In a world of endless opinions, the most radical thing the Church can do is remember the gospel it has received and confessed from the beginning. Not in a sentimental way-like nostalgia for “the good old days”-but with fidelity: holding on to what God has revealed, even when the cultural weather keeps changing. Because if we don’t remember, we end up morphing the historic faith for today’s crises instead of letting the historic faith address them.
That’s why creeds still matter. In a few dense lines, they gather the Bible’s big claims: who God is, who Jesus is, what the cross and resurrection mean, what the Spirit does, where history is going, and what it means to belong to the Church. Creeds are not “extra” words added to the Bible; they are the Church’s practiced way of saying again what the Bible says most clearly and most centrally.
They also give ordinary believers something precious: a faith that can be shared. Much of modern spirituality turns inward, organised around personal experience, but Christianity has always been public. It is allegiance to a crucified-and-risen Lord, confessed with the Church and embodied in visible practices like baptism and the Lord’s Supper. The creed, then, is not mere tradition-talk. It is a set of words we can stand inside, especially when our own words wobble, so we can confess with God’s people what is true, even when we feel unsure.
This becomes even more urgent in today’s religiously plural society, where Jesus is easily placed into familiar categories. Some add Jesus to their existing framework, others dismiss him as foreign, and others reduce him to self-help morality.
The creed categorically refuses all of this.
When we confess, “God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth,”[1] we are saying God is not one force among many forces, not one deity among many deities, but the source and Lord of all reality. It also disrupts the religious marketplace instinct, where the divine is approached mainly as a means to an end. And when the creed insists on the concrete scandal of the gospel, that Jesus “suffered… was crucified… rose again… will come to judge,”[2] it blocks a softer, safer Jesus. Not merely a guru with good advice. Not merely a healer for our needs. Not merely a figure we can respect while leaving everything else untouched. The creed gives us the living Lord who acted in history and will complete history. That Christ cannot be added as a decorative layer. He demands worship.
Creeds also matter in contexts where public life pressures everyone to merge into a single story of cultural loyalty. In any society, faith can be pulled into ostracising identity battles or pushed into silenced silos. Abnegating these demands, the creed forms a different kind of citizen: someone who seeks the good of neighbours and the peace of the nation, but refuses to make it ultimate. To confess “the communion of saints” is to remember that the Church is a people stretched across languages, regions, and centuries, a community no party can own and no tribe can fully contain. It relativises every identity that tries to become absolute, and it keeps the Church from being drafted into someone else’s project.
All of this brings us back to the same question. Why do we still need to do the radical work of remembering the creeds? Because we still forget. We still drift. We still get discipled by fear, media, power, and the longing to fit in. The creeds dispel this threat by giving the Church a common spine, enabling it to remember together, speak clearly, and remain recognisably Christian amid every pressure to revise.
1[1] First Article of the Apostles’ Creed
2[2] Second Article of the Apostles’ Creed
