creeds

In a previous meeting we had looked at the doctrine of the trinity, this led us on to looking at creeds and how the idea of the trinity developed and became fixed (to some extent) in the ancient creeds that we still say in church today.

We decided to follow on from this by looking at what is a modern example of a creed, and that is the Basis of faith of the Evangelical Alliance.

This had been revised in 2005, the previous version had been written in 1970. 

It was interesting both to look at the content of the latest statement but also to compare the two and think about what had caused the compilers to change their ideas.

There were many differences, not least in terms of language, the 1970 statement used language that was not even usual for it's time being very formal and legal. The 2005 version used far more ordinary language. The 2005 version was also more inclusive re. women and men, the 1970 version spoke entirely about 'man' and 'men'. The 2005 version was quite a bit longer and often, it seemed, more explicit. We thought that perhaps this was as some ideas had being challenged since the 1970 statement was drawn up. For example there was no mention of Jesus' virgin birth in the 1970 statement but in 2005 it was mentioned, is this because in the gap between these statements people had questioned the idea of the virgin birth? In addition to being more explicit it introduced ideas about how evangelical christians should act, ie. to have concern for creation, justice and love, the 1970 version was almost entirely concerned with what evangelicals believed (should believe?).

There was a feeling that as soon as you try and put belief into a statement like this you create problems of interpretation, that you are both forced to try and be very precise without ever actually being able to completely nail down a meaning.

Personally I think that by their very nature creeds & statements of faith have the effect of excluding certain people (those who cannot sign up for it) from the group that has produced it. They are about defining who is in and who is out, who is orthodox and who is not. Much like the issues we currently have in the Anglican Communion in which different groups find it impossible to accept that others believe different things about, for example, woman being bishops. 

Certainly there were some members of our group that would not have been able to sigh up for the whole of the Evangelical Alliance's Basis of Faith.

-----

Next meeting we'll be thinking about poverty, what is it and what can/should we do about it?