Creeds and confessions

A creed or confession is a formal, corporate statement of Christian belief, framed to preserve and hand on the church’s understanding of Scripture rather than to add to it.¹ Scripture alone binds the conscience without qualification; a confession binds only so far as it teaches Scripture’s own doctrine, and it stays open to correction by that standard.² The church has produced such statements in every era, to guard the faith against error, hand it on to new generations, and bind together those who hold it in common.³

Biblical Basis

Scripture itself contains short, fixed formulas of belief that function as embryonic creeds. The Shema states the church’s most basic confession: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deut. 6:4; cf. 1 Cor. 8:4). Paul makes the confession “Jesus is Lord” the substance of saving faith (Rom. 10:9; Phil. 2:11), and he hands on what he calls a received tradition “of first importance”: that Christ died for sins according to the Scriptures, was buried, was raised on the third day, and appeared to named witnesses (1 Cor. 15:3-7). Other passages read the same way: a hymn-like summary of Christ’s person and work (1 Tim. 3:16), the mark by which the Spirit of God is known, namely confessing “that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh” (1 John 4:2), and Peter’s own confession that Jesus alone has “the words of eternal life” (John 6:68-69).

Purpose and Authority

Because all revealed truth is internally consistent, every reader of Scripture inevitably works its parts into some coherent whole; a creed simply records for the whole church, more carefully and more formally, what an individual believer would otherwise do alone.¹ Confessions have historically served four purposes: to mark and preserve the doctrinal ground the church gained at some crisis in its development, to distinguish true teaching from “the glosses of false teachers,” to bind together those who hold the same faith closely enough to labor together, and to instruct.³

That authority is carefully bounded, not absolute. “The matter of all these Creeds and Confessions binds the consciences of men only so far as it is purely scriptural, and because it is so. The form in which that matter is stated, on the other hand, binds only those who have voluntarily subscribed the Confession and because of that subscription.”⁴ Herman Bavinck states the same relationship from the other direction: “Scripture alone is trustworthy in and of itself… unconditionally binding us to faith and obedience, unchanging; a confession, on the other hand, always remains examinable and revisable by the standard of Scripture.”² Churches have accordingly distinguished the terms on which they receive members, a credible profession of faith in Christ, from the terms on which they install office-bearers, who subscribe the confession’s system of doctrine in the sense it has historically been understood.⁴

Historical Development

The ecumenical creeds

The oldest creed in continuous use, the Apostles’ Creed, was not composed at one sitting or by the apostles themselves; it grew gradually out of the baptismal confessions used in the churches of the Latin West, chiefly Rome, and reached its present wording no earlier than the sixth century.⁵ The Nicene Creed defined the church’s Trinitarian faith against Arian denials of Christ’s full deity: the Council of Nicaea produced its original form in AD 325, and the Council of Constantinople in 381 added the clauses on the Holy Spirit that give the creed its familiar shape, later affirmed at Chalcedon in 451; the Western church subsequently added the filioque clause at the regional Council of Toledo in 589, a change the Greek church has never accepted.⁶ The Athanasian Creed is not Athanasius’s own work; its careful statement of Trinitarian and Christological doctrine is traced instead to North Africa and the school of Augustine, and its complete form is not attested before the end of the eighth century.⁷ The Chalcedonian Creed, agreed by 630 bishops meeting from October 8 to 31, AD 451, defines Christ as one person in two natures, “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.”⁸

Roman, Greek, and Lutheran standards

Rome’s doctrinal standards took shape at the Council of Trent (1545-1563), called by Pope Pius IV against the Reformation; its canons and decrees were later summarized in the Roman Catechism (1566) and the Creed of Pope Pius IV (1564), to which the Vatican Council of 1869-1870 added the dogma of papal infallibility.⁹ The Eastern church, which separated from the Latin West over the course of the seventh through eleventh centuries, holds the ancient ecumenical creeds as its own inheritance and has produced comparatively few later confessions, chief among them the Orthodox Confession of Peter Mogilas (1643) and the Decrees of the Synod of Jerusalem (1672).¹⁰ Luther and Melanchthon’s Augsburg Confession, presented to the emperor at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, became the oldest Protestant confession and remains the one standard accepted across the Lutheran churches; it was followed by Melanchthon’s Apology (1530), Luther’s Larger and Smaller Catechisms (1529), the Smalcald Articles (1536-1537), and the more precisely Lutheran Formula of Concord (1577), which settled disputes over grace, the will, and Christ’s presence in the Supper.¹¹

Reformed confessions

The Reformed confessions are more numerous than the Lutheran and agree substantially with one another even where their wording differs. Heinrich Bullinger’s Second Helvetic Confession (1561, published 1566) was received by the Reformed churches of Switzerland, Scotland, Hungary, Poland, and France alike.¹² The Heidelberg Catechism, prepared by Ursinus and Olevianus in 1562-1563 for the churches of the Palatinate, was later endorsed by the Synod of Dort and remains a doctrinal standard of the Dutch and German Reformed churches.¹³ Cranmer’s original Forty-Two Articles (1553) were revised into the Thirty-Nine Articles under Archbishop Parker and ratified by Convocation in 1563, becoming the doctrinal standard of the Anglican churches; the seventeenth article, on predestination, states election in unqualified Reformed terms.¹⁴ The Canons of Dort (1618-1619), drawn up by an international synod against the teaching of Arminius’s followers, were received throughout the Reformed churches as an authoritative statement of Calvinist doctrine.¹⁵ The Westminster Assembly, convened by the Long Parliament in 1643 and sitting until 1649, produced the Westminster Confession and its Larger and Shorter Catechisms, adopted at once by the Church of Scotland and still the standard of Presbyterian churches of English and Scottish descent.¹⁶ The Congregationalist assembly that met at the Savoy in London in 1658 approved the doctrinal substance of the Westminster Confession nearly unaltered in the Savoy Declaration.¹⁷ The particular Baptist churches followed the same pattern: the London Baptist Confession of 1689 built deliberately on Westminster and Savoy rather than departing from them, its framers stating in their own preface that they had “no itch to clog religion with new words, but do readily acquiesce in that form of sounds… used by others before us.”¹⁸

Objections and Responses

Creeds are said to set up a human standard alongside, or in place of, Scripture alone. Critics of confessional subscription have sometimes framed the issue as though the true choice were “between the word of God and the creed of man.”¹ Hodge draws the line differently: the real alternative is not Scripture against creed but “the tried and proved faith of the collective body of God’s people” against “the private judgment and the unassisted wisdom of the individual objector,” since anyone who rejects the church’s confessions must still, in the end, construct some creed of their own “by their own unaided wisdom.”¹ Bavinck locates the same answer in the difference between Scripture’s self-authenticating authority and a confession’s derivative, correctable one: the church’s rule of faith is “not a standard of coercion but of persuasion and voluntary submission,” and, unlike Scripture, it “always remains examinable and revisable by the standard of Scripture.”²

Related Doctrines

References

Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 112. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 113-114. ↩ ↩²
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 114. ↩ ↩²
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 115. ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 115-117. ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 117-119. ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 118-119. ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 119-121. ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 121-122. ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 122-124. ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 124. ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 124-125. ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 125-126. ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 126. ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 126. ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 126. ↩
Preface to The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677; Auburn, MA, 2000 reprint), quoted in Micah John McCormick, “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 62. ↩