Confessing the Faith: Catholic Councils and Creeds (Jerusalem Declaration Clause 3)
Editor’s Note: This is the seventh in a series of articles by Dr. Stephen Noll, titled “The Jerusalem Declaration: A Personal Commentary.” In this series, Dr. Noll draws on decades of experience in the GAFCON movement, especially his role as Secretary of the Statement group that drafted the Jerusalem Declaration and its accompanying Statement.
Having heard the Gospel Word written and preached (clauses 1 and 2), we can now proceed to the Creed! This brings us to the next clause of the Jerusalem Declaration:
Sponsored
- We uphold the four Ecumenical Councils and the three historic Creeds as expressing the rule of faith of the one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
Each Sunday, Anglicans rise up from their pews and recite the Nicene Creed, whether from the Prayer Book or projected on a screen. In doing so, they are joining a chorus of confessing Christians who have done likewise (except for the screen part) for fifteen hundred years and are paying their respect to the “ancient fathers” of the Church.
At a time when some in England argued that the Church was insufficiently reformed and reordered, and others were claiming that it had been apostate since the days of the Apostles, Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), the Dean of St. Paul’s in London, set down this five-finger rule:
One canon reduced to writing by God himself, two testaments, three creeds, four general councils, five centuries, and the series of Fathers in that period—the centuries, that is, before Constantine, and two after, determine the boundary of our faith.
In clause 3, the Jerusalem Declaration aligns the Global Anglican Communion with Andrewes in claiming a place within the one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.
Upholding the Faith
Clauses 1 and 2 begin, respectively, with “we rejoice” in the Gospel and “we believe” the Scriptures. Clauses 3 and 4 sound a conservative note: we uphold the councils, creeds, and articles. This defensive tenor is similar to the New Testament exhortations to put on the whole armor of God and to hold fast and contend for the “form of teaching,” “sound doctrine,” “deposit of faith,” or “tradition” of the apostles (Eph 6:11; Rom 16:17; 2 Tim 1:13-14; Titus 2:1; Jude 1:3).
Confession is the mark of the “Church militant.” The prophecy of St. John the Divine in the final book of the canon of Scripture issues marching orders to Christian soldiers: “the one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God and he will be my son” (Rev 21:7). And the fiercest battles foreseen for the faithful are not against the Beast of this world but pretenders within the Church, as we see in the Letters to the Churches (e.g. Rev 2:18-25). This is the situation of apostasy which the Gafcon movement describes in its Jerusalem Statement.
20th Century Apostasy
I was ordained in 1971 in the Episcopal Church, in the Diocese of Virginia. At that time, the rector of “historic” St. John’s Church in Richmond was the Rev. John Shelby Spong. Five years later, Jack Spong became a bishop, and in that capacity, he served for many years as a member of the Episcopal House of Bishops Theology Committee. Like many Episcopalians of that day, Spong was a follower of the German theologian Paul Tillich, known for positing that the God of the Bible is the “ground of being” (i.e., “panentheism”). The “moderate Anglican” interpreter of Tillich was Prof. John Macquarrie, whose Principles of Christian Theology was the standard textbook in Episcopal seminaries.
Bishop Spong took the implications of Tillich’s revisionism and shouted them from the rooftops. Among his many flamboyant statements is this:
I say the Creeds every Sunday. To me they are a love song that the Christians, my ancestors, sang to their understanding of God in their time… I say to people that if you have trouble with the Creeds, sing it, because no one ever pays any attention to the words if they sing it….”
Trolling aside, Spong propounds a theory of how the creed came to be:
The earliest creed of the Christian church had three words: “Jesus is Messiah.” When they became a gentile organization, the gentiles had no earthly idea what messiah meant so they translated it with kyrios—and it became “Jesus is Lord”… And the next thing you know we’re building creeds and adopting doctrines like “Incarnation” and “Holy Trinity” and trying to make rational sense out of our human experience.
New Testament Confessions
Most of Spong’s fulmination is historical nonsense, but he has a point: the three historic creeds were a development of earlier confessions, simple or extended, in the New Testament:
…for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.
1 Cor 8:6
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.
Rom 10:9
By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God.
1 John 4:2-3
Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness: He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.
1 Tim 3:16
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Phil 2:5-11
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.
1 Cor 15:3-8
The Faith Once For All Delivered
The reason I call Spong’s theory historical nonsense is that this development is coming first-hand from those eyewitnesses who knew Jesus of Nazareth before and after the Resurrection and who were passing on their understanding of his coming under the guidance of the Spirit.
The very concept of the canon of Scripture includes a principle of doctrine development: a divine revelation that occurs “once for all” and which an authoritative tradition passes on. The question is whether that development is faithful to “the faith once for all delivered to the saints” or has been perverted by ungodly people (Jude 1:3-4). I count Bishop Spong among the latter group.
The Rule of Faith
The early church Fathers identified this legacy of the apostles as the “rule of faith” or “canon of truth.” The second-century bishop Irenaeus, for example, describes the rule in terms of its trinitarian shape and as the lens for interpreting Scripture:
The Church, though dispersed throughout the whole world, even to the ends of the earth, has received from the apostles and their disciples this faith: [She believes] in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are in them; and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who became incarnate for our salvation; and in the Holy Spirit, who proclaimed through the prophets the dispensations of God, and the advents, and the birth from a virgin, and the passion, and the resurrection from the dead, and the ascension into heaven in the flesh of the beloved Christ Jesus, our Lord, and His [future] manifestation from heaven in the glory of the Father “to gather all things in one…
Against Heresies 1.10.1
This rule became part of the baptismal confession and, over several centuries, developed into the current version of the Apostles’ Creed.
After their baptism, many converts clearly stayed at Christianity 1.0, still in need of spiritual milk (Heb 5:12-13). Teachers claiming that Jesus was a godly man (Ebionitism) or that he was a divine spirit that only appeared human (docetism) misled some converts. Others needed moral exhortation concerning care for the poor or sexual purity, given the class system and lax morals of pagan society.
The Ecumenical Councils and Creeds
Controversy over Christian doctrine continued throughout the first centuries, often originating from within the Church. The presbyter Arius (256-336 AD) in particular taught that Jesus was a created being, inferior to the Father, and hence “there was a time when he was not.” Arianism was a powerful force throughout the fourth century.
The Council of Nicaea
The first Christian emperor Constantine convened the first Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325 AD—called “ecumenical” because bishops from around the Mediterranean “world” (oikoumene) attended. The Council published the Nicene Creed, which opposed the teaching of Arius by speaking of the “consubstantial” unity (homoousios) of the Father and the Son.
The Council of Constantinople
Fifty years of further controversy passed before the second Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 381 confirmed the Nicene teaching. The Creed we use today comes from this council. It develops the Nicene doctrine by identifying the Holy Spirit as a Triune Person, “proceeding from the Father.” To this phrase, the Western churches began adding the word filioque, “and from the Son.” While this development may seem like a quibble to us, it ultimately led to the division of Eastern Orthodoxy from Roman Catholics and Protestants. (Note the discussion of this matter in the ACNA’s 2019 Prayer Book, page 768, which concludes with an appeal to the “Gafcon Theological Commission”).
The Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon
The third and fourth Ecumenical Councils of Ephesus in 431 and Chalcedon in 451 resulted from a dispute concerning the Person of Jesus Christ as truly God and truly Man. Some leaders (the monk Eutychus) taught that in the Incarnation, Christ’s divine nature had absorbed his human nature, while others (the archbishop Nestorius) said his divine and human natures remained separate to the point of a disunited Personhood. The Councils rejected both of these positions and proposed this development of doctrine, known as the “Chalcedonian definition”:
Therefore, following the holy fathers, we all with one accord teach men to acknowledge one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man, consisting also of a reasonable soul and body; of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood; like us in all respects, apart from sin… one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation…
Another result of the disputes over the fully divine and human natures of Christ was the affirmation of the Virgin Mary as theotokos (God-bearer).
The third creed mentioned in clause 3, “the Athanasian Creed,” dates to the early 6th century AD, although its name honors the spirit of Athanasius, the 4th-century defender of Nicene orthodoxy. We can see this creed as the capstone of the four Ecumenical Councils, summing up the patristic teaching on the Triune God and the Person of Jesus Christ. It concludes: “This is the catholic faith: one cannot be saved without believing it firmly and faithfully.”
The Athanasian Creed is cited in the Thirty-nine Articles and authorized for occasional use in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (also in BCP 2019, pages 769-771).
Creeds and Confessions
Why were the Councils and Creeds of the first five centuries so special for the Reformers looking back a millennium later and for us today? Firstly, their age paid homage to antiquity, especially to the apostles and their immediate successors. Secondly, the decisions of the patristic church seemed to mark the conclusion of a dispensation in which the Church settled the doctrines of the Trinity and the Person of Christ. Finally, the Reformers were convinced that these decisions were in accordance with Scripture, and the Gafcon movement concurs with them, “respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading” (clause 2).
According to Bishop Spong’s theory of development, the early church got it all wrong in its confession of the faith. The Jerusalem Declaration begs to differ. However, that is not the end of the story, as we come to clause 4.
Published on
Confessing the Gospel in Our Day (Jerusalem Declaration Clause 1)
The Jerusalem Declaration is the confessional basis for a reformed and reordered Communion. It is not only a memento of the first GAFCON in 2008, but it is also the ongoing “contemporary standard for Anglican identity” for individual and corporate membership in the Global Anglican Communion.
The Bible: Walking in God’s Word (Jerusalem Declaration Clause 2.2)
The Jerusalem Declaration offers a set of principles to guide us in our Christian walk, as outlined in the second sentence of Clause 2: “The Bible is to be translated, read, preached, taught and obeyed in its plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading.”
