Who Do We Trust?: The Authority of Creed and Canon

Ever since the Reformation, the question of authority in the Church has often been reduced to a fight between Scripture and Tradition. But this is not an obvious battle — Indeed, proponents of Tradition affirm Scripture very strongly, but as something that exists within Tradition, not apart from it. But even if we accept this dichotomy introduced by the Reformers, Tradition itself is not a single, monolithic thing. It is a diverse and rich phenomenon and authority plays out in different ways within this internal diversity. Over the next few posts, I’ll be exploring the question of authority within several aspects of Tradition. Today I’m going to start by looking at the authority of Creed and Canon, official statements whose purpose is to mark out the boundaries of a given Church tradition. Creeds, or confessions, are doctrinal in character, while canons tend to be more about practice (defining roles and responsibilities, providing instruction on how rituals are performed, etc.).

When thinking about Creeds, the first ones we need to consider are within the Scriptures themselves, both for their content and for how they were to be used. First there is the Shema’, which has acted as a kind of statement of faith for Jews and their religious forebears for millennia. It reads as a simple statement of monolatry (the worship of one God): “Hear, O Israel: YHWH is our God, YHWH is One.” But this is more than a simple statement of belief. The following verses indicate the role these words were to play in shaping the community:

You shall love YHWH your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6.4-9)

These are words of the utmost importance: They are to be kept not just in the mind but in the heart, to shape the people’s desires, to be passed on from generation to generation, on their lips when they rise and when they fall asleep, with reminders posted on their bodies and homes.

The second is the so-called ‘First Corinthians Creed’, which is the earliest known Christian statement of faith. Found in 1 Corinthians 15, the whole passage is helpful for our purposes today. (I’ll bold the creed itself to set it apart):

Now I should remind you, brothers and sisters, of the Good News that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, through which also you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you—unless you have come to believe in vain.

For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to someone untimely born, he appeared also to me. … Whether then it was I or they, so we proclaim and so you have come to believe.

Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. (1 Corinthians 15.1-14)

A few things stick out about this passage that are instructive about creeds. First, in a Christian context, a creed is going to be about the Gospel. Second, a creed is traditioned — it’s something that has been passed down from one person to another; it is received, not created or recreated anew. Third, the content of the shared Gospel Paul is passing on is largely narrative in form. This is something that the ancient creeds of the Church maintain, but newer statements of faith have largely abandoned. But, for Christians, the Gospel is at its heart the story of Jesus. Fourth, the individual pieces that are focused on highlight the issues of the time in which the creed developed. In this case, it’s clearly the resurrection of Jesus that was the big question. If we think of later creeds, in the Nicene Creed of 325 CE, it was Christ’s divinity that was under debate, and in 381, the nature of the Holy Spirit. And, the major Protestant Confessions highlighted the specific themes of the Reformation, such as justification by faith (e.g., Augsburg Confession, Article IV), and the state of human will (e.g., Westminster Confession, Chapter 9). This means that Creeds and Confessions delineate the boundaries of belief within a particular community, generally coming down on one side or another of a major controversy of the day. And relating to this, returning to 1 Corinthians 15, fifth, creeds can be appealed to as authoritative within that community.

For their part, canons focus less on doctrine than on practice: how a community is structured, how it worships, and how it handles specific situations. And some of these are very specific. There are ancient Church canons, for example, not just about universal community things like fasting regimens or the dating of Easter, but also about what type of livestock can be sheltered within a church building, or what to do when a priest has been castrated by invading soldiers. In other words, canons are responsive to a community’s needs at any given time.

At their most basic, creeds, confessions, and canons, operate as boundary markers for a given community. As such, they are important and necessary — they provide a sense of order and definition to the chaos of human spirituality, without which community life and culture would be impossible. Just as the existence of prescriptive grammar, as artificial as it may be, allows me to be able to read Jane Austen or converse with an English-speaker from across the world with only minor difficulty, so too do these religious boundary markers allow me to understand what it means, or doesn’t mean, to be ‘Christian’, or ‘Orthodox’, or ‘Lutheran.’ And this is why, despite their universal insistence that Scripture alone is authoritative, most Protestant groups have statements of faith that members need to uphold, whether at the level of a larger tradition, like the Augsburg and Westminster Confessions, or for a denomination, or even a particular local church. So in actual fact, the relationship within Protestantism between Scripture and creeds is tacitly similar to the relationship within Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy between Tradition and Scripture: Just as these older Churches uphold Scripture, but believe it says what Tradition already teaches; so too do different Protestant groups uphold creeds or confessions, but believe that their own statement of faith properly expresses the ‘clear’ teaching of Scripture.

Before moving on, it’s also important to note that some communities have informal statements of faith that carry as much, if not more, de facto authority than formal ones. For example, the ‘five points of Calvinism’ are not an official statement of faith, but seem to come from a widely-circulated pamphlet that sought to summarize the teachings of the Canons of Dort. Their influence on North American Calvinism, both in terms of doctrine and gate-keeping cannot be overstated, however. (For example, I attended an evangelical seminary that was roughly half Calvinist; the Calvinists would openly discuss the ‘five points’ to suss out their conversation partners’ orthodoxy; generally, anything less than four of the five was seen as very suspect.)

But once again, not all authority is created equal. Creeds and confessions are treated quite differently by different groups. In some communities, both their formal statements of faith and canonical requirements are treated as a kind of statute law: it’s the rule book, and if you break the rules you are held to account. But, in others, they are treated more like case law, which is normative without necessarily being prescriptive. At the one extreme, departing from the accepted creed can lead to excommunication; at the other, it’s not seen as very big of a deal at all. In a similar way, different statements of faith can have a greater importance and authority than others upheld by that same community. My own Anglican tradition, for example, upholds both the Nicene Creed and the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion as formal statements of faith. But, the Nicene Creed is read at every Eucharist service, and forms the basis of the liturgies of baptism and confirmation, while the Articles are barely ever referred to in the vast majority of parishes — and you’d be hard pressed to find many Anglicans today who could accept all of the Articles without reservation. In part this is because of the particularities of Anglican history, as its official theology has always been an attempted compromise that left few people happy. But, the importance of the Nicene Creed, which Anglicans theoretically share with the vast majority of Christians around the world, over our own denominational statement of faith, is also significantly due to to the impact of the ecumenical movement, which sought to find increased unity among different Christian traditions.

All this is to say that, while I think it’s important to talk about the authority of creeds and formal other statements of faith, it’s a messy idea. Whether explicitly or tacitly, every Church has them, but the level of authority they wield varies a lot.

Again, the point of this series is not to point to one perspective as correct, but to get us all thinking explicitly about authority and what shapes not only our communities’ beliefs but our own as well. As I’ve thought about creeds and canons over the years, here are some of the major considerations that have become important to me:

• Creeds and canons are important because they give shape and definition to a community. Just as boundaries are important for us as individuals, so we know what’s ‘mine’ to own and what’s not, so too are boundaries important for communities. Without them, membership or belonging becomes meaningless.
• At the same time, because boundaries are so important, we also have to take great care and sensitivity around where we place them. In this, we should keep the example of Jesus close to heart and place them as generously as possible. Also, we would do well to find ways of upholding the boundaries of belief and practice within our communities without becoming obsessed with them. The Church does not exist to define its boundaries; boundaries exist to help the Church live as fully as possible.
• As such, in place of the doctrinally-specific Reformation-era confessions, I prefer the older, simpler and narrative form of Creed. At the end of the day, Jesus did not command us to agree with one another, but to love one another; not to believe the right things, but to live the right way. Getting too detailed in our formal dogma only distracts us from the job before us, and can back us into theological corners if we’re not careful.
• Upholding the ancient Creeds is a way of intentionally placing ourselves within holy tradition. Our culture has a strange preoccupation with independence and not having to follow what’s been done before. While this is driven by a correct understanding that tradition needs to be challenged and adapted in present circumstances, it misses the important point that existing within a tradition gives us a strong foundation from which to live. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel; we can humbly and gratefully accept the wheel and then apply it in ways that make sense today.
• I think the most helpful analogy for the role of Creeds and Canon is the linguistic paradigm. Here’s what I wrote a few years ago about that:

Paradigms are helpful descriptive tools of what generally happens, but are rarely statements about what must happen. At the same time, the irregularities that inevitably occur are rarely actually random or even unpredictable, but usually have historical rationale or are governed by some contextual factor that, when taken into account, actually erases the surface irregularity.

I think this is a helpful approach to understanding dogma because it allows for both regularity and irregularity (whether real or just in appearance), similarity and difference, to coexist within a system. It’s a humbler approach that walks our dogmatic statements back from “Thus saith the Lord” to “all else being equal….” In a sense, it combines the practical ‘realness’ of descriptive approaches with the community-building and boundary-marking benefits of prescriptive approaches.