style="font-size:15px;"> THE DESCENT OF THE SYMBOLS
For the Church, the appeal of a creedal structure gains value. Rising fundamentalism and entrenching liberalism, both aiding and abetting post-Christianity, make the worth in black and white of a sound statement of faith necessary. Consider two reasons:
1
Since Christ may never be divided by schismatic works, that is, denominationalism, we need in the Church growing unity on the nature and authority of the Scriptures as well as on God (the Son, the Father, and the Holy Spirit), on the Kingdom, on the Church, and within the communion of saints, on covenantally manifested salvation, grace, commandments, sacraments, ecclesiastical authority, the coming of the Kingdom, the significance of life, as well as many other scriptural themes. A comprehensive and succinct symbol binds all of the Church to administer the glory of God.
Also, in the light of the biblical teachings, we may define major and minor anguishes of the ages—racial hatred, power politics, warring, ecological pollution, social brokenness, poverty, etc. The more all of the Lord Jesus identify sin and its results, the easier in grace intercontinental cooperation to alleviate sufferings.
Thus, we set the parameters for what the Church believes for all times and places, plus the consequences of failure to abide by all biblical teachings. At the same time, we may instruct new generations: This is Christianity. And to potential converts we may declare: This is the Faith to which Christ Jesus summons all. Simultaneously, we give critics, anti-Christs, an unambiguous target.
The criticality of a goal-intensifying standard of faith is impossible to overestimate.
2
With a confessional standard, preachers know themselves within boundaries, the biblical circle throughout which they may express freedom of exegesis and, clearly, beyond its perimeter they sink into swamps of heresy and apostasy. As long as ministers of the Word oppose and contradict the Scriptures in line with fundamentalism and liberalism, centrifugal forces of unbelief disrupt and distort the Church of Jesus Christ.
For obvious reasons, the value of a sound standard of faith reaches out into all the Church to overcome overrated values of post-Christianity.
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Since the arrival of the first Western European immigrants, North America proved to be an infertile continent for then current ecclesiastical confessions of faith, or standards of belief; steadily, symbols of the Church faded before the spurious processes of anti-creedalism. From the open-ended vision of the Anglicans/Episcopalians and Puritans with the Thirty-Nine Articles in hand and heart to twentieth-century confession-making, all such creedal statements fell into poor, rocky soil.
FIRST STUDY:ANTI-CONFESSING ACROSS NORTH AMERICA
In North America, from coast to coast, north-south/east-west, immigrant believers planted confessions in rocky ground, land without depth of soil and amidst proliferating thorns. To make matters worse, over the imported creedal plants swept searing winds of liberalism, conservatism, revivalism, fundamentalism, individualism, neo-orthodoxy, ecumenism, etc.; with varying degrees of intensity and violence, these dry winds sucked precious moisture out of the symbols struggling, indeed, eventually gasping for life. In effect, the history of confessions of faith consisted of defeated hopes and broken commitments. As more waves of immigrants landed,21 rightly expecting to live respective standards of belief, subsequent generations opted for anti-confessionalism. In fact, North American proved to be an impossible, if not hostile, landscape to statements of faith.
THE ARRIVAL OF FUNDAMENTAL CREEDS
Three fundamental creeds—the Apostles, the Nicene, and the Athanasian—recited or sung still reflect flickers of life. But who knows the historical circumstances and birthing pains of even one? These creeds survive in barren atmospheres. Beaten by winds of anti-confessionalism, death throes mark the slow demise of these global creedal statements. Decline into death characterizes even more four mighty sixteenth-century traditions—the Episcopalian/Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles, the Presbyterian Westminster Standards, the Lutheran Book of Concord, specifically the Augsburg Confession (the formidable Augustana), and the Reformed Forms of Unity.22
1
The Church of England shaped her Thirty-Nine Articles (1571) slowly during the sixteenth century, a work in content deeply indebted to Huldreich Zwingli, John Calvin, Martin Bucer (Butzer), and Henry Bullinger for basic theological orientation.23 In the 1610s Virginia-settling and in the 1750s Nova Scotia-dwelling Anglicans placed the Articles central to Episcopalianism, the life-force of the Church of England, “the English Church.”24
Demonstrating wane in commitment to the Thirty-Nine, the proprietors of the King’s Chapel in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1782 set aside certain trinitarian references in the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds to accommodate dissident scruples of a Harvard-trained minister.25 Thereafter the denomination as an entity omitted the Athanasian from its creedal foundation.26 This anti-confessionalism continued apace in the nineteenth century.
Much stabilized by the Anglican Book of Common Prayer,27 nevertheless, the decennial Lambeth Conference, “though it has no legislative power,”28 interpreted the Articles in the light of current questions, theological trends, and denominational pressures, exerting further commanding demands on the integrity of the Thirty-Nine. The Conferences’ Episcopal decrees, heavily influencing North American Episcopalianism, slowly surrendered to mortifying anti-confessionalism.
Moving fast forward, the 1963 Anglican Congress confronted modern issues. “The agenda covered the whole gamut of missionary and pastoral responsibilities. These had to be faced in the light of modern realities and recent theological findings. Confronting every church sensitive to world needs and ecumenical growth is the perennial question: Can the Christian message, as expounded by Christ and His Apostles, be adapted to current situations without thereby diluting the ‘kerygma’ or essential Christian truth to which all responsible churches are committed? This tension between an unalterable norm and a facile expediency always pervades church and council deliberations, not unlike a ghost at a banquet.”29 As poor in taste as the ghost-at-a-banquet analogy, so negligent the Anglican/Episcopalian Church in her North American provinces at reforming herself to the Scriptures, eviscerating the venerable lead of the Thirty-Nine Articles.
Again, accommodation to Bishop John A.T. Robinson’s 1963 Honest to God, his 1965 The New Reformation?, and his 1967 But That I Can’t Belief, etc., as well as Bishop John Spong’s 1991 Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism, 1992 Born of a Woman, 1998 Why Christianity Must Change or Die, etc., depreciated more the fundamental intent and relevance of the Thirty-Nine. Such latter-day attacks provisionally concluded any liveliness in the Anglicans’ original identification and central heritage, adding this once powerful confession to other valuable, now considered useless artifacts, stored indefinitely in the cavernous Episcopalian garage.
2
In the Westminster Assembly of Divines (1643–1647) the Presbyterians forged the Westminster Standards, the creedal structure also adopted by American Congregationalists, a denomination strong in the pre-Civil War New England area. Several mutations contemporized these Standards—the Congregationalists’ Savoy Confession (England, 1658), the Puritan’s Cambridge Platform (1648), and the Congregationalists’ Saybrook Platform (1708), etc. Whatever form or modest reconfiguration, the Standards across North America identified Presbyterianism, per Synod of Philadelphia, 1729.30 In fact, numerically, the Standards dominated over other creedal establishments, the Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed.31 More people believed these Standards than the Episcopalians the Thirty-Nine, the Lutherans the Book of Concord, and the Reformed the Forms of Unity.
Upon the first Great Awakening, often
