Why Creeds, Confessions, and Catechisms Don't Make You Roman Catholic

Why do we confess the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed in worship? Doesn’t that make us Roman Catholic?

In this episode of Catechizing Conversations, we dismantle the common misconception that creeds and confessions belong to Rome. By walking through the Reformation debate on Scripture and tradition—especially Luther’s critiques—we show why Protestants have always been a creedal people.

We explore the Didache and early church catechesis, Carl Trueman’s three foundational assumptions for confessional Christianity, and the rich world of biblical creeds found in both the Old and New Testaments.

Creeds didn’t begin with Rome. They began with Moses, Jesus, and the apostles.

This episode will help you begin to understand why creeds are not optional—but essential—for the life, unity, and faithfulness of the church.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:28

Welcome back to Catechizing Conversations. My name is Sisko Victor, and I'm glad that you have joined us today. This is the podcast Catechizing Conversations, and today we're answering a question that many Christians, even well-meaning ones, often ask when they visit a confessional church for the first time. Why does your church use creeds and catechisms? Isn't that Roman Catholic? People may hear us confess the Apostles' Creed in church or the Nicene Creed, may hear us answering questions and answers from the Westminster Shorter Catechism in worship, and their assumption is that sounds Catholic. Well, in one sense we are Catholic. The word means universal. We belong to the one church of Jesus Christ across all ages. But we are emphatically not Roman Catholic, we are Protestant, more specifically Presbyterian, and even more specifically confessional. And the purpose of these episodes is to explain what that means. But in this episode I want to show why using creeds doesn't make us Roman Catholic, how the Reformers thought about scripture and tradition, how catechisms existed long before Rome, how the Bible itself contains creeds and why creeds still matter today. At the time of the Reformation, the central debate between Protestants and Rome wasn't whether the church should teach doctrine. Everyone agreed the church must do that. The real debate was who has the final authority, Scripture or the institutional church? In 1520, in his address to the Christian nobility of the German nation, Martin Luther attacked what he called the walls Rome had built around itself, especially the claim that only the Pope could infallibly interpret Scripture. Martin Luther saw this as a kind of spiritual hoarding of God's word, and his words on this are fascinating from Luther's works, volume 32. He wrote, See how the Pope fools and deceives the whole world? He selects from the divine word whatever he wants, even though it belongs equally to everybody, and pretends to drink the best wine out of the very cask from which others can scarcely get water. God's plain and simple word with its uniform power is gold for him, but he will not let others pass it as copper. Stop it, Pope. The game has gone far enough. Luther, critiquing the Roman Catholic view of tradition, used the imagery that whereas all get water from the same cask, the Pope claims to draw wine. According to Luther, this means the Pope asserts he alone can extract a special, superior interpretation from Scripture, whereas others only get the ordinary understanding. However, Luther counters this papal claim as baseless. He describes it a mere dream of Rome, especially since even the popes have contradicted each other. This critique is part of Luther's overall argument that no one person, not even the Pope, has infallible interpretive authority over the Word of God. When Luther confronted Rome with Scripture, Rome essentially answered, only the Pope can determine what Scripture really means. But Luther rejected this because Scripture teaches the exact opposite. The Bible teaches that Christ distributes spiritual gifts widely in his church, not to one man alone. Ephesians 4 7 says grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ's gift, and the Spirit apportions to each one individually as he wills, 1 Corinthians 12 11. In the New Testament, many teachers and elders share in the ministry of the Word, and there is no single infallible interpreter. This became the foundation of the Reformation. Scripture is our highest authority. The church teaches, guards, and proclaims truth. But the church can err. Scripture cannot. Rome claimed a legislative authority to create dogma. But what the reformers insisted is that the church has a ministerial and declarative authority. It receives truth from God and then confesses it and teaches it, distributes it. And the church must confess the truth indeed. The church must speak it clearly, though, and through creeds, confessions, and catechism. So we're beginning to see that creeds and confessions were not a medieval invention. Christians were using them long before there was anything resembling modern Roman Catholicism. Catechetical instruction has roots in the earliest centuries of Christianity, likely the first century, certainly by the second. One of the earliest known Christian catechisms is the Dedecay from the early second century. Its full title is The Teaching of the Lord through the Twelve Apostles to the Nations. The Dedecay was roughly one-third the length of Mark's gospel, and it echoed the Sermon on the Mount and the Gospel of Matthew. The D decay taught new converts or those preparing for conversion, Christian ethics and love for God and neighbor, prayer and fasting, how baptism should be administered, daily Christian living. And again, this is centuries before the Roman Catholic system emerges as we know it today. So historically, catechisms and confessions are not Roman Catholic distinctives, they are Christian practices. Now, before we move into the biblical material of catechisms and confessions, let me reference from the scholar Carl Truman in his what I think is an excellent book, The Creole Imperative, where at the beginning of his book he gives us three important foundations, three assumptions that must be true if creeds and confessions are going to matter in healthy church life and for that matter in our own personal walks of faith. The first assumption that Truman suggests is that the past is important and has things of positive relevance to teach us. So we cannot take creeds seriously unless we believe Christians before us had wisdom worth preserving. If we think the past is irrelevant or that modern people understand Christianity better than the early church, creeds will certainly feel unnecessary and irrelevant. But if the Holy Spirit has been work for 2,000 years, and we know even further back than that, then Christians in the past have gifts we need today. The second assumption that Truman suggests is that language must be an appropriate vehicle for the stable transmission of truth across time and geographical space. In other words, creeds use words to teach truth. That means we must believe words have meaning, that language can communicate truth clearly and reliably. If we believe words are too slippery or everyone has their own private interpretation, then creeds and catechisms become impossible. But if God speaks, and if truth can be expressed in human language, then creeds are not only possible, they're essential. Truman's third assumption is there must be a body or institution that can authoritatively compose and enforce creeds and confessions. This body or institution, Truman says, is the church. And so creeds are not private journals, they are church documents. Christ gave the church authority to teach sound doctrine and protect the truth. If you reject all institutions or think all authority is automatically corrupt, then creeds, of course, lose their purpose. But if Christ established the church as the pillar and buttress of the truth, 1 Timothy 3.15, then the church has the responsibility to confess the truth publicly and clearly. Now these three assumptions, trusting the past, trusting language, and trusting Christ's church, prepare us for the most important truth of all, and that is creeds and confessions are not just ancient or historical, they are biblical. Creeds are not merely traditional or historical, they are scriptural. God Himself placed creeds inside the Bible as short, authoritative summaries of the faith for his people to confess, memorize, recite, and obey. Let's look at a few of them. Of course, the one of the most popular in the Old Testament is the Shema. In Deuteronomy 6, 4 through 5, hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. That's a creed. It's short, it certainly is authoritative. And it identifies the church in Israel. Of course, in the New Testament, this will be expanded upon in the light of Christ. Romans 1, 3 through 4 is a summary of Christ's person and work concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh, and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness. By his resurrection from the dead, Christ is our Lord. Or how about 1 Corinthians 15, 3 through 4? For I delivered to you of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures. Or 1 John 4 2. By this you know that the Spirit of God, every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is from God. We can look at Philippians 2 6 through 11, which is widely believed to be an early Christian hymn, which begins, 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 by being born in the likeness of men. The poetic structure of Philippians 2, 6 through 11 suggests it was sung in worship or used in baptismal services. We could look at more New Testament scriptures, Matthew 28, 19, the come to be known as the Great Commission, or the the benediction of 2 Corinthians 13, 14, or 1 Timothy 1 15, the saying is trustworthy and deserving of all the full acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the foremost. These and many more are creed-like statements embedded in the life of the early church. Now, why does this all matter? When someone says your church uses creeds, that sounds Catholic. The answer to that statement is simple. Creeds did not begin with Rome. Creeds began with Moses, confirmed by Jesus, expanded by the apostles, used by the early church, and then we see sharpened by the reformers. Those creeds helped the church obey God's command to hold fast the pattern of sound words, 2 Timothy 1 13, and to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints, Jude 3. This is why the church needs creeds. This is why we should learn to love creeds. It's why creeds matter. So as you hear the Apostles' Creed or the Nicene Creed read in worship, or you're working through a catechism with your children, or as your church publicly confesses its faith, you're not drifting towards Roman Catholicism. You are standing with the church under age, Israel, with the apostles, with the early church, with the reformers saying together, this is what we believe, this is what Scripture teaches, this is the faith once for all delivered to the saints. Thank you for joining me on Catechizing Conversations. If this episode has helped you think more clearly, or at least begin to think about studying this further about creeds and confessions, consider sharing it with someone who may be unsure about these things, or use it as a your own springboard for conversation with others in your church or in your own personal study. Until next time, may the Lord bless you as you grow in the knowledge and confession of his truth.