A Letter to the Churches: On the Necessity of Creeds

Dear brothers and sisters,

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I write to you today concerning a matter that has long troubled the churches in our region and, indeed, throughout the broader evangelical world, a sentiment that sounds pious on its face but which, upon careful examination, undermines the very thing it claims to protect.

I speak of the well-known phrase: “No creed but the Bible.”

You have heard it many times. Perhaps you have said it yourself. I do not doubt the sincerity of those who hold to it. Many who repeat this phrase do so out of genuine love for the Scriptures and a desire to guard against the traditions of men. That impulse is commendable. It echoes something of our Lord’s own rebuke of the Pharisees, who nullified the Word of God for the sake of their tradition (Matthew 15:6). But sincerity alone does not make a position right, and good intentions do not exempt us from the obligation to think carefully.

So let us think carefully together.

The Creed That Denies Being a Creed

The first and most obvious difficulty with “No creed but the Bible” is that it is itself a creed. A creed is simply a statement of belief. The word comes from the Latin credo, “I believe.” When a man says, “I believe that we should have no creed but the Bible,” he has just made a creedal statement. He has articulated a theological conviction about the nature of authority, the sufficiency of Scripture, and the role of the Church’s confession, all in a single sentence.

The irony is inescapable. The position is self-refuting. You cannot find the sentence “No creed but the Bible” anywhere in the Bible. It is a human summary of what someone believes the Bible teaches about itself. Which is, of course, precisely what a creed is.

As the Reformed theologian R.C. Sproul once observed: “Everyone has a theology. The question is whether it is a good theology or a bad one.” In the same way, everyone has a creed. The only question is whether it has been carefully examined, tested by the whole counsel of God, and refined by the wisdom of the Church across the centuries, or whether it is an unexamined set of assumptions carried around in one’s head, accountable to no one.

Scripture Commands Us to Confess

If the Bible itself forbade creeds and confessions, we would be obligated to obey. But the opposite is the case. Scripture repeatedly commands the people of God to articulate, summarize, and hand down what they believe.

Consider the words of the Apostle Paul to Timothy:

“Follow the pattern of the sound words that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you.”2 Timothy 1:13–14

Notice what Paul says. There is a pattern of sound words, a form, a shape, a recognizable body of teaching that Timothy received and was charged to guard. This is not the raw text of Scripture alone. It is the apostolic teaching about Scripture, summarized and transmitted in a form that could be followed, preserved, and handed on. What is that if not a creed?

Or consider Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, where he delivers what many scholars recognize as one of the earliest Christian confessions:

“For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.”1 Corinthians 15:3–5

Paul is not simply quoting the Old Testament. He is passing along a received summary of the gospel, a tradition in the proper sense of that word. He received it and delivered it. This is creedal language. This is confessional practice. And it is right there in the inspired text.

We find the same pattern in 1 Timothy 3:16, where Paul appears to quote an early Christian hymn or confession:

“Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness: He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.”1 Timothy 3:16

“We confess.” There it is, in the very words of Scripture. The Church confesses. She articulates what she believes. She puts her faith into words and says them together. That is what creeds are.

The Church Has Always Confessed

From the very beginning, the people of God have been a confessing people. Israel had the Shema: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4). This was not the whole of the Torah. It was a summary, a confession that every Israelite was to teach to their children, bind on their hands, and fix on their doorposts. A creed.

The early Church followed the same pattern. When heresies arose, and they arose almost immediately, the Church did not simply say, “Read your Bibles.” She gathered, deliberated, searched the Scriptures, and produced confessions that clarified what the Bible teaches and where the boundaries of orthodoxy lie.

When Arius denied the full deity of Christ in the fourth century, the Church did not respond with a vague appeal to “just read the Bible.” She convened the Council of Nicaea in 325 and produced the Nicene Creed, declaring that Christ is “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father.” Every word of that creed is derived from Scripture, but it is not a direct quotation of Scripture. It is the Church’s careful, precise, Spirit-guided articulation of what Scripture teaches, over against a man who also claimed to believe the Bible.

That is the critical point. Arius had a Bible. He quoted it frequently. He claimed it supported his position. The creed was necessary precisely because Scripture requires interpretation, and not all interpretations are faithful. As Athanasius, who spent his life defending Nicaea, understood: the heretic and the orthodox may both open the same book, but they do not both read it rightly.

Without Confessions, Error Flourishes

Here is the practical reality that the “no creed” position refuses to face: without confessions, there is no meaningful way to guard the Church against false teaching. If a pastor begins teaching that God is not triune, or that Christ is a created being, or that justification is by works, what standard do you hold him to? If the answer is “the Bible,” he will simply tell you that his reading of the Bible supports his view. And then you are left with nothing but competing private interpretations and no churchly mechanism to adjudicate between them.

This is not a hypothetical concern. It is the lived experience of countless congregations in our own region. Churches without confessional standards are churches without immune systems. Every wind of doctrine blows through them because there is no agreed-upon summary of what the Bible teaches to serve as a guardrail.

The Apostle Paul warned the Ephesian elders of exactly this danger:

“I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them.”Acts 20:29–30

How do you identify a wolf? How do you recognize “twisted things”? You need a standard, a measuring rod. The confessions provide exactly that. They are the Church’s tested, time-honored articulation of what straight teaching looks like, so that when something twisted comes along, the people of God can recognize it for what it is.

Confessions Do Not Replace Scripture

Let me be very clear about what I am not saying. I am not arguing that creeds and confessions stand above, beside, or equal to Scripture. God forbid. The Westminster Confession itself makes this point with crystal clarity:

“The Supreme Judge, by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture.”Westminster Confession of Faith 1.10

The confessions are subordinate standards. They have authority only because and insofar as they faithfully reflect what Scripture teaches. They can be corrected by Scripture. They can be amended and reformed. But this does not make them unnecessary. A map is not the territory, but you would be a fool to throw away your map because you have the territory. The confessions are the Church’s map of biblical teaching, drawn carefully over centuries by faithful men who gave their lives to understanding God’s Word.

Humility, Not Pride

There is one final thing I would say to you, and I say it gently. The “no creed but the Bible” position often presents itself as humble, but it is in fact a form of pride. It says, in effect: “I need nothing but my Bible and the Holy Spirit. The collective wisdom of the Church across two thousand years has nothing to teach me. Augustine, Athanasius, Calvin, the Westminster divines. I have no need of their labors. I will work it all out on my own.”

But that is not how the body of Christ works. Paul tells us that Christ gave the Church “the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ” (Ephesians 4:11–12). The gifts Christ has given His Church are not limited to the living. The teachers of the past are gifts to us as well. To ignore the creeds is to say that the Holy Spirit has been silent for two millennia, that He taught the apostles but then abandoned the Church until we came along.

True humility receives what has been handed down, examines it by the Word of God, and gratefully stands on the shoulders of those who came before. True humility says not “I have no need of you” but “teach me.”

A Call to Confess

So I urge you, brothers and sisters: do not be afraid of the creeds. Read them. Study them. Test them by Scripture, as the Bereans tested even the Apostle Paul’s teaching (Acts 17:11). You will find in them not a replacement for the Bible but a faithful guide to the Bible, a lamp that has been lit by generations of believers and passed down to us so that we might walk in the same light.

Take up the Apostles’ Creed and confess with the ancient Church. Read the Nicene Creed and marvel at the precision with which it guards the doctrine of the Trinity. Open the Heidelberg Catechism and let its first question wash over you: “What is your only comfort in life and in death? That I am not my own, but belong, body and soul, in life and in death, to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.”

These are not the words of men who loved the Bible less than we do. These are the words of men who loved it so deeply that they labored to summarize it faithfully, defend it courageously, and hand it down to their children and their children’s children.

Let us do the same.

“Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith.”Hebrews 13:7

Your brother in Christ and fellow laborer in the Ozarks,

Ozark Doctrine