Featured Creeds vs. Bible

A Caution Concerning Creeds and Confessions

When I first entered my Reformed stage (what Sproul Jr. referred to as the "cage" stage!) I was quite interested with all things Reformed, including studying out the various Confessions, especially the Westminster Confession of Faith.

Although I still believe in the five Sola's I hesitate to call myself Reformed or Calvinist because of the additional baggage of those two terms.

But I noticed a tendency. Confessions tend to, over time, impose an interpretive and domineering grid over the Word of God. It is very subtle but it happens. It ends up, all too often, that the Confessions become our teachers and not the Bible. And Bible verses become footnotes to the Creeds.

Christ told us:' "A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher." Luke 6:40

Now, if we admit that confessions and creeds are not as perfect as the Bible, and need to be corrected (as in the "Jesus went to Hell" mistake) then this shows that our teacher (Creeds and Confessions) are not going to get us where we want to be. When we are fully trained we will be like our teacher - walking Creeds and Confessions.

By contrast we have the inspired observation of David:

"Oh how I love your law!
It is my meditation all the day.
Your commandment makes me wiser than my enemies,
for it is ever with me.
I have more understanding than all my teachers,
for your testimonies are my meditation.
I understand more than the aged,
for I keep your precepts." Psalm 119:97 - 100

It is much better to direct all of our efforts, study, and devotion to the perfect Word of God. This way we have a much brighter prospect of being like our blessed Teacher.

 

A clear reading of the Scriptures would have shown that your "clear confession of faith" is not actually based on the Bible on certain points. Not a single passage of Scripture tells us there will be a physical return of Christ still in our future. Those verses that you think teach that have already happened. We are now in the Kingdom that Christ promised His earthly contemporaries would be inaugurated in that generation. The Jews of that generation - just like the futurists of these last generations - made the mistake of looking for physical signs for a spiritual, invisible kingdom.

Their mistake was letting their traditions crowd out the Word of God. Your mistake - on this point, at least - is letting creeds eclipse the truth of Gods Word.

 

Well, yes. I think we all do that. But it is not superfluous. There is a general tendency for us - all of us - to drift away from the simplicity of the Word of God. Yes, I do present commentary, but I would always welcome scriptural rebuttal. I don't claim to have all the answers.

 

Bible verse please. Especially the physical.

 

You know little about Jehovah's Witnesses, apparently, and less about me if you think I am like them.

I affirm the deity of Christ and His bodily resurrection, the Trinity, and salvation by His grace through faith.

I only believe what the Bible teaches. If I am wrong on some point I also welcome Scriptural correction.

Christ most certainly did what He promised, that He would come back in that generation. That some standing there at the Transfiguration would not die before He came back with power. That He would come soon.

As far as the rod of iron is concerned - what do you think he meant? A literal visible rod?

 

How is wanting to just go by the Bible be off the rails?

Where was historic Christianity most of the, say, 14 centuries before the Reformation? Their creeds and confessions made scarce notice of justification by faith.

What writer in those first centuries wrote of that blessed doctrine between the end of the first century and the 14th?

Can you consider the possibility that traditions that make the Word of God of no effect, as Christ warned in the first century, did not just die out in that first century? That tradition still has potentially the same effect throughout history?

Augustine seemed to come close to salvation by faith alone but, in all my reading of that great man, I never read a clear and succinct stating of that cardinal doctrine. His seemingly closest sola fide formulations are those that are marred by an insistence of the necessity of baptism.

It is in the Bible.
It was rediscovered by, among other people, Martin Luther.

But it is not in those early writers.
It is not in the creeds.

Sometimes going off the rails is a necessary option when the train is going down the wrong track.

 

Hello, Hank. Doing fine. Thanks for asking. I hope you are too.

 

We are in Belgrade. We hope to be in Timisoara, Romania in a couple days.

 

Oh, sorry. I took your comment to mean me.

The JWs were never on the rails.