What the Creeds Are and Why They’re Not Just Church Furniture

The Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed predate every denomination, every split, and every argument Christianity has ever had with itself. That’s worth something.

Scripture: Matthew 16:15–16; 1 Corinthians 15:3–5; 1 Timothy 3:16; 1 John 4:2

If you grew up in a liturgical church, you’ve said the creed hundreds of times. Maybe thousands. You know the words the way you know the words to songs you’ve heard since childhood — automatically, without thinking, in a kind of muscle memory that has nothing to do with attention.

That’s one of the things that makes the creeds easy to dismiss. Anything said that many times, in that tone of voice, in that context, starts to feel like wallpaper. Present but not noticed. Recited but not meant.

And if you grew up in a church that didn’t use creeds — many don’t — you may have learned to distrust them. Man-made documents. Institutional artifacts. Not the Bible, so why treat them like Scripture?

Both of those responses make sense. And both of them are missing something worth recovering.

What the creeds actually are

The creeds are not denominational documents. They are not the product of any single theological school or tradition. They predate Protestantism by more than a thousand years. They predate the split between Eastern and Western Christianity. They predate almost every argument Christianity has ever had with itself about almost anything.

The Nicene Creed was shaped by the first worldwide council of the Christian church, held at Nicaea in 325 — called to address whether Jesus was fully God or merely the highest of created beings. The Arian position said the Son was a divine creature, exalted but not eternal, not of the same essence as the Father. The council said otherwise, and the Nicene Creed is the result: a precise, hard-won statement that Christ is “of one substance with the Father.” Not similar. Not like. The same.

The Apostles’ Creed is older in its roots, though its present form came later. It grew out of the baptismal confessions of the early church — the statements new Christians made when they entered the water. “Do you believe in God the Father? Do you believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son? Do you believe in the Holy Spirit?” The creed is those questions compressed into a single statement.

Neither of these documents is Scripture. The church has always known that. But they were produced by people across a wide and diverse Christian community who were trying, very carefully, to say what Scripture says — particularly in moments when someone was saying something different and the difference mattered enormously.

Why they survived

There’s something worth pointing out: the creeds survived.

Not every document from the early church did. Not every council’s decisions held. Not every theological formula made it across the centuries. The creeds did — across East and West, across Catholic and Protestant, across cultures and centuries and wildly different expressions of the faith.

When Christians in ancient Antioch and medieval Florence and Reformation Wittenberg and contemporary Tokyo all recognize the same words as the floor of the faith, that convergence is worth taking seriously. Not because age is the same as truth. But because when something survives that long, across that much diversity, it usually means it’s pointing at something real.

The creeds are also strikingly minimal. They don’t resolve everything. They don’t tell you how to be baptized or what worship should look like or how to read Genesis or what happens at the Lord’s Table. They leave an enormous amount open. What they do is name the load-bearing walls — the things that, if removed, leave nothing standing.

The resurrection of Jesus. The full humanity and full deity of Christ. The triune God. The forgiveness of sins. The resurrection of the body. The life everlasting.

If you can say those things and mean them, you are standing on the same ground as Christians across twenty centuries and every culture on earth. The creeds don’t make you a member of a denomination. They make you a member of something much older and wider than any denomination.

Why this matters for people sorting through their faith

A lot of people in deconstruction throw out the creeds along with everything else — the institution failed them, everything the institution touched feels contaminated, and the creeds were part of the institution’s furniture.

That’s understandable. It’s also worth examining carefully, because the institution doesn’t own the creeds. It was only supposed to be keeping them.

The creeds existed before your denomination. They’ll exist after it. They weren’t produced by the specific community that hurt you. They were produced by people across a much wider and more diverse church who were trying to say, as clearly as they could, what they had received.

What a lot of people discover — when they engage the creeds directly rather than through the lens of the community that handed them — is that the words are still standing even when everything around them has fallen. The institution may have been corrupt. The tradition it was carrying may not have been.

There’s also something to be said for the creeds as an anchor in seasons of uncertainty. When the feeling of faith is gone, when prayer feels empty, when the elaborate theological system you were handed has collapsed — the creeds offer something minimal and historic. Not a feeling. Not an experience. A set of claims about what happened, carried forward by the church across centuries of use and argument and cost.

There are seasons when borrowed words are all you have. “I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting” said in a season of profound doubt isn’t dishonest. It’s the borrowed words of the whole church, carried on its behalf, until your own words return.

What the creeds don’t do

They don’t settle every question. They were never meant to.

The creeds say Jesus rose from the dead. They don’t tell you how to interpret every passage in Revelation. They confess the Trinity. They don’t resolve every dispute about baptism or communion or the end times or gender roles or political engagement. A huge amount of what Christians argue about most loudly sits well outside what the creeds address.

This is one of the most practically useful things about them: they help you tell the difference between the load-bearing walls and the wallpaper. If something isn’t in the creed and isn’t directly implied by what the creed confesses, it might still matter — but it doesn’t carry the same weight as what the creed names. Treating secondary questions with the intensity of primary ones is one of the most common and most damaging moves in Christian community. The creeds push back on that, quietly and persistently, just by existing.

A word on saying what you don’t fully understand

One more thing worth highlighting.

The creeds use language that is precise without being exhaustive. “Of one substance with the Father” — that phrase took years of argument to arrive at, and it’s not a phrase anyone found ready-made in the Bible. It was forged because the language already available kept being bent in directions that lost something essential.

That precision doesn’t mean you have to fully comprehend what you’re saying when you say it. “I believe in the resurrection of the body” contains mysteries no theologian has fully worked out. “I believe in the Holy Spirit” names something the church has understood only partially and argued about continuously.

Saying the creed isn’t claiming to have it all figured out. It’s standing in a long line of people who didn’t have it all figured out either, and who found that the words held them when their understanding ran out.

The creeds have been the borrowed words of the church for a very long time — and they hold.

---