Why Do We Use Creeds and Confessions?

Dr. Daniel R. Hyde

(c) 2010, 2025

The story goes that a Dutch Reformed Christian once asked one of his nondenominational Christian friends the following question: “So, what is your church’s confession of faith?” The evangelical replied simply, “The Bible.” The Dutchman was a bit puzzled, so he said, “But the Bible is so big.”

This apocryphal story amusingly illustrates that while every Christian professes to believe the Bible, the real question is this: What does an individual Christian or a Christian church profess to believe the Bible teaches? After all, Christians of all sorts will readily swear allegiance to the Bible as the Word of God, but they may have vastly different understandings of such matters as how God created us, how God saves us, how the Holy Spirit brings gifts to the church, and how and when the Lord Jesus Christ will come again. 

Reformed churches like Oceanside United Reformed Church teach and confess the ancient Christian creeds and Reformed confessions because their tenets come straight from the Bible and Christians have believed them over the centuries. To be a Reformed church, then, is to be a biblical church—but also a confessional church. This means that what Reformed churches believe to be the foundational truths of God’s Holy Word are stated in public documents called creeds (Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian, as well as the Definition of Chalcedon), catechisms (Heidelberg), confessions (Belgic), and canons (Canons of Dort).

We believe the creeds and confessions are faithful expressions of what the Bible teaches and are used to guide their beliefs and practices.

“No Creed But Christ”

That Reformed churches are confessional is extremely important, because many churches and groups in our day say they are Christian and Protestant churches rooted in the Reformation. But while it may be true that a “family tree” could be traced from these churches back to the Reformation, they are not reformational churches because they are not confessional churches. In fact, these churches say something like, “We believe no creed but Christ,” or they believe that having creeds and confessions is nothing but a Roman Catholic practice. Yet even these “just the Bible” churches have “statements of faith.”

Despite claims that the creeds and confessions are unbiblical, that they are merely Roman Catholic traditions, or that they stifle the Spirit of God in the life of God’s people, to state it succinctly, they are, in fact, biblical and beneficial.

Biblical

First, creeds and confessions are biblical.

This is illustrated by the fact that the Old Testament people of God confessed their faith every morning and evening with the words of Deuteronomy 6:4, the basic confession of the Old Testament: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God: the Lord is one.” We also learn that the Israelites confessed their faith in this one God when they publicly worshiped Him at the tabernacle and temple in response to His blessings of salvation (Deut. 26:1–11).

We also encounter many creeds and confessions throughout the New Testament, as the coming of the Son of God in human flesh prompted the people of God to give fuller expression to their beliefs. Peter confessed Jesus as “the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16). This was the basic creed of the New Testament. Paul went on to elaborate on this in places such as 1 Corinthians 15:3–4, where he summarized the faith of the church in this creed: “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures…he was buried…he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.” In the previously referenced Ephesians 4:4–6, Paul gave what many scholars believe to be a creed that was recited when a new convert was baptized: “There is one body and one Spirit…one hope…one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father.” One last example of a New Testament creed is 1 Timothy 3:16, where Paul wrote to the young pastor Timothy, saying,

“Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness:

He was manifested in the flesh,

vindicated by the Spirit,

seen by angels,

proclaimed among the nations,

believed on in the world,

taken up in glory.”

While these texts from the Old and the New Testament are not as extensive as the creeds that were written by the ancient church fathers or the confessions of the Reformation, they show that there was a basic body of belief that the people of God confessed as the truth. Based on this fact, the church fathers and Reformers expressed the truth of the Word in their contexts in order to make clear what they believed. Thus, creeds and confessions are not statements of stuffy “dead orthodox” churches or Roman Catholic churches. Instead, Christians throughout the millennia have written and recited creeds to express the faith that lived in their hearts. The Bible teaches us that, as the people of God, we have something to confess to the world. The slogan “No creed but Christ” actually hinders the church. Without something to confess, our faith is empty and meaningless to a world in need of Christ and the answers He gives to our lives.

Beneficial

Not only are creeds and confessions biblical, following the scriptural pattern of expressing core beliefs, they are beneficial in many ways.

According to the New Testament, the church is to be unified. Paul speaks of glorifying God “with one voice,” “standing firm in one spirit,” and “with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel” (Rom. 15:5–6; Phil. 1:27).

The church also needs a clear standard of truth. Because the church has ever existed amid false doctrines and philosophies, under the threat of being “tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine” (Eph. 4:14), it needs to be taught the essential truths of the Word of God; in that way, it can better “contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). For this reason, Paul preached “the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27) and spoke of Gentile Romans who were slaves to sin coming to be “obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed” (Rom. 6:17). Paul also wrote to Timothy that he should “follow the pattern of the sound words” (2 Tim. 1:13). The creeds and confessions of the church can help in carrying out all of these mandates by establishing a common confession of the faith.

The creeds and confessions are also beneficial because they provide a public standard for church discipline. They provide an objective standard to evaluate teaching and protect members from being excommunicated and shunned without any biblical steps of reconciliation simply because of personal differences or disagreements with the pastor.

They are also useful in witnessing to the truth of the Word of God to those outside the church. 

Conclusion

The creeds and confessions are the official public faith of the Reformed churches. To fully answer the question, “What is a Reformed church?” you must read our historical creeds and confessions. A simple summary cannot do full justice to the breadth of the Reformed faith. I wholeheartedly encourage you to read them to find out for yourself what a Reformed church is all about and to see why we use creeds and confessions.