Note: From Crisis of Confidence (Crossway 2024). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
When I wrote The Creedal Imperative in 2012, I was motivated by the conviction that churches need 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. And I was convinced that the section of the church most cautious about creeds and confessions – Protestant evangelicalism – could actually best protect what it valued most (the supreme authority of Scripture) by, perhaps counterintuitively, embracing the very principles of confessionalism about which it was so cautious.
Creeds versus Cultures
In the decade since The Creedal Imperative was published, my convictions on both points have not changed. If anything, they have become stronger. What has changed is the wider context in which the church now finds herself. On the positive side, orthodox Protestantism has rediscovered the classical theism of the ancient creeds and the consensus of the Reformation confessions. Scholarship in the last thirty years has deepened its understanding of both Nicene Christianity and the relationship between patristic, medieval, Reformation, and post-Reformation theology. The result is that we now have a far more profound and accurate understanding of the history of Christian orthodoxy than the rather tendentious and simplistic pieties about the relationship of Protestantism to broader theological currents that earlier generations took for granted. Now we have a much better grasp, for example, of what exactly the Westminster Confession means when it claims that God is “a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions.” For this we can be truly grateful.
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 placed the church under serious pressure on points that were only just starting to emerge in 2012. Our disagreements with the wider world today are not simply the traditional ones of whether Christianity’s 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. And after centuries when the broad moral assumptions of the world and of the church enjoyed huge common ground, we now live in a time when these are frequently in direct opposition to each other. We can no longer assume that the world will cultivate in our children a moral vision broadly compatible with that of Christianity.
The Legitimate Concerns and Erroneous Excesses of Expressive Individualism
Christianity involves a creed, a code, and a cult. The creed sets out the beliefs of the church – beliefs about God, creation, human beings, sin, redemption, and consummation. It describes reality. The code presents the moral vision for life here on earth. God’s people are meant to reflect God’s character. That was clear for Old Testament Israel and remains true in the New Testament. It is why Paul, for all his glorious emphasis on the objective work of salvation in Christ, sees that work as having clear practical implications for believers. And 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. The three are all intimately connected, all grounded in the reality of God, and all nonnegotiable. 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.
In The Creedal Imperative, my focus was on the creed and, to some extent, the cult aspects of this triplet. In the years since, the code has become far more urgent as a topic for discussion. And, as with the creed and the cult, classic formal creeds and confessions are excellent resources for addressing this matter.
As I have argued elsewhere, at the heart of the issues we face today is the phenomenon of expressive individualism. This is the modern creed whose mantras and liturgies set the terms for how we think about ourselves and our world today. It is the notion that every person is constituted by a set of inward feelings, desires, and emotions. The real “me” is that person who dwells inside my body, and thus I am most truly myself when I am able to act outwardly in accordance with those inner feelings. In an extreme form we see this in the transgender phenomenon, where physical, biological sex and psychological gender identity can stand in opposition to each other. I can therefore really be a woman if I think I am one, even if my body is that of a male. But expressive individualism is not restricted to questions of gender. When people identify themselves by their desires – sexual or otherwise – they are expressive individuals. And to some extent that implicates us all. The modern self is the expressive individual self.
In the world where expressive individualism is normative, creeds and confessions become even more problematic for the wider culture and even more important and useful for Christians. First, in a world increasingly inclined to radical subjectivism, creeds and confessions represent a clear assertion of objective reality. In The Creedal Imperative, I made the point that this relativizes our time and place in history. In subscribing to a confession and in reciting a creed in corporate worship, we acknowledge that our age does not have all the answers and that we as churches stand upon foundations laid down by our ancestors in the faith. That is important in promoting humility, in reminding us that we are merely the latest stewards in a line of witnesses charged with passing on the apostolic faith to the next generation.
But it is now clear to me that these acts also thereby relativize who we each are as individuals. Creeds and confessions remind us that we are not the center of the universe; nor are we those who decide what the meaning of our own 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. To declare “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, / Maker of heaven and earth” is to declare that we are not the center of the universe, that I must be understood in terms of a larger, objective reality. Immediately as I recite this with the congregation, I am asserting, confessing, and reminding myself that I am not autonomous but am a mere part of creation. My identity is thus in a very deep sense not something I construct, choose, or feel. It is a given over which I have no say or control, just as the identity of my biological parents is something that is simply a reality and not a matter of my will or decision. Perhaps nothing is more important than this realization: on it hangs biblical anthropology, biblical ethics, and biblical worship – creed, code, cult.
Second, creeds and confessions do not negate that which is true about expressive individualism but rather, when used correctly, answer the deepest legitimate concerns of the same. Expressive individualism is correct in seeing our inner lives, our feelings and emotions, as important to who we are. Where it errs is in two specific ways: it grants an overwhelming authority to those feelings, and it sees the subsequent outward expression of those feelings as that which makes us “authentic.”
Creeds and confessions speak to both the legitimate concerns and the erroneous excesses. Take the Heidelberg Catechism, for example. It uses the first person singular throughout and is framed by a first question that speaks of hope and assurance grounded in God’s action in Christ and a last question that indicates that God’s commitment to us is even greater than our desire for the things for which we pray. In both cases, human feelings are not repudiated or dismissed as of no significance. Rather they are set within the context of a broader understanding of God. In other words, the believer’s feelings are shaped by the theology summarized in the Catechism.
Where Creed, Code and Cult Connect
This also connects to the area where expressive individualism is creating most havoc today: moral and social codes. Emotions do play a part in what it means to be a moral person. If I see someone being physically attacked on the street and feel no outrage, then it would be fair to say that there is something morally problematic about me. Yet feelings cannot be the sole guide to morality. I might feel terribly sad, even guilty, that I cannot affirm a friend who comes out as gay, but that does not mean my feelings in this matter are a reliable guide to the intrinsic morality of the situation. My feelings need to be informed by the great moral structure of the world; and even if I never rid myself of all such sadness and guilt, my feelings still need to be subordinated to that moral structure. Confessions point me to that structure and summarize it for me. They offer a helpful rule by which to judge my own emotional instincts, and a view of reality to which, over time, I learn to conform such instinct.
That is, of course, where code and cult connect: praise and worship, precisely because they appeal to both the mind and the heart, are critical here; and as worship is shaped by creeds and confessions, so creedal and confessional theology even forms my emotions. And that is where the concern for authenticity comes in: I am authentic not as I give free rein to autonomous feelings and emotions; I am authentic as I bring my inner feelings into conformity with outward reality and can thus give expression to them in a legitimate and edifying way. This is what the psalms do: they give legitimate expression to our feelings in corporate worship, combining words, meter, and music in a way that involves the whole human person while ultimately thereby channeling those feelings in ways that reflect God’s truth. Our creedal worship should do the same.
The church in the West, particularly in the US, is waking up to a strange new world. Its assumptions about its place in that world – for example, that its theology would be regarded as inherently implausible but its morality would continue to be broadly compatible with that of society as a whole – have been shown to be incorrect. That this revelation has come so suddenly tempts us all to panic or despair. 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. In short, they remind us that God will bring all things to a conclusion in which the marriage of the Lamb will take place, and they help us know how to think, live, and worship in the interim. The creedal imperative is greater today than it was ten years ago because the God to which the creeds and confessions point remains the same even in these times of change and flux, and we need perhaps more than ever to be reminded of that fact and its implications.
Content taken from Crisis of Confidenceby Carl Trueman, ©2024. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.
Carl Trueman, professor of biblical and religious studies, Grove City College
