“Ours is not a creedal church,” I often hear. By that we mean that we don’t officially hold churches and their members to any of the historic statements of faith from the first few centuries of church history, such as The Apostles’ Creed (late 4^th C. AD), the Nicene Creed (early 4^th C. AD), the Athanasian Creed (5^th Century AD), or others.  Anabaptists have Confessions instead, like Schleitheim (1527) and Dordrecht (1632), and the Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective (1995) which are more attuned to the needs of the time and the context. While the creeds focus on what the faith is, Anabaptism and its confessions focus on what faith should look like in life. Unlike the Creeds, Confessions can be reviewed and renewed as the needs, the times and the context change.

One reason for that difference was the Anabaptist experience of corruption in and persecution by creedal churches (Roman Catholic and Protestant) in which one might recite the Creed for a minute during Sunday worship and then live violently and immorally the rest of the week. The creeds don’t even express any ethical content, leaving the door open for the kind of disconnect between belief and behavior, doctrine and discipleship, that Anabaptism has always sought to avoid and to overcome. When we look back on the ages when people were conquered, imprisoned, tortured, enslaved or killed with the blessing of some state church authorities, we might associate the creeds with imperialism, authoritarianism and oppression. Some would even blame the creeds themselves for the sordid history of Western conquest, colonialism, and oppression.

To take being “confessional” as being anti-creedal, however, goes way beyond where most of the first Anabaptist leaders, theologians and evangelists were. Anabaptism has been a diverse family of beliefs and character from the start. But the Anabaptist groups which survived, thrived and spread were those which hewed most closely to the ancient Christians creeds. With a few exceptions, their writings, sermons and histories typically display the language, the mindset and the assertions of the creeds on such matters as the Incarnation, the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, that “Christ died  for our sins…the resurrection of the dead, and the life everlasting,” and that “he shall come again to judge the living and the dead.”

They survived and thrived despite being a kind of Anabaptism that the creedal state churches found worth persecuting. They were threatened as much because of how much the Anabaptists shared with them in belief, as in how much they differed in their expression of it. Other Anabaptist groups, like the violent peasant revolutionaries of Munster, were un-creedal to the point of being anti-creedal, and so became obvious object lessons against themselves. The Spiritualist kind of Anabaptists were often so quietist, private, individualistic and isolationist that they posed no organized challenge to the state-church system. Creedal churches had plenty of such dissenters in their own ranks already, and didn’t mind them “defecting in place” as long as they remained separate, private and personal about it.

Our Anabaptists forbears were not about rejecting all previous 1500 years of church history, traditions and practices. Some, like Michael Sattler, were deeply formed by them, even while they weighed the accumulated traditions and practices of creedal church history against the Bible. Nor should we assume that they were only going “back to the Bible,” as though the previous 1500 years of theological reflection and development had never happened, did not matter, or had all been wrong. Like Luther, they wanted to trim the traditions and practices back from the tangled and over-grown thicket they had become, and which obscured the Bible and the Gospel. But the creeds were not readily considered as part of the dead wood and underbrush of church tradition that needed pruning. If anything, the creeds may have helped them in this process. For, at their best, the creeds not only derive from the Bible, they help interpret the Bible.

One commonly-held stereotype is that the creeds came down from gilded palaces and cathedrals as power plays by a self-promoting hierarchy eager only to cement its power over people whose faith and consciences would otherwise have been free. The creeds were consolidated within living memory of persecution, when Christians had to discern which faith, which Jesus, and which gospel were worth dying for. That may be one reason why the creeds don’t address conduct and church structure, as do our confessions. It’s not that the 5^th Century church cared only about belief and not about behavior. That distinction is more ours than theirs. It’s that Christians could be opposed and ridiculed for what they did (like adopting abandoned newborns), while they could be killed for who and what they confessed.

The Athanasian Creed strikes modern ears as most oppressive and offensive with words such as, “Which faith unless everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.” But that stern language was a push- back against the allegedly Christian emperors who advocated in the councils and the controversies over Christ’s nature for a less-than-divine Christ. The implications of an incarnate Servant-God for their own kind of power and leadership are not hard to discern. Bishop Athanasius was exiled five times for his insistence on the divinity of Christ.

Anabaptists rightly stress that the Spirit of God guides the interpretation of the Word of God through the People of God. We usually mean the local congregation, or perhaps a cluster of churches, like a conference. The creeds, however, contribute to our interpretive task the voice of believers from beyond our own time and culture. These other voices can open our mental, spiritual horizons even while they challenge the unstated, unconscious creeds by which we often interpret the world and the Bible as stringently as does the Athanasian Creed. One of those unconscious creeds holds that contemporary Western society (along with its churches) is automatically and inevitably progressing morally, spiritually and intellectually toward ever greater personal wisdom, freedom, and justice, along with our technological and medical progress, and that we are leading the way for the rest of the world. Therefore, the past has nothing to say to us.

That, and other unstated, subconscious creeds are all the more powerful for flying under our conscious mental radar. By contrast, a long-tested, hard-fought, high cost, carefully-worded, lived-out creed like the Apostles’ Creed consciously expresses a worldview that we can choose, or not. It also exposes and illuminates other creeds and counter-creeds, whether acknowledged or assumed.

Creed and confession, belief and behavior, cannot help but affect and reinforce each other, for good or ill. Rather than pit creed against confession, and so pit belief against behavior, in false dichotomies, let’s be clear and honest about the creeds which lie behind and beneath our confessions, and which inspire our behavior and organization. As our post-Christian 21^st Century turns out to be more like the 1^st Century than the 20^th, we may again have to consider which faith is worth suffering, perhaps even dying, for. Anabaptism has much to contribute to the wider world church “for such a time as this.” Voices from outside our communion, our context, and our time, also have much to contribute to us, even those from the past, which still speak through the creeds. We may find out again why they were worth confessing, suffering and even dying for.