5. The Church's experience in
all ages has found creeds and confessions to be indispensable.
Even in the days of the
Apostles, there were those who were peddling a 'false gospel.' How did the
Church respond to such a situation? Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit, wrote
that Christians should not be content with a mere profession of belief in
Christ, but that teachers should be examined to ascertain whether their
doctrine accorded with the “form of sound words,” which he had taught them.
Paul adds to this the fearful warning of a curse on the head of anyone who
brings a message other than the one they had received from him.
What we have here is, in
effect, an instance – with Divine warrant, I might add – of employing a creed
as a test of orthodoxy. A naked profession of belief in God or the Bible was
insufficient. It had to be determined in
what sense they understood the Gospel. The peculiar situation of the Church
in that early age probably required a short and concise confession, but a
confession nonetheless. Whether the confession Paul sought agreement with had
one article or 100 is irrelevant; the principle is the same.
When we come to the 2nd
Century, in the writings of Irenaeus, or the 3rd Century, in the
writings of Tertullian, Origen, Cyprian, and Gregory Thaumaturgus, we find creeds
and confessions occupying a prominent place in the Church as a safe-guard
against error. This is especially important when we remember that by this very
standard, large swathes of both Tertullian's and Origen's works were ruled
unorthodox by their contemporaries and later generations.
By the time we get to the 4th
Century, the exigencies of the Arian heresy forced the Church to respond at the
Council of Nicaea with the Nicene creed, a standard of orthodox Trinitarianism
which has stood both the test of time and the ravaging winds of theological
innovation.
With Arius, a creed turned out
to be an indispensable tool. Arius was exceptionally crafty. It was extremely
difficult to pin him down theologically. He almost always resorted to the
actually words used in Scripture when pressed for an explanation of his teaching,
but it was always evident that something was still awry. Whenever the members
of the Council attempted to pin him down on the question of what he believed to Bible to teach, or, in what sense did he understand the language
of Scripture, he was found to equivocate and evade the questions put to
him. As long as he was permitted to hide behind a veneer of general profession,
his errors were not readily apparent. The solution was to draw up a statement
of what the Fathers believed to be the Scripture's teaching on the deity of
Christ. When Arius was confronted with this and asked to subscribe to it, he
was flushed out as the heretic that he was. The Council was proven correct in
their judgment of him, for by his refusal to subscribe to the creed, he showed
that he understood the Scriptures in an entirely different sense than the rest
of Christendom. This has repeatedly been case throughout history.
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