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Updated: January 4, 2025


In this discussion we have been careful to avoid the terms of formal and creedal orthodoxy. This is not because the present writer is out of sympathy with these terms, but because he is trying to keep to the main impression produced by the New Testament. The fundamental scriptural fact is that in Jesus the early believers saw God; they came to rest in God as revealed in Christ.

Through the ignorance and malice of men and through the wily activity of Satan, who creates divisions and offenses contrary to the doctrine of Christ, and is busy sowing tares among the wheat, there have arisen many church organizations, known by party names, differing from one another in their creedal statements, and warring upon each other.

Speaking simply as a journalist and a student of social and industrial conditions, I believe that to-day Japan needs nothing more than Christian missionaries men who are willing to forget dogma and tradition and creedal differences in emphasizing the fundamental teachings of Christ Himself, and who have education, sympathy, and vision to fit them for the stupendous task of helping mold a new and composite type of human civilization, a type which may ultimately make conquest of the whole Oriental half of our human race.

And he should understand that discipleship consists in conduct that conforms to His spirit. To make the test creedal is not only contrary to the intensely pragmatic character of childhood but inimical to the resistless spirit of inquiry and speculation which breaks out in reflective youth. Childhood needs a religion of deeds.

No matter how spiritual the movement at its beginning, when its leaders were not longing for church power but were earnestly preaching the Word of the Lord as it came unto them, as soon as the sect machinery was thoroughly organized and was set in motion the inevitable tendency has been to throw around the movement a wall of creedal and ecclesiastical exclusiveness which shut out other true people of God; and then began a process of crystalization which ever afterwards precluded the unfolding of new truth.

That this attitude is critically perilous to the integrity of the Christian movement will at once be obvious to any one whose own spiritual experience is centered in Christ. From the beginning until now the faith of Christian people has been primarily directed, not to a set of abstract principles, nor to a set of creedal definitions, but to a Person.

Even in days less democratic than ours this was abundantly true. It is the fashion to denounce some of the councils of the old church which shaped the creeds. It is often said that these creedal councils were moved by considerations of low-grade expediency.

He notices these gleams of light, but not understanding them, he proceeds to erect elaborate theological and creedal structures to account for them, the work of the Intellect, however, always lacking that "feeling" that the intuition itself possesses.

It is true they are not creedal, but his idea is that every act of life should be from a true and earnest spirit, and that this is the substance of all creeds; and strange to say to you, who believe that Associations like ours have a levelling effect, those who have their faiths fixed, say, "I think more of the symbols of my church than ever, since I came here."

Very early in Christian history the presence of conflicting heresies led the church to define its faith in creeds and then to regard these as final formulations of Christian doctrine, incapable of amendment or addition. Tertullian, about 204 A. D., spoke of the creedal standard of his day as "a rule of faith changeless and incapable of reformation."

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