The Need for Creeds: Confessionalism in a Sea of Evanjellyfish

Modern evangelicalism often prides itself on being “Bible-only,” Spirit-led, and free from the “dead weight” of tradition. The result, too frequently, is a Christianity with the consistency of a jellyfish: soft, translucent, and carried wherever the cultural current happens to be flowing. Call it evanjellyfish-earnest, often sincere, but lacking the spine of clear doctrinal definition. Against this, the historic church has insisted on creeds and confessions. Not as rivals to Scripture, but as necessary instruments for remaining faithful to it.

Scripture Is Sufficient; Summaries Are Still Necessary

Sola Scriptura does not mean solo Scriptura in the sense of every believer reinventing the faith from scratch in isolation. The Bible itself contains confessional summaries. The Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4), the early Christological hymn in Philippians 2:5–11, the “mystery of godliness” in 1 Timothy 3:16, and the gospel summaries in 1 Corinthians 15:3–8 all function as concise, authoritative statements of what must be believed. The apostles expected churches to hold a shared “form of sound words” (2 Timothy 1:13) and to guard “the faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).

Creeds and confessions simply continue that pattern. They do not add to the canon; they distil it. When the church faced Arianism, it did not invent new revelation; it used the language of the Nicene Creed to say, with precision, what Scripture already taught about the Son’s relation to the Father. The same is true of the Chalcedonian Definition, the Athanasian Creed, and the great Reformation confessions. They are subordinate standards- normed by Scripture, never normative over it- yet they are not optional for churches that intend to remain recognisably Christian across generations.

The Problem of Formlessness

Without confessional boundaries, doctrine becomes a matter of personal preference or the latest conference buzzword. One generation’s “non-essential” becomes the next generation’s orthodoxy or heresy by slow drift. Seeker-sensitive pragmatism, therapeutic moralism, progressive revisions of sexual ethics, and prosperity teaching have all flourished in environments where the only required confession is a vague affirmation of “Jesus” and “the Bible.” The result is not greater freedom but greater vulnerability. A jellyfish has no skeleton; it cannot stand against pressure.

Confessional churches, by contrast, require officers and members to subscribe (with varying degrees of strictness) to a public standard. This creates accountability. A pastor cannot quietly redefine justification or the nature of God without it becoming obvious that he has departed from the confession he once vowed to uphold. The confession functions as a fence: it does not produce life, but it keeps the sheep from wandering into the same old ditches the church has already mapped.

Unity Without Uniformity, Clarity Without Novelty

Critics sometimes claim that creeds divide. In reality, they clarify the terms of unity. The early church used the rule of faith and the baptismal creeds precisely so that Christians scattered across the empire could recognise one another. The Reformation confessions did the same for churches emerging from medieval distortions. A shared confession allows real catholicity- unity in the essentials of the faith- while leaving room for secondary differences. The alternative is a lowest-common-denominator evangelicalism that eventually discovers it holds almost nothing in common.

Nor do confessions freeze theology. Healthy confessional traditions continue to study Scripture, write catechisms, and address new errors. What they refuse to do is treat every doctrinal question as permanently open or every innovation as automatically Spirit-led. The burden of proof rests on the one proposing change, not on the one defending the received summary of the faith.

Common Objections

“No creed but Christ” is itself a creed, and an inadequate one. It leaves undefined who Christ is, what He has done, and how sinners are united to Him. History shows that such minimalism rarely stays minimal for long; something always fills the vacuum.

Others worry that confessionalism produces dead orthodoxy. It can. Formal subscription without living faith is a real danger. But the remedy is not the abandonment of confessions; it is the recovery of confessional vitality- preaching, catechesis, and church discipline that take the standards seriously. Spineless Christianity has produced its own deadness: churches that cannot tell the difference between the gospel and inspirational self-help.

Still others insist that creeds are “man-made.” So is every sermon, every systematic theology textbook, and every contemporary worship song. The question is not whether humans summarise Scripture, but whether those summaries are accurate, tested, and publicly owned.

Recovering a Backbone

The need for creeds is not antiquarian nostalgia. It is the recognition that the church is always one generation from losing the gospel if it will not define and defend it. Confessionalism is not a guarantee of faithfulness- no human instrument is- but it is one of the ordinary means by which the church has historically resisted both heresy and cultural captivity.

In a sea of evanjellyfish, the churches that will still be recognisably Christian in fifty years are likely to be those that know what they believe, why they believe it, and are willing to say so in public, binding statements. Creeds do not save. Christ does. But churches that refuse to confess Him clearly often discover, too late, that they have been confessing something else entirely.

Suggested Resources:

Books

• Carl R. Trueman, Crisis of Confidence: Reclaiming the Historic Faith in a Culture Consumed with Individualism and Identity (Crossway, 2024 — revised & updated edition of The Creedal Imperative):
https://www.crossway.org/books/crisis-of-confidence-hcj/

• J. V. Fesko, The Need for Creeds Today: Confessional Faith in a Faithless Age (Baker Academic, 2020):
https://www.amazon.com/Need-Creeds-Today-Confessional-Faithless/dp/1540962598


• Donald Fairbairn & Ryan M. Reeves, The Story of Creeds and Confessions: Tracing the Development of the Christian Faith (Baker Academic, 2019):
https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9780801098161_the-story-of-creeds-and-confessions

• Chad Van Dixhoorn (ed.), Creeds, Confessions, and Catechisms: A Reader’s Edition (Crossway, 2022):
https://www.crossway.org/books/creeds-confessions-and-catechisms-cob

Videos & Audio

• J. V. Fesko, “No Creed but the Bible? What the Bible Says About Creeds” (Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology / Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUqzEscpvi4

• Carl R. Trueman, “No Creed but the Bible?”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8T_EGnoNvU

• Reformed Forum (Christ the Center), “Creeds and Confessions in the Contemporary Church” (interview with Carl Trueman):
https://reformedforum.org/podcasts/ctc248/