Believe it or not: why creeds matter

Christian Century, Sept 20, 2003 by William C. Placher

JUST A FEW MONTHS before his 80th birthday, Jaroslav Pelikan has published yet another major project--editing, in collaboration with Valerie Hotchkiss, a collection of the creeds and confessions of the Christian tradition from its beginnings up through the Lutheran-Roman Catholic 1999 joint declaration on the doctrine of justification. This is a monumental and marvelous work of scholarship, the worthy successor to Philip Schaff's Creeds of Christendom, published 125 years ago.

Given the price, I can't honestly urge every reader to rush out and buy a set. but get a library near you to buy it and spend some time reading and looking through it. Hope for a paperback edition. The books are physically beautiful, and the introductions, bibliographies and indexes are models of their kind. The creeds lead from the first fragments confessing the faith of early Christians through the ecumenical councils, the doctrinal debates of both East and West in the Middle Ages, the vast multiplicity of Reformation confessions and catechisms, down to contemporary statements from new denominations, the Third World and ecumenical discussions.

Some texts are here translated into English for the first time. The accompanying CD ROM provides all the non-English texts in their original languages. (Techies might dream of a CD ROM that included translations and a search capacity, but the fine indexes will help in tracking down almost anything a reader needs.) The set of books comes with endorsements on the back cover from nearly everybody but God, who, I suppose, stopped endorsing new books some time ago.

Scholars will consult these volumes to answer all sorts of particular questions; interested readers should find just thumbing through them endlessly fascinating. To pick some random examples: In the 12th century, Peter Abelard, after a life of tragedy and tribulation, concludes his account of his own faith by saying, "The storm may rage but I am unshaken, though the winds may blow they leave me unmoved; for the rock of my foundation stands firm." The Masai Creed, written about 1960 (the introduction here oddly puts the Masai in Nigeria, on the wrong side of Africa), summarizes Christology like this: "We believe that God made good his promise by sending his Son, Jesus Christ, a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe, born poor in a little village, who left his home and was always on safari, doing good, curing people by the power of God, teaching about God and man, showing that the meaning of religion is love." The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, meeting in 1996, declares: "The loss of God's centrality in the life of today's church is common and lamentable. It is this loss that allows us to transform worship into entertainment, gospel preaching into marketing, believing into technique, being good into feeling good about ourselves, and faithfulness into being successful." In every case, there is an unexpected phrase to inspire or set a reader thinking.

No collection of Christian creeds and confessions can be complete. As Pelikan points out, the confessional texts from just the one German province of Franconia in the decade between 1520 and 1530 add up to more than 500 pages. Other books, therefore, include documents not to be found here. For instance, Lukas Vischer's 1982 Reformed Witness Today has a wider selection of recent Reformed confessions from around the world than appears here. J. Gordon Melton's 1988 Encyclopedia of American Religions: Religious Creeds remains the best resource for finding out the beliefs of some American denominations you've never heard of. But for the whole sweep of the world over 2,000 years, Pelikan and Hotchkiss have produced what will be the standard work for decades to come.

PELIKAN'S INTRODUCTORY first volume, Credo, comes as part of the set but can be purchased separately. It may be significant that Schaff took only eight pages to comment on the general topic of creeds and confessions before moving on to introductions of particular texts, while Pelikan takes 500 pages. As late as the 1870s when Schaff was writing, creeds were obviously important. Denominational identity mattered, and it was the beliefs set out in their confessional statements that centrally defined most denominations. Presbyterians believed in predestination; Methodists didn't. Catholics and Lutherans differed on the meaning of justification and the Eucharist. And so on. They brought their children up to know why those other folk were wrong.

At least in North America, times have radically changed. To the people on the left (to use admittedly problematic categories), doing good and being "sincere" often appear more important than believing correctly, and even the thought of condemning anyone for heresy seems embarrassing. As Pelikan observes, many in this age feel "that even if the time for faith as such may not have passed, the time for teaching Christian faith as authoritative dogma probably has, and the time for confessing it in a normative creedal formulary certainly has." On the right, many of those who think themselves most concerned about maintaining every jot and tittle of Christian orthodoxy see little reason to look beyond the Bible itself for instruction. The whole history of creeds and confessions is veiled by evangelical amnesia. And in the broad middle, people are more apt to choose their congregation because of its congenial music or strong youth program than because of the particular set of beliefs it confesses. Even scholars of Christian history often conclude that political and social conflicts really have been more important than doctrinal debates.