A few years ago when I was
involved with co-leading a new church plant one of the first things I had to do
was to form a ‘statement of faith’ for the congregation. This was a novel
experience for me since as someone brought up a Baptist in Wales (I am still a
baptist, by the way) I never had to think about such a thing before because
Welsh Baptist churches never had a formal statement of beliefs. But as people
felt we needed to be well defined in our theology (and there’s nothing wrong
with that as long as it’s not set in stone) I set about the task and read many
such statements. In the end we settled on a version that was very close to the
Evangelical Alliance’s.
Non-biblical terminology
One thing I noticed as I
researched was how much churches depended on words and phrases that were
non-biblical to define their doctrines. Words such as: ‘trinity’, ‘born again
Christian’, ‘God-head’, ‘second person’, ‘hell’. It reminded me of my student
days when we were introduced to ‘homoousios’
– a Greek word that was used in the Nicene Creed to refer to Jesus sharing
God’s divine nature. Rarely heard – alas – within ordinary church contexts
these days it is still a word that defines Jesus and has deep pagan roots. Then
there is that curious muscular phrase about the Bible being ‘supreme authority’
over our lives – despite the much weaker wording of the Bible about itself
being ‘useful’ (2 Tim 3:16).
There is, of course, nothing
wrong with these words. They have been devised and used to help us understand a
little clearer what we believe in – something many feel is very necessary. It’s
just that when some insist that the Bible is sufficient in all things, it
clearly isn’t.
