The Perennial Importance of Creeds for Christian Faith – Part 4
by Rick Plasterer, Juicy Ecumenism:
Three earlier articles dealt with the development and meaning of the Nicene/Constantinopolitan Creed, usually simply called the Nicene Creed, and the later explication of the dual divine and human natures of Christ by the Council of Chalcedon in A.D. 451, based on presentations at the Prince George’s Conference on Reformed Theology on Sept. 23-24. Panelists followed this with a discussion of the use and meaning of the creeds today, and a presentation on the uses, abuses, and limits of creeds by J.V. Fesko, who introduced the conference.
The abuse of Creeds
Fesko observed that “up until World War I, the most destructive conflict in all of world history was the Thirty Years’ War which was fought from 1618 to 1648 … essentially, there were eight million people that were killed in the Thirty Years’ War. One third of the pre-war German population perished.” This was, particularly in its beginning, a religious war between Protestants and Catholics. Similarly, the English Civil War, which killed a quarter of a million people, was fought near the end of the Thirty Years’ War between royalists and parliamentarians but was really a conflict between Anglicans and Puritans. While the doctrinal disagreements that these wars were fought over are important, they were not worthy of bloodshed, Fesko said.
One common modern reaction to the religious wars, however, has been to “throw out dogmas.” While this is wrong, it is sometimes “only the children and grandchildren” who can see the wrongs of the past. We must avoid bloodshed over religious conflict, Fesko insisted. He noted that John Locke witnessed the execution of King Charles I of England, and this may have moved him, along with the religious conflict of the day, to pen the Letter Concerning Toleration. Locke said that the individual, not the church, must decide what he or she believes.
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