UNDERSTANDING THE FAILURE OF CREEDS

  Years ago, I supply preached for a small country church that had about 35 in attendance. They weren’t part of our brotherhood, but they liked me and asked me to consider becoming their preacher. Since they weren’t part our brotherhood I asked to look at their by-laws to make sure there wasn’t anything I had to consider before saying "yes" to them.
  They handed me a document roughly 10 pages in length and I took it home to read it over. Their by-laws seemed fairly normal (essentially what ours might look like) until I got to the back pages. And I swear to you, the last 2/3rds of their constitution consisted of their church’s “Creed.” Most of it was fairly common Bible doctrine, but there were parts of it that I felt were questionable and hard to justify. So when I met with their leadership the next week I told I’d want to change their constitution’s doctrinal statements if I became their preacher.
 “Oh no” one of the sighed, “the last 3 preachers have wanted to change our doctrine.” And I could see why, it was so intricate and exhaustive, nobody could agree with all of it. But I reassured them that the change I wanted to make was very simple…and nobody would ever see a need to change their constitution’s statement of faith ever again.
  I told them that they needed to scrap the entire section on doctrine and replace it with one simple statement: “Where the Bible speaks, we will speak and where the Bible is silent, we will be silent.” They were quiet for a moment or two, and at last one of them said “We can live with that.”

   Creeds are common in most denominations (each denomination seems to have its own distinctive creed), and most of their people know their creeds pretty well… oftentimes better than they know their Bible.
  But our brotherhood has always rejected creeds. We see them as divisive and manmade substitutions for relying on God’s Word. Paul wrote: “All Scripture (not manmade creeds) is God-breathed and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”
  In other words, creeds are unnecessary. All you really need is the Bible. If creeds say less than what the Bible says, they say too little, and if they say more, they say too much.

   Creeds are essentially “man-made” doctrines. I once asked to borrow a denominational preacher’s “Book of Doctrine” because I was curious about some of their teachings. He said “Keep it. The next one comes out in a couple of months.” Then he said “We vote on our doctrine every 2 years.”
  It was all I could do to avoid saying “YOU WHAT???” (It wouldn’t have been polite). But that’s the nature of man-made creeds – they are the result of a vote on what that group of believers will accept from Scripture. And what folks vote in… they can vote out.
  By contrast, God doesn’t let you do that with Scripture. You don’t get to vote on it. God warns: “Everything that I command you, you shall be careful to do. You shall not add to it or take from it.” Deuteronomy 12:32

  Lastly, creeds, are divisive. They are part of the reason there are so many denominations. A church historian by the name of Philip Schaff wrote a book entitled “The Creeds of Christendom” In his book he wrote: “the first object of creeds was to distinguish the Church from the world, from Jews and heathen, afterwards orthodoxy from heresy and finally denomination from denomination.”

   It is our brotherhood’s contention that, if you remove all man-made creeds and just turn to the Bible, much of the divisiveness in the religious world would disappear. If you let God’s Word do its work, God can work to bring unity. As God said in Isaiah 55:10-11 “As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.”