Why Creeds are Necessary

     Many churches today do not believe in creeds or confessions. They believe that having a creed is unnecessary, because we have the Bible. Some people believe that a man-made creed is a denial of the authority of the Bible. Thus, they have slogans like “no creed but the Bible,” or “no creed but Christ.”

 

As sincere as these people might be they do not realize that every Christian has a creed. The word creed comes from the Latin word credo, which simply means: “I believe.” A creed is simply a statement of belief. Every Christian and every Church has a creed, whether or not they write it down. Statements such as “I believe Jesus is Lord” or “I believe in the resurrection of Christ” are creeds. The statement “No creed but Christ” is a creed. But what a poor creed it is, as it does not tell us anything about Christ or what He did. Merely saying “I believe the Bible” is not good enough. Most cults say they believe the Bible. The key question is: “What do you believe the Bible teaches?” “Who is Jesus Christ?” “What does a person need to know and to believe in order to be saved?” The answer to these questions is your creed, whether or not you right it down. The honest thing to do is to have a written creed so that it can be evaluated in the light of the Scriptures. 

 

People who are against creeds because they are man-made are not being very consistent. Every sermon preached is a man-made proclamation of the Bible. A creed is in the same category as a sermon in the sense that both are man-made attempts to interpret and explain the Bible. Those who claim no creed but the Bible ought to be consistent and just read the scriptures publicly without trying to explain or apply them, because any attempt to explain or apply them will be a man-made attempt. Man-made explanations of the Scriptures are unavoidable. The question is whether our man-made explanations are true to Scripture.

 

Just because something is man-made does not necessarily mean it cannot be accurate. Take maps, for example. While they are not a perfect reflection of the earth’s surface, they are still accurate. Although creeds are not perfect like the Bible, they can still be accurate. It is wrong to think that the Bible cannot be accurately interpreted by man, especially since the Bible itself commands us to interpret the Bible accurately (2 Timothy 2:15). The Apostle Peter warns the church to beware of untaught and unstable people who misinterpret the Scriptures (2 Peter 3:16).

 

We need to understand that the Bible must be carefully studied and interpreted. We must put various verses together and see how they affect each other. No single passage tells us all about God or Jesus. It is necessary to assemble all the verses, or as many as we can, and make a statement that summarizes the total meaning. This is what a creed is for: to provide accurate explanations and summaries of what the Bible teaches.

 

The purpose of a creed is to explain and summarize the Bible’s most important teachings. Everything in the Bible is important, but some truths are more important than others. For example, the truth that David was king of Israel is an important truth but it is not going to save you from hell. The truth that Jesus was born in Bethlehem is an important truth, but it alone will not make you a Christian. The most important truths of the Bible are those truths that are necessary for salvation. The truths that are necessary for salvation have to do primarily with Jesus Christ: who is He is and what did He do to save His people from their sins. The Bible itself in Hebrews 6:1-2 gives us a list of basic or elementary truths, which include “repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, of the doctrine of baptisms, … of the resurrection of the dead, and of eternal judgment.”

 

There is no need to reinvent the wheel. There is no need to reinvent Christianity every Sunday. We should certainly follow creeds only so far as they make sense of Scripture, but it is surely foolish, arrogant, and anti-historical to reject one of the primary ways in which the church has painstakingly transmitted her faith from age to age. In no branch of science would there be any real advance if every generation started fresh with no dependence upon what past generations have achieved.

 

The Bible contains a wealth of information. It isn't easy to master it all. In fact, no one has ever mastered it completely. It would therefore be foolish for us to try to do it on our own, starting from scratch. We would be ignoring all the study of the word of God that other godly people have done down through the centuries.  This is exactly why we have creeds. They are the product of many centuries of Bible study by a great company of believers.