The importance of creeds

Mohler argues that creeds are not optional accessories to Christian faith but instruments the church has always needed, and that the modern distaste for them is a symptom of modernity rather than a discovery about Scripture.

He traces where the aversion came from: liberal theology's rejection of the supernatural, Harnack's claim that Nicea's language marked the corruption of a simpler faith, Bultmann's demythologizing program, and more recent arguments that creeds are socially constructed or instruments of power. He then turns to objections closer to home: the evangelical worry that a binding creed sets tradition above Scripture, the preference for story over proposition, and what he calls a presentism content to leap from Jesus straight to the present day.

Working from Pelikan and Schaff, he defines what a creed is and distinguishes it from a denominational confession, then shows creedal statements already at work inside Scripture: the Shema, Jude's charge to contend for the faith once delivered, Paul's summary of what he received and passed on in 1 Corinthians 15. Scripture remains the norming norm; the creed is a normed norm, authoritative as it conforms to Scripture. He closes with Southern Seminary's own recovery of a binding confession, and a friend who first heard the gospel in the Apostles' Creed.

Albert Mohler, “The importance of creeds,” plenary session, Nicea Conference 2025, Istanbul.

Why we are here

Hello. Hello. It is wonderful to be here. I greet you in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Mary and I are thrilled to be here and we exalt in seeing brothers and sisters from so many different places gather together to declare the faith once for all delivered to the saints and to do so in a spirit of worship and we rightly have begun.

So fellow pilgrims, fellow believers, we come to stand together for the faith once for all delivered to the saints and to hold fast to the true confession of the faith. One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one gospel for all time. The same Lord, the same faith, the same gospel is accomplished and declared by the one Lord Jesus Christ, preached and defined by the apostles, by the Holy Spirit, confessed and believed by all true Christians throughout the ages, world without end.

Amen. The astounding nature of what we are doing these days it has to be placed in an historic context. I think even many evangelical Christians and I say this of American evangelical Christians would be surprised just a generation ago to know that such an event would be taking place and to be taking place here in Istanbul and to be taking place in on the 1700th anniversary of the council of Nicea and its creed. Many of us has come a long way and frankly in the eyes of some we have come for no good reason at all.

Why would anyone come from far places in the world to commemorate an event that took place 17 centuries ago and seems to have left very little impression upon the people who are living at Nicea at the moment which is a parable unto itself.

Those who doubt in the necessity or usefulness of creeds and confessions would be surprised that we are here simply because they think such things are useless in the first place and perhaps even worse than useless. But we are here to say that we’re not just here celebrating the anniversary and commemorating the anniversary of a council but of a creed. And you know that’s a declaration of war in certain theological circles. But then again it was at the time.

Those who acknowledge that there were once Christians who believe such things. There are those who would now have us to believe that Christians do and should believe these things no more. There are many who have no memory or notion of the Council of Nicea or any other council. Who never think of a creed even if they know that distant Christians once did. Those who deny the creed, for in their pragmatism or experientialism or emotivism or activism or simple ignorance do not openly deny the creeds, but respond to them all now with incredulity.

How could it matter? A creed would hardly pass into their minds at all ever. But we are here because we believe that creeds are important and that the Nicene Creed and its subsequent developments are determinative, descriptive, and declarative for the Christian faith.

Again, many people would consider that odd. Many who consider themselves and name themselves as evangelicals would see this as simply as odd. We see it as glorious. They would wonder, why would anyone meet in Istanbul for an archaic commemoration? In what sense is this even evangelical? What does this have to do with the gospel? Why would anyone do this?

The modern aversion to creeds

All right, let’s talk about the modern aversion to creeds. For the sake of time, let’s just say that this is in its particular form that we encounter now pretty much a part of the phenomenon of modernity of the modern age. It’s a revolt against authority and it’s a form of expressive individualism. All these things come together. But I want us to look more closely at the major complaints against creeds. The major arguments you will find against creeds where you find such an argument.

First we need to understand that liberal Christianity and I trace this in very strategically to the modernist movement and in the 19th century to the emergence of theological liberalism in Germany that spread far elsewhere with modern biblical criticism and all the rest. The modern revolt was against any supernaturalism and it was assumed that supernaturalism is simply an exaggerated claim in order to buttress some form of religious authority. Of course, there was also just skepticism that such a thing could have happened such as say a miracle and skepticism as to whether or not there could be any authentic historic record that would demonstrate the same. So, miracles out, the bodily resurrection of Christ out, liberal Christianity simply dispensed with those supernaturalist elements they designated as just too awkward to hold to in the modern age.

We also have to look at the Kantian revolution in which all of a sudden there was the argument that there are two realms of knowledge, two realms of experience, two realms of truth. The phenomenal, that’s where 2 plus 2 equals 4. And the noumenal, which is that upper story in which you don’t have rational propositions that correspond with truth, but rather you have expressions of religious belief and supernatural hope.

Third, you also have figures such as Adolf von Harnack, the towering German theologian figure of the early 20th century who said that when you look at an event like Nicea, the council of Nicea, what you see isn’t the preservation of Christianity, but the destruction of previous of primitive Christianity because his argument is that what happened at Nicea and he would just use the Greek language homoousios and other terms that we use but homoios in particular and then he would say this the fall of primitive, simple, pure Christianity. And he u identified the problem as what he called the acute Hellenization of dogma.

All these Greek terms alien to simple Christianity. Then we come another German Rudolf Bultmann in his program of demythologization. Okay, so you have to take all that apart syllable by syllable. Demythologization. First of all, you have to have the idea of mythologization, which is to say that he said the heightened supernaturalism. By the way, you have to be a German, no insult to German friends or brothers who are here, but you have to be a German academic to come up with the category of heightened supernaturalism as opposed I guess to mid-range supernaturalism and lower degree supernaturalism. Any other anyway. Well, Rudolf Bultmann said that that those who communicated the gospel in its simplicity were replaced by those who mythologized the story of Jesus. The miracles and such things were the result of this mythologization and thus the modern task is to demythologize.

But you also had the denorming of creeds even in some Christian groups and denominations and churches where they maintained the creed. They didn’t dispense with it altogether. They denormed it. It’s no longer regulative. It’s no longer binding. It’s merely now symbolic.

At least more honest, we might say, were those who have been pushing for creedal revisionism, changes in creeds and confessions. You know, we once said that and evidently members of our church once believed that, but we don’t believe it now. So, we’re going to change the creed. Famously in Presbyterianism, liberal Presbyterianism, this took place in the confession of 1967 where there was a revision of the creed. And by the way, I wanted to look that up and I found that it has been updated. So the updated confession has now been updated in an inclusive language version. All right, you can rest assured they’re hard at work.

Another aspect of this is political and ideological protest. And you those of us in certain places, you knew this was coming. Creeds are oppressive. They were the result of propositional arguments that were not recognized at the time as being indicative of patriarchy or heteronormativity.

There’s also the movement simply of postmodernism and deconstruction that denied the reality of propositional truth or at least the validity of propositional truth in making claims of objective reality. All truth claims, they said, are socially constructed. And thus, they would look at the history of creeds and confessions and say, “Aha, there’s where the doctrine was constructed. That truth claim had not been made before. Now it has been made.”

Then there was the Constantinian revolution where we find those who argue that creeds are the instruments of empire and imperial aggression. And then finally, you just have to note modern individualism and notions of personal autonomy in which nobody’s going to tell me what to believe.

And it’s one thing that that comes down to the heresy of an individual saying, “No one’s going to tell me what to believe.” It’s kind of the toddler stage of anti-creedalism. But now you have entire churches and denominations, institutions and all the rest who say basically no one can tell us what to believe.

Years ago, I came across a statement made by one author of religious books. I’ll just leave it there. That’s a big category. And this person said of the creed, “It doesn’t say what I want to say.” My honest response was, “I could care less. I just I don’t care whether the creed says what you want it to say is or what you would say. It doesn’t express. In other words, the creed doesn’t speak for me.

All right, let’s just face it. This is a part of the air we breathe. This is a part of the swamp of modern religion. This is one of the issues of we need to clarify. All right. There’s another aspect of this and that is coming closer to home particular problems among evangelicals when it comes to an aversion to creeds. You will hear the argument that to affirm a creed to hold to a creed that has binding authority to require subscription to a creed is to subvert or deny the authority of Scripture and to put tradition over Scripture. We’ll we be looking at that more carefully, but you’ve heard that. You will hear it again. Others who would claim even some kind of evangelical identity would say that that creeds and confessions are unnecessary for Christian experience.

Others would say they simply have a preference for narrative over propositions. These are those who want to say I don’t want to talk about doctrines. I want to talk about the gospel as story. I think a lot of evangelicals fail to understand that that can be an escape hatch very quickly in which people just say the Bible’s only a story. The gospel’s only a story. You have others who say the existence of creeds and confessions is indicative of doctrinal disputation and doctrinal sideshows, the very thing we want to avoid. And of course, all I’ll say to you is what you already know, and that is the only way to avoid them is to avoid them, which means abandoning the faith.

Christianity is whatever anyone wants to say it is. Frankly, there’s also an embarrassing naivete and what can only be described as presentism. And I’m coming from the United States and maybe it’s a bigger problem in the United States than elsewhere. I fear not. And that is that there are so many evangelical Christians who simply want to say they can jump from Jesus to 2025 and don’t need anything in between.

All those theological disputes, all those arguments about the development of doctrine, all those old creeds and confessions, we don’t need any of that. We live in present Christianity. And then the other point I want to make is that among evangelicals, liturgical impoverishment has also played a role where the creeds are simply completely absent from worship in far too many evangelical congregations.

What is a creed?

Well, all right. If I’m going to talk about the importance of creeds and confessions and in particular credal statements of faith, maybe I should define what I’m talking about. Maybe that would be helpful. I’m not going to try to do this at first freelance. I’m going to cite those who’ve had a very significant influence in my life in thinking through these issues. And one of them is a man named Jaroslav Pelikan. All right, I’ll simply say it’s a hard name to forget.

Jaroslav Pelikan was a Sterling professor at Yale. Had been a Lutheran and then became at the end of his life Eastern Orthodox. The most important thing he did however was as an historical theologian to assemble the biggest critical work on creeds and confessions in the history of Christianity published in a massive project on the creeds of Christendom and Pelikan who was a one of the most titanic figures in historical theology in the 20th century. He wasn’t afraid to deal with creeds directly.

He defined a creed as a concise, formal, and authorized statement of important points of Christian doctrine. Oh, say, let’s go back to it. A concise, formal, and authorized statement of important points of Christian doctrine. So, it’s concise. It’s not saying everything. You can’t just recapitulate all of the Bible and the entire body of theology into a statement of faith. Otherwise, it’s not useful. So, it’s useful because it is concise, but it’s not just incidental. It’s formal. That is to say, it’s a formal document. It’s not just something. It’s a freelance expression. It’s a set of words. They’re words set into sequence. The sequence is sentences. The sentences include propositions. It’s a formal statement. And the last qualifier he put in was authorized. Someone has authorized this. We are talking primarily here about the Nicene tradition and the creed of Nicea. It was adopted by the council of Nicea.

In another context, Pelikan defined a creed this way. He said it’s an exposition in few but precise words of that doctrine which all Christians are bound to believe. And so Pelikan makes a very helpful differentiation here, a distinction between creed and confession. Now etymologically that’s not so easy to hold to but historically and theologically it’s an important distinction. A creed in Jaroslav Pelikan sense is a binding upon all believers in the Lord Jesus Christ.

All believers in the Lord Jesus Christ. And of course we’re talking about the those first very formal creeds that were a part of what we would call the normative creeds of the ecumenical councils. He said a confession can be denominational and thus you would have orthodox believing conservative Lutheran and Presbyterians and Baptists and we may have very strong doctrinal disagreements but not over first order issues that are defined by the creed.

Rather, Baptists will have a Baptist confession with Baptist views of church government and not to mention baptism and thus there will be a distinction in his mind between creeds and confessions. But both of them he says come down to concise, formal and authorized statements of important points of Christian doctrine.

Pelikan was very helpful to me when I was a very young student when he defined Christian doctrine as what the church believes, confesses and teaches on the basis of the word of God. It was very helpful to me because of those three different aspects here. It’s what the church believes in the heart of Christians. This is what Christians believe. But it’s also what the church confesses in a formal declaration when we say not only among ourselves in confessing the faith but to the world what it means that we confess the faith and then also what the church teaches formal teaching documents like catechisms and the creeds themselves as teaching documents. Another very important scholar of creeds was Philip Schaff who also collected the creeds of Christendom in a three- volume work in the 19th century. He defined a creed or rule of faith or symbol as a confession of faith for public use or a form of word setting forth with authority certain articles of belief which are regarded by the framers as necessary for salvation or at least for the well-being of the Christian church.

A creed may cover the whole ground of Christian doctrine and practice or contain only such points as are deemed fundamental and sufficient as they have been disputed. It may be declarative or interrogative in form. It may be brief and popular as the apostles and Nicene creeds for general use in catechetical instruction and at baptism or more elaborate and theological for ministers and teachers as a standard of public doctrine. He went on to say in the latter case a confession of faith is always the result of dogmatic controversy and more or less directly or indirectly polemical against opposing error. He says each one of these creeds bears the impress of its age and the historical situation out of which it arose. There is a development he said in the history of creeds.

I want to tell you that Jaroslav Pelikan after assuming and assembling that just massive he tried to get to every creedal statement in every branch of Christianity in every form in every language and put it all together in one massive collection which is now available online. After having defined the creed so carefully and so many times, he came to the end of that project and said, “The most important thing you know about a creed is that you know one when you see one.” And there’s truth in that.

And it helps us to understand that it may be very short. It may have been developed in a moment of extreme urgency. It might not have been considered so important at the time, but now it is.

I’m going to offer boldly my own definition of a creed. This is what you’ve been waiting for. The moment has arrived. The curtain is drawn back. Just to be helpful, I would define a creed as a declarative statement of Christian truth that simultaneously defends and defines the true Christian faith. Is revealed in Scripture, expressed in declarative propositional statements that are held to be normative for the Christian faith as believed and affirmed by the faithful.

There’s more to a creed, of course. There’s more to confessions, of course, but there’s not less. All right. When we think about creeds and confessions, we’re talking about the historical context in which they arose. We’re talking about doctrinal development. The usual context for the emergence and influence of a creed directly is controversy and that’s certainly what brought about the council of Nicea even a theological crisis.

Creeds in Scripture

All right. Where do we first find creedal statements? You might be inclined to say, well, in primitive Christianity, maybe in the second century and certainly there were developing creeds in both the eastern and the western sectors of the church with a great deal of unity, but also some particular a little more elaborate in the east. You can see where doctrinal controversies and doctrinal questions and instructional needs were a part of this developing tradition as is seen most classically in the emergence of the Apostles’ Creed.

But the first thing we need to note is that there are creedal statements in holy Scripture. Creedal statements were necessary for Israel and creedal statements were necessary for the church in the New Testament. If you’re looking for an Old Testament creed, you can look no more classically than at Deuteronomy 6:4-8 and the Shema, which is indeed a creedal statement, the creed of Israel.

Here, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command to you today, they shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise, you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. [Deuteronomy 6:4–9]

Here, O Israel, the Lord thy God, the Lord is one. The existence of the one true God, the assertion of monotheism. Just for the sake of time, I’ll mention some other creedal statements that are found in the Scriptures and references to creedal formulations. So, for example, in the latter category, you would have Jude 3 where believers are commanded to contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints. That that means that the faith is something specific. The faith is an objective reality. The faith to which Jude makes reference. That faith once for all delivered to the saints which the saints living now are commanded to contend for.

Christianity is already very clearly a set of doctrines. It is more than that. It is not less than that. Similar reference is made by the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians chapter 15 which some would argue is itself a creedal expression. But the apostle makes very clear that that status when he says in terms of even how it came to him and how he now presents it to the Corinthians Paul writes I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received.

So this is the faith once for all delivered to the saints. Paul says he received it. There’s an it and he passed it on and passes it on even now to the Christians in Corinth. And then he said he sets out the most basic issues of contention that required his restatement of this creedal, this objective body of truth that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures and that God raised him from the dead according to the Scriptures. In the New Testament, believers are told that it is our task to continue in the apostles teaching.

Going back to Pelikan, he made this statement. Anyone who in the name of the New Testament declares an opposition to the very notion of creeds is obliged to come to terms with the priority of creed within the teaching of Jesus himself and of his apostles as those are reported in quotation from Old Testament creeds by the New Testament.

Creeds in the early church

We find ample evidence of creedal statements both included in and referenced within the apostolic preaching. We can note the development the creedal development of early Christianity. As I said there was a western development of creedal Christianity and an eastern development and then eventually we saw the emergence of statements such as the Apostles’ Creed and that’s just one among several but the one that of course most famous from that era. Then we have the emergence of the Nicene tradition. The anniversary of which is what brings us here. But even before the creed and the council of Nicea, the year before there was the Synod of Antioch, special credit for those of you who can figure out where it was held.

At the Synod of Antioch, the fathers adopted a creed against Arianism. It did not yet specify homoousios. But you can already see that that even before the council of Nicea, a smaller council, the synod was held and orthodoxy was upheld. The faith was indeed affirmed and declared and defined that faith once for all delivered to the saints. Arius was already identified as a troubling heretic and his teachings concerning Christ were identified as heresy.

There were three and for the sake of time I won’t name them. I’m going to break that. I do have to say that one of the men who wouldn’t sign the creed was actually named Narcissus.

Philip Schaff on creeds

Got to love it. Arguments about the use and utility of creeds are not particularly new. Although again some of these debates have to be placed in the historic context that the questions that are now asked and the arguments against creeds are generally characteristic of modern Christianity. Christianity in the modern age prior to that the real question was which creed which confession. The total aversion to creeds and confessions and the argument that you have to come up with a purpose and necessity of creeds that’s pretty modern. A lot of this flowered in the 19th century in the Protestant world.

Philip Schaff was at least a part of responding to that concern. He said this quote, “Confessions in due subordination to the Bible are of great value and use. They are summaries of the doctrines of the Bible, aids to its sound understanding, bonds of union among their professors, public standard and guards against false doctrine and practice.

Schaff very carefully said that in the category of creeds and confessions, the necessity of which is that which he is now arguing, he said you’d also include catechisms for children in the same category. So three C’s, creed and confession and catechism.

He also made an interesting point about how creeds came about in their form over the development of the church. He said this quote the first object of creeds was to distinguish the church from the world from Jews and heathen afterwards orthodoxy from heresy and finally denomination from denomination. Isn’t that interesting? I think that’s very helpful. Three great phases you might think of in terms of the history of and the use and the necessity of creeds and confessions and the first was to define Christianity over against other belief systems. The second was to define orthodoxy as opposed to heresy and the third was to distinguish denomination from denomination clearly of lesser significance.

Our main attention is to those first two phases. I want to tell you that one figure who has been enormously helpful to me is one of the lesser known figures at old Princeton. We so often we think of Princeton think of Hodge and Warfield and Alexander. I want to make reference to Samuel Miller.

I came across his work when I was a very young man and it was enormously helpful to me. He wrote on the necessity and utility of creeds. He came up he suggested with several uses and the book went through his argument because it was based on his class teaching there at Princeton Theological Seminary during the heyday of orthodoxy at that great institution.

And in his classes to young ministers, he outlined what he saw as the necessity and the practical uses of creeds and confessions. I want to share them with you. He said the first use is, and I’m quoting him here, without a creed explicitly adopted, it is not easy to see how the ministers and members of any particular church and more especially of any large denomination of Christians can maintain unity among themselves. The creed is an instrument, not the ground of unity.

It’s an instrument of unity. He went on to say, in short, there are multitudes who professing to believe the Bible and to take it for their guide, reject every fundamental doctrine which it contains. So it was in the beginning as well as now.

He’s read the history of the church. He suggested a second use. In his words, the necessity and importance of creeds and confessions appear from the consideration that one great design of establishing a church in our world was what was that she might be in all ages a depository, a guardian, and a witness to the truth. And of course he’s drawing that from the New Testament making very clear that the church’s identity is a pillar and the ground of truth comes very crucial here. The third use the adoption and publication of a creed is a tribute to truth and candor which every Christian church owes to other churches and to the world around her. The fourth use, another argument in favor of creeds publicly adopted and maintained is that they are friendly to the study of Christian doctrine and of course to the prevalence of Christian knowledge. The fifth use, it is an argument of no small weight in favor of creeds, that the experience of all ages has found them indispensably necessary.

Try maintaining orthodoxy without one. Sixth, he said, “A further argument in favor of creeds and confessions may be drawn from the remarkable fact that their most zealous opposers have generally been latitudinarians and heretics. That’s the company you don’t want.”

And that is fundamentally true. The main and most zealous opposers have been latitudinarians. Those who say anything goes and heretics. All right. With the time that remains, I want to offer to you my own list of the reasons why creeds and confessions and creeds in particular are necessary and helpful to the church.

Why we need creeds

Putting this as simply as I think you know modern needs may require. Let me say this. Number one, creeds allow the faithful church to recognize right doctrine. In a world in which there is so much theological error, in the world in which there is so much rampant heresy, and that’s not an exaggeration, you know it’s true, there has to be some means of assisting the faithful to recognize right doctrine, that is to say, what the faith is. Secondly, creeds allow the faithful church to detect heresy and know what is false. In other words, what the faith is not. That’s one of the reasons why creedal statements often have to deploy a negative propositions as well as positive. Now, the ones that that are most important to us appear not to have not in them so often. In other words, the negative statement, but you’ll notice that even some of the words we have to use in their etymology are negative like immutable.

Third, creeds declare the true Christian faith at one in the same time to the church and to the world. Fourth, creeds instruct the faithful. They are very useful in instruction. Fifth, creeds undergird the faithful in confessing the faith together. It’s the church together where it’s one thing to say I believe and that’s necessary, but it’s also necessary that we move to we believe together.

Sixth, creeds establish boundaries of belief and define orthodoxy desperately needed. Seventh, creeds employ propositional statements of agreement or disagreement to establish union. In other words, creeds employ propositional statements you’re either going to agree with them or you’re going to disagree.

Eighth, and by the way, that’s in their design. That’s not an accident. That’s in the design. Eighth, creeds define true worship. And ninth creeds enrich true devotion. For the sake of time I am going to rush to something else.

Creeds and the Scriptures

What about creeds and the Scriptures? We make a distinction between the creed as a normed norm and the Scripture as the norming norm. All right? So in other words, Scripture is the ultimate authority. It’s the norming norm. But creeds have an authority in so far as they correspond to Scripture as a normed norm. It is not the creed that norms Scripture. It is the Scripture that norms the creed. I love the statement that I heard first from the great reformer Martin Luther when he said of the Scriptures that the Bible is norma normans non-norma normata norma norman’s norma normata the Scripture is the norm of norms that can’t be normed but that does not ignore the fact that tradition has a servant role that is an essential role in the life of the church following even in the apostolic exhortation. How do creeds function? A couple of distinctions. There are two ways to approach a creed. Just basically you can look at a creed as having binding authority or lacking that binding authority. You can look at a creed and understand it to be regulative or say it’s merely indicative.

It’s just indicative of what people believe. Not regulative. I will argue that you don’t really understand the necessity of a creed in terms of faithfulness as required by Scripture unless the creed is regulative. It must regulate the beliefs of the church, the life of the church, the worship of the church.

George Lindbeck, who also taught at Yale, said there’s a major distinction in doctrinal statements between those that are declarative and those that are expressive. All right. So 2 + 2 equals 4 is declarative. Whatever you find in the latest greeting card might be expressive.

The creed is not to be understood rightly as expressive but rather as regulative declarative. All right. Perhaps one way I can be helpful today is to get personal. The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary was established in 1859 and the charter of the institution clearly required a confession of faith to operate as a creed. The language in the original documents of the seminary says that every professor must teach in accordance with and not contrary to all that is contained within the creed known as the abstract principles.

and the language which I promise you I can recapitulate just I could do it in the middle of the night just call me and I’ll give you the language every professor must sign his solemn agreement to teach in accordance with and not contrary to all that is contained therein without hesitation or mental reservation nor private arrangement with the one who invests him in office. Now that’s regulative binding creedal statement. All right. Where did the founders of Southern Seminary get that? They got it from the Presbyterians. They stole it fair and square from Princeton. Half the founding faculty at Southern had been educated at Princeton. And they were convinced even by Samuel Miller and by Hodge and Warfield and others that the only way even as theological liberalism was already spreading, the only way to stop it in the training of ministers was to adopt a binding confession. And it’s not just what people say they’re willing to acknowledge or even willing to teach, but what they must believe ex animo.

Subscribing in good faith

Okay. So, how did the Westminster tradition, how did the Presbyterians get that? Well, part of it was because of the language of creedal con subscription in the Protestant tradition. But the Protestants will steal stuff from others, too. All right. So, where did the reformers get the language of without hesitation or mental reservation? Where did they get that? They stole it fair and square from the Spanish Inquisition.

Truth. Absolute truth. In the Spanish Inquisition, there were people asked direct doctrinal questions and the Jesuits among them, for instance, most famously said things like or those who follow Jesuitical logic. They said things like, “I hold to that and we’ll affirm that, but with hesitation.”

Lyn, you’re not teaching at our school. Our penalties are not quite so dire as the Spanish Inquisition, but you know, principle remains the same. Mental reservation. Okay, I agree to it, but by my own understanding, no. No, not allowed. When I was elected president of Southern Seminary in 1993, I had a document that could be recovered, an authoritative creedal regulative requirement that was there. The seminary gone liberal because there had been a direct rejection of that responsibility and people were signing the document without any particular reference. On a cru crucial day after I had just given my first major address as president. I said, “Here is the confession of faith, and if you believe that ex animo without hesitation or mental reservation, you may stay here.” Which meant basically two out of 70.

If not, you’re falsely employed. So, I knew that a faculty group was going to come visit with me. It was a formal group known as the faculty committee, senior faculty, seven of them. And it was tough, I must admit, because so many of them have been directly my teachers. And now we had a square off in my office at 3:00 in the afternoon.

And the spokesperson for the faculty came in. He said, “Mr. President, that statement will not stand. Your threat is empty. Each one of us has the right to interpret the confession of faith for ourselves.” Okay. I just read carefully to them that without hesitation or mental reservation or private arrangement with the one who invests them in office. Okay.

So I didn’t know exactly what to do. And look, I fear saying what I’m going to say now because it’s going to sound like Albert Mohler’s self assertion. Okay, I had to be assertive, but it wasn’t in my own authority. The senior member of the faculty said, “What is your response to this?” And my response was, “You’re fired.” Okay. So now I will tell you that metaphysically I kind of saw the words going out and I knew this was going to go very badly. Not only that, but at the time crucial parenthetical phrase at the time there was the old system of tenure. And so you could get rid of liberal faculty who were in violation of the creed, but it was going to take some time. You go through a formal process. And I just said, “You’re fired.”

And the faculty member said, “You can’t do that. I have a contract.” And I said, “Oh, you do have a document that has binding authority.” Okay. You just said you have the right to interpret the creed as you wish. I have the right to interpret your contract as I wish. And a faculty member looked at me and said, “You’ll lose.” And I said, “Yes, I will lose in court making that argument.” I’m going to tell you up front, I will lose that argument in court because you’re going to go into court and argue against the very thing you argued for in this room, which is the indeterminacy of language, the social construction of all reality.

All right? I just share that because this is not just ancient church history, brothers and sisters. This is where we live. And I just want to warn you, if you think you can maintain the faith once for all delivered to the saints without structures of accountability that have proved their usefulness over 2,000 years of church history, you’re fooling yourself.

I think we know that intuitively and that’s why we’re here. It felt to me to define and to affirm some of these things. My own denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, had to learn this the hard way. Adopting the Baptist Faith and Message in 1925 and then having the Neo Orthodox revise it in 1963. We had to recover and return it to Orthodoxy in the year 2000. If we didn’t do that, then we wouldn’t have been able to bring about a transformation. And that’s not enough on its own. And by the way, they’re throwing the issues at us all the time.

That’s why not only do we have formal creedal statements and let’s just start right now with Nicea because here’s where we are. But let’s also fast forward and say in 2025 we’re thankful for statements that don’t have the same creedal status but have the same kind of purpose such as the Chicago statement on biblical inerrancy, the Danvers statement on biblical manhood and womanhood, the Nashville statement on sexuality and gender. Again, you have to put these things into propositional language. They haven’t worked their way into the major creedal and confessional statements yet, but I believe they will. I think the LGBTQ revolution alone is going to require that confessions of faith and the creedal basis of our churches are more explicit than they were a hundred years ago because we have to say things now you didn’t have to say in the same way a 100 years ago because the challenges are new and they are dire and they are urgent and it won’t end with this.

The conversation continues

This process will continue until Jesus comes. Okay. Hey, I also want to say it’s not enough to have a creed. If I had time, I was going to read to you the creedal statement from Arius which he sent to Alexander of Alexandria. That’s another name. If you fail that, if you can’t remember Alexander of Alexandria, I got no hope for you.

Arius defended himself by sending a creed. I don’t have time to read it. Other speakers will make reference to these issues and expound them. It’s not enough to have a creed. The creed has to correspond to biblical truth. The creed has to correspond to define and defend and declare the faith once for all delivered to the saints. Scripture is the norming norm.

But we also need the normed norm of the creed. I want to end with a very personal note. My understanding of these things has been hammered out by hard experience. And one of them and I say hard experience, let me just say experience. One of the sweet experiences I had was discovering the creeds and beginning to read them and understand.

I’m a part of a very long conversation in which faithful Christians have been trying to declare the faith once for all delivered to the saints. You know, I was born in 1959, but Christianity wasn’t. And I want to find my place in the long line of the faithful.

I want to end by saying that one of my dear friends, a pastor who has been here for this event, told me years ago of how he came to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. He came to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ as a 15-year-old boy in a very liberal mainline Protestant church. He never heard the gospel from the pulpit.

He heard the gospel in the Apostles’ Creed. And every Lord’s day, the Apostles’ Creed was recited by the congregation. And he assumed they meant it. He assumed it was declaring what Christianity is. Over time, standing with his parents, 15 years old, he would week after week, Lord’s day after Lord’s day, recite the creed. And every line, he would pause in his mind to think, “This is evidently what Christianity is.”

that led to some later discernments of what Christianity isn’t, such as what was preached. But I just want to tell you that it’s a sweet thing for me to imagine a man I know as a dear friend who is a 15-year-old boy in a liberal church did hear the Christian faith, even if it was found only in the Apostles’ Creed. As if only is even the right word. We stand together, one Lord, one faith, one gospel. Let’s do so praying the Lord will make us faithful and on that day find us faithful to the glory of the everlasting name of our Lord Jesus Christ. We pray. Amen. God bless you.