June 26, 2000
Difference between creeds & confessions seen in application
___By Mark Wingfield
___Managing Editor
___What's the difference between a confession of faith and a creed?
___Plenty, say some Baptist historians. Nothing at all, say others.
___The question has gained nationwide attention since the Southern Baptist Convention adopted an updated version of its Baptist Faith & Message doctrinal statement June 14.
___Some critics see the statement moving from a loose outline of commonly held beliefs to a detailed description of what a person must affirm to remain a Southern Baptist in good standing. Others see the updated document as an explicit statement of doctrines needed to maintain fidelity in teaching and missions agencies of the SBC.
Baptists have debated creeds & confessions for centuries
___"Baptists have always been a confessional people and not a creedal people," said Leon McBeth, distinguished professor of church history at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. "A creed excludes, and a confession includes. A creed tells you what you must believe, and a confession affirms what you do believe."
___McBeth's view is countered by Greg Wills, assistant professor of church history at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
___"Throughout Baptist history, Baptists have used the terms 'creed,' 'confession of faith,' 'articles of faith,' 'summary of doctrines' and 'abstract of principles' synonymously," Wills said. "You find all those terms or phrases used to describe a summary of doctrine."
___Others draw a line down the middle to assert that the difference between a confession of faith and a creed has more to do with how a document is used than with what it's called.
___"A confession and a creed can be worded exactly the same way. The thing that determines whether it's a confession or a creed is how it's used," said Charles Deweese, director of the Southern Baptist Historical Society.
___"A confession is a document to which there is a voluntary response," he added. "A creed is a statement of belief which is in a sense forced on a body--there is an attempt to achieve a level of uniformity or conformity."
___Alan Lefever, director of the Texas Baptist Historical Collection, agreed there is a definite difference between a confession of faith and a creed and that the difference is in the application.
___"A confession is something you use to find common ground," he said. "A creed is something you use to force agreement or uniformity. That's the difference in a nutshell."
___Those who want to enforce a creed often fail to see the distinction between creeds and confessions, Lefever asserted. "If you think there's no difference between a confession and a creed, you're not going to treat them differently. When you're using a confession as a creed, you can't differentiate between the two."
___In modern terminology, "we can define a creed any way we want," said Wills, the Southern Seminary professor. "What is the Baptist Faith & Message? It is whatever we say it is as a denomination.
___"Many Baptist leaders say a creed has coercive authority but a confession of faith does not. It's true that the SBC does not coerce associations or state convention or individuals to agree with this confession of faith. The convention controls its own agencies."
___Given that understanding, the true issue is one of Baptist polity rather than of defining what is a creed and what is a confession of faith, Wills said. "What authority does a convention have? What authority does it have over its agencies?"
___While no creed or confession of faith can be used to require conformity among other autonomous Baptist bodies, any convention or association or church has the right to require its employees to conform to its doctrinal statement, Wills said.
___"There are some Southern Baptists, who tend to be in the more progressive wing, who oppose erecting any doctrinal standards as a hiring criterion in Southern Baptist agencies. On the one hand, that's naïve," he said. "They themselves would recognize certain doctrinal criteria. The real question is, 'How narrowly are we going to define our doctrinal standards?'"
___At this point, Deweese of the Southern Baptist Historical Society agrees with Wills.
___"An institution has the right to create its own confessional statement," he said, citing Southern Seminary's Abstract of Principles as an example. "As I understand it, each professor who has taught there from day one has signed that statement of faith. But then they have taken different positions on what the implications of that statement are for their ability to teach freely."
___And that is the point of departure, he explained.
___"What has happened in recent years is efforts to determine very precisely what position each professor must take on each doctrine. The issue here is academic freedom, which has suffered in serious ways."
___While academic institutions have the right to adopt statements of belief, trouble arises when those statements get narrower and narrower, Deweese said.
___"Is this statement of faith intended to be a general understanding of the doctrinal sentiment of this academic community, or is it intended to be a set of legalistic rules by which this institution is going to be run? That will determine the degree of academic freedom in that community."
___Deweese, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on church covenants, said he has made an extensive study of various Baptist confessions of faith from the 16th century to the present.
___"One of the lessons I have learned is that these confessions vary widely in their content from generation to generation," he explained. "That raises a flag of caution about taking any specific set of doctrine and hammering it down as though it has some canonical status.
___"They are literally man-made words that reflect the views of the person or persons who wrote it."
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