Bring me your finest Creeds and Confessions

...taken from our February newsletter

I write this today in the middle of pouring over books and teaching manuals on the catechism. I have the privilege of teaching the senior high Sunday school this coming term. In that term I am planning to go over some aspects of the catechism and other doctrines of the faith. Sounds exciting right? Well, for me this stuff is amazing and inspiring but, I realize that not everyone seems to agree with me. In fact some of you might laugh when I use words like “amazing” and “inspiring.”

So, why the Heidelberg Catechism? Why the Belgic Confession? Why the Cannons of Dort? Why the Apostle’s, Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, (And hopefully the Belhar Confession soon)? A short answer—they give us a place to stand. This term was coined by a giant of the reformed tradition—Cornelius Plantinga Jr. Plantinga started to speak about these creeds and confessions as simply a place to stand as he himself worked to give church members a digestible form of the creeds and confessions. We go through our lives constantly wading through some of the toughest questions that are known to our world. We wade through them using the Bible, talking about them faithfully with those whom we share this journey. Yet, sometimes these questions are hard to wade through, sometimes the questions go over our head and, sometimes we feel as though we don’t have a place to start talking about how wonderful and deep is our God.

This is where these confessions and creeds come in to the discussion. Throughout the centuries faithful men and women have struggled to put into the words the massive mysteries of the faith. From St. Basil, Gregory of Nyssa and St. Thomas Aquinas to Martin Luther, John Calvin and even more recently, N. T. Wright, people have tried to add to the faithful conversations of the biblical witness. And so, that’s where we find ourselves. These confessions that we sometimes find boring, these creeds that we think are over stated, these are faithful witnesses to scripture that simply give us a place to stand. They give us a foundation so we can enter more deeply into the loving mystery of the vast truth of our Lord. That’s why I find them amazing and inspiring, because they help us with the greatness of scripture and the vastness of our God. They give us a place to stand.