We Believe

These creeds and catechisms are beautiful.

Just go read the first question and answer of the Heidelberg Catechism, and I challenge you to find more stunning sentences. These are true aids to help us be faithful disciples in the 21st century. You hear us often say at Ligonier that we want to help you know what you believe, why you believe it, how to live it, and how to share it. So what do you believe? What have Christians believed and confessed throughout the centuries? Well, today's conversation on Renewing Your Mind is to introduce you to a new volume from Ligonier Ministries, simply titled, We Believe. And it's a collection of historic creeds, catechisms, and confessions.

And we'd like to spread this volume far and wide, so it's available this week for your donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. I'm joined in the studio by Ligonier's President and CEO, Chris Larsen. Chris, I'm so thankful that Ligonier decided to publish this volume. I have a copy in my office here on campus.

I've also got another one at home. But what was behind Ligonier's decision to publish this collection of creeds, catechisms, and confessions? Thank you, Nathan.

Good to be with you today. At the beginning of Jude's epistle, he speaks of beginning to write on one subject and then switches gears. And he speaks to them of appealing that they would contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. And much of the reason why we created this resource is because many of the saints today do not know the faith that they are to contend for. And Dr. Sproul would often speak of it's not enough to simply defend the truth.

We have to contend for it. And these creeds and confessions and the catechisms are the deposit of truth that's been handed down from previous generations. And this responsibility is ours now to pass it down to the next generation. And so we so long to have this as an enduring testimony so that the next generation understands what has been received and that they can guard the deposit of the truth. This is what we stand for at Ligonier Ministries, to equip God's people to grow in their faith.

And they have to know the content of that faith. And these historic statements that have been passed down to us are treasures for us to pass along and to share more freely. And so that's a big motivation for why we wanted to do this project.

And I'll just mention another crucial reason. So much of what Ligonier is involved in today is serving not just here in these United States but truly around the world. And the global church needs these documents and they need them so that they themselves can pass down the faith. The church is growing in other parts of the world. But the challenge is discipleship and discipleship in the truth. And we know of no better teaching tool than these creeds and catechisms and confessions of the faith that have stood the test of time. And they are not scripture, but they are indeed helpful teaching aids to help us to understand the doctrine of the Bible.

I couldn't agree more, Chris. And as you know, for many years, I taught middle school Sunday school. And week in and week out, we walked through the Westminster Confession of Faith. And these confessions can be so helpful to ensure that we're studying, we're thinking, we're even confessing every area of theology and we're not getting stuck on our hobby horses.

Well, Chris, we titled this volume, We Believe. Who is the we in We Believe? The Christian faith is confessed individually, but it's also confessed corporately because when we come to Christ, we are made to be part of his body, the church. Ligonier Ministries is not the church. We are a community of Christians dedicated to furthering the mission entrusted to us by Dr. Sproul. And the we believe is both a statement about what Ligonier believes, the consensus of these documents, this enduring testimony to the truth.

But it's also something that we hope that individuals can use with friends, but also to see it used in family settings. And of course, to be able to see it used as congregations are gathering each Lord's Day, again, as a teaching tool and an aid to discipleship. I mentioned using one of these confessions in a Sunday school class, but why would a Christian choose to study one of these documents rather than simply studying the Bible? As has already been mentioned earlier, these documents are subordinate standards to the scriptures. The scriptures are our only rule for faith and practice. And so we want to be perfectly clear about the authority is God's word.

These documents are created by the church throughout history. And why it's important to just pick up one of these documents is because it's a lens into better understanding the scope of Christian truth. I love how Dr. Sproul helps us to understand the sweeping scope of theology. And he does that from Genesis to Revelation, his teaching series, Dust to Glory, where he goes book by book and theme by theme.

It's infused with the theology that we call confessional Christianity because he's tying together these larger themes that are derived from scripture. And so Dr. Sproul and the rest of our teachers that teach through Ligonier are, yes, using these tools, but really just as an aid to help people to better understand the Bible. And so we need these teachers that God has given to the church, and Ligonier is trying to raise up more teachers to be able to teach the truth.

And what is that truth? What is it that we are striving to help Christians contend for this day in our generation? It's hard to imagine better summaries than is in this volume, We Believe. Well, thank you, Chris, for being with us, and I'm glad you could be part of introducing our Renewing Your Mind listeners to this new resource. And I do believe that this volume will be a blessing to the church and, Lord willing, for generations to come.

If you'd like to own your own copy, you can request yours with a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. And I'll remind you again, and I'll share more details about this volume at the end of today's conversation. But now I'd like to welcome Dr. Stephen Nichols, who serves as Ligonier's chief academic officer. He's also the president at Reformation Bible College and is the host of the popular podcast, Five Minutes in Church History.

Dr. Nichols, it's good to have you with us. Can we go back to the beginning? What is a creed, a catechism, a confession of faith? Well, Nathan, the creeds began in the early church, but in the early church, the bishops and those that gathered at the councils saw themselves as actually carrying on a tradition that they saw in the pages of Scripture itself. And one of these places is 1 Timothy 3.16, and here Paul pulls together a variety of phrases that are related to the incarnate life of Christ, and it's given in a way that's very memorable.

There's actually a rhythm to the Greek text here and a rhythm to the way Paul presents it, and the idea is that this is a helpful summary that actually can be memorized. And some scholars think that Paul might even be quoting a creed that was already circulating in the early church itself, but even just something as simple as Jesus Christ is Lord is a creed, and we see that proclaimed in Scripture. So the first creed we bump into is the Apostles' Creed, and the form we have here comes to us from later centuries, but it has its roots back in the second century of what are called the early bishops' creeds. And these were creeds that were put together for people who wanted to join the church, and it was a way of giving them a summary of beliefs. And it was very easy to memorize the Apostles' Creed.

It just has a nice rhythm to it, and it becomes a gateway for us to understand all of Scripture. Then we move into the creeds from the councils, the Nicene, the Chalcedonian, and these are dealing with heresies that had crept into the church and were very disruptive to the church and were proclaiming a false gospel. And so the church responded by setting up what become the boundary markers for orthodox faith.

So that's where this book begins. It begins right in those early centuries with these creeds that are very formative and foundational for us. For Christians who might be less familiar with the idea of a confession, a catechism, a creed, how have they been used throughout history in the life of the church? Yeah, so these creeds, and then especially in the Reformation era, we have the confessions and catechisms, are a way of getting at the whole counsel of God. This was what Chris was talking about, helping us understand the breadth of biblical teaching and, as you mentioned, not just having our hobby horses. So these have become teaching tools in the church. Catechisms are instructional documents by their very nature. They're intended to teach children doctrine. The confessions are used in ministerial training. The confessions are in the traditions that have these confessions.

Ministers who desire to serve in those denominations need to affirm those confessional standards, and they're also used, as you mentioned, in Sunday school classes and just for laity, to be able to understand doctrine and to be able to grasp the whole counsel of God and then to live out that theology in our lives. You serve as president at Reformation Bible College here on the campus. Do you think a resource like this, this volume, will be helpful for students? Oh, absolutely. This is going to be a textbook at RBC. In fact, I hope this becomes a textbook at many colleges and seminaries. And not only students at RBC need this, but as Dr. Sproul would tell us, we're all students. So I really think this is a real gift, this volume. And I think for folks who care about doctrine and want to know doctrine because they know that that means that will deepen their knowledge of who God is and understanding of what he's doing, this book is invaluable.

What some of our listeners might not realize, Dr. Nichols, is that R.C. Sproul's first book was actually on a creed. That's right. It was called The Symbol, and credo is from, I believe, symbolum is the Latin that also represents creed, so these creeds are sometimes called symbol. It's on the Apostle's Creed.

Actually, this year is the 50th anniversary. It was published in 1973, his first book. You know, an interesting thing there, Nathan, at the end of the book he talks about, and he had to go back to the end of the 60s and 70s, it was a time of cultural turmoil in America. And he says, what's needed in this time of cultural crisis? Well, his answer is a confessional church, which is a way of saying a church that knows what it believes and, as has been said already, can defend it and contend for it. And here we are, right, 50 years later, we could say we are in a time of turmoil in culture and in the church, and what's the answer?

Well, same thing. It's a confessional church that's going to stand on God's Word, not compromise it, the changing of the times, and this is what the church needs and what our culture needs, to hear God's Word, the whole counsel of God, faithfully proclaimed. In this volume, we believe there are 20 creeds, catechisms, and confessions. Why are there so many that are being written throughout church history? Why isn't there just one statement of faith?

Yes. Well, the bulk of these come from the Reformation era, and one of the things we realized as we look at the Reformation is they were united in what they were against. They were against the Roman Catholic Church, and they were all four of the solas, every branch of the Reformation.

You can see the five solas central to their identity. But when it came to church polity, when it came to practices of the Lord's Supper, when it came to, you know, that interesting issue that there's no division over in the Reformed world, baptism, they had different views. And what these different confessions and catechisms do is represent those movements within the Reformation. So, of course, we start off with the Lutherans. And so we've got Luther's catechism in here, and we've got the Augsburg Confession. So those are the confessional statements of the early Lutheran branch of the Reformation. We have a number of things here from the Reformed movement. And so we've got Geneva as an epicenter.

But then it also migrates to Holland. And so we've got Dort in here. And the Dutch Reformed Church follow the so-called three forms of unity, which is the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Belgic Confession, and the Canons of Dort. So that represents that community. Then you go to the British Reformation, and we've got Anglicanism, which they have the 39 articles. You've got the Westminster Standards, which comes to be the statement for Presbyterianism.

But you also have the Scots Confession in here. But then you have the Congregationalists, or as they were also known in England, the Independents. So they're sort of a mixed group because they believe in infant baptism, but they also believe in what they call the particular church. We would today call it the local church.

So they get the Savoy Declaration. And then, of course, we do have our Baptist friends. So we have the Second London Baptist Confession of 1689. So some of this is here because we do have those different groups that do come from the Reformation and then represent what we see in the Reformed world today. All the while recognizing that when it comes to the doctrine of Scripture, the doctrine of God, and the doctrines of salvation, there is unity on those core doctrines among all of us in the Reformed community. So having 20 documents in this volume is not showing that there is disunity in the church as actually revealing unity? You pull on the threads through these creeds and catechisms and confessions, and you're going to see 85, 90 percent of continuity.

I like to tease my Baptist Reformed friends to tell them that London Baptist Confession really just plagiarized 98 percent of the Westminster standards, just, you know, adding their unique approach to polity and baptism, same with the Savoy Declaration. So sometimes those differences get enunciated and emphasized, especially in our sort of social media culture where can get pretty loud out there. And I think in the midst of all that, we do need to remember just how much we do have in common with each other. And when you think about the multiple number that's in here, we're also recognizing that Westminster, for instance, it's the shorter catechism, it's the larger catechism, and it's the confession. Those aren't three different approaches to theology or three different theologies.

Those are three different packages of all of the same thought. And so that does help get us to see that there is a great deal of unity within this Reformed community that we are a part of, we who believe. What would you say to someone that says, I don't need a creed, I don't need a confession, no creed but Christ? Which is actually a bit of a creed.

And the introductory pages to the volume, you know, raise that question. Again, when you look at the pages of Scripture, we are presented with propositions. It's not just faith. It's not some faith as an abstraction and as Kierkegaard would later say, leap in the dark.

It's faith in. And the biblical authors are very clear to present teaching. We read Paul so careful. This is his final letter.

He's a condemned man and he's soon going to make his final steps to be martyred. And what does he tell Timothy? Guard the deposit of faith. You've been entrusted, Timothy, as a faithful teacher and now you pass this faithful teaching on.

That's what we're talking about here. We're not substituting Scripture. We're not substituting an emphasis on a personal relationship with Christ when we talk about being creedal or being confessional. What we're talking about is being biblically faithful. And I just want to help folks who come out of a sort of broader evangelical world and see creeds and confessions as either stifling or as ritualistic or as nominal to see that, you know, abuses of the Apostles' Creed in, say, certain communions or traditions doesn't mean that we should jettison it. We need to see that there is value here for us and really these confessions and catechisms all serve at the end of the day to keep us biblically faithful. As I look through this table of contents, perhaps you could share with us the back story of perhaps a lesser known catechism in this case.

What about Luther's catechism? Oh, yes. So there is a great story there. So this is early. This is 1529. And, you know, 1517 is the 95 Theses, but really it's 1521 to 25 is where things are getting solidified. So this new Reformation movement is an absolute infant. And Luther's looking around and recognizes that this next generation has to be taught this truth. This truth is so precious and apostasy is such a real threat that we have to ensure.

In fact, he would say, if we don't if we don't train up the next generation, all of our efforts are for naught. So let's put together a catechism to teach children. He tasks his lieutenants with it and they start, you know, you can see him sitting there and they bring him in.

They're so proud of their drafts and they bring them to him and they're just too complicated or too moralistic. And so finally, Luther just realizes, I guess I'm just going to have to do this myself. So Luther writes the small catechism. But what I love about it is he used it. He taught it. He taught his own children it. But in the mornings, he would sort of open his home. You know, the Black Cloister was the former monastery, massive building there in Wittenberg.

He'd open his home and the neighborhood kids would come in. So before he'd go off and do his lectures at the university or preach at the Miriam Kirche or the Castle Church, he's teaching kids the catechism in his home. So I love that aspect of Luther. And it's such a beautiful reformation document that comes down to us. And all it is is Ten Commandments, the Apostles' Creed, and the Lord's Prayer.

Well, Dr. Nichols, someone that might be on the fence, unsure whether this would be helpful for them, what would you say to them? These are beautiful works of art, these documents. You know, for theologians, we have to be precise and faithful to the text. But when you think about the Bible, it's a beautiful piece of literature. These creeds and catechisms are beautiful. Just go read the first question and answer of the Heidelberg Catechism, and I challenge you to find more stunning sentences. The chapter in the Westminster Confession on Assurance.

You know, so many Christians, Nathan, we do the Always Ready conferences, and we get a lot of questions from kids about assurance for their faith. The paragraph on assurance in the Westminster Confession is beautiful. These are true aids to help us be faithful disciples in the 21st century. I wholeheartedly recommend getting this book, and not just putting it on the shelf, because it's beautiful to have on your shelf, but get this book and get into it, and let it get into your soul. Dr. Nichols, I'm grateful that you could be with us today, and I'm excited to see what the Lord might do through this volume. It's always good to be with you, Nathan, too.

Thanks so much. We've been speaking today about this new volume, We Believe, and it contains 20 creeds, catechisms, and confessions. You may be familiar with the first question and answer of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, What is the chief end of man? Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. You heard Dr. Nichols earlier reference the Heidelberg Catechism and that first question and answer. It is beautifully written.

I love it. So I'd like to read a portion of that answer to you now. The question is, What is your only comfort in life and death? That I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.

He is fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood and has set me free from all the power of the devil. Well, the Heidelberg Catechism, along with 19 other documents, are in this hardcover volume, We Believe. It's approaching 700 pages in length, and we'll send you a copy as our way of saying thank you for your donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org.

You can always call us too at 800 435 4343. In addition to getting a copy for yourself, this would make a wonderful gift for a Bible college or seminary student, or perhaps even for your pastor. So visit renewingyourmind.org today. One of the confessions in this volume is the Westminster Confession of Faith. And beginning tomorrow, we'll hear R.C. Sproul help us know what we believe as he teaches through portions of the Westminster Confession. That's tomorrow, here on Renewing Your Mind. .