Lately, it seems like I’ve been coming across the subject of statements of faith and summaries of Bible teaching in a lot of different contexts. This week, I was reading in A History of Christian Thought, Vol. 1 by Justo González, and I came across a statement about the origin of what is commonly known as the Apostles’ Creed. He wrote:
However, emphasis on apostolic succession and the formation of a New Testament canon were not enough to determine whether a doctrine was apostolic or not. Apostolic succession could guarantee a certain measure of continuity, and it was a very valuable norm, but it did not include an exposition of the correct doctrine. The New Testament, on the other hand, did expound that doctrine, but it did so in such an extensive and unsystematic way that it by itself was not enough for a quick and definitive recognition of unorthodox doctrine. It was therefore necessary to develop a systematic summary of the faith of the church – a summary of such a nature that it could serve to distinguish clearly between that faith and the various doctrines that modified or supplanted it. It was that need which gave rise to the idea of a rule of faith, and which at the same time increased the importance of the creeds as a proof of orthodoxy.
Before going further, let me offer a couple of points of clarification. First, when González speaks about apostolic succession, he does not mean it in the sense of the direct succession of bishops from the apostles down to today through the sacrament of ordination, as the Roman Catholic Church claims. Instead, the argument for apostolic succession in the church of the 2nd century was that the apostles’ teaching had been preserved by passing down the faith from one generation of bishops to the next. This was one way they argued against doctrinal innovations that were being introduced in the decades following the deaths of the apostles. The second was the canon of Scripture. Like apostolic succession, this became an issue because of the rise of various heresies which challenged the church either by claiming that other books should be recognized as God’s word or that other extra-biblical writings had been added to those of the apostles and their representatives. In either case, the church began to see the need for a recognized canon or fixed list of inspired Scriptures to combat the claims of cults like the Gnostics and of teachers like Marcion and Montanus.
But the statement by González suggests that these two were not enough to defend the church against false doctrine, and his argument is very similar to the one that I have made in recent weeks. Beginning with Irenaeus of Lyons, we hear about the importance of the “rule of faith,” which he says “we must keep strictly, without deviation,” and we must “carry out the commands of God, believing in God, and fearing Him, because He is Lord, and loving Him, because He is Father” in order to avoid being led astray and turning from the straight path. This “rule of faith,” of which many of the early church fathers speak, is the received set of truth or right doctrine, which is to be believed and obeyed in order to follow the upward path that leads to the kingdom of God. In other words, by the middle of the 2nd century, the church recognized the need to believe and follow certain doctrines in order to do God’s will and even to be saved, and these they called the “rule of faith.”
There was not one single expression of the rule of faith in the early church, but various creeds developed slowly over time, in different places, and to respond to a variety of issues. In fact, in the writings of one church father, Tertullian, we can identify three different summaries of the rule of faith, and the most recognized statement, the Apostles’ Creed, was based on an older Roman creed, which was itself based on a series of questions asked at the baptism of a new believer. The presence of a variety of doctrinal statements is well explained by González: “it seems possible to say that the rule of faith was not a fixed text, which it was necessary to repeat word by word, but that it was rather a summary of the fundamental contents of the Christian message, probably underlining those aspects of that message which the heretics denied.” The point is that while there was generally one rule of faith in the church during the first few centuries, one set of doctrine that had been passed down from the apostles, creeds were used more pragmatically to deal with specific controversies that arose in the church and therefore they show much greater variety. This is not a mark of weakness, but rather it is a sign that the church has consistently applied the teaching of God’s word to new situations and doctrinal challenges.
The history of statements of faith is certainly more complicated than we might at first expect, but their role as bulwarks against false doctrine and error continues to this day. We need statements of faith, if only to help us quickly and definitively identify heresies that return with each new generation, and to express and teach the rule of faith which has been handed down to us from the apostles by faithful men and women in the church.