Creeds, Confessions, and Statements of Faith

Several brief expressions of widely accepted Christian beliefs are available on the Internet. The three mentioned below may be especially helpful in coming to understand what Christians consider central to their faith. One virtue of such formal statements are that they enable someone in search of a church more easily to compare various branches and traditions.

Some groups do not use these such documents, which outline basic Christian beliefs and practices, finding them unnecessary or insufficient. Other groups regularly use them in public and private worship. Still others accept and endorse traditional Christian documents but employ them only occasionally, perhaps reciting one or more when new members are admitted or during Eucharist or Holy Communion.

Even if a particular group does not use a formal document expressing beliefs and practices, those within it tend implicitly to hold to these essentials. Regardless of how precisely or imprecisely articulated, Christian bodies share common beliefs and engage in the same common practices such as baptism.

Theologians distinguish between a creed and a confession, defining creed as what all Christians believe and confession as embodying the essence of these creeds but going beyond them to express what some consider secondary. Some Christian traditions shy away from using the terms creed or confession, and instead publish Statements of Faith. Such statements, if they are Christian, are always consistent with the creeds.

As an example of how a creed and a confession differ, both Presbyterians and Lutherans accept the Nicene Creed without reservation. But Presbyterians embrace the Westminster Confession, while Lutherans do the same with the Augsburg Confession. All students at a seminary, for example, might pay little attention to creeds or confessions, yet strongly endorse the statements of their particular orders or denominations.

As early scholars wrote down concise and organized summaries of Christian beliefs, they paid close attention to what the New Testament indicates people close to Jesus said about him and what he said about himself. They captured these beliefs in three key documents, the Apostles,’ Nicene, and Chalcedonian creeds. All Christian, knowingly or unknowingly, subscribe to these creeds, sometimes along with decisions of later councils attended by church leaders, even if these Christians are unaware of their existence or historical significance.

It took centuries for the Christian church to develop the language and underlying concepts to express who precisely Jesus was. They faced the challenge of capturing in words how Jesus could be both human and divine, the only being in the universe to share God's nature: How is it that Jesus, while fully human, had the same essential nature as God? And how, then, could there be only one God? The creeds address these sorts of issues.