Unpacking “No Creed but the Bible”
Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Tuesday, March 12, 2024
The best scenario for Christians, therefore, is to acknowledge that all of us have creeds and confessions—all of us think the Bible means something and that its teaching can be formulated in a manner that is concise and summarizes the Bible’s position on a whole variety if important. But we should not stop there. We move from such an acknowledgment to look to the great creeds and confessions of the church to see what “forms of sound words” have been useful throughout history to keep the church faithful to the gospel message. Time is no guarantee of truth, but if a creed—say, the Apostles’ or the Nicene—has served the church for over 1,500 years, that says something about the consistency of its content with what the Bible says. Of course, a church today can produce its own statement of faith. But why reinvent the wheel when tried and tested creeds and confessions already exist?
This article is part of the Unpacking Culture series in which we examine a well-known axiom and weigh any true or positive aspects of it against any negative or misleading connotations of the phrase.
An Important Truth
Many Christians from non-denominational evangelical backgrounds may well have heard the phrase “no creed but the Bible” at some point. Perhaps a pastor has used it while preaching or somebody has used it at a Bible study or in conversation about what Christians are supposed to believe. As a statement it is concise and clear. But the key question is, Is it a faithful and useful principle for guiding how we as Christians think about Christian truth and authority?
Before offering some criticism of how the principle of “no creed but the Bible” is sometimes used, it is first useful to understand what important truth those who use it are rightly trying to protect. That truth is the unique authority and sufficiency of the Bible as the source and criterion for Christian doctrine. This scriptural principle is something that is rooted in the Reformation when the Protestant Reformers asserted that many of the claims of the medieval church—for example, purgatory, indulgences, and the elaborate theory of transubstantiation—not only lacked warrant in Scripture but were arguably inconsistent with scriptural teaching. They were inventions or speculations of a church that claimed access to a tradition of Christian truth that was independent of the biblical revelation.
Against this background, “no creed but the Bible” highlights an important truth: the Bible provides the content of Christian doctrine and the principles for judging whether a doctrinal claim is true or not. Is justification by faith? Yes, for Paul teaches that in Romans. Can someone buy God’s favor through the purchase of an indulgence? No. Not only does the Bible never teach that, it teaches against it, as in the case of Simon the Magician in Acts 8. The desire to protect scriptural sufficiency is therefore something to be commended.
But does this mean that creeds and confessions—statements of faith that summarize biblical teaching—are problematic and should have no place in the church? Does the use of a creed or confession necessarily mean that the unique authority of Scripture has been compromised? Not at all. And it is important to understand why.
First, we all need to acknowledge that no Christian has no creed but the Bible in a comprehensive and exhaustive sense. To understand why, one need only reflect on the fact that nobody simply believes the Bible.
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The Spirit’s Fruit: Love
In Galatians 5:22-23, Paul gives us a list of the fruit of God’s Spirit. Notice that it is fruit and not fruits. In other words, all the moral character traits listed in those two verses are organically united to each other, and ought to be understood as aspects of each other in one organic whole. I would submit to you that one of the proper ways to read that list is to recognize that it is another way of Paul describing love. In other words, that we might as easily put a colon after love rather than a comma, and recognize that Paul is saying that the fruit of God’s Spirit is love and it manifests itself in joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
According to The Beatles, love is all you need. Of course, you won’t actually learn anything about love from their vapid lyrics, yet we need to learn about love, if we are to know God, and live glorifying him and blessing others.
Unquestionably, 1Corinthians 13 is the text that readily comes to mind when we think of love. There, Paul speaks of the preeminence of love as the greatest human character trait or virtue; greater than faith or hope. It should go without saying that for Paul faith, hope and love are understood in accordance with all of God’s written revelation. It is faith and hope in God, and the love of him of which Paul speaks. Along the way, he delineates what love is. It is patient and kind, does not envy or boast, is not arrogant or rude, does not insist on its own, is not irritable or resentful, does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth, as well as bears, believes, hopes and endures all things. These affirmations, however, have to be understood within other texts that Paul also wrote in Romans 13:8 and Galatians 5:22-23.
In Romans 13:8 we read, “Owe no one anything except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” The law of which Paul wrote was the Ten Commandments and we know this because in the next verses Paul lists the commandments not to commit adultery, murder, theft and coveting. He concludes that section by writing, “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.” Neither the Old Testament nor the New teach that obedience to God’s law is unnecessary, as if all that matter was our sincerity, or what we thought was a good effort at obeying God.
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Singing in Church and Enjoying God’s Commands
By and large, I’m not a big one for the singing. It is an element of church I do, and I engage with, because I love Jesus, I want to obey him and I want to serve others and prefer their needs. And I think that is far more important than whether I enjoy them on a personal level myself.
My wife and I were chatting about singing in church the other day. We had recently been somewhere where the singing was particularly good. Everything was sung with gusto and the room was full of people really belting out the hymns. She absolutely loved it. Whilst I was glad to hear people singing up, and it was nice enough, I wasn’t nearly so moved by it.
The truth is, I’m just not that fussed by hymns. There I said it. Of course, it is absolutely right for us to sing in church. It is right because scripture tells us to do exactly that. It is also absolutely true that some people love hymns and singing in church, they find it a really key way they engage with the Word. And that is absolutely great. But we aren’t all built that way, and that’s okay I think.
The reason I share this isn’t to say how great it is that I don’t tend to love singing in church. I don’t think it is something to aspire to. I wish I liked it more if I’m honest. But it is a prime example of something I do in church, essentially, because scripture tells me to do it not because I love it.
Now, you can – if you are so minded – consider that a defect in me. I don’t absolutely love something the Bible tells me to do. The issue is surely mine.
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Is Divine Speech Hate Speech?
When we create our identities by our own individual fiat rather than receive our identities from God’s words of life, we create counter-creations, fictional worlds which have no correspondence to what is real and true and good. The great misconception, however, is that Christians affirm that God hates us, when in reality it is that God hates our hatred of the good words he has spoken. The great irony of holding that God’s speech is hate speech is that such disdain for God’s word is hatred for the only words which present the world to us as it actually is, who we truly are, and how deeply we are loved.
The sacred season of “Pride,” the month-long panoply of indulgence and identity, recently came to a close. Through it all, many Christians have remained publicly steadfast to orthodox commitments to biblical sexuality.
In America, we saw the campaign to establish “Fidelity Month,” which sought to honor commitments to marriage vows, the family, and one’s community. We also witnessed Christians confidently expressing their convictions through Target boycotts, calling out BudLight, and lending support to a US Supreme Court case which sided with religious liberty over the LGBTQ movement’s tyranny of conscience.
But even as Christians must remain bold in their public witness, we should take seriously the questions our society often raises against our faith. Our testimony to a lost world can never merely be, “God’s word is right, and you are wrong. So repent!”
This is always essential, but we should also take seriously the deeply existential questions about whether the Christian faith is actually true, good, and desirable. Then we must offer good-faith arguments not only for why God’s words are actually true, but also demonstrate compelling reasons why they are both believable and present a way of life in the world that is actually inhabitable and leads to flourishing. Such is the task of apologetics for the Christian faith.
Are God’s Words Hate Speech?
In the wake of a month in which our whole culture is hyper in-tune to issues of gender and injustice, one timely question we need to take seriously is, “Are God’s words actually hate speech?” If what God has spoken is perceived to marginalize, deadname, or nullify someone’s chosen pronouns, surely those words must be hateful, right?
Many today certainly think so. In a society enthralled with self-pronounced identity, any limits on what one can desire or attain is deemed an injustice. So, it is no surprise that what God has spoken is quickly discarded as hateful and beyond the pale of what polite society can tolerate. In a plot twist which would be deeply ironic if it were not so shocking, many in our society have turned to Satan—whether they actually believe in him or not—because he offers complete affirmation of one’s desires and self-expression.
In the rest of this article, let us consider what God has spoken, if he is indeed hateful, and how we Christians might speak God’s words of life in a world of death.
The Subjectivity of Hate Speech
Hate speech is notoriously difficult to define. We all tend to have a sense that it is wrong to be hateful towards someone else. But what does it mean to hate something, and do we each have a right not to be hated for the way that we are or the things that we do? A simple definition might be that hate involves disdain or severe disapproval towards something. But are such sentiments themselves always wrong? In certain cases, it seems clear that there are things we should indeed hate, like the killing of innocent persons or taking advantage of the vulnerable. God himself, who says he is truly loving, hates these things (Prov. 6:12-15).
The great debate of our times seems to be not whether to hate, but what to hate. Our culture ironically tends to express great hatred towards perceived bigotry or religious intolerance. In such instances, we do not seem to be ridding society of hate so much as we are flipping the script on those that we think are showing hatred, by choosing to actually hate them ourselves.
Opposing what many today identify as hate speech does not involve true tolerance, but rather demanding everybody get with the program and accept only the sanctioned beliefs of good and evil. So, identifying something as “hate speech” is often just a veiled moral judgment of our own that we do not like what someone else is saying about us.
So, what about when it comes to what God has said? Does God hate me when he says things that I think cannot possibly be true or good? We might perceive such words as hateful, but are they really and how can I tell?
Our culture has devised a disastrous stalemate, in which the standoff between our own self-perceptions of what is hateful and whether God’s words are actually hateful in reality cannot be arbitrated. We have so elevated the individual as the supreme source of moral good and meaningful identity, that nothing can trump the self. Our mantras show this is so: “You do you” and “Be true to yourself” or “Live your truth.”
It seems that the only way forward is to invite the skeptic to step into the world God’s words create and see for themselves if there is life and love within it.
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