Article by Justin S. Holcomb who serves as Canon for Vocations in The Episcopal Diocese of Central Florida. He also teaches at Reformed Theological Seminary and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. (original source: whitehorseinn.org)
Tradition is the fruit of the Spirit’s teaching activity from the ages as God’s people have sought understanding of Scripture. It is not infallible, but neither is it negligible, and we impoverish ourselves if we disregard it. — J. I. Packer1
Obviously, Christianity did not begin when it was born, nor did our generation invent Christian thought. We live two thousand years removed from the time of our founder, and—for better or for worse—we are the recipients of a long line of Christian insights, mistakes, and ways of speaking about God and the Christian faith. Today’s Christianity is directly affected by what earlier Christians chose to do and to believe.
The fact that Christianity developed over time (as opposed to having spontaneously appeared)—that the sixteenth century, for instance, looked very different from the third, and that both look very different from the twenty-first—can sometimes lead us to wonder what the essential core of Christianity is. As a result, some people decide to ignore history altogether, and they try to reconstruct “real Christianity” with nothing more than a Bible. But this approach misses a great deal. Christians of the past were no less concerned with being faithful to God than we are, and they sought to fit together all that Scripture has to say about the mysteries of the Christian faith—the incarnation, the Trinity, predestination, and more—with the intellectual power of their times. To ignore these insights is to attempt to reinvent the wheel and to risk reinventing it badly.
Thankfully, the church of the past has given us a wealth of creeds, councils, confessions, and catechisms. These are tools the church has used to speak about God clearly and faithfully, to guide its members closer to God, and sometimes to distinguish authentic Christianity from the innovations, heresies, and false teachings the New Testament warns of. While their purposes differ, all try to communicate complex theological ideas to people who do not have sophisticated theological backgrounds (in some cases, to people who are illiterate).
Once the divine authority and sufficiency of Scripture are properly understood and established, we should regard the church’s ministerial authority (the theological statements from the tradition) as very useful tools. John Calvin writes:
Thus councils would come to have the majesty that is their due; yet in the meantime Scripture would stand out in the higher place with everything subject to its standard. In this way, we willingly embrace and reverence as holy the early councils, such as those of Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus 1, Chalcedon, and the like, which were concerned with refuting errors—in so far as they relate to the things of faith. (Institutes of the Christian Religion 4.9.1)
What Is a Creed?
The English word creed comes from the Latin word credo, which means “I believe.” Church historian J. N. D. Kelly says that a creed is “a fixed formula summarizing the essential articles of the Christian religion and enjoying the sanction of ecclesiastical [church] authority.”2 More simply, the creeds set forth the basic beliefs of the church that have been handed down from earliest times, what the New Testament calls “the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people” (Jude 3). When teachers throughout history called parts of this faith into question (usually the parts that were taken for granted or less well-defined), the early church reaffirmed the essentials in ways that honored the traditional teaching. Continue reading →
Catechism (from the Greek word catechesis) is simply instruction in the basic doctrines of the Christian faith. Instead of replacing or supplanting the role of the Bible in Christian education, catechism ideally serves as the basis for it. For the practice of catechism, as properly understood, is the Christian equivalent of looking at the box top of a jigsaw puzzle before one starts to put all of those hundreds of little pieces together. It is very important to look at the big picture and have it clearly in mind, so that we do not bog down in details, or get endlessly sidetracked by some unimportant or irrelevant issue. The theological categories given to us through catechism help us to make sense out of the myriad of details found in the Scriptures themselves. Catechism serves as a guide to better understanding Scripture. That being noted however, we need to remind ourselves that Protestants have always argued that creeds, confessions and catechisms are authoritative only in so far as they faithfully reflect the teaching of Holy Scripture. This means that the use of catechisms, which correctly summarize biblical teaching, does not negate or remove the role of Holy Scripture. Instead, these same creeds, confessions and catechisms, as summary statements of what the Holy Scriptures themselves teach about a particular doctrine, should serve as a kind of springboard to more effective Bible study.