Creeds

What does the Uniting Church believe? Some people think that we don’t have any “doctrine” (agreed teaching), but that is certainly not the case. The Uniting Church has a number of significant doctrinal documents that help us to understand who we are and who God is for us. The Basis of Union is perhaps the most significant of these documents. It is the theological statement that helped the Congregational, Methodist and Presbyterian churches to agree that they could unite.

The Basis of Union points to other important documents that we share with other Christians. For example, as part of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church, we are committed to the historical ecumenical creeds (the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds). Paragraph 9 of the Basis of Union says:

The Uniting Church enters into unity with the Church throughout the ages by its use of the confessions known as the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed. The Uniting Church receives these as authoritative statements of the Catholic Faith, framed in the language of their day and used by Christians in many days, to declare and to guard the right understanding of that faith. The Uniting Church commits its ministers and instructors to careful study of these creeds and to the discipline of interpreting their teaching in a later age. It commends to ministers and congregations their use for instruction in the faith, and their use in worship as acts of allegiance to the Holy Trinity.

These creeds provide a framework for doing theology in a Christian way. They provide an outline for the “system” of Christian theology by defining basic Christian beliefs and showing us how different theological topics are connected to each other (e.g. the relationships between the 3 “persons” of the Trinity). When we are thinking theologically about a new topic or situation, the “systematic” theology outline must be kept in mind. It is part of the “Tradition” that keeps us within the Christian tradition. Tradition is one of the 4 sources for doing Christian theology. (The other 3 sources are Scripture, Context and Reason; but I’ll talk about those another time.)