Creed (Not Just an Amazing Band) and Sola Scriptura
I had the privilege of helping to teach a small group at our church this summer. It’s perhaps my most favorite thing to do and I don’t get enough chances as a retired pastor. For my part, we spent the first five weeks looking at the Nicene Creed at a high level. But we first had to ask the question, “Why do we need creeds today?” Isn’t it enough that we have the Bible and the Holy Spirit? Christians can probably figure things out on our own without anyone else’s help. What could be harmful in that approach?
If you’ve spent any amount of time studying the Protestant Reformation, you’ve probably come across something called the five solas (or solae – they’re in Latin because everyone in the 16th century was writing theology in Latin): solus Christus (Christ alone), sola fide (faith alone), sola gratia (grace alone), soli Deo gloria (glory to God alone), and sola scriptura (Scripture alone).
In the last century, these were used as summary statements to express what the Reformation was trying to emphasize and call the Church back to. Now, with respect to sola Scriptura – the Bible alone – this does not mean that we as Protestants believe the Bible is our only source of authority. I’ll say that again – Protestants do not believe that the Bible is our only authority. We never have. When the Reformers appealed to the Scriptures to explain why they were renewing the Church catholic, they did not do so in a vacuum. They appealed to reason, yes, but they also appealed to church history – to the creeds and councils, to our early church fathers. It was not the Bible alone that was their only authority. It was the Bible alone that was their highest authority.
When you read Martin Luther’s The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), John Calvin’s Institutes (1560) or John Jewel’s Apology for the Church of England (1562), these men are constantly appealing to the creeds of the early church and what we might call the first seven ecumenical (or global) councils of the Church. In their historical moment, they were looking back at St. Augustine and St. Chrysostom and Basil the Great and were saying, “They actually agree more with us than with Rome.” Protestants have always insisted on reading the Scriptures through the lens of the Church. Creedal Christianity is simply Christianity.
Creed as Anchor
Do you have to understand everything in the Nicene Creed to be a Christian? No. I would argue that no one can understand it fully! Some of what you’ll read in the creed is a mystery. And I mean that as an actual category: mystery. I don’t mean that as a cop out to say, “who knows, can’t explain it”.
Can you not understand some things in the Nicene Creed and still be a Christian? Yes. Can you reject anything in the Nicene Creed and still be a Christian? No.
In other words, if you take any statement in the Nicene Creed and say, “No, I don’t believe that”, you have left biblical Christianity behind. And therein lies the powerful help and guardrail that is the Creeds. I’m grateful to be at a church that believes in the great creeds of the faith (the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds). But she believes in the Nicene Creed not because the Creed has any binding authority in and of itself. But our church believes in the Nicene Creed because it is a summarization and an explanation of the truth of the Scriptures. The creeds anchor us to Jesus.
Does the Nicene Creed address everything? No. The Creed was written to answer very specific questions that we’ll discuss tonight, but it doesn’t summarize absolutely everything in the Bible. But in the Creed contains the essentials – the gospel essentials – that tell us who God is, who Jesus is, who we are, and who we can become. The Holy Spirit used his Church and guided her into two councils that produced this one document, what is perhaps the most beautiful and concise expression of the gospel that exists today.
Creed as Guardrail
Some Christians (particularly those churches influenced by the Stone-Campbell movement, the Restorationist movement from the Second Great Awakening (1790-1840) will say that we should have no creed but Christ and no book but the Bible. But as soon as you ask the question, “who is Jesus”, you need the Creed.
I’ll go further, as soon as you show up on a Sunday morning and start singing a worship song to Jesus, you need the Creed. Because if Jesus is less than completely divine and we’re worshipping him, we are all idolators and need to stop immediately. If the Holy Spirit is an impersonal force, if the Spirit is an “it” and not a “he”, then we need to stop doing baptisms the way we’re doing them – in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If Mary was not the mother of God, then we are still dead in our sins because a mere human tried to die for us, and it didn’t work.
If we don’t believe in one holy, catholic, and apostolic church then we are completely alone without community, without sacraments, without the word preached on a Sunday morning and we’re better off trying to do this all on our own. The creeds anchor us to Jesus. That’s why we need the Creed as the Church.
