Should the creeds be revised?

As no-one took up the last question, I'll take a stab at it before we move on to ignoring the next topic.  Revision of creeds: this is huge question which really defies reduction to a blog, but here are some thoughts: 1. Creeds and confessions only have authority (a) as far as they summarise and are consistent with scripture and (b) as far as they are ecclesiastical documents.

2. They do have other useful aspects.  For example, they offer lines of continuity and connection with the past, something critical in an age when even a Trueman niece can profess ignorance of the identity of Robert Plant and consider 1999 `the olden days.'

3. Thus, they can, of course, be revised, when shown to be contrary to scripture, or when their language no longer has the same field of meaning as it once had.  A good example is the shift in the meaning of hypostasis between the Nicene Creed of 325 (when language oif three hypostases in God is anathematised as implying threee gods) and its affirmation at Constantinople in 381, after the work of Athanasius and company in refining the term to remove the ontological connotations.

The problems which need to be taken into account in any revision would seem to include at least the following:

1. The modern situation presents us with a very different ecclesiastical scene to that of the era of great creeds and confessions.  The church is now much more highly fragemented and no longer territorial; and, in the virtual age, this is compounded by the fact that anybody can now set himself up as the True Covenant Chalcedon Reformed Reconstructionist Church of God the Saviour in Christ and appear to be important, even though the denomination only includes him, his three wives, and their fifty children.  Thus, the confusion of the ecclesiastical context for creedal revision is problematic.

2. Parachurch organisations face even more difficulties.  If ACE decided to revise a creed or to make a new one, the obvious question is: who authorised you to do this?  ACE is not a church; and thus to engage in this action would be, frankly, the height of self-importance.  Further, parachurch organisations, by their very nature, need to be more ecumenical, particularly when we consider later confessional material (Westminster Standards, Three Forms of Unity etc) because important issues -- baptism, Lord's Supper -- are presupposed to be marginal to the enterprise at the outset.  So I'm happier with parachurch groups producing co-belligerence statements and not aspiring to revisind or even producing creeds and confessions.

3. The other problem is the `I want it all and I want it now' mentality of modern Western capitalist culture.  Even the Catholic Church has succumbed to this at points -- boy, it's a whole lot quicker to make saints these days than in the past.  Compare Edmund Campion to the fast-tracking of Mother Theresa. Creedal revision takes time and care -- today's scholarly consensus can easily crumble in the mid- to long-term.  Asked recently about whether certain aspects of the New Perspective required us to revise the creeds, my answer was -- `How can I tell?  Unless I have the consitution of Methuselah, I'll be dead before the long-term jury comes back on that one.'  Patience is the supreme virtue on these matters, but not something for which modern society has much time.