The Importance of Creedal Christianity

The following post is a part of a series about learnings from reading
Jaroslav Pelikan’s Five-volume The Christian Tradition: A Development of Doctrine.

In June the Southern Baptist Convention, which has a track record of swimming in controversy after controversy, cannonballed into one more debate at their last gathering when four messengers proposed an amendment to add the Nicene Creed to the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message.¹ If you’re unfamiliar with the Nicene Creed, it is one of the earliest summaries of the faith (4th century AD). As Southern Baptist theologian Dr. Malcolm Yarnell notes:

“The [Nicene] Creed establishes once and for all that God is Trinity, that the Father is Almighty, and that he is the Creator of all things. It continues by defending at length the full deity and full humanity of the one Lord Jesus Christ, the gospel of his death and resurrection, and that his Kingdom is eternal. It also affirms the deity of the Holy Spirit, our need to worship God the Spirit with the Father and the Son, and the reality of the church and the resurrection.”

The creed was originally created to fight against an historic influential heresy claiming Jesus wasn’t divine. Thus, the purpose behind the Nicene Creed was to establish how true Christianity interpreted the Scriptures against those of false faith. The creed was one more way the church obeyed Paul’s admonitions to Timothy to both, “Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers,” (1 Timothy 4:16) and ”Follow the pattern of the sound words that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you.” (2 Timothy 1:13-14) It is also why from the 4th century to the present, the vast majority of Christendom has been deeply creedal, and why virtually every Christian church up to the Protestant Reformation embraced “the guarding the good deposit” the Nicene Creed offers. Jaroslav Pelikan refers to it as “the only universal creed.”

So, what gives with the Baptists’ hestitation? Well, many, if not most, consider themselves anti-creedal.² They offer the well-known refrains, “No creed but Christ!” or “No creed but the Bible!” Many Baptists think this way because of their emphasis on the doctrine of the priesthood of the believer (aka, soul competency) which promotes the idea that “each believer is free and responsible for reading the Scriptures and can trust the Holy Spirit to provide guidance and interpretation. [Thus] Christians are accountable to God for living out the Scriptures but are not accountable to any confession of faith written by humans. Scripture is complete and needs no addendum.” The strength of this doctrine is that it reinforces the individual Christian’s ability to study the Scripture for oneself. However, the weakness is that Arias, Nestorius, and other infamous heretics of church history would likely affirm this same distinctive for their own heretical ends happily chanting along: “No creed but Christ!”

But they’re heretics! I agree, but why wouldn’t the priesthood of believers and soul competency also apply to them? How can anyone reject someone else’s interpretation if said interpretation is purported to be given under the Spirit’s “guidance and interpretation”? The answer in church history is that the interpretations of every believer-as-priest aren’t equal, on the contrary, the solution was to be found in the Spirit’s corporate guidance of the global church in the ecumenical interpretation of the Scripture – like the one preserved in the Nicene Creed. To not have a creed by which the church collectively stacks its hands leaves her open to an interpretive free-for-all that’s essentially unable to “guard the faith” as 1 and 2 Timothy command. Even Baptists realize the limitations of the priesthood of the believer in this concern. That’s why they created pseudo-creeds called statements or confessions of faith that outline Baptist doctrinal distinctives. However, many argue that these distinctives can’t be enforced upon individual churches because of, ironically, another Baptist distinctive: local church autonomy,³ which also is a double-edged sword.

Though my background is Baptist, growing up I frequently attended my friend’s Episcopal church where congregants weekly recited the Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed. My wife comes from the Methodist tradition where she recited the Apostles’ creed every Sunday without fail. Today, CCCC periodically recites the Apostles’ Creed in services. If anything, reading about Pelikan’s work on theological development in church history reinforced the goodness and benefits of creedal Christianity. Here are a few encouragements for regularly confessing the Apostles’ or Nicene Creed as a congregation:

• It unifies us with the Christian church throughout almost the entirety of her history.
• It demonstrates that we, as followers of Jesus, are people marked not only by certain beliefs we deem essential but are shaped by certain acts that have happened in history (e.g., “born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried“).
• It helps both new and old believers by boiling down the essence of the faith into a memorable and theologically sound summary.
• It cautions that no matter how well-meaning one’s interpretation is, there are ways of misunderstanding the Scripture that leave us far afield from “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.” (Jude 1:3)

For reasons such as these, I join the saints over the ages as a creedal Christian given to creedal Christianity which affirms in the Nicene Creed that…

We believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.

We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and became man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,
he suffered death and was buried,
and rose again on the third day
in accordance with the Scriptures.
He ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead
and his kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father,⁴
who with the Father is adored and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.
We believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.
We confess one baptism for the forgiveness of sins
and we look forward to the resurrection of the dead
and the life of the world to come.
Amen.

Some resources for further reading:

• Article: Why ‘No Creed But the Bible’ Is Misguided by J.T. English
• Article: Why the Global Church Still Needs the Creeds by Adonis Vidu
• Essay: The Value and Role of Creeds and Confessions by Carl Trueman
• Book: What Christians Ought to Believe: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine Through the Apostles’ Creed by Michael Bird
• Book: Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition by Jaroslav Pelikan

1. This is the SBC statement of faith.
2. Ironically, it is worth noting that Baptists historically have been more creedal than many realize. As Yarnell states, “The oldest generations of Baptists either quoted the Creed verbatim or otherwise used its excellent teachings to provide doctrinal clarity for their own confessions.”
3. This is exactly the problem the SBC continually faces as they are functionally using the Baptist Faith and Message as a creedal document in discipline proceedings with local churches.
4. Later the church added “and the Son” to the chagrin of the Orthodox Church in what is known as the Filioque Controversy