Creed or confession? Depends on how it’s used

While Baptists live by a strong sense of commitment — a confession of faith — the denomination’s members are far from being a creedal people.
   
“I would say in three senses, we are not (creedal people),” said Timothy George, dean of Samford University’s Beeson School of Divinity.
   
George said the first sense in which he believes Baptists are not a creedal people is that they do not believe any state or government should impose a set of beliefs on individual citizens.
   
“That’s another way of saying we believe in religious liberty,” George said. “We don’t believe the government has any legitimate authority to impose a set of religious beliefs on anybody.”
   
The question of the difference between a confession of faith and a creed has gained new attention since the Southern Baptist Convention adopted an updated version of its Baptist Faith and Message doctrinal statement June 14.
   
Revisions from the version of the statement adopted in 1963 are subtle, but some critics say the document now crosses an important line between representing a loose consensus of commonly held beliefs and a binding statement of what one must believe in order to be a Southern Baptist.
   
“Baptists have always been a confessional people and not a creedal people,” said Leon McBeth, distinguished professor of church history at Southwestern Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. “A creed excludes, and a confession includes. A creed tells you what you must believe, and a confession affirms what you do believe.”
   
However, Wayne Flynt, distinguished professor of history at Auburn University and member of First Baptist Church, Auburn, argues there is not much difference between a creed and confession of faith. He said the problem comes in the fact some people are alarmed by what they perceive as the meaning of a creed.
   
“If people believe that a word means something, it doesn’t matter what’s written in Webster’s dictionary,” Flynt said.
   
“I think confession and creed mean roughly the same thing, but that’s not the way they’re perceived,” Flynt said.
   
The second sense in which George said Baptists are not a creedal people can be seen in that the denomination does not believe any confession or statement of faith should be elevated to the same level as Scripture.
   
“We believe the Bible and the Bible alone is the only infallible, inherent, authoritative word of God for us and the rule of all faith and practice,” George said.
   
“So no confession is at the same level as the Bible,” George added.
   
A third aspect George points to is that Baptists do not believe any confession of faith is beyond revision.
   
“We always hold ourselves responsible to Scripture and that means we should and may revise our confessions of faith and change them from time to time,” George said. “So we’re not creedal in the sense that there’s no one set form of words to which we’re committed, other than the Bible itself.”
   
But George said his belief that Baptists are not a creedal people does not mean the denomination has no defining beliefs or convictions by which they live.
   
“Historically, Baptists have used confession and creed very much as synonymous,” George said.
   
Flynt said he believes most Baptists view a confession of faith as a “voluntary, nonbinding statement of one’s belief.” On the other hand, he thinks a creed is viewed as something as more compulsory and that often involves force.
   
“I think most Baptists feel real comfortable with (the term) confession of faith, and they feel real uneasy about creeds,” Flynt said.
   
Greg Wills, assistant professor of church history at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Ky., said Baptists ought to “get over” their aversion to the word creed.
   
“Throughout Baptist history, Baptists have used the terms ‘creed,’ ‘confession of faith,’ ‘articles of faith,’ ‘summary of doctrines’ and ‘abstract of principles’ synonymously,” said Wills, director of the seminary’s Center for the Study of the Southern Baptist Convention. “You find all those terms or phrases used to describe a summary of doctrine.”
   
Others, meanwhile, draw a middle line, asserting that the difference is not so much in the document itself but in how it is used.
   
“A confession and a creed can be worded exactly the same way. The thing that determines whether it’s a confession or a creed is how it’s used,” said Charles Deweese, executive director of the Southern Baptist Historical Society in Brentwood, Tenn.
   
“A confession is a document to which there is a voluntary response,” he added.
   
“A creed is a statement of belief which is in a sense forced on a body — there is an attempt to achieve a level of uniformity or conformity.”
    
Alan Lefever, director of the Texas Baptist Historical Collection, agreed the difference between a confession of faith and a creed is in the application.
   
“A confession is something you use to find common ground,” he said. “A creed is something you use to force agreement or uniformity. That’s the difference in a nutshell.”
   
Those who want to enforce a creed often fail to see the distinction between creeds and confessions, Lefever asserted.
   
“If you think there’s no difference between a confession and a creed, you’re not going to treat them differently,” Lefever said. “When you’re using a confession as a creed, you can’t differentiate between the two.”
   
Charles Deweese of the Southern Baptist Historical Society said, “One of the lessons I have learned is that these confessions vary widely in their content from generation to generation.”
   
“That raises a flag of caution about taking any specific set of doctrine and hammering it down as though it has some canonical status,” Deweese said.
   
“They are literally man-made words that reflect the views of the person or persons who wrote it,” he added.