The church has a problem of its own making. In many instances it has become mere Christianity. It presents itself as something different from the world in order to attract outsiders, but has divorced theology - historic creedal and confessional doctrine - from its inner life making itself not all that different from a social club with a few religious rituals and rules. In some cases the move away from theology has created lowest common denominator Christianity. The church which becomes minimalist in doctrine ends up wounding itself significantly; it encourages an “impoverished Christian life.”
This is where Carl Trueman’s book Crisis of Confidence steps in as a corrective. It is an updated version of a book Trueman wrote in 2012 called The Creedal Imperative. He wrote that book because of the “conviction that churches needed statements of faith that do more than specify ten or twelve basic points of doctrine. They need confessions that seek to present in concise form the salient points of the whole counsel of God.” His belief, and I think he is correct, is that churches which set forth minimalist doctrinal statements, especially those who claim ‘No creed but the Bible,’ do not properly protect the supreme authority of Scripture. In fact, they work against it. By embracing the principles of confessionalism / creedalism (the summary of historic Christian doctrine as a public statement of belief which excludes contrary beliefs) the church can reverse this dangerous trend. This return is both biblically faithful and consistent with the practice of the church throughout its history.
Now, a little more than 10 years later, Trueman sees an additional need to affirm a more creedal perspective. He writes,
On the positive side, Orthodox Protestantism has rediscovered the classical theism of the ancient creeds and the consensus of the Reformation confessions… The result is that we now have a far more profound and accurate understanding of the history of Christian orthodoxy…
On the negative side, however, the last few years have seen fundamental changes in Western culture that have both transformed the relationship between wider society and the church and place the church under serious pressure…
He goes on to identify those points,
Our disagreements with the wider world today are not simply the traditional ones of whether Christianity supernatural claims about miracles, the incarnation, and the resurrection are true. The mainstream acceptance of gay marriage and gender ideology witnesses to an emerging world that finds not only Christian theology implausible but Christian anthropology and ethics offensive and even dangerous.
He argues that Christianity involves a creed, a code, and a cult. The creed sets out the belief of the church -- beliefs about God, creation, human beings, sin, redemption, and consummation. The code presents the moral vision for life on earth. The cult is the way in which Christians are to worship the God described in the creed and whose character is reflected in the code. No church, and no Christian, merely has a creed or a code or a cult. “All three are inseparable facets of the one Christian faith.”
Today, it is the code in particular that has come under fire by our culture. He points specifically to the expressive individualism that is characteristic of our Western society. Expressive individualism is “the notion that every person is constituted by a set of inward feelings, desires, and emotions.” Trueman recognizes that Christianity devoid of historical understanding as found in creeds and confessions will be unable to stand against the constant attacks by the culture around us. In the West, he observes, we have woken up to a broad rejection of the creed, code, and cult of our faith. No longer does the culture deny our creed and cult but adhere to our code, our morality. Christianity is now whole-scale rejected by our culture.
It is into this subjective world that creeds and confessions can help us immensely. He offers three reasons.
First, in a world increasingly inclined to radical subjectivism, creeds and confessions represent a clear assertion of objective reality. They remind us that “we are not the center of the universe; nor are we those who decide what the meaning of our lives is to be. We are embedded in a greater, given reality that is decisive in determining who we are and how we should understand ourselves.
Second, creeds and confessions answer the deepest legitimate concerns of expressive individualism. He notes that expressive individualism is not wrong in seeing our inner lives, our feelings and emotions, as important to who we are. Where the error lies in the exaggeration and excessive application of what is seen. Creeds and confessions ground our identity and shape our feelings by pointing to the objective reality that exists in God’s world.
Third, creeds and confessions ground moral and social codes. “Feelings cannot be the sole guide to morality,” he writes, “My feelings need to be informed by the great moral structure of the world… my feelings need to be subordinated to that moral structure.”
We need, then, to be grounded in the theology of Scripture as articulated in the historical creeds and confession of the church as protection against this negative aggression from the world around us. He remarks,
This is why creeds and confessions are even more important now than before: they anchor us in history; they offer us reasonably comprehensive frameworks for thinking about the connections between God, anthropology, and ethics; and above all they point us to the transcendent God who rules over all things.
Trueman’s book is an excellent corrective to those who see little value in the historic creeds and confessions of the church or hold to a ‘no creed but the Bible’ view of theology. It is a reminder that,
Creeds and confessions are, in fact, necessary for the well-being of the church, and… churches that claim not to have them place themselves at a permanent disadvantage when it comes to holding fast to that form of sound words that was so precious to the aging Paul as he advised… Timothy.
Soli Deo Gloria