THE SCRIPTURES AND CREEDS.
The following excerpt from the address of Dr. A. H. Quint, retiring moderator of the Congregational Triennial Convention, recently held in Syracuse, is worthy of consideration. After speaking of such great men as Luther, Calvin, and Wesley, he says:— Great men were these, mighty men, and their life has been infused into the Christian church, and their teachings have added to the great wealth of Christian thought. But we look above them, to their Lord and our Lord, and bow only to the name of Him who sitteth upon the throne forever and ever. It would be needless for us to tell the world that the word of God, expressed in the Sacred Scriptures, is to us authoritative. It is exclusively authoritative. Men have said, plainly by way of disparagement, that the church existed before the New Testament Scriptures, and gave us those Scriptures. But we recognize the fact that without those Scriptures we should not know that there was a church. We should not know even that there was a Christ. “Men spake from God, being moved by the Holy Ghost.” Here are the teachings of the unerring Christ, to whose slightest word, brought to the remembrance of the apostolic writers by the Holy Spirit, as Jesus himself promised should be done, we listen in profound submission. But, for this very reason, we find ourselves obliged to refuse submission to such as claim authority to impose upon us their own creeds and confessions of faith. Our creeds, when we must make them, are only our testimonies of belief. They are not statutes. We must hold to the truth; but we distinguish between the truth and the formulas in which that truth may be stated. It is a vital distinction. Even when the forms of statement of scriptural truths made by men who placed them in logical and orderly arrangement may satisfy us, we accept them because they seem to us to express facts, and not because there is any authority for requiring us to accept them. From them we continually recur to the Scriptures for the infallible word of God. The evangelical faith we find in various confessions, but we can not admit any one of these confessions to be authoritative or exclusive. It is easy to state the scriptural facts in simple language. But men have made great theological treatises—philosophical, metaphysical, inferential—which they have called confessions of faith. We study them, but Christ has given none of their authors commission to impose them upon his church. The best of these forms of statement are human, and therefore imperfect in their language. They are incomplete, because human experience can not cover the complete truth of God. They are sectional, because framed by single sections of the whole church. They are conceived in the spirit of a particular age, and, so far as thus conceived, may not be fitted to the age which follows. The truth in them is eternal; the outward expression of that truth is transitory. There is no logical ending to the search for authoritative and unchangeable creeds till we reach the Vatican. I have quoted from the words of John Robinson that more light is yet to break forth from the word of God. More than once has it been assumed as the significance of Robinson’s expression that the word of God itself was to be superseded. Nothing could more completely misrepresent that devout man. The light is come from the word of God. The word itself is to be luminous. The experience of the church is to understand it better from age to age. The great facts involved in redemption are to stand out more and more clearly. These are important principles; they speak out genuine Protestantism and Christianity. We stand with Congregationalists in the above utterances. There “is a vital distinction” between creeds and the word of God. The former are founded in the wisdom of men. They are men’s imperfect conception of God’s truth. They can not save, and there is no more power in them than in the men behind them. But most of the framers of creeds are dead, and that is the case with the creeds; they are simply dead, cold expressions of thought. Not so God’s word; it is vital, living, and, being living, it imparts life to all those who will receive it by faith, who come into harmony with its operative power, or inherent life. And this is loyalty to every part of God’s word.