VI

      CREEDS AND DOCTRINE

      In christian teaching faith always has to do with persons. It is not a matter of wishful thinking; neither is it an amiable ability to swallow things whole. Faith means the capacity for confidence in a Person.

      Sometimes people say they have faith in a government. They do not really mean that. They mean they have faith in the persons who administer a government. You do not have faith in an automobile, or a fire extinguisher, or a vacuum cleaner. You have faith in the people who make such things and believe they will turn out a satisfactory product. Faith belongs to persons, not to things.

      It is important to keep this straight in our Christian minds. When we stand up in church and recite the Creed, we often say “that is my faith.” Whereupon someone draws the conclusion that the Christian faith consists in the proper recitation of an ancient formula. The Creed is not your faith—it is an expression of your faith. Your faith is in God, not in any combination of words, however venerable they may be. In a derivative sense you may speak of “the faith once delivered to the saints,” meaning thereby that body of doctrine which expresses the foundation upon which your faith rests. But your faith is always in a Person.

      Faith represents an attitude of life. It is far more than verbal assent to any proposition. The good old doctrine of justification by faith does not mean that you win your soul’s salvation by speaking up affirmatively in a loud voice. Your life may belie your words, in which case your statement of faith is vitiated. Justification by faith means that your hope of divine approval is justified by the fact that your life is definitely facing Christ in the path of Christian progress. You may declare it in words, but as Studdert Kennedy once put it, what you actually do is to “bet your life on God.”

      I tell you that I have faith in a friend, I believe in him, I trust him. You ask why. I say it is because I know his family. I know something of his training. I am familiar with what he has done, his previous record, his reputation, what he stands for and what other people think of him. All this is the basis of my faith in him.

      That is what the Church has done with our Lord Jesus Christ. At the outset the Church proclaimed her faith in Him. Why? Because, said the Church, we know His Heavenly Father, we know how Christ Himself was born into the world, how He lived a sinless life, how He did nothing but good, suffered, and died, and rose again. We know His personal representative, the Holy Spirit, and we have His matchless teachings supported by His peerless character. That is the Church’s creed—the expression of our Christian faith.

      Why is a creed necessary? Why must we have doctrine anyhow? May we not swing our lives toward God, fasten our faith on Him, and let it go at that without bothering our heads over formal statements as to what it all means? There are two answers to such questions. In the first place, our minds are an important part of us and we must use them. Because faith means an attitude of life, it covers all the elements of which we are made—will, instinct, feelings, reason. We must not only love God but we must think about Him, and if we are to think intelligently we must organize our thoughts. Christian doctrine is (as we have said before) organized thinking about God.

      But the Creeds themselves grow out of the second answer. Very early in Christian history certain persons began to twist the Gospel to suit their own ideas and strayed away from the apostolic tradition. Some of them said that Christ was divine but not really human. Others declared that He was a very fine man but not necessarily divine. Still others took a half-and-half position, selecting only those portions of the Gospel record which happened to fit their particular contentions. In order to protect the integrity of the Gospel the Church found it necessary to state the case in exact terms which could not be misconstrued. For example there was a queer idea propounded that our Lord did not really die—that being divine He could not die, and that the Crucifixion was not an actual event. In repudiation of any such extraordinary garbling of the facts and to clarify its own position, the Church wrote it into the Apostles’ Creed in such plain terms that it could never be misunderstood—He “was crucified, dead, and buried; He descended into hell.” Suppose the Church had been content merely with saying that Christ really was crucified. The distorters might have replied that they fully agreed, but that the Crucifixion did not bring death to Him as we all have to face it. Then anybody could have made it mean anything he liked and the reality of our Saviour’s death would have been held in serious question. So the Church bore down on it, stating it in four ways in order that no one might mix the meaning.

      You see, it is not sufficient to say, “I believe in God.” It makes a difference what kind of God you believe in. As the Archbishop of York has well said—“We tend to become like that which we worship.”¹ People who worship an indulgent deity, too good-natured ever to reprove them for wrong-doing, are sure to discount sin and become self-satisfied, self-centered, and self-righteous. Those who worship a vague spirit of Goodness soon become spiritually shallow, sentimental, and deficient in the sense of personal responsibility. On the other hand, those who may worship an exacting Judge gradually turn critical themselves, censorious and unsympathetic with the frailties of their neighbors. It can scarcely be otherwise. Cast your best thoughts and aspirations toward an unworthy object and the same unworthy characteristics will be stimulated in your own life. It is far from satisfying when people say they are religious. We want to know what kind of religion they have. Adherents of a bad religion are often excused on the ground that they are very much in earnest. The