Creeds and Confessions in the New Testament

The other week I had the pleasure of having coffee (i.e. coke) with Keith Stanglin from Austin Graduate School of Theology where he kindly gave me a copy of their journal Christian Studies which had several nice pieces, including one by Jeffrey Peterson on “Confessions of Faith in the New Testament.” There Peterson briefly discusses texts like Acts 8.37, 1 Cor 15.3-5, 2 Cor 4.5, and 1 Jn 4.2-3 and how they represent short summaries of the faith.

While I’m out and about promoting What Christians Ought to Believe about the Apostles’ Creed, I thought I’d post Jeff’s conclusion about the importance of proto-creedal summaries in the New Testament:

It was through the use of these confessional summaries, which reminded the first converts to the gospel of the church’s fundamental convictions and obligations, that the apostles formed the earliest communities gathered in Jesus’ name for faithful living in a social environment that presented daily challenges to their decision to follow him. The social environment in which we are called to live out the faith has much in common with that of the first Christian converts and those who came after them before the reign of Constantine and his embrace of the Christian Church in the fourth century AD. The development of a “proto-creedal” tradition within the canon suggests that Christians who seek to be guided by the New Testament should give careful consideration to later credal formulations and the purposes for which the Christians of the second and later centuries employed them as they also sought to follow in the path marked out by Jesus and the apostles.

When you realize that such a statement is coming from a scholar in the Stone-Campbell tradition, which normally eschews creeds, then it is all the more remarkable!

But he’s right, proto-creeds are in the NT, because faith has propositional content, and faith as belief in God and Jesus matters.