar to the way we might speak of a spouse after many years of marriage.

In order to speak well, however, we need more than intimacy, more than “getting to know.” We also need what could be called a grammar. Children must pick up the grammar of their native language, and before they do so, their expressions of love and relationship are clumsy and their words to describe love even clumsier (however charming!). So, too, Christians must learn the grammar of Christian intimacy, the grammar of relationships described through a Christian lens, the grammar of living in light of the one whose name we bear. We learn this grammar, first and foremost, from Scripture. But to learn it only from Scripture is akin to being handed the complete works of Shakespeare and being asked to describe the English language therefrom. Everything is in that massive volume—all the beautiful turns of phrase, the precision, balance, and elegance of which the language is capable in the hands of perhaps its greatest writer. But most of us could use a guide to help us navigate—let alone explain—the riches of Shakespeare’s English. Similarly, most of us could use a guide to navigate the riches of Scripture—not as a replacement for Scripture, but as a brief summary that can help us find our way around and talk about what we are reading and experiencing. We affirm that the Bible stands alone as our ultimate authority, but if we are honest, we’ll likely admit that we need some help with the Bible, in much the same way that we need some help with Shakespeare. Creeds and confessions—the grammar of the Christian faith provided for us by the church of the past—can help us to speak well of Jesus, whose name we bear.

There is yet another reason why many of us may object to the use of creeds and confessions. In contemporary English, the word “creed” often refers to a political allegiance or a general worldview. It usually has negative connotations, as if the act of holding to a creed makes one intolerant, in contrast to those who accept everyone regardless of race, gender, or creed. Well-meaning Christians, thinking of “creed” in this sense, proudly claim no creed but Jesus. And the word “confession” sounds even worse to contemporary ears, with connotations that we need to apologize for what we confess, or that we confess only when we have been placed in a situation where we have no choice.1

A look at the original sense of the word “creed” can help us overcome these negative connotations and see the value of giving attention to creeds and confessions. The Greek word used in the early church for a creed was symbolon, from which we get the English word “symbol.” A symbolon, in the most basic use of the word, was a combination of two pieces placed side by side, allowing a person to verify one piece because it matched the second piece.2 Think of a painting or tapestry, cut into two pieces, which are then verified by placing them back together again to show that they line up. We know that one piece is authentic because it matches the second. Nothing better describes the relationship between personal faith and ancient creeds: we have faith in Christ, but we must verify that we have not invented Christ according to our own fantasies. It is as if the authors of creeds and confessions are saying to us, “Come and lay your faith down next to this pattern and see whether the images match, or whether they reveal a fundamental difference between your impressions and the faith of our fathers. Should these images differ, then reflect, struggle against the parameters of the faith to see whether there is something to be learned.”

The writers of creeds and confessions did not envision that we could quickly grasp every facet of the creed in one reading—as if the faith could be swallowed in one gulp and the bones of heresy spat out. Instead, creeds are, to recast a romantic phrase, living documents—not because they adapt to fit our changing attitudes, but because our attitudes must always be checked against their original design. Creeds, as symbols, instruct us in the design of our theological house; they are like blueprints. Imagine us, as contemporary builders, laying a foundation for rooms that, once built, will make the house unlivable because we proudly proclaim that we have no need of blueprints!

Creeds and confessions were not meant to be comprehensive, at least not comprehensive in the sense that all subsequent discussion became moot.3 Christians over the centuries never shared our modern desire to explain everything all at once, even in the context of a lengthy confession. Their intention was to give Christians a guide, a blueprint—the second half of the symbolon—so that we might avoid the many pitfalls of those who too hastily attempted to explain Christ in their own words. And so creeds and confessions were pressed into service against a staggering variety of theological problems. The impulse of the church to write down its grammar sprang partly from the fact that some Christians, in their zeal to emphasize a certain facet of theology, had adopted views of God or Christ that were closer to their own imaginations than to the Scriptures. Far from being a means to depart from the Bible, creeds and confessions served to warn of the danger of straying from Scripture.

But the original design of a creed or confession, even if clear, still needs interpretation and explanation today. Creeds are composed of words used to encapsulate the biblical drama, just as we do when we choose to boil the essence of the gospel message down to a single concept such as grace, kingdom, evangel, salvation. There is nothing wrong with doing this, but such words demand an explanation. Imagine a pastor, in answering questions about the faith, simply placing a Bible in our hands and saying, “This is our faith.” There is nothing wrong with the pastor’s motives—the Scriptures are the source of our faith, and we will do wonders for our faith if we begin a lifetime of exploration in the Old and New Testaments. But it would be a dereliction of duty if the pastor never helped us understand anything other than the individual passages of Scripture. He or she would have no justification either for preaching, counseling, teaching, exhorting, and so on—all of which require a pastor to gather and to apply the biblical faith rather than simply to read and preach the Bible passage by passage.

We gather our faith so as to explain it in shorthand all the time, and so do the creeds and confessions. We use language for our faith that is not found in the Bible, and so do the creeds. Like the writers of creeds, we understand that the Scriptures are meant to shape our language about Christ and his kingdom, how they relate to the covenant of the Old Testament, and how we serve the Lord from the cross until the final resurrection. Creeds and confessions can thus be an indispensable aid in helping us draw near to the Scriptures, draw near to the Jesus of the Scriptures whose name we bear, and speak well of him. They are worthy of our attention.

The Chronology of Creeds and Confessions

While the effort to confess in whom and what we believe has gone on throughout the entire two millennia of Christian history, that effort has been concentrated in two major time periods. The first is what we call the patristic period, the several hundred years after the end of the New Testament. The word “patristic” comes from the Latin word for “father,” and the great Christian thinkers who articulated and reflected on the Christian faith in the centuries after Christ are collectively known as the church fathers. The patristic period began about AD 100, and scholars give varying dates for its close. For purposes of this book, we consider the patristic period—what we call the era of the creeds—to have extended until about 500, by which time all the ancient creeds were either in or near their final form.

The second period of intense confessional activity was the time of the Reformation. This period began in the early sixteenth century, and Martin Luther’s alleged nailing of his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Schlosskirche in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517, serves as a nice symbolic starting point.4 A convenient ending date for the Reformation is 1647, ...