The creeds of Christendom have not originated in mere speculative curiosity and logical hair-splitting. They are statements of doctrine in which the attacked and imperiled church has sought to express the truth which constitutes her very life. Those who deride the early creeds have small conception of the intellectual acumen and the moral earnestness which went to the making of them. The creeds of the third and fourth centuries embody the results of controversies which exhausted the possibilities of heresy with regard to the Trinity and the person of Christ, and which set up bars against false doctrine to the end of time. Mahaffy: “What converted the world was not the example of Christ's life—it was the dogma of his death.” Coleridge: “He who does not withstand, has no standing ground of his own.” Mrs. Browning: “Entire intellectual toleration is the mark of those who believe nothing.” E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 360–362—“A doctrine is but a precept in the style of a proposition; and a precept is but a doctrine in the form of a command. … Theology is God's garden; its trees are trees of his planting; and ‘all the trees of the Lord are full of sap’ (Ps. 104:16).”
Bose, Ecumenical Councils: “A creed is not catholic because a council of many or of few bishops decreed it, but because it expresses the common conviction of entire generations of men and women who turned their understanding of the New Testament into those forms of words.” Dorner: “The creeds are the precipitate of the religious consciousness of mighty men and times.” Foster, Christ. Life and Theol., 162—“It ordinarily requires the shock of some great event to startle men into clear apprehension and crystallization of their substantial belief. Such a shock was given by the rough and coarse doctrine of Arius, upon which the conclusion arrived at in the Council of Nice followed as rapidly as in chilled water the crystals of ice will sometimes form when the containing vessel receives a blow.” Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 287—“The creeds were not explanations, but rather denials that the Arian and Gnostic explanations were sufficient, and declarations that they irremediably impoverished the idea of the Godhead. They insisted on preserving that idea in all its inexplicable fulness.”Denny, Studies in Theology, 192—“Pagan philosophies tried to capture the church for their own ends, and to turn it into a school. In self-defense the church was compelled to become somewhat of a school on its own account. It had to assert its facts; it had to define its ideas; it had to interpret in its own way those facts which men were misinterpreting.”
Professor Howard Osgood: “A creed is like a backbone. A man does not need to wear his backbone in front of him; but he must have a backbone, and a straight one, or he will be a flexible if not a humpbacked Christian.” Yet we must remember that creeds are credita, and not credenda; historical statements of what the church hasbelieved, not infallible prescriptions of what the church must believe. George Dana Boardman, The Church, 98—“Creeds are apt to become cages.” Schurman, Agnosticism, 151—“The creeds were meant to be defensive fortifications of religion; alas, that they should have sometimes turned their artillery against the citadel itself.”T. H. Green: “We are told that we must be loyal to the beliefs of the Fathers. Yes, but who knows what the Fathers believe now?” George A. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 60—“The assumption that the Holy Spirit is not concerned in the development of theological thought, nor manifest in the intellectual evolution of mankind, is the superlative heresy of our generation. … The metaphysics of Jesus are absolutely essential to his ethics. … If his thought is a dream, his endeavor for man is a delusion.”See Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, 1:8, 15, 16; Storrs, Div. Origin of Christianity, 121; Ian Maclaren (John Watson), Cure of Souls, 152; Frederick Harrison, in Fortnightly Rev., Jan. 1889.
(e) In the direct and indirect injunctions of Scripture. The Scripture urges upon us the thorough and comprehensive study of the truth (John 5:39, marg.—“Search the Scriptures”), the comparing and harmonizing of its different parts (1 Cor. 2:13—“comparing spiritual things with spiritual”), the gathering of all about the great central fact of revelation (Col. 1:27—“which is Christ in you, the hope of glory”), the preaching of it in its wholeness as well as in its due proportions (2 Tim. 4:2—“Preach the word”). The minister of the Gospel is called “a scribe who hath been made a disciple to the kingdom of heaven” (Mat. 13:52); the “pastors” of the churches are at the same time to be “teachers” (Eph. 4:11); the bishop must be “apt to teach” (1 Tim. 3:2), “handling aright the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15), “holding to the faithful word which is according to the teaching, that he may be able both to exhort in the sound doctrine and to convict the gainsayers” (Tit. 1:9).
As a means of instructing the church and of securing progress in his own understanding of Christian truth, it is well for the pastor to preach regularly each month a doctrinal sermon, and to expound in course the principal articles of the faith. The treatment of doctrine in these sermons should be simple enough to be comprehensible by intelligent youth; it should be made vivid and interesting by the help of brief illustrations; and at least one-third of each sermon should be devoted to the practical applications of the doctrine propounded. See Jonathan Edwards's sermon on the Importance of the Knowledge of Divine Truth, in Works, 4:1–15. The actual sermons of Edwards, however, are not models of doctrinal preaching for our generation. They are too scholastic in form, too metaphysical for substance; there is too little of Scripture and too little of illustration. The doctrinal preaching of the English Puritans in a similar manner addressed itself almost wholly to adults. The preaching of our Lord on the other hand was adapted also to children. No pastor should count himself faithful, who permits his young people to grow up without regular instruction from the pulpit in the whole circle of Christian doctrine. Shakespeare, K. Henry VI, 2nd part, 4:7—“Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.”
V. Relation of Theology to Religion.
Theology and religion are related to each other as effects, in different spheres, of the same cause. As theology is an effect produced in the sphere of systematic thought by the facts respecting God and the universe, so religion is an effect which these same facts produce in the sphere of individual and collective life. With regard to the term “religion”, notice:
1. Derivation.
(a) The derivation from religāre, “to bind back” (man to God), is negatived by the authority of Cicero and of the best modern etymologists; by the difficulty, on this hypothesis, of explaining such forms as religio, religens; and by the necessity, in that case, of presupposing a fuller knowledge of sin and redemption than was common to the ancient world.
(b) The more correct derivation is from relegĕre, “to go over again,” “carefully to ponder.” Its original meaning is therefore “reverent observance” (of duties due to the gods).
For advocacy of the derivation of religio, as meaning “binding duty,” from religāre, see Lange, Dogmatik, 1:185–196. This derivation was first proposed by Lactantius, Inst. Div., 4:28, a Christian writer. To meet the objection that the form religio seems derived from a verb of the third conjugation, Lange cites rebellio, from rebellāre, and optio, from optāre. But we reply that these verbs of the first conjugation, like many others, are probably derived from obsolete verbs of the third conjugation. For the derivation favored in the text, see Curtius, Griechische Etymologie, 5te Aufl., 364; Fick, Vergl. Wörterb. der indoger. Spr., 2:227; Vanicek, Gr.-Lat. Etym. Wörterb., 2:829; Andrews, Latin Lexicon, in voce; Nitzsch, System of Christ. Doctrine, 7; Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 75–77; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 1:6; Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:18; Menzies, History of Religion, 11; Max Müller, Natural Religion, lect. 2.