In this day, God still calls the church to be “a pillar and buttress of the truth,” so what “we confess” has eternal significance (1 Timothy 3:15-16). The church needs the creeds if we are to proclaim Jesus is Lord to the world with biblical clarity and receive only those into our number who confess it truly with us. It would not be biblical, Christian, or Baptist, to fulfill our calling without them.

Few phrases expose the confusion and contradiction of our time more than “self-identifying.” Many today assume that anyone can assign to themself any identity they wish, and no one can question it. Even if that chosen identity runs counter to every observable, biological reality. But what about as a Christian? Is it enough to simply identify yourself as a Christian to make it so?

Scripture teaches that you become a genuine Christians, not by assigning yourself the label, but by the Spirit, whose work is observable in a personal confession of faith in Jesus as Lord. Paul wrote, “no one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except in the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor 12:3). Christianity’s fundamental message is “Jesus Christ as Lord” (2 Cor 4:5), so Christians are those who have received Him as Lord (Col 2:6) and confessed Him to be the same. Memorably, Paul wrote in Romans 10:9:

… if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

Christians believe that their salvation from judgment is based on Jesus’ vicarious life and substitutionary death, being assured of this by the fact that He rose from the dead. And that faith includes the public testimony and confession that He is Lord. We could say that “Jesus is Lord” is the most succinct creedal summary of Christianity and the very basis of our creedal heritage.

The word creed comes from the Latin, credo, which means, “I believe.”^[1] And confession comes from Greek and Latin words referring to a public testimony or agreement. In other words, Christians can be identified objectively as those who confess with their mouths the creed of their hearts, that Jesus is Lord. But how can we determine whether someone means by their confession the same thing that the Bible does? How can we be sure they agree on the Bible’s teaching on who Jesus is and what it means to say that He is Lord?

Since the days of the Apostles, there have been distorted understandings of our Lord based on the misuse of His revelation. Take, for example, the claim of Hymenaeus and Philetus, that “the resurrection already happened” (2 Timothy 2:17). Truly, Christians “are alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Rom 6:11), but these men were distorting the biblical teaching on the resurrection. A common characteristic of false teaching is that it takes God’s words but uses the devil’s dictionary. In the second century, Tertullian observed, “They put forward the Scriptures, and by this insolence of theirs they at once influence some.”^[2] In the 19^th century, James Bannerman said the same:

A man may accept as the rule of his faith the same inspired books as yourself, while he rejects every important article of the faith you find in these books.  If, therefore, we are to know who believes as we do, and who dissent from our faith, we must state our creed in language explicitly rejecting such interpretations of Scripture as we deem to be false.^[3]

So to preserve the Scripture’s teaching on the future, bodily resurrection, and Christians are to persevere in the hope of it, Paul cited a “trustworthy saying” (vv. 11-13).^[4] It is a short synthesis of what the Bible taught so that Timothy could use it as a standard to train other teachers (v. 14) and to guide his own teaching, “rightly handling the word of truth” (v. 15). This is how the church was to follow “the pattern of sound words” (1:13) that the Apostles had given.

Scripture itself assumes that it reveals a coherent body of doctrine that may be summarized and then used to evaluate any specific claim or teaching. This is why we find references to “the faith” (Jude 3) or “a standard of teaching” (Rom 6:17), or that elders are to “hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught” (Titus 1:9). Scripture prods us to synthesize its teaching to discern whether doctrinal claims or confessions of Christ are true or false. Failing to use such creedal summaries of the Bible is simply unbiblical, as Carl Trueman has said:

To claim to have no creed but the Bible, then, is problematic: the Bible itself seems to demand that we have forms of sound words, and that is what creeds are.^[5]

The early church obeyed this biblical imperative and followed the apostolic example by using credal summaries that they called “the rule of faith” or truth. Irenaeus articulated the rule of faith in the second century like this:

“One God, the Creator of heaven and earth, and all things therein, by means of Christ Jesus, the Son of God; who, because of His surpassing love towards His creation, condescended to be born of the virgin, He Himself uniting man through Himself to God, and having suffered under Pontius Pilate, and rising again, and having been received up in splendor, shall come in glory, the Savior of those who are saved, and the Judge of those who are judged, and sending into eternal fire those who transform the truth, and despise His Father and His advent.”^[6]

Anyone familiar with the later creeds will recognize their origin here in this rule. To explain the purpose of the rule of faith, Christian leaders likened it to the plans that were given along with tiles for the mosaics that were popular on floors and walls in the Roman empire. The plan showed how the tiles were to be installed to create the intended mosaic design. Similarly, the rule of faith showed how Christians were to properly arrange the teachings of Scripture to truly confess Jesus as Lord. Irenaeus put it this way: “he also who retains unchangeable in his heart the rule of the truth… though he will acknowledge the gems [mosaic pieces], he will certainly not receive the fox instead of the likeness of the king.”^[7]

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