What You Need to know about the Christian Creeds → A More Beautiful Life Collective

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S2E15 – What You Need to Know about the Christian Creeds – A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast

In this episode, we are talking about the high-church confessional documents and why you should engage with them. No matter what denomination you belong to, these confessional texts – like Christian creeds, confessions of faith, catechisms, and liturgies – have been incredibly influential in the history of the Church. We need to wrestle with what they say and determine how it fits in with our own personal statement of faith. Today, we are going to talk about why you should read these texts, and then, turn our focus to the Christian creeds in particular. Read more on the blog: https://amorebeautifullifecollective.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-christian-creeds/ Get a PDF copy of the Christian Creeds here: https://a-more-beautiful-life-collective.kit.com/d080819cc1 Get the Doctrine and Theology Cheat Sheet Here: https://a-more-beautiful-life-collective.ck.page/bd897d28d0 Get a list of the names of God here: https://a-more-beautiful-life-collective.ck.page/43d2d5cf6b Get a copy of our personal statement of faith creation guide here: https://amorebeautifullifecollective.com/product/we-believe-your-personal-statement-of-faith-workbook-pdf-download/ Get “Building Our Foundations: 10 Week Study” here: https://amorebeautifullifecollective.com/product/building-our-foundations-11-week-systematic-theology-book-bible-study/ Visit our Shop to get a copy of any of the resources mentioned in this episode: I’m your host, Cayce Fletcher, and you can learn a little bit more about me here. While you’re here, would you consider leaving a comment, rating, or review? You can find our podcast, A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or watch on YouTube. Subscribe to the blog for access to our latest content and some freebies. I love creating and sharing resources with you. You can find all of our resources at A More Beautiful Life Collective Shop. Keep creating a life you love, and cultivating your heart for God.

Welcome to Season 2 Episode 15 of A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast. For the past several months on the podcast, we’ve been focusing on going through 10 core doctrines and creating our own personal statement of faith. So far, we’ve talked about Theology Proper, Bibliology, Theological Anthropology, Hamartiology, and Christology. You can get a copy of our Building Our Foundations Systematic Theology Workbook at our shop.

In our episode on creating our personal statement of faith, we talked about four key steps for this process. You can get a printable workbook version of this at our shop. To create your statement of faith, you should:

Figure out the beliefs of your church or domination.
Examine those beliefs to understand them and determine whether you agree or disagree with them.
For any beliefs that you are unsure of, listen to sermons, podcasts, and read books concerning that topic. Do a deep dive and learn about perspectives from all sides.
Write out your personal beliefs.

As we have gone through the process of creating our statement of faith, you may be reaching a point where you feel unsure about certain doctrines. You may even feel like you feel unsure of your place within your greater church denomination. You may be struggling to learn the finer points of doctrine, you are wrestling with what should be important and what is not important concerning doctrine, and you definitely don’t know how you should pass on these important beliefs to your kids.

There’s discomfort when you begin to articulate your beliefs and you recognize that what you believe doesn’t match up with what you hear from the pulpit. Or what’s truthfully worse, when nobody around you seems to care all that much if you have conflicting beliefs. As long as you don’t rock the boat or pressure other people too much, they seem to be fine with it.

Seeker-sensitive Christianity (popularized in the 90’s and early 2000’s) often rejected any kind of tie to the past. They participated in a kind of Christian amnesia – where the only thing that mattered was just them in that moment and how they felt about what they were hearing. Now, we are seeing a pendulum swing in Christianity. People are beginning to research the past, denominations are putting emphasis on ancient Christian creeds and texts, and the great Christians of the past are becoming known and venerated in Protestant traditions.

People truly are hungry for a tie with the past. They want to feel like they have a place in the world. They want to feel like there is some connection between where they are now and humanity of the ages. This is why we see such an emphasis on services like ancestry.com. People want to know where they came from.

***If you have enjoyed visiting A More Beautiful Life Collective, please like, comment, share, and subscribe. Let’s make the world more beautiful together. This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase something through this link, I earn a small commission at no cost to you. It’s a win-win!***

Often now, we try to sum up our doctrines and beliefs with simple phrases. One popular church close to me uses the statement “Found people find people. Saved people serve people. Loved people love people.” Another ministry says, “Know who you are and whose you are.” Another says, “The gospel changes everything.” Catchphrase theology may capture the passion of the moment but miss the mark on the larger issue. Many of these catchphrases offer sticky statements that are easy to remember, but neglect to teach the actual doctrine the statement is based on.

As we wrestle with our personal beliefs, we can look back on the past to help us understand, clarify, and expand our beliefs. Most church denominations are based on ancient texts that communicate doctrine in a succinct very poignant way.

Today is the beginning of a two-part series where we are going to talk about 4 different types of church documents used in various denominations. We are going to think about the benefits and detriments to using these confessional documents and how you can refer to them while still developing your own statement of faith.

Today, we’ll talk about what these texts are and then focus in particular on the ancient Christian creeds.

The four types of high-church confessional statements are:

Creeds
Catechisms
Confessions of Faith
Liturgies

We all come from different backgrounds when it comes to these four types of ‘church texts.’ Throughout the 20th century, there was an increasing departure from any of these ancient texts, seen in the pinnacle of the non-denominational megachurch. Now, there is a pendulum shift back to a reliance on these texts, especially as the reformed movement is growing.

We’re focusing on these confessional documents now because you need to know about the impact these texts have had on the formation of doctrine in order to understand what you actually believe better. Many of these texts have been the key factor in formulating beliefs about doctrine surrounding Theology and Christology, specifically about the Trinity. Understanding what these texts are and their role is crucial to having a right understanding of doctrine as a whole.

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The difference between high-church denominations and low-church denominations

As we study these confessional statements, one key piece of terminology is the difference between ‘high-church’ and ‘low-church’ denominations. We aren’t going to go deeply into the various denominations today, but recognizing this distinction can help you understand why you may or may not be familiar with the types of texts we’ll talk about.

Basically, “The terms have to do with worship procedures, specifically, the use of ritual, liturgy, and accouterments in worship. Leaders of a High Church congregation place a “high” emphasis on ceremony, vestments, and sacraments. Leaders of a Low Church congregation place a “low” emphasis on such things and follow a freer worship style.”

High-Church Denominations include all Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, and Episcopalians and some Methodists, Lutherans, and Presbyterians. They follow a specific liturgy, dress code for worship leaders and church calendar and often recite the Christian creeds in services.

Low-Church Denominations include Baptists, Amish, Pentecostal, and some Methodists, Lutherans, and Presbyterians. These churches are more participatory and evangelical in nature and follow an unstructured, informal worship service program.

In my Southern American context, most churches on the street (think Baptist and non-denominational churches) are about as low-church as you get. This doesn’t mean that they are less than the other denominations. They just worship differently.

Once you know what sets the two types apart, it’s easy to tell what your church is a part of. Many modern churches were steadily moving to a low-church format with the far extreme being the ‘rock concerts and jeans’ of the mega-churches of the early 2000s and 2010s. Now, some people want to move back towards a more formal worship service, with some people even looking into Catholic or Orthodox beliefs because of the structure it provides.

Why should we talk about these high-church confessional statements at all?

These texts have played an incredibly important role in church history and the development (and perpetuation) of certain doctrines.
If you come from a church tradition that doesn’t use these texts, you may feel unsure of what they even are. This could lead you to (1) blindly agree with what they state without using discernment or (2) reject them outright as extrabiblical texts.
Even if you decide not to engage with the texts, others are. It can be helpful in your conversations with Christians because it will show that you are well-read and willing to engage with the more intellectually difficult parts of Christianity. These texts can also help with your conversations with non-Christians because they may vocalize certain doctrines and thoughts more eloquently than you can on your own.
Many of these texts contain beautiful wisdom, even if you don’t agree with all of their doctrine and theology. It can be edifying to enter into a conversation with the text and see what you can glean from it.

As I mentioned before, regardless of what your beliefs are there is a movement in Christianity to recover its past. Believers are turning to ancient Christian creeds and confessions to add some stability to their faith and fight against the historical amnesia that affects us all.

The Southern Baptist Convention actually just voted to adopt the Nicene Creed to use in their faith message. The Baptists, often priding themselves in not being a creedal people, are starting to feel the push to adopt a system of teaching and repeating truth.

This movement of the Southern Baptist Convention is indicative of a larger sentiment surrounding Evangelical Christianity. This means you need to know and understand what these church documents are.

How should we approach extrabiblical confessional statements?

There are benefits to regularly repeating what you believe. Even the process of creating your own statement of faith is an attempt to force you to pause and reconsider what you believe and tell it back to yourself. Creating a succinct statement of beliefs that unites you with other believers and can be used to teach and disciple new believers is a worthy goal.

What are the dangers of some of these confessional statements? Well, they have the mystique of history surrounding them. Most protestants would not assume that a pope’s word from the 5th century should really impact their beliefs as Christians unless it was based on scripture. And yet, these creeds become the end-all, be-all statements of faith for a vast majority of churches. Going against the creeds is viewed as going against the very word of God.

If we want to take ownership of our faith, we have to search and investigate the scriptures and hold up what we find against the confessional statements to decide for ourselves what we believe.

This requires us to (1) know what these confessional documents are, (2) actually read them, (3) know their history and context, and (4) know what scripture says about the doctrines that talk about.

The first question you have to ask yourself is what do you believe about scripture? Do you follow Solo Scriptura – or scripture alone being where we turn for truth and guidance about our faith? Or do you give lip service to Solo Scriptura while actually practicing Prima Scriptura? You hold scripture as primary but these extrabiblical texts as still being authoritative for your beliefs?

As we study and interact with these texts, we need to make sure that we deal with these texts rightly. We can understand their value while also putting them in their proper place. I have been encouraged, edified, and equipped by the many podcasts, sermons, and books I’ve read about Christian living and theology. But, I would never put these books in the same category as scripture.

How do we view these confessional statements? Are they on the same level as scripture? Or the same level as the modern podcasts, sermons, and books that you read? Your answer to this question is incredibly important.

Now, let’s go through each one of these types of church documents, look at the most recognizable examples, and talk about their purpose.

What are the Christian Creeds?

A creed is a confessional statement that describes what someone believes. Creed comes from ‘credo’ which simply means ‘I believe.’

Christian creeds are probably the oldest widely circulated church document outside of scripture. They were short statements formulated during church meetings – or councils – and disseminated to the people.

In the beginning, Christian creeds were created to describe the beliefs of new believers as they were baptized into the church. Over time, they were used in church worship services. Some Christian creeds contain only beliefs someone should have. Others also include anathemas – or what would happen to the person who did not believe in the creeds’ beliefs.

The church councils that created these beliefs were generally called because of various controversies surrounding beliefs in the church. The early centuries of Christian belief were fraught with conflicting viewpoints, particularly on the nature of Jesus and how he related to God. The councils were called to make resounding statements about these beliefs.

This is not just something that the early Catholic church does. Earlier this year, we saw the response of the Southern Baptist Convention to Saddleback Church’s view on women pastors. We wouldn’t read a statement of faith voted on in the 20th century as the authoritative word of God, though people treat the ancient creeds this way.

The most popular and widely used Christian creeds are the:

Apostles Creed (2nd century)
Nicene Creed (4th century, 325, Rev. 381)
Athanasian Creed (5th century)
Chalcedonian Creed (451)

The Ecumenical Creeds is an umbrella term for the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed, and Athanasian Creed. These creeds are accepted by most Western, trinitarian dominations. The Eastern Orthodox church only accepts the Nicene Creed.

Some protestant churches – like most non-denominational churches – ascribe to a “No Creed but Christ” motto. Others, like Presbyterians and Lutherans, often recite one of the Christian creeds weekly in church services. Here is an article that advocates for reciting the Christian creeds regularly.

In the section below, I give one example of how the Nicene Creed was created to give you an idea of the complicated nature of these documents.

Going Deeper: Christian Creeds and the Nature of God

As we look throughout the Bible, we are given a very deep and vivid picture of God. Some of the characteristics and attributes of God are told by himself as we’ve seen. Some attributes we’ve created terms for are clearly seen in scripture. The term immutability is never mentioned in scripture, but we read in Malachi 3:6, “For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed.”

This brings us to a major church doctrine that we have to examine if we truly want to know and understand who God is. The doctrine of the trinity is pervasive among Christians today and has been one of the dominating beliefs in the church since the councils in the 300s A.D. Interestingly, the term Trinity is never mentioned in the Bible. In fact, the term Trinity was created in 213 by Tertullian.

In a nutshell, the idea of the Trinity is that God exists as three coequal, coeternal, and consubstantial divine persons. The persons are beings of the same substance (or Ousia) which forms the Godhead in hypostasis. It’s important to recognize that none of this language exists in the Bible. It was formulated over several hundred years as early church fathers speculated on who Jesus was and how he related to the God of the Old Testament.

Much of the Trinity was formulated in response to different ideas that popped up over time. An idea would be brought up, and a debate would ensue. The winner would have their version of theology incorporated into the official church doctrine. The loser would be determined a heretic and excommunicated, killed, or just shunned. You can read about the complicated formulation of the Trinity in “The Holy Trinity” by Robert Letham (a Trinitarian) or “When Jesus Became God” by Richard Rubenstein (A Jewish Rabbi). You can also listen to this podcast series that goes through the history of the early church from Restitutio by Sean Finnegan (a Biblical Unitarian).

The debates followed this basic timeline:

1st Century – Early Church Persecution & The Gnostics (a religion in its own right prior to Christianity, potentially derived from Zoroastrianism)
2nd Century –
- Dynamic Monarchians: Held that Christ was a mere man, miraculously conceived, but constituted the Son of God simply by the infinitely high degree to which he had been filled with divine wisdom and power. (Monarchians believed that God is one indivisible being as opposed to a tripersonal being.)
- Docetists: Docetism allowed that Jesus may have been in some way divine, but it denied His full humanity. Hardcore Docetists taught that Jesus was only a phantasm or an illusion, appearing to be human but having no body at all. Other forms of Docetism taught that Jesus had a “heavenly” body of some type but not a real, natural body of flesh.
- Logos Subordinationists: Jesus preexisted as the logos and is eternal, but he is subordinated to God the Father.
- Modalistic Monarchians: View that Jesus was God, but only by virtue of the fact that Jesus was one of God’s “manifestations.” According to Modalistic Monarchianism, the biblical terms Father, Son, and Spirit are only different names for the same Person.
3rd Century –
- Arius & Bishop of Alexandria
  - Arius believed that Jesus was the greatest of all created beings, but was begotten. He differentiated Jesus from the Father, Yahweh, because Yahweh was never begotten.
- The Councils of Nicea (325) & Constantinople (381)
  - Homoousions: Believed the Son and the Father were made of the same substance
  - Anomoeans: Believed the Son was not like the Father, strong subordinations
  - Homoians: Believed the Son was like the Father but not the same substance
- The Council of Constantinople is where we get the modern version of the Nicene Creed. Emperor Theodosius decreed that all “Catholic Christians” had to accept the Trinity as defined at Constantinople in 381. It was attended by only 150 members, none from the West (thus not ecumenical), and was not considered a definitive council in its time.

By the Council of Constantinople, we can see how far off course much of the conversations about the nature of God had gotten. Instead of the question being, “How can we know God better?” and looking to scripture to support answers, the fight became who can win this philosophical argument. The Council of Constantinople only won out because they had the support of the emperor. Much of the language and ideas we read are very much not in scripture and have led to a murkiness of understanding about who God is veiled behind the statement that “God is a mystery.”

In fact, the divide between the Western and Eastern churches, which ultimately led to more and more division throughout the ages, came from the Constantinople/Nicene Creed. The Filoque clause was added in 589 A.D. which states that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. There was so much disagreement that the church split into the Western Roman Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Church later on in 1054 A.D. (The Eastern church did not agree with the filioque clause).

We see the formulation of these beliefs in the Christian creeds. You can get a PDF copy of the four ancient church creeds here along with a short history of the beliefs. This can help you see the development of beliefs over time.

I bring all this up because we need a reminder that our theology and doctrine should be based on scripture, not on church doctrines that are steeped in controversy and philosophical language. The best way to truly grasp doctrine taught by the Bible is to look at your beliefs and ask yourself: Now, why do I think this? What led to me formulating this idea?

This may lead you down a rabbit trail of church history, deep bible study, and reading lots of articles and posts online. Ultimately, you will come away with a deeper understanding of your faith, whether or not you change your beliefs along the way.

Why should you read the Christian Creeds?

Much of mainstream Christianity’s doctrine is derived from the creeds.
They have driven the history of the church, especially in the first millennia of the faith.
They can lead to a deeper understanding of your faith as you learn about where these doctrines come from and what you think about them.

Using the Confessional Documents to Grow Your Faith

In the next podcast, we will talk about the last three confessional documents including Confessions of Faith, Catechisms, and Liturgies. As you read through the Christian Creeds, think about how they can spur you on in refining your own statement of faith. These documents have been central to mainstream Christianity, but many people don’t know why these beliefs even came about.

Understanding the historical contexts of the Christian creeds as well as the theology they espouse will deepen the understanding of your faith. As you read them, be sure to learn what you can about the context of their creation. This will help you to understand church history and the development of doctrine better as well.

You can get a copy of your personal statement of faith creation guide here and our Building Our Foundations Systematic Theology workbook here. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and blog to get the latest updates plus free content related to the podcast sent straight to your inbox. Until next time, keep creating a life you love and cultivating your heart for God.

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