As we survey the history of the Church, we see that it has been confessional. The confession of Christ has been the bedrock of the Lord building the Church for the last 2000 years. As Peter confessed that Jesus was the Christ, the son of the living God, so Christians from the day of Pentecost to today have made that same confession. As the Church has grown, there has arisen a need to define what is means to be labeled a Christian.

As an institution, there is a need to define what the Church is and what it is to believe, and so confessionalism is a must. There is also a need to define the boundaries of what it means to be within the institution. The simplest mark that anyone can have regarding these ideas is the confession that Jesus is Lord, as per Romans 10. This was the confession of the early Church.

As time goes on and the Church continues to grow, there are more false teachers coming into the Church and bringing chaos. Codifying the confession of the Church became necessary. The Catholic Creeds are the early statements made by the Church to make clear the basic teachings of the Church. If there isn’t a creedal, or confessional statement, how can the Church purge the heresy from within? How can we tell the difference between someone who would be in orthodoxy if there are no doctrinal statements that are the standard by which to test and judge.

Historical Creeds

The first of these creeds is known as the Apostles’ Creed. As a creedal statement, it is the most basic form of the Gospel message that there is in Christianity. As Al Mohler has said in his book on the subject, “People may believe more than this Creed, but no Christian believes less than this Creed.”

What is amazing about the Apostles’ Creed is that it is really a historic statement about the Gospel that includes the Trinity, virgin birth, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the completeness of the work of Christ, the reality of the new heavens and new earth (with new bodies), the forgiveness of sins, the unity of the Church, and life eternal.

For such a short and memorable statement, there is a lot of theology packed into it. There are also all the necessary statements within it is make a dividing line between orthodox Christianity and Islam, Judaism, Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and anything else that does not have those foundational truths at its center. The first doctrinal gate into orthodoxy is the Apostles’ Creed.

Next, there were debates about the nature of Christ and what He accomplished on the cross. There are clearly false doctrines about Christ Himself that show themselves in the lifetime of the Apostles. The First Letter of John is an argument against Proto-Gnostics who were denying the reality of the humanity of Christ. Paul was fighting the Judaizers in their statements that Jesus’ work wasn’t quite enough and needed something else added to it. Even if the Judaizers said that Jesus was God, the fact that Christ’s work fell short is indeed a failure to understand fully the person of Christ and the work that only Christ could do.

From these early forms to more advanced forms that include Arianism (the denial of the Deity of Christ) to Gnosticism (the Denial of the Humanity of Christ), there would need to be more clear statements of orthodoxy that had to be created and agreed upon to continue to keep the Church faithful to the Scriptures.

The next Creeds to be written were the Nicene and Athanasius Creeds. These creeds are primarily about the nature of God and the nature of Christ. While the Apostles’ Creed mentions the three persons of the Trinity, the Nicene Creed looks to define the trinitarian nature of God and how each person works. Because there is a Trinity, this also means that some definition about the nature of Christ must also be defined and understood, which happened at Chalcedon.

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