AP

Review of Carl Trueman, The Creedal Imperative, Wheaton: Crossway, 2012

The Creedal Imperative appeared on several recommended reading lists in my time at college, but given its title, I didn’t think it was going to be worth reading as I thought it would be “preaching to the choir”. Thus, the book sat on my shelf for years as one those “might get to one day” books.

But having read The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, I thought Trueman might have something valuable to say in his own domain of expertise (i.e. church history). How that hunch turned out to be right! I wished I’d read this book earlier. Had I done so, I may have been more successful in bringing back creeds into my own church.

It’s a short book – only 205 pages – very accessible, and really packs a punch! Here are some thoughts on the book:

Trueman does a fantastic job speaking as to why creeds get such a hard time in our cultural moment. Worth the price of admission just in the first chapter, Trueman helpfully identifies the cultural roadblocks to modern use of creeds: our proclivity to devalue the past, our general suspicion that words are an insufficient means of communicating things of importance, and our general anti-authoritarianism. He also helpfully identifies the fear of using creeds as a fear of being exclusionary. It’s a highly useful chapter because anyone who wants to do something substantive in restoring the use of creeds is bound to have to clear some roadblocks.

I thought Trueman’s second chapter “The foundation of creedalism” lacked the punch and clarity of the first chapter. Nevertheless, if one concentrated, one could understand his point: words are adequate because the Bible uses words! The Bible assumes that we will be using our words to pass on the faith. Creeds, as with the Bible, carry a universal message to humans that share a universal nature (i.e. we can’t dismiss it as the product of old white men.) The church (as an institution) has a responsibility to make sure its leaders are good stewards of the doctrine and this necessitates the need for “the pattern / form of sound words” (2 Tim 1:13) i.e. creeds.

Chapters 3 and 4 are excellent. They are about early church creeds and Reformation creeds. They not only provide good summaries of creedal formation over history, they also helpfully point out that the church has always been in the business of making creeds to exclude heterodoxy. The implication is that we stand quite apart from orthodoxy if we are squeamish about excluding heterodox teaching. Further, if one wanted to do away with creeds, one would quickly run into the problem of having to replace them, e.g. how else would you defend the Trinity?

Trueman’s treatment of Reformation creeds also calls attention to this strange modern phenomenon of avoid taking positions on doctrines where there is disagreement e.g. baptism and Lord’s Supper. That the Reformers took positions and heatedly disagreed with each other showed that the doctrine was important, regardless of the answer. Modern evangelical churches prefer not to take positions to avoid the embarrassment of disagreeing, or the fear of being seen as exclusionary, and so mistakenly send the message that these doctrines are unimportant, something the Reformers would not have agreed with at all. We call ourselves Confessional, but being Confessional historically meant to actually think these areas important and requiring a position!

Chapter 5 “Confession as Praise”, while perhaps the weakest chapter in persuasiveness, is most challenging in terms of how we ought to be using creeds in the doctrinal formation of the congregation. It challenged me with a few concrete ideas as to how to make use of confessions in worship.

Chapter 6 “On the Usefulness of Creeds and Confessions” was indeed a very useful chapter! In particular I loved this quote:

The character I mentioned in the opening paragraphs of the introduction claimed no creed but the Bible, yet he was dispensationalist in eschatology, Calvinist in soteriology, and brethren in ecclesiology. What he really should have said was: I have a creed but I am not going to write it down, so you cannot critique it; and I am going to identify my creed so closely with the Bible that I am not going to be able to critique it either. There are numerous obvious ironies here, not least that last point. It is probably this person who objected to creeds on the grounds that they represent a man-made framework that was imposed upon the Bible by the church and thus distorted how the Bible was read. In fact, by refusing to acknowledge even the existence of his own framework, he removed any possibility of assessing that framework in the light of Scripture. Thus, he invested more absolute authority in his private creed and his tradition than even the Roman Catholic Church or the Eastern Orthodox, who at least have the decency to put their confessional standards into the public domain. The standard evangelical objection to creeds and confessions is simply not sustainable in the light of its own self-referential incoherence, the Bible’s own teaching, and the history of the church.

Very piercingly put.

Some other great points are made too: Creeds are useful because they limit the church’s institutional power (e.g. we who uphold the Westminster Confession would not be able to command parents to homeschool their children) whereas other churches may find trouble with delimiting the power of its officers. Creeds are useful because they set the ceiling to which you can reasonably expect members to reach in their doctrinal understanding. Furthermore, creeds are useful because they allow churches to have an appropriately “low bar” for new members, but have a sufficiently “high bar” for office bearers.

The Creedal Imperative should be categorised as a “must read” for pastors and elders. As pastors, we read book after book about how to do evangelical ministry more effectively. Here is one that really demands to seriously considered! Are our churches truly Reformed? Did the Reformation give us more than just some loose theological basis on which to build a generic evangelical ministry? I think it did. The Reformers think they did. A theology shaped by creeds ought to also shape our convictions about church ministry.

I would be a hypocrite to suggest that I am doing this well. But I’m convinced, having read this, I need to do it better. The need for renewal and revival in the church is as urgent as ever, but doctrinal reformation ought not to be sidelined. In fact I’d argue it’s all part and parcel of renewal.

I’m not suggesting we let our disagreements dictate who we can be friends with (there is still a place for the Gospel Coalition), but we can’t let embarrassment over our differences dictate what we allow  / disallow. The more I go on, the more I’m convinced that our Reformed heritage has much more to offer. If we go deeper in the truth, we can make a more solid foundation for the church to grow and remain united in years to come.

– Bryan Kim