Crisis of Confidence E-Book

Carl R. Trueman

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Carl Trueman Analyzes How Ancient Creeds and Confessions Protect Biblical Christianity in a Culture of Expressive Individualism Historic statements of faith—such as the Heidelberg Catechism, the Apostles' Creed, and the Westminster Confession of Faith—have helped the Christian church recite and hold fast to God's truth for centuries. However, many modern evangelicals reject these historic documents and the practices of catechesis, proclaiming their commitment to "no creed but the Bible." And yet, in today's rapidly changing culture, ancient liturgical tradition is not only biblical—it's essential. In Crisis of Confidence, Carl Trueman analyzes how creeds and confessions can help the Christian church navigate modern concerns, particularly around the fraught issue of identity. He contends that statements of faith promote humility, moral structure, and a godly view of personhood, helping believers maintain a strong foundation amid a culture in crisis. This is a revised edition of Trueman's The Creedal Imperative, now with a new section on the rise of expressive individualism. - Updated Edition of The Creedal Imperative: Includes fresh cultural insights on modern individualism - Written by Carl Trueman: Author of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (100,000+ copies sold) - Theological and Historical: Explains why creeds and confessions are necessary, how they have developed over time, and how they can function in the church of today and tomorrow - Ideal for Pastors, Professors, and Those Interested in Liturgical Tradition - Replaces ISBN 978-1-4335-2190-4

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“Carl Trueman’s defense of the creedal imperative is well-known and greatly appreciated. This revised edition gives us greater insight into why the creeds and confessions of the church are so helpful—and at a time when many denominations and churches seem to be adrift. We cannot afford to act as if we are the first to ever consider the great claims of Christian doctrine and discipleship. The creeds of the early church and the confessions of the Reformation are in fact God’s good gifts to keep us from idiosyncratic individualism. This book is worth reading, and its argument worth pondering afresh.”

Mark D. Thompson, Principal, Moore Theological College

“This little gem crystallizes a message that Carl Trueman has been preaching for many years, and preaching very well: orthodox creeds and confessions are biblical, practical, and crucial to the revitalization of our churches. They are derived from the Bible, they summarize the Bible, and they ought to shape our leaders’ interpretations of the Bible. They also ought to shape believers’ doing of the word in corporate worship and daily Christian practice. I commend this book heartily to all who love the Lord, submit themselves to his word, and commit themselves to making disciples.”

Douglas A. Sweeney, Dean, Professor of Divinity, Beeson Divinity School

“In Crisis of Confidence, Carl Trueman returns to his compelling argument for creeds and confessions in light of the contested issues of our strange new world. With clarity and pastoral insight, Trueman shows how historic creeds define us and bind us to the community of faith. They identify not only what we believe but also how we act and worship. Creeds are also peculiar in that we receive them and find our meaning in their confession. Trueman laments that too many today believe inner feelings determine outward identity. For them, authenticity is not received but produced by our deepest desires. Trueman’s timely book reminds us how creeds and confessions shape and inform our identity by pointing us always to the God who brings us authenticity by his gospel.”

Carl Beckwith, Professor of Historical Theology, Concordia Theological Seminary

“In Crisis of Confidence, Carl Trueman makes a fresh case for creeds and confessions. At a time when not only individuals but also churches are unsure of their purpose and identity, Christians have reason to be thankful for this useful update of an important book.”

Chad Van Dixhoorn, Professor of Church History and Theology, Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte

“In this remarkable book, Carl Trueman addresses the crises that plague both church and culture in the light of historic confessional formulations of our faith in the triune God. He offers a prophetic and apostolic call to return to the creedal confession of Christ and the Creator’s design for human living, which provides new life and guidance for how to live out the faith in our modern world. This book is a valuable resource for believers as they think through their own lives and the life of Christ’s church. It will help them remain faithful to Scripture and our Christian heritage as well as witness to the Lord in the twenty-first century.”

Robert Kolb, Professor of Systematic Theology Emeritus, Concordia Seminary

“I know of few people better equipped to write this book. As both a scholar and a pastor, Carl Trueman combines his expertise as a historian with some important biblical observations to make a convincing case. This book will prove to be immensely useful in today’s ecclesiastical climate.”

Mark Jones, Senior Pastor, Faith Presbyterian Church, Vancouver, British Columbia

“Carl Trueman, again, has given us a stimulating book. He manages to demonstrate the relevance of creeds by showing how fresh the old ones are. This book is not only a must-read for those who stick to creeds without knowing why, or for those whose creed it is to have no creed, but for everyone who tries to practice the Christian faith.”

Herman Selderhuis, President, Theological University Apeldoorn, the Netherlands; Director, Refo500; President, Reformation Research Consortium

“Church leaders often dispute the need for confessions of faith on the grounds of the supreme authority of the Bible. In this timely book, Carl Trueman demonstrates effectively how such claims are untenable. We all have creeds—the Bible itself requires them—but some are unwritten, not open to public accountability, and the consequences can be damaging. Trueman’s case deserves the widest possible hearing.”

Robert Letham, Senior Research Fellow, Union School of Theology

“Carl Trueman’s case for what he terms ‘the creedal imperative’ of the Christian faith is spot-on. Trueman not only identifies but also deftly rebuts a number of traditional as well as more-recent objections in contemporary culture to creeds and confessions. On the one hand, he shows the untenability of the ‘no creed but Christ, no book but the Bible’ position of many evangelical Christians. And on the other hand, he defends the use of creeds and confessions that summarize and defend the teaching of Scripture without supplementing Scripture or diminishing its authority.”

Cornelis P. Venema, President and Professor of Doctrinal Studies, Mid-America Reformed Seminary; author, Christ and Covenant Theology and Chosen in Christ

Crisis of Confidence

Other Crossway Books by Carl R. Trueman

Histories and Fallacies: Problems Faced in the Writing of History

Luther on the Christian Life: Cross and Freedom

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution

Crisis of Confidence

Reclaiming the Historic Faith in a Culture Consumed with Individualism and Identity

Carl R. Trueman

Crisis of Confidence: Reclaiming the Historic Faith in a Culture Consumed with Individualism and Identity

Formerly published as The Creedal Imperative

© 2012, 2024 by Carl R. Trueman

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Faceout Studio, Spencer Fuller

First printing 2024

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated into any other language.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible. Public domain.

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4335-9001-6 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-9004-7 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-9002-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Trueman, Carl R., author. 

Title: Crisis of confidence : reclaiming the historic faith in a culture consumed with individualism and identity / Carl R. Trueman.

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, 2024 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023011673 (print) | LCCN 2023011674 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433590016 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781433590023 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433590047 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Confidence. | Individualism. | Christianity.

Classification: LCC BJ1533.C6 T78 2024 (print) | LCC BJ1533.C6 (ebook) | DDC 158.1—dc23/eng/20230815

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023011673

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023011674

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2024-01-18 03:45:45 PM

To Peter, John, Lauren, and Emily

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface: Old Creeds versus the New Creed

Introduction

1  The Cultural Case against Creeds and Confessions

2  The Foundations of Creedalism

3  The Early Church

4  Classical Protestant Confessions

5  Confession as Praise

6  On the Usefulness of Creeds and Confessions

Conclusion

Appendix: On Revising and Supplementing Confessions

For Further Reading

Index

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Allan Fisher and Justin Taylor at Crossway for encouraging me to write the first iteration of this project, The Creedal Imperative. Justin was also instrumental in suggesting a second edition, revised in light of more recent developments in both the culture of the church in North America and my own research. Over the years, I have benefited from conversations about the nature of confessionalism with my friends Sandy Finlayson, Greg Beale, Todd Pruitt, David Hall, Bob Godfrey, Kevin DeYoung, Matt Eusey, and Max Benfer. I must also thank Catriona for providing such a happy home and escape from work. I dedicate this edition to Peter, John, Lauren, and Emily.

Preface

Old Creeds versus the New Creed

When I wrote The Creedal Imperative in 2012, I was motivated by the conviction that churches need statements of faith that do more than specify ten or twelve basic points of doctrine. They need confessions that seek to present in concise form the salient points of the whole counsel of God. And I was convinced that the section of the church most cautious about creeds and confessions—Protestant evangelicalism—could actually best protect what it valued most (the supreme authority of Scripture) by, perhaps counterintuitively, embracing the very principles of confessionalism about which it was so cautious.

In the decade since The Creedal Imperative was published, my convictions on both points have not changed. If anything, they have become stronger. What has changed is the wider context in which the church now finds herself. On the positive side, orthodox Protestantism has rediscovered the classical theism of the ancient creeds and the consensus of the Reformation confessions. Scholarship in the last thirty years has deepened its understanding of both Nicene Christianity and the relationship between patristic, medieval, Reformation, and post-Reformation theology. The result is that we now have a far more profound and accurate understanding of the history of Christian orthodoxy than the rather tendentious and simplistic pieties about the relationship of Protestantism to broader theological currents that earlier generations took for granted. Now we have a much better grasp, for example, of what exactly the Westminster Confession means when it claims that God is “a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions.”1 For this we can be truly grateful.

On the negative side, however, the last few years have seen fundamental changes in Western culture that have both transformed the relationship between wider society and the church and placed the church under serious pressure on points that were only just starting to emerge in 2012. Our disagreements with the wider world today are not simply the traditional ones of whether Christianity’s supernatural claims about miracles, the incarnation, and the resurrection are true. The mainstream acceptance of gay marriage and gender ideology witnesses to an emerging world that finds not only Christian theology implausible but Christian anthropology and ethics offensive and even dangerous. And after centuries when the broad moral assumptions of the world and of the church enjoyed huge common ground, we now live in a time when these are frequently in direct opposition to each other. We can no longer assume that the world will cultivate in our children a moral vision broadly compatible with that of Christianity.

Christianity involves a creed, a code, and a cult. The creed sets out the beliefs of the church—beliefs about God, creation, human beings, sin, redemption, and consummation. It describes reality. The code presents the moral vision for life here on earth. God’s people are meant to reflect God’s character. That was clear for Old Testament Israel and remains true in the New Testament. It is why Paul, for all his glorious emphasis on the objective work of salvation in Christ, sees that work as having clear practical implications for believers. And the cult is the way in which Christians are to worship the God described in the creed and whose character is reflected in the code. The three are all intimately connected, all grounded in the reality of God, and all nonnegotiable. No church, and no Christian, merely has a creed or a code or a cult. All three are inseparable facets of the one Christian faith.

In The Creedal Imperative, my focus was on the creed and, to some extent, the cult aspects of this triplet. In the years since, the code has become far more urgent as a topic for discussion. And, as with the creed and the cult, classic formal creeds and confessions are excellent resources for addressing this matter.

As I have argued elsewhere, at the heart of the issues we face today is the phenomenon of expressive individualism. This is the modern creed whose mantras and liturgies set the terms for how we think about ourselves and our world today. It is the notion that every person is constituted by a set of inward feelings, desires, and emotions. The real “me” is that person who dwells inside my body, and thus I am most truly myself when I am able to act outwardly in accordance with those inner feelings. In an extreme form we see this in the transgender phenomenon, where physical, biological sex and psychological gender identity can stand in opposition to each other. I can therefore really be a woman if I think I am one, even if my body is that of a male. But expressive individualism is not restricted to questions of gender. When people identify themselves by their desires—sexual or otherwise—they are expressive individuals. And to some extent that implicates us all. The modern self is the expressive individual self.

In the world where expressive individualism is normative, creeds and confessions become even more problematic for the wider culture and even more important and useful for Christians. First, in a world increasingly inclined to radical subjectivism, creeds and confessions represent a clear assertion of objective reality. In The Creedal Imperative, I made the point that this relativizes our time and place in history. In subscribing to a confession and in reciting a creed in corporate worship, we acknowledge that our age does not have all the answers and that we as churches stand upon foundations laid down by our ancestors in the faith. That is important in promoting humility, in reminding us that we are merely the latest stewards in a line of witnesses charged with passing on the apostolic faith to the next generation. But it is now clear to me that these acts also thereby relativize who we each are as individuals. Creeds and confessions remind us that we are not the center of the universe; nor are we those who decide what the meaning of our own lives is to be. We are embedded in a greater, given reality that is decisive in determining who we are and how we should understand ourselves. To declare “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, / Maker of heaven and earth” is to declare that we are not the center of the universe, that I must be understood in terms of a larger, objective reality.2 Immediately as I recite this with the congregation, I am asserting, confessing, and reminding myself that I am not autonomous but am a mere part of creation. My identity is thus in a very deep sense not something I construct, choose, or feel. It is a given over which I have no say or control, just as the identity of my biological parents is something that is simply a reality and not a matter of my will or decision. Perhaps nothing is more important than this realization: on it hangs biblical anthropology, biblical ethics, and biblical worship—creed, code, cult.

Second, creeds and confessions do not negate that which is true about expressive individualism but rather, when used correctly, answer the deepest legitimate concerns of the same. Expressive individualism is correct in seeing our inner lives, our feelings and emotions, as important to who we are. Where it errs is in two specific ways: it grants an overwhelming authority to those feelings, and it sees the subsequent outward expression of those feelings as that which makes us “authentic.”

Creeds and confessions speak to both the legitimate concerns and the erroneous excesses. Take the Heidelberg Catechism, for example. It uses the first person singular throughout and is framed by a first question that speaks of hope and assurance grounded in God’s action in Christ and a last question that indicates that God’s commitment to us is even greater than our desire for the things for which we pray. In both cases, human feelings are not repudiated or dismissed as of no significance. Rather they are set within the context of a broader understanding of God. In other words, the believer’s feelings are shaped by the theology summarized in the Catechism.

This also connects to the area where expressive individualism is creating most havoc today: moral and social codes. Emotions do play a part in what it means to be a moral person. If I see someone being physically attacked on the street and feel no outrage, then it would be fair to say that there is something morally problematic about me. Yet feelings cannot be the sole guide to morality. I might feel terribly sad, even guilty, that I cannot affirm a friend who comes out as gay, but that does not mean my feelings in this matter are a reliable guide to the intrinsic morality of the situation. My feelings need to be informed by the great moral structure of the world; and even if I never rid myself of all such sadness and guilt, my feelings still need to be subordinated to that moral structure. Confessions point me to that structure and summarize it for me. They offer a helpful rule by which to judge my own emotional instincts, and a view of reality to which, over time, I learn to conform such instinct. That is, of course, where code and cult connect: praise and worship, precisely because they appeal to both the mind and the heart, are critical here; and as worship is shaped by creeds and confessions, so creedal and confessional theology even forms my emotions. And that is where the concern for authenticity comes in: I am authentic not as I give free rein to autonomous feelings and emotions; I am authentic as I bring my inner feelings into conformity with outward reality and can thus give expression to them in a legitimate and edifying way. This is what the psalms do: they give legitimate expression to our feelings in corporate worship, combining words, meter, and music in a way that involves the whole human person while ultimately thereby channeling those feelings in ways that reflect God’s truth. Our creedal worship should do the same.

The church in the West, particularly in the US, is waking up to a strange new world. Its assumptions about its place in that world—for example, that its theology would be regarded as inherently implausible but its morality would continue to be broadly compatible with that of society as a whole—have been shown to be incorrect. That this revelation has come so suddenly tempts us all to panic or despair. This is why creeds and confessions are even more important now than before: they anchor us in history; they offer us reasonably comprehensive frameworks for thinking about the connections between God, anthropology, and ethics; and above all they point us to the transcendent God who rules over all things. In short, they remind us that God will bring all things to a conclusion in which the marriage of the Lamb will take place, and they help us know how to think, live, and worship in the interim. The creedal imperative is greater today than it was ten years ago because the God to which the creeds and confessions point remains the same even in these times of change and flux, and we need perhaps more than ever to be reminded of that fact and its implications.

1  Westminster Confession of Faith (hereafter cited as WCF) 2.1, in Creeds, Confessions, and Catechisms: A Reader’s Edition, ed. Chad Van Dixhoorn (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022), 188 (hereafter cited as CCC).

2  Nicene Creed (CCC 17).

Introduction

A colleague of mine loves to tell the following story about a church he used to visit. The pastor there had a habit of standing in the pulpit, seizing his Bible in his right hand, raising it above his head, and pointing to it with his left. “This,” he declared in a booming voice, “is our only creed and our only confession.” Ironically, the church was marked by teaching that included the five points of Calvinism, dispensationalism, and a form of polity that reflected in broad terms its origins as a Plymouth Brethren assembly. In other words, while its only creed was the Bible, it actually connected, in terms of the details of its life and teaching, to almost no other congregation in the history of the church. Clearly, the church did have a creed, a summary view of what the Bible taught on grace, eschatology, and ecclesiology; it was just that nobody ever wrote it down and set it out in public. That is a serious problem. As I argue in subsequent pages, it is actually unbiblical; and that is ironic and somewhat sad, given the (no doubt) sincere desire of the pastor and the people of this church to have an approach to church life that guaranteed the unique status of the Bible.

The burden that motivates my writing of this book is my belief that creeds and confessions are vital to the present and future well-being of the church. Such a statement may well jar evangelical ears that are used to the notion that Scripture alone is to be considered the sole, supreme authority for Christian faith and practice. Does my claim not strike at the very heart of the notion of Scripture alone? Does it not place me in jeopardy of regarding both Scripture and something outside Scripture, some tradition, as being of coordinate and potentially equal authority? And is there not a danger that commitment to time-bound creeds and confessions might well doom the church to irrelevance in the modern world?

These are, indeed, legitimate concerns, and I address these, and more, in the coming pages. Here, however, I want to place my own cards on the table. Every author writes from a particular perspective, with arguments shaped to some extent by personal commitments, background, and belief. Thus, it seems entirely appropriate to allow the reader insight into my own context and predispositions in order to be better prepared to understand what I am going to say.

I am a professor at a Christian liberal arts college, but I am also a minister in a confessional Presbyterian denomination, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. In other words, I am a confessional Presbyterian. This term is extremely important for locating me on the spectrum of Christian churches and commitments.

To take the latter term first, Presbyterian means that I am committed to a Presbyterian form of church government, whereby the church is ruled at a congregational level by a session, or committee, of elders; at a regional level by a presbytery of ministers and elders drawn from the churches in the area; and at a national level by a General Assembly of ministers and elders drawn from all parts of the country. When I became a minister in my denomination, I took vows to uphold this form of government both in what I teach and in the respect I give to the various courts of the church. I am accountable to these church courts for what I teach and how I live.

More significant for this book is the adjective confessional. This means that I am committed to the idea that the Presbyterian confessional position, as stated in the Westminster Standards, represents a summary of the teaching of the Bible on key points such as who God is, who Christ is, what justification means, and so on. When I became a minister, I took a solemn vow to that effect. This points to another aspect of being confessional: my vows connect to a structure of church government such that, if I am found to be teaching something inconsistent with what I am pledged to uphold, I can be held to account. If necessary, in the worst situations, I can even be removed from public office in the church.

Notice, I said above that my vow reflects the fact that I believe the statements in the Westminster Standards are a summary of Scripture’s teaching, not that I believe the Westminster Standards represent teaching supplemental to Scripture, or independent of it. Rather, they summarize what is already there in Scripture itself.

Now, this position is not without its problems. How, one might ask, do I avoid making the Standards a kind of a priori framework into which Scripture is made to fit? In other words, is there not a danger here of the tail wagging the dog, of treating the summary as the grid by which I read Scripture? I address this and similar questions later. At this point, my purpose is simply to let readers know the position that I occupy so they can understand the perspective from which this book is being written. In sum, I not only believe that creeds and confessions are good for the church but also am committed by vow to uphold the teaching of a particular confession. This indicates that the status of creeds and confessions is not for me simply a matter of intellectual interest; I am committed to the notion at a deep, personal level.

The fact that I am a confessional Christian places me at odds with the vast majority of evangelical Christians today. That is ironic, because most Christian churches throughout the ages have defined themselves by commitment to some form of creed, confession, or doctrinal statement. This is the case for the Eastern Orthodox, for Roman Catholics, and for Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican Protestants. Some streams of Baptists also have confessions; and many independent churches today that may not think of themselves as confessional have brief statements of faith that define who they are and what they believe. Furthermore, as I argue later, even those churches and Christians who repudiate the whole notion of creeds and confessions will yet tend to operate with an implicit creed.

Despite this, it is true to say that we live in an anticonfessional age, at least in intention if not always in practice. The most blatant examples of this come from those who argue that the Protestant notion of Scripture alone simply requires the rejection of creeds and confessions. Scripture is the sole authority; of what use therefore are further documents? And how can one ever claim such documents have authority without thus derogating from the authority of Scripture? These arguments have a certain specious force, but I argue in chapters 1 and 2 that while the reasons for anticonfessionalism are manifold, many of them are driven more by cultural forces of which too many are unaware. Awareness of these forces, by contrast, may not automatically free us from their influence but can at least offer us the opportunity of subjecting them to critique.

I do want to make the point here that Christians are not divided between those who have creeds and confessions and those who do not; rather, they are divided between those who have public creeds and confessions that are written down and exist as public documents, subject to public scrutiny, evaluation, and critique, and those who have private creeds and confessions that are often improvised, unwritten, and thus not open to public scrutiny, not susceptible to evaluation, and, crucially and ironically, not therefore subject to testing by Scripture to see whether they are true.

Anticonfessionalism among evangelicals is actually closely related to their putative rejection of tradition. For many, the principle of Scripture alone stands against any notion that the church’s tradition plays any constructive role in her life or thought. Some regard this as one of the principal insights of the Protestant Reformers: Rome had (and has) tradition; Protestantism has Scripture. The sixteenth-century Reformation was thus a struggle over authority, with church tradition being pitted against the supremacy of Scripture; and modern evangelicals stand in lockstep with their Protestant forebears on this matter.

A few moments of reflection, however, indicate how misleading and, in fact, untrue is the claim that Protestants have the Bible rather than tradition. Most evangelicals, for example, will typically use Bible translations, and such translations—be they the New International Version (NIV), Revised Standard Version (RSV), English Standard Version (ESV), or King James Version (KJV)—stand within established traditions of Bible translation, linguistics, lexicography, and so forth. Further, beneath these translations lie the original Hebrew and Greek texts; so traditions of textual understanding also underlie these translations and, even for those linguistic geniuses who are more comfortable with just the Hebrew and Greek, these various traditions will shape the choice of text, the way the languages were learned, and the kind of choices made on matters of obscure grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. Thus, “Scripture alone,” whatever else it means, cannot mean Scripture approached in a vacuum.

And we can take this reflection on tradition a step further. All Protestant pastors, even the most fundamentalist, will, if they are remotely competent, prepare their sermons with the help of lexicons, commentaries, and books of theology. As soon as they take down one of these books from their bookcases and start to read it, of course, they are drawing positively on church tradition. They are not simply reading the word of God; they are reading the thoughts and reflections on that word offered by someone else and articulated using words, sentences, and paragraphs that are not found anywhere in the Bible. Indeed, as soon as one uses the word Trinity from the pulpit, one is drawing on tradition, not Scripture.

In fact, tradition is not the issue; it is how one defines that tradition and how one understands the way it connects to Scripture that are really the points at issue. Indeed, this was the crux of the Reformation, which was not so much a struggle between Scripture and tradition as between different types of traditions. In a famous exchange between a leading light of the Catholic Reformation, Cardinal Sadoleto, and the Reformer John Calvin, Sadoleto argued that the Protestants had abandoned the church tradition. Calvin responded that, on the contrary, the Protestants had the true tradition; it was the Catholic Church that had moved away from the truth. The point was simple and well-made: the tradition that transmitted the correct understanding of Scripture from generation to generation belonged to the Protestants.

Here is not the place to debate the veracity of Calvin’s claim regarding the content of tradition; suffice it to note that he understood the Reformation not as Scripture versus tradition but as scriptural tradition versus unscriptural tradition. Thoughtful Protestants then, and ever since, have understood the Reformers as arguing for what we might call a tradition that is normed by Scripture. In other words, Protestants know that they use language and conceptual terminology not found explicitly in the Bible; but they understand that such articulations are useful in understanding what Scripture says and that at the point where they are found to be inadequate for this task, or even to contradict Scripture, there they must be modified or abandoned.

The same is true of the creeds and confessions of the church, which are, one might say, the most concentrated deposits of tradition, as affirmed by the church. These documents are often referred to as normed norms or, to use the Latin, norma normata, in contrast to Scripture which is the norming norm, or norma normans. What that means is that the creeds and confessions represent a public statement of what a particular church or denomination believes that Scripture teaches in a synthetic form. By synthetic, I do not mean “false,” as in, say, a synthetic fiber like nylon, which is designed to look like cotton but is not really cotton. I mean rather a presentation that is not simply a collection of Bible verses but a thematic summary of what the Bible teaches. Thus, in the Nicene Creed, we have an explication of the identity of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which is considered to represent what the Bible as a whole teaches on this subject. The important point to note is that such statements are public, and thus open to public scrutiny in the light of what Scripture teaches. Thus, they can be accepted or rejected, modified or clarified, as and when they are found to be wanting; the context and means for such change I discuss elsewhere. Here, I simply want the reader to note the synthetic and public nature of the documents.

This book consists of six chapters. In chapter 1, I look at some of the powerful currents within modern culture that serve to make the whole idea of creeds and confessions somewhat implausible. I do not intend to reduce evangelical objections to mere religious expressions of such secular forces, but I believe that an understanding of such forces can be of great help in clarifying why the case for confessionalism can be difficult to make at the present time.

In chapter 2, I look at the biblical teaching on a number of related points (the importance of language; the reality and unity of human nature; Paul’s emphasis on doctrine, on eldership, on a “form of sound words,” on human identity and mutual dependency, and on tradition). My conclusion is not only that creeds and confessions are plausible, given biblical teaching, but that Paul actually seems to assume that something like them will be a normal part of the postapostolic church’s life. In other words, there is a sense in which the claim to have no creed but the Bible is incoherent, given the fact that the Bible itself seems to teach the need for creeds. I also argue that creeds and confessions embody another point that is crucial to Paul: Christians belong together, and a significant part of that belonging is our common commitment to common beliefs that define who we are as a people, not as individuals.

In chapter 3, I outline the ecclesiological developments of relevance to the case for creeds and confessions. In particular, I focus on the Trinitarian and Christological discussions between the Council of Nicaea in 325 and the Council of Chalcedon in 451. I also touch on the Apostles’ and the Athanasian creeds. Two important lessons I draw from this study relate to doctrinal complexity and the importance of the church. As to the former, history teaches that many Christian doctrines can exist only in a stable form within a relatively complex network of related doctrines. Christian theology, in other words, always has a certain ineradicable complexity, which has serious implications for the modern evangelical predilection for simple and very brief statements of faith. As to ecclesiology, it is clear from the early church that terms such as heresy have a meaningful content only when connected to a church that has a specific confession.

In chapter 4, I deal with major Protestant confessional standards: the Anglican Articles and Homilies; the Lutheran Book of Concord; the Three Forms of Unity; the Westminster Standards; and the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith. This chapter is of necessity highly selective. Protestantism has produced a vast amount of confessional material, and so I have chosen to focus on those with which I am most familiar. In choosing these, I do not intend to imply that Arminians, General Baptists, Anabaptists, and others do not have confessions and cannot be confessional. I hope that anyone from these traditions who reads this book will see that the principles of confessionalism are not confined simply to those confessions I happen to have mentioned.

In chapter 5, in order to do justice to the doxological origins of Christian creeds and to underline the important function that such have played, and can continue to play, in the life of the church, I focus on creeds and praise. Too often we think of these documents in a negative sense, as if their sole purpose was simply to keep people out of the church and to offer a dry-as-dust account of the Christian faith. By contrast, creeds are central to Christian doxology. Further, building on my earlier argument, I argue that creeds and confessions inform the worship of Christians in a way that binds us all together: worship is not about self-expression; it is about giving corporate expression to God and his reality.

In chapter 6, I make the case for the usefulness of confessions by highlighting a number of advantages to having them, from limitation of church power to a proper pedagogical structure for church life. After the conclusion, I also include an appendix addressing the vexing question of the possibility and practicality of confessional revision.

In writing this book, I come to my subject as one convinced that confessional Christianity captures a very important aspect of biblical teaching on the church. I was a nonconfessional evangelical for many years; discovering confessional Presbyterianism in my early thirties was a liberating experience. Nevertheless, I am aware that there can be a rather distasteful, not to mention sinful, tendency among many confessional writers to look down with scorn and derision on those who are not confessional. I trust that I have not written in that spirit; rather, I hope that this book will go some way to persuading nonconfessional Christians who love the Bible and seek to follow Christ that confessionalism, far from being something to fear, can actually help them better protect that which is so dear to them.

The astute reader should now be able to see the case I make in this book: I argue that creeds and confessions are thoroughly consistent with the belief that Scripture alone is the unique source of revelation and authority. Indeed, I go somewhat further: I argue that creeds and confessions are, in fact, necessary for the well-being of the church, and that churches that claim not to have them place themselves at a permanent disadvantage when it comes to holding fast to that form of sound words that was so precious to the aging Paul as he advised his young protégé, Timothy. Indeed, while such churches are often motivated by the highest of intentions—safeguarding the authority of Scripture—this can be done best by having creeds and confessions. Linked to this latter point, I make the case that it is at least arguable, based on Scripture, that the need for creeds and confessions is not just a practical imperative for the church but also a biblical imperative.

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The Cultural Case against Creeds and Confessions

In the introduction, I briefly mentioned the standard, knee-jerk reaction against creeds and confessions, often found in evangelical circles, that such documents supplant the unique place of the Bible, place tradition on an equal—or even superior—footing with Scripture, and thus compromise a truly evangelical, Protestant notion of authority. While I offer a more thorough response to this line of objection later, I did note that all Christians engage in confessional synthesis; the difference is simply whether one adheres to a public confession, subject to public scrutiny, or to a private confession that is, by its very nature, immune to such examination.

Before proceeding to a more thoroughgoing exposition of the use and the usefulness of confessions, however, it is worth spending some time reflecting on other reasons why creeds and confessions are regarded with such suspicion these days. While the objection to them is often couched in language that appears to be jealous for biblical authority, there are also powerful forces at work within our modern world that militate against adherence to historic statements of the Christian faith. As the goldfish swimming in the bowl is unaware of the temperature and taste of the water in which he swims, so often the most powerfully formative forces of our societies and cultures are those with which we are so familiar as to be functionally unaware of how they shape our thinking, even our thinking about what exactly it means to say that Scripture has supreme and unique authority. It would be a tragic irony if the rejection of creeds and confessions by so many of those who sincerely wish to be biblically faithful turned out to be not an act of faithfulness but rather an unwitting capitulation to the spirit of the age. It is some of the forces that shape this spirit that I address in this chapter.

Four Assumptions

My conviction that creeds and confessions are a good and necessary part of healthy, biblical church life rests on a host of different arguments and convictions; but, at root, there are four basic presuppositions to which I hold that must be true for the case for confessions to be a sound one. These are as follows:

1. Human beings are not free, autonomous creatures defined by feelings but creatures made in the image of God and always defined by external relationships to God and each other. We as human beings do not exist in isolation; nor do we exist in a world that is mere “stuff,” a kind of cosmic playdough of no intrinsic significance that we can simply make mean anything we wish. Our identity is determined by the fact we are made in God’s image and placed from birth in a network of relationships that have a binding authority on us and determine who we are. In short, our identity at base is not something we invent for ourselves; it is something we learn as we learn about the objective nature of the world in which we live.

2.The past is important and has things of positive relevance to teach us. Creeds and confessions are, almost by definition, documents that were composed at some point in the past; and, in most cases, we are talking about the distant past, not last week or last year. Thus, to claim that creeds and confessions still fulfill positive functions, in terms of transmitting truth from one generation to another or making it clear to the outside world what it is that particular churches believe, requires that we believe the past can still speak to us today. Thus, any cultural force that weakens or attenuates the belief that the past can be a source of knowledge and even wisdom is also a force that serves to undermine the relevance of creeds and confessions.

3.Language must be an appropriate vehicle for the stable transmission of truth across time and geographical space. Creeds and confessions are documents that make theological truth claims. That is not to say that is all they do: the role, for example, of the Apostles’ and the Nicene creeds in many church liturgies indicates that they can also fulfill doxological as well as pedagogical and theological roles; but while they can thus be more than theological, doctrinal statements that rest upon and express truth claims about God and the world he has created, they can never be less. They do this, of course, in words; and so, if these claims are to be what they claim to be—statements about a reality beyond language—then language itself must be an adequate medium for performing this task. Thus, any force that undermines general confidence in language as a medium capable of conveying information or of constituting relationships is also a force that strikes at the validity of creeds and confessions.

4.There must be a body or an institution that can authoritatively compose and enforce creeds and confessions. This body or institution is the church. I address the significance of this in more detail in subsequent chapters, but it is important to understand at the outset that confessions are not private documents. They are significant because they have been adopted by the church as public declarations of her faith, and their function cannot be isolated from their ecclesiastical nature and context. This whole concept assumes that institutions and institutional authority structures are not necessarily bad or evil or defective simply by their very existence as institutions. Thus, any cultural force that overthrows or undermines notions of external or institutional authority effectively removes the mechanisms by which creeds and confessions can function as anything other than simple summaries of doctrine for private edification.

If these are the presuppositions of confessionalism, then it is clear that we have a major problem, because each of these four basic presuppositions represents a profoundly countercultural position, something that stands opposed to the general flow of modern life. Today, Western culture is dominated by expressive individualism, the idea that we are defined by our inner feelings, that our relationships with others place no natural or necessary obligations upon us, and that we can pick and choose them as they serve our emotional needs. This idea plays into the general cultural assertion of individual autonomy and rejection of external authority—or at least of traditional external authority—that requires some sacrifice of ourselves for others. Whether it is the child rebelling against the parent or the individual rebelling against the sex of his or her own body, today autonomy and personal desire are king; and these press against anything from outside that tells us who we are, what we should believe, or how we should live. Next, the past is more often a source of embarrassment than a positive source of knowledge; and when it is considered useful, it is usually as providing examples of what not to do or of defective, less-advanced thinking than of truth for the present.

Third, language is similarly suspect: in a world of spin, dishonest politicians, and ruthless marketing, language can often seem to be—indeed, often is—manipulative, deceptive, or downright wicked but rarely transparent and worthy of taking at face value. Finally, institutions—from multinational corporations to governments—seem to be in the game of self-perpetuation, bullying, and control for the sake of control. They are rarely seen as entities that exist in practice for the real benefit of others. As noted, above, in a world where