Confessions and Creeds

                                                                                                                                                                     Vol. XXIII, No. 3, March 2010

      Churches established confessions by which they defined their mission and disciplined their membership. William Stokes wrote an essay on creeds that the Midland Association published in its two-hundredth anniversary history. Stokes, from Birmingham, argued that "it is not enough, therefore, that a man declares that he believes the Bible." Christian communities have not only a right but an obligation to ask in what sense he believes the Bible – as a Socinian, an Arian, or a Pelagian? Creeds not only have declared the faith of Christian communities but have served "to test and expose the character of dishonest men, who, under the plea of believers, entered the church to pollute its doctrine and to divide and scatter its members." Creeds then, as they should be now, were used against "the agents of the wicked one" who had crept into the church. "The orthodox creed was employed by the Church to correct the mischief by excluding those men."

[Tom Nettles, Ready for Reformation? (Nashville, Broadman & Holman, 2005) p. 18. William Stokes, “Essay on Creeds” in The History of the Midland Association of Baptist Churches from Its Rise in the Year 1655 to 1855 (London: H. Theobald, 1855) pp. 10-11, 13]