What Christians Believe
The Articles of Faith

Preservation

From the earliest days, the regular recitation, confession and memorization of the creeds and confessions in the church served a very, very important role, especially in societies like the first century world and beyond in early Christianity where the literacy rates were very, very low. And so very few people could read and even among those who could read, very few would ever own a Bible. And so the regular confessions of these creeds publicly in the worship service served again a very important role in providing parameters or what we might call the rule of faith or a ruled reading for what is a proper understanding of how the Scriptures are to be put together. [Dr. Jonathan Pennington]

As we mentioned when we spoke of rules of faith, the church is not infallible. And the Apostles' Creed is not encouraging us to believe whatever our local church teaches. Rather, it is simply affirming the fact that Christ appointed his church in part to protect and to proclaim the gospel and other truths.

Listen to the way Jude, the brother of Jesus, wrote about the church's mission in verses 3 and 4 of his epistle:

Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt I had to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints. For certain men … have secretly slipped in among you. They are godless men, who change the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord (Jude 3-4).

According to Jude, part of the church's job is to contend for the faith, to protect the truths and beliefs that have been entrusted to it against those who promote false teachings and practices.

Now, it should be obvious to most of us that there are many false teachings in various parts of the church today. And there are many sinful practices as well. Nevertheless, God has never withdrawn the church's assignment, or declared that any other group or individual should take over the job of protecting true doctrine. It is still the job of the church to protect the truth.

And the church is still trying to do its job. Sometimes we do it better than others. Some of our theology is faithful to Scripture, but other parts of it need to be improved, or even changed altogether. And this will always be the case. But for our purposes in this lesson, the point we want to make is this: We can't give up. We have to keep trying to preserve doctrine in the church. And if we abandon this call, we are denying a central article of the historic Christian faith: I believe in the church.

Now that we have looked at the articles of faith related to God and the church, we are ready to turn to our third category: the statements about salvation that are presented in the Apostles' Creed.