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Editor’s Note: This story first appeared in the 2025 Beeson magazine, which can be read in its entirety.

In March, Dean Douglas A. Sweeney invited founding dean Timothy George and professors Gerald Bray and Mark Gignilliat to his office for a discussion on the history, importance and role of creeds and confessions in the church. This story summarizes that conversation.

In the early days of the Christian church, it was not uncommon to hear new believers affirm their faith with the Latin word, credo. At their baptism, new believers would be asked, “Do you believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God?”

They would reply, credo, which means “I believe.” These statements of faith, which most often accompanied the act of baptism, marked a new believer’s confession of faith, grounding them in the truth of God’s Word.

“It was a confession of faith, a personal faith in Jesus Christ,” said Timothy George.

Over time, these statements became part of the life of the entire church body, and there was a notable change. “The singular ‘I believe’ became the plural, ‘We believe,’” said Gerald Bray.

These early statements of Christian faith laid the foundation for later creeds and confessions which addressed heresies, organized Christian doctrine and served to unite Christians worldwide.

Though, creeds such as the Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed were not fixed forms for some time. They were revisited by church councils as they sought to formalize and organize the teachings of the New Testament. “For example, what we call the Apostles’ Creed wasn't produced in its current form, the modern form, until the eighth century,” Bray said. “What we call the Nicene Creed today was not the creed of the First Council of Nicaea, but it has come to be known as that because it was meant to convey the faith of Nicaea. The Apostles’ Creed wasn’t written by the apostles, but it was meant to convey their faith.”

George elaborated. “All of the creeds we have been talking about have gone through various stages and changes, including the Nicene Creed, so creeds can be changed. They can appeal to the Scriptures as we look at the wording of creeds and how they speak to particular situations, but they are always accountable to the authority of the Holy Scriptures.”

While some might quip, “No creed but the Bible,” Bray said those who wrote the creeds were careful to ensure that the teaching written down by the church was only that of the New Testament.

“Those who composed and who authorized these things were very careful to make sure that the teaching they gave was based on the New Testament,” Bray said. “The reason for this is they were living in a culture where books were very expensive, and Christianity is a faith based on a book—but a book that most people couldn’t afford. So, what do you do? You produce a kind of résumé, a shortened form that can be memorized.”

While it is true and good to say Christians put no “humanly constructed statement, confession or creed above the Bible,” George said, the Protestant commitment to Sola Scriptura ought not become a commitment to Nuda Scriptura, or naked Scripture, without understanding the important role of the Holy Spirit.

“We do not put a creed up on a pedestal as though it can never be touched, unchanged and is irrevocable,” he continued. “We don’t say that of any of the creeds, because we subject them all to the written authority of God’s Holy Word in Scripture. Creeds and confessions are not the Bible. We do not claim them to be the infallible, inerrant Word of God. They are summaries of Scripture. They are ways in which Scripture can be explicated and given to God’s people—to strengthen them in their walk with Christ.”

George elaborated on the Bible’s own affirmation of creeds. “I think it's helpful to think about how the New Testament itself refers to the creeds in at least three different ways,” he said.

“First, there is the faith, or the faith once for all delivered to the saints as we read in Jude 3. It's singular. It's unique. And then there is my faith, because each of us must have our own personal faith in Jesus Christ. And so, my faith is an expression of the faith. And then there's the church's faith. The creeds, the confessions, they are all expressions of the church's faith in different ways and different times, reflecting the context in which they emerge. But they all are connected, interrelated, co-inherent,” he said. “They’re saying the same thing in different ways, for different purposes, at different times.”

“There is the faith once for all delivered to the saints, the deposit of faith. There is my faith by which I enter into the life of Christ, expressed through baptism. And there’s the church’s faith, which involves the whole community of faith coming together—sometimes in council and sometimes in congregations,” George said. “And let’s not forget the martyrs who also bore witness to the faith through their life and witness until death.”

One benefit of creeds and confessions is they create protective barriers for reading the Bible, preventing believers from projecting a God of their own making, Mark Gignilliat explained.

“These creeds… their function at the end of the day was to help us understand the nature of the God of Israel, who we worship—number one—but also to provide guardrails for the reading of the Bible,” he said.

Gignilliat goes on to explain that creeds did more defensive work than offensive work. “The defensive work was to make sure that we were on the right interpretive highway and not getting off that,” he said. “The offensive work was the engagement of the Bible in its totality. These early expressions of our faith that are in the creeds are ‘exhibit A’ of the church fathers seeking to do attendance to the totality of the biblical witness.”

We learn from the history of Israel and from the nature of our own fallen hearts that left to our own devices, we will project a God of our own making, he said. “From a constructive and spiritually formative standpoint, what the creeds are doing are helping us avoid idolatry,” Gignilliat said.

Creeds and confessions also serve to connect Christians to their ancestors in the faith, George said. Confessional Christians have a sense of “intentional accountability” to God's work throughout history.

“The Christian faith did not start with me or you. It’s something God has been doing all along. A confessional Christian is one who senses some accountability to what happened with Athanasius. What happened at Nicaea, Constantinople… that’s my story, too. And I can’t understand myself or my church or my community of faith without reference to that,” he said.

“It’s not that we’re lone ranger Christians experiencing God all on our own,” George said. “It’s the story across time and across centuries. A confessional Christian has a sense of intentional accountability throughout history.”