It is often rightly said that the most important thing about your church is not what makes it different, but what it shares in common with every other true church throughout history. At Trinity Church, one of the primary ways we seek to put this into practice is through corporate recitation of historic creeds and confessions during our Sunday morning worship gatherings. Ironically, this practice is one of the more noticeable differences between our church and many others within the modern evangelical landscape. My assumption is that many of our members and visitors generally appreciate this practice, yet they might still find it strange or uncomfortable. Still others might find it difficult to articulate precisely why they view this to be a healthy and necessary practice. Why then are we so committed to creeds and confessions? Though this short article cannot fully cover this broad topic, I do pray that it will increase your appreciation and understanding of both the purpose and necessity of creeds and confessions in our life together.
What are Creeds and Confessions?
The word “creed” comes from the Latin credo, meaning “I believe.” Thus, creeds are simply statements of what Christians believe. More specifically, Creeds and Confessions are formal, written statements that summarize key biblical teaching or doctrine. They often focus on the essentials of the faith: Who is God? Who is Jesus? How is one saved? Creeds and confessions hold no authority over Scripture. They are only useful to the degree that they accurately distill the teaching and doctrine of the Bible itself. That said, the weight of historical acceptance of these documents gives us good reason to carefully consider their utility.
There are two notable differences between Creeds and Confessions. First, as one author helpfully put it, “Creeds are about whom we believe, confessions are about what we believe.”1 Notice the difference between saying “I believe in God the Father Almighty” and “I believe there is one God.” The second statement is confessional because it answers the question of what we believe. The first statement is creedal. Again, quoting from the same author, it is an “an assertion of allegiance to the one true God who has created everything that exists.”2
Second, creeds are intentionally broad while confessions are narrower. Generally speaking, Creeds function to distinguish the church from the world while confessions help distinguish churches from each other. Our statement of faith, The Abstract of Principles, is one such example of a confession of faith. This difference helps demonstrate that the creeds of the early church were not intended to cover every aspect of Christian theology but to clarify the essentials.
Are Creeds and Confessions Biblical?
As mentioned previously, I expect that the posture of many Christians towards creeds and confessions is one of apathy. But what if the Bible actually teaches the necessity of creeds and confessions? Should that not change our posture towards these historic documents? Below is a brief case arguing from two biblical texts that Scripture necessitates the use of creeds and confessions.3
1. Contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3)
The New Testament letter of Jude is a short exhortation primarily warning Christians about the dangers of false teachers who have slipped into the church. Jude begins the book this way:
“Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people, who pervert the grace of God into sensuality and deny our only master and Lord, Jesus Christ.”
The purpose for writing the letter is clear: In the face of false teaching, contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. Jude wants his believing readers to fight and struggle to protect the faith. But notice that he doesn’t say “your faith.” He says to contend for “the faith.” This phrase refers not to your own personal, saving faith but to the objective body of doctrinal content known as The Christian Faith. “The faith” then is a short phrase that encapsulates the essentials of the Christian gospel.
Furthermore, “the faith” is something that was “delivered to the saints.” God first gave the objective truth of the Christian gospel to the apostles (1 Cor. 15:3-10) who then passed down this truth to the saints, i.e., the redeemed church of God. Those saints are still tasked to protect that gospel message as well as pass it down to the next generation of saints. Thus, the task of the church remains virtually the same in every generation: protect the gospel and pass it down. This is why Paul calls the church a “pillar and buttress of the truth” in 1 Timothy 3:15.
This is an important first step to understanding the importance and necessity of creeds and confessions. If the gospel has fixed doctrinal content that remains unchanged by time and culture, and if the church has been given the task to protect and pass down that content to subsequent generations, then the only reason that Trinity Church Kennesaw even exists today is because the biblical truth of the gospel was protected and passed down from previous generations of saints. We would do well to pay attention to how those saints accomplished that task.
2. Follow the pattern of sound words (2 Tim. 1:13)
The letter of 2 Timothy contains some of the Apostle Paul’s final words to his young protégé pastor, Timothy. To be sure, Paul emphasizes to Timothy the importance of the public reading and preaching of Scripture (1 Tim. 4:13, 2 Tim. 4:2). However, notice this additional exhortation in 2 Timothy 2:13–14:
“Follow the pattern of sound words that you 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.”
Paul goes out of his way to instruct Timothy to devote himself to a “pattern of sound words” that came from the Apostle himself. Notice that he doesn’t just tell Timothy to follow the conceptual content of his words. He specifically instructs Timothy to hold on to certain phrases and sayings that soundly and accurately summarize the Christian faith. For Paul, it isn’t enough to merely summarize Christian teaching. Timothy must tether himself to the specific ways in which Paul spoke of the gospel.
In his book The Creedal Imperative, Carl Trueman observes two likely purposes for this instruction. The first concern is theological. Teachers of any discipline develop certain vocabulary and teach their students how to use it. This allows for effective communication between insiders. For a similar purpose the church develops phrases and words that accurately communicate the teaching of the Bible. We could reinvent the wheel each time we want to describe who God is, or we could simply use the word “Trinity.” The second concern is pastoral as forms and patterns of words allow for easy identification of outsiders. When someone stands up in the pulpit and says that they don’t believe in the Trinity, you don’t need a seminary degree to know that you should stop listening.
The end goal of Paul’s exhortation to Timothy is a familiar one in light of our previous look at Jude 3: Guard the gospel message that has been entrusted to you. One of the main ways the church has done that over the centuries is by synthesizing the teaching of the Bible into creeds and confessions. Ironically, it is those who abandon the pattern of sound words who run the risk of losing the truth of the Christian gospel.
Why use Creeds and Confessions in Corporate Worship?
Much could be said about the usefulness of Creeds and Confessions in the life of the church and the individual Christian. Here, I want to offer three particular benefits of using creeds and confessions in our corporate worship gathering.
1. Creeds and Confessions remind us what matters most.
Mission drift is defined as a departure from the original stated goal or purpose. We’ve all been there. Sadly, the church is not exempt. One of the primary benefits of using creeds in our corporate worship gathering is that it provides a regular drumbeat of the essentials of the Christian faith. Remember the issues that the early creeds address: Who is God? What is the Trinity? Who is Jesus? How is one saved? These creeds remind us what must absolutely be believed in order to be a Christian. They remind us of the basics that we must protect and pass down to the next generation of saints. The time-tested clarity and truth of the language of the creeds make them a valuable tool to accomplish this most basic task.
What do you expect from a Sunday morning worship gathering? Among other things, I hope you come with eager expectation to hear afresh from God’s word and grow in your understanding of it. But is it possible that this good desire to “learn something new” might lead you to be bored by the unchanging foundations of the faith? Is the Apostles’ Creed monotonous because you have all heard it so many times before? Many wise pastors have said that the generation that assumes the gospel is only one generation away from losing the gospel. Brothers and sisters, I would encourage each of you to resist this temptation to be bored by the basics. Learn to delight in the wonderful truths of the gospel contained in the ancient creeds and pray that God would use our corporate recitation of them to preserve our faith in those gospel truths that are of first importance (1 Cor. 15:3).
2. Creeds and Confessions give expression to our unity in Christ.
All Christians are called to be “eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph. 4:3). For many Christians today, obedience to that command requires the dismantling of doctrinal boundaries and commitments. As the saying goes, belonging comes before believing. This kind of sentiment could not be farther from the Biblical picture of unity. Rather, Scripture teaches that our unity is fundamentally based on a shared commitment to the truth of the gospel. Corporate recitation of creeds is a unifying act of public identification with the people of God and is a powerful way to give expression to our unity with the other Christians in the room, other Christians around the world, and the saints of old who protected the faith and passed it down to us. In this sense, our corporate recitation of the creeds becomes a foretaste of the gathering of saints around the throne of God who declare with one unified voice, “Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory” (Rev. 19:6–7).
3. Creeds and Confessions lead us to rightly praise God.
Scripture never divorces the right worship of God from a right knowledge of God. Instead, we are called to worship in spirit and in truth (Jn. 4:23). In fact, the biblical pattern is that theology always leads to doxology. Consider how Paul bursts into praise in Romans 11:33 after eleven intricate chapters of theological heavy lifting. Or, consider his mediation on the humility of Christ in the incarnation that results in the creedal–like doxology of Phil. 2:6–11. Maybe more importantly, we should remember that the Psalms, the biblically–inspired hymn book of Israel, is primarily focused on declaring the identity and works of God. It is here we realize that theology doesn’t just lead to doxology. Theology is doxology. Worshiping God fundamentally requires verbal expression of who He is and what glorious deeds He has done. The Scriptures call us to do this through preaching, praying, singing, and yes – through the use of creeds and confessions. For that matter, creeds may essentially be viewed as spoken hymns. Just like a biblically faithful hymn, creeds and confessions faithfully distill biblical doctrine for the purpose of instruction, edification and doxology.
The early creeds were in part birthed out of this desire to rightly give praise and honor to the God of the Bible. True, it is possible to turn creedal recitation into a cold, heartless exercise. But the same could be said of listening to a sermon, praying, or even lifting one’s hands during a praise song. The problem is not with the creeds but with us. Rather than seeing the creeds as a stale recitation of theology, think of them as our pledge of allegiance. Reciting our nation’s pledge of allegiance or singing its national anthem should cause a kind of pride to well up inside of us, even if we are singing it for the five hundredth time. How much more our public declaration that we worship God the Father almighty, that he has rescued us through His Son Jesus, and that we will have no other Lord but this Christ! May our corporate recitation of the creeds always direct our souls to rightly honor, praise and delight in our Triune God.
