There’s an interesting discussion going on over at the Generous Orthodoxy/Thinktank site about whether the so-called Emerging Church “conversation” or “movement” or whatever it is should have some kind of formal creed or doctrinal statement. Now, all I know about the Emerging Church stuff is what I’ve read and I can’t say that much of it seems to “speak to my condition,” but it’s still worth thinking about why we have or should have creeds in the first place.

I’ve sometimes talked to Christians who say something like “Our church doesn’t need a creed because we just believe what the Bible says.” The problem there is that you need some way of interpreting the Bible, and for the church the creeds have provided a rule of faith for identifying the key elements of the Christian proclamation. Churches who don’t have written creeds often end up with unwritten articles of belief, many of which deviate from the central beliefs that Christendom has found central. Think of churches where some particular story about the “end times” or a particular set of beliefs about the state of Israel becomes normative, or even central to their faith. Creeds keep us from going off the rails and keep us focused on what’s essential to the faith (and keep us connected to the larger church).

Another common argument against creeds is that they try to distill our knowledge of God into propositions, whereas in reality God is ineffable and can never be adequately captured by human language. Here we need to distinguish between the idea that we can’t exhaustively describe God’s essence, which is surely true, and the idea that we can’t make any true statements about God, which is false. Christianity has always affirmed that we can speak truly about God, partly because God has revealed himself to us in his mighty acts, and above all in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The creeds tell the story of those acts in capsule form. If we deny that we can say anything true about God, then we might as well hang up the whole business.

Finally, you sometimes hear people say that we need to focus on living a moral life as Jesus commanded and exemplified instead of worrying about creeds and dogmas and other boring and irrelevant theology-type stuff. But once you start reflecting on who Jesus is and why he should be normative for the way we live, you suddenly find yourself, well, doing theology, and formulating propositions, and making truth-claims, and all that other horrible, oppressive, logocentric, patriarchal, Western jazz. Action can’t be separated from understanding and practice can’t replace theory – you need both.

A need to constantly reinvent the wheel has long been the bane of Protestantism. And this often goes hand-in-hand with a profound ignorance of Christian history and why the creeds came about the way they did in the first place (otherwise, why would people be prone to swallow the bunk of The Da Vinci Code?). Rather than chucking the creeds we need better instruction in them and why they’re important.

P.S. The Creeds can also provide ideal material for prayer and meditation as Luther says in his little book A Simple Way to Pray. And, of course, the meditation on the Apostle’s Creed makes up much of Luther’s Small Catechism.

P.P.S. Here’s a very good discussion of the whole issue in terms of modernism vs. postmodernism.