IF modern advertisers afflicted our eyes with designs and drawings dating from the cliff-dweller stage of art, the sale of their products would be somewhat curtailed. If the science text-books of our public schools, or even the notes on Cæsar's Commentaries, were phrased in sixteenth-century English, the cause of learning would be dangerously threatened. If our modern city fathers and good roads boosters composed the rules of the road and set up the danger sig nals in Anglo-Saxon, accidents would forthwith increase; he who ranespecially if he ran in a motor vehicle-could not read, and he who walked would have to carry a dictionary of the ancestral dialect along with him. We demand to be addrest in terms of our modern life and in the language whose phraseology is molded in the thought-forms of to-day; and we will neither learn, buy, nor take orders from the man or the institution that insists on using an unfamiliar terminology.

The day of creeds is no more past than the day of religion. But the day of all those creeds which were written before the coming of the evolutionary hypothesis and the methods of historical criticism has long since passed. For the one has changed our view of the world and the other has changed our view of the Bible. The most rabid opponents of evolution think every day in its terminology; and the most ultra-conservative bibliolaters will behold their children accepting the Bible as the record of an evolving religion and not as an inerrant and once-for-all revelation of the whole mind of God.

Yet the creeds of yestercentury remain.

This would be less of a tragedy if, as some people think, creeds had no

legitimate function to perform in the religious development of the race. Unfortunately they have. As almost every one ought to know, the earnest repetition of a purpose or a belief confirms the soul in such purpose or belief. If any one doubts this, let him attempt to throw aspersions on the Apostles' Creed in the presence of any acquaintance who from childhood has been been repeating this secondcentury test of orthodoxy every Sunday morning. He will discover that the venerable avowal will be strongly defended in its every part; even tho the defender be unable to give an intelligible definition of the word "catholic," or to tell what is meant by the phrase "descended into hell," he will declare it to be every word true.

The purpose of a creed, however, should not merely be to promote orthodoxy, but to deepen the spiritual dynamic of the Christian. A priori, it is not probable that creeds whose phraseology was devised merely as a correct statement of orthodoxy are so framed as to give maximum results in motivation for Christian living. But, that question aside, it is no more possible to secure the best religious results from the use of the king's English in the day of the ad-man's English than it is to secure the best advertising or pedagogical results. The universe of thought is changing hourly to conform to the transformations being wrought in the realms of literature, art, invention, and the sciences. And with every change of thought comes a change of language; subtly old words lose their power and are relegated to the fine print of the obsolete, or take on new and more vigorous meanings with the enrichment of their content; and new words are devised to give voice to concepts and acquisitions of knowledge never

before possest. To demand that the creeds keep their original phraseology is therefore to demand that they shall remain fossilized and static when they might be clothed in a language of life and power.

But this is the smallest part of our quarrel with the creeds. A creed has a twofold excuse for existence; it must fulfil a double requirement to justify its being given a place in church economy. It must express the acme of human knowledge concerning God and his will-the crystallization of the experience of the race with the Eternal and with eternal values; and it must give to these verities a mold which will make them vivid and dynamic in their impact upon the mind. To change the language of the creeds is merely a matter of hours and rhetoric, altho ecclesiastical consent would be difficult to secure even for this and that in spite of the fact that most denominational leaders are supposed to know something about how to produce a desired psychological effect by means of language.

But it is a much more serious fault that the creeds do not express the epitome of our knowledge of God and his will. If they do, then among all the bodies of Christendom the acquisitions of science, the broadening conception of man, the enrichment of Bible lore from a hundred scholarly sources, the experiences of 400 years of modern Christianity, with its worship and prayers and devotion, its contact with the Spirit of the living God, and its missionary achievements -all, have added not one jot or tittle to our store of moral and spiritual truth. This, were it true, would be a very shameful confession to make, and would be tantamount to saying that both the Holy Spirit and the spirit of prophecy had been far removed from the spiritual leaders and advisers of God's people.

Being formed in an age of con

troversy and heresy, most of the creeds contain some statements of whose truth we are not sure and whose truth or error is comparatively unimportant; and they omit some statements which (we are very sure) are true and have an important bearing upon Christian conduct. Being formed in an age when the universe was conceived in terms of an absolute monarchy, when creation was thought of as ended after six days of hard work and conceived as static forever after, and when the Bible was deemed to be the verbally inspired and inerrant Word of God, it is necessary that they should reflect all these views and that in so far as they do they should not represent modern knowledge. It is true that we still speak of God as a King, and of Christ as a Prince, but we do not think of them as such, and there is nothing in modern Christian experience which corresponds to such a belief concerning Deity. We believe in God as the Creator of the worlds, but we know that the creative process is still active and has never stopt since the moment that the first protoplasmic cell began to form an interior wall and make twins of itself. Theological students on emerging into the metamorphosis of ordination still profess to believe that the Bible is the Word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practise; but ninety-nine out of every one hundred of them define infallibility in such a way as to make the authors of the creeds turn in their graves; what they really believe is that the Bible contains the Word of God along with many errors in statistics and history. But, whereas the statistics and history were religiously all-important to the creedmakers, they are important to the modern Christian chiefly as exhibiting the progressive character of revelation-or, to phrase it differently, the evolutionary processes of religion.

And here we have the heart of the whole matter, in the creedal conception of the Bible. Because the Bible was believed to be in final form the ipssissima verba of all God would ever have to say to man-the canon being forever closed, and the primary work of the Holy Spirit being not to reveal new truth but to illumine the sacred page-the chief concern of the creedmakers was to reduce the teachings of the Bible to a metaphysical and theological harmony. And since religion was conceived as a static faith resting upon a once-for-all recorded revelation, the aim of the creeds of the past was to define the content of faith for purposes of orthodoxy. On this theory it would not only be unnecessary to alter the phraseology of the creeds or to expand their contents; it might plausibly be said to be dangerous to do, lest heresy should creep in. Historical criticism has changed all this. We are not concerned to reduce the teachings of the Bible to a theological and metaphysical harmony; for in the light of a historical study of the Bible documents we know that there is no possible legitimate way of deriving such a harmony from a collection of Scriptures, some of whose early writers conceive of God as a tribal deity, regard witches as possessing power over the spirits of the dead, and believe in the magic of sacred stones and other relics, while its later writers, recording the life and teaching, and reflecting the spirit of Jesus, believe in God as a Father of all mankind and reprove the users of magic and divination. We know to-day that the only way to get a Christian doctrine from the Bible is to derive it from the teachings and life of Jesus, interpreted and further clarified by the writings of the apostles and by the test of experiment, i.e., the experience of modern Christendom. Knowing the history of the documents, we no longer conceive of the Bible as a

canon of Scripture forever closed. This is not to say that any one ever expects to add further to the contents of the Bible; but surely historical criticism has strengthened the position of the Reformers in maintaining the supreme validity of Christian experience. As a matter of fact, each Christian makes his own canon, and by the same process as that by which the apocrypha and the pseudepigrapha were eliminated and the apostolic (together with some pseudoapostolic) writings included in the New Testament canon by the early Church; namely, by the process of usage. And as a further matter of fact, our usage or non-usage of Scripture passages as a means of religious inspiration and instruction is determined by their accord with our Christian experience. The creed of to-day, therefore, will not concern itself with trying to derive a theological system from the Bible, but will seek to present the fundamental precepts of our common Christian faith and experience in such a form that they will be readily grasped and remembered.

Moreover, in the light of historical criticism, we no longer think of the Christian religion as a static faith resting upon a once-for-all revelation (as did the creed-makers of the Reformation era), but rather as a social-spiritual current in history emanating from the person and life of Jesus Christ. Therefore, the creed for to-day will not be concerned to define the content of faith for purposes of orthodoxy. Rather it will seek to mark out the course by which that current of spiritual and social idealism may be made to flow through all the channels of modern life, so that men everywhere and in all the relations of their lives may partake of its living waters.

There is no objection to keeping a few copies of the various old creeds of Christendom bound in fine, rare

bindings, on the shelves of bibliophiles, historians, and research libraries. They belong to a dead era. It is proper that we should respect them as we do our other dead. But there is always danger in leaving the dead unburied. Putrefaction spreads disease, in the religious as well as the physiological realm.

Yet never was there an age which, for devotional and inspirational purposes, felt a greater need of a living creed than the age in which we now are. When the Church needs bread, why continue to offer it a stone? The leaders of the modern Church are intellectually and spiritually as capable of framing an acceptable creed as were the men who gathered in Heidelberg and at Westminster and elsewhere and issued those documents which now we prefer to see in the calf skin of preservation rather than the buckram of every-day usage. And, And, besides, we have the advantage of knowing these men of to-day, and we would not make the mistake of giving undue reverence to the product of their conferences.

In fact, we have such creeds, in partial form; creeds which breathe the spirit of Christ as witnessed in the common spiritual experience of Christendom and attempt to set forth the convictions of the most spiritual among us concerning the channels and means through which the modern Christian spirit must find expression. Why not replace the Apostles' Creed -which was not written by the apostles in our morning church services by a devout summary of the best convictions of the modern Church as exprest in the program of the Federal Council of Churches and the Interchurch World Movement? Or, at least, why not supplement the Apostles' Creed with some adequate expression of the missionary and evangelizing spirit of Christianity, that this spirit may sink into men's

the

souls and become a constant, burning energy of zeal within them?

But the Church to-day needs not one creed, but many-many creeds, all of which can be accepted by Protestantism as one; not creeds which mark distinctions, but creeds which unify; creeds, therefore, which are based upon a modern historical, and not a medieval allegorical, interpretation of the Bible and of the teaching of Jesus. The Church needs a devotional creed, a social creed, an international creed, a personal and consolatory creed; and the churches need community creeds. The public worship would be enriched by the possession of such a variety of creeds for use as occasion required, and for revision also as Christian experience might require. might require. And such a usage would strengthen both the power of the living Word upon the Christian community and the prestige and influence of the Church.

If such creeds were conceived in prayer, brought forth in the spirit of unity, and written with insight and power, they would be holier truth for to-day than the most sacred formulas of yesterday, and more powerful to touch men's hearts and actuate their lives. In them the Church would possess an instrument more potent for Christian unity than the creeds of yesterday were for unchristian schism; more sure as a norm of right living than they were as a norm of right teaching; and more near to the will of the Master than to a comprehensible definition of his person.

Have we any use for creeds? Yes, more use than ever before in the history of Christianity. But the creeds for which we have use must be built upon the historical interpretation of Scriptural truth, phrased in a modern language, and expressing the vital evangel to the modern world as witnessed in the experience of Christian leaders of every sect.

CREEDS are a constant challenge to the Christian. They gather up the confessions of those who have gone before and express the experience of each new generation of believers. But the riches of Christ are so inexhaustible and inexpressible that creeds are constantly changing. New knowledge of nature and grace reveals the inadequacy of previous confessions. The struggle goes on continuously between the champions of progress and those of tradition. The one side resents any effort to insist on a creed as a clamp upon intellectual and spiritual freedom. The other side views with alarm the dropping of any of the shibboleths of previous conflicts and victories. A state of equilibrium will never be found between the forces of action and reaction. The Nicene Creed was the expression of the majority against the Arians. A formal creed is always the result of conflict and of compromise. And yet it is idle for men to ridicule creeds per se. We may protest against the dead hand of the past upon present liberty of thought and action. But at bottom every man with convictions has his own creed. He may change his creed each year like his clothes with the seasons, but for the time being he speaks his mind and sets forth his creed.

He may grant the utmost freedom to others and yet he can hardly escape a feeling of superiority over those who do not occupy his level of thought and of faith. The problem to-day does not differ essentially from that in the first century, A. D. Christ, himself, challenges modern men as he did those of the first century. Traditionalists there were in plenty who had fixt opinions concerning all questions in theology and philosophy.

The Pharisees found no room for the teaching of Jesus in their theology. The Gnostics of Paul's day approached Christ from the standpoint of Persian and Greek philosophy and mysticism. They likewise refused to admit the Pauline interpretation of Christ and incorporated Christ into their philosophy as a subordinate

œon.

Jesus, himself, compelled men to take sides for or against him and to confess him or to deny him before man. That confession is the heart of the Christian creed. In each instance this personal confession is the expres sion of individual experience and conviction made in the face of opposition. John the Baptist says of Jesus at Bethany beyond Jordan, "I have seen, and have borne witness, that this is the son of God" (John 1:34). That is his creed about Christ. Andrew, after a day spent with Jesus, goes to Simon and says, "We have found the Messiah" (John 1:41). Philip goes to Nathaniel and affirms his faith: "We have found him of whom Moses is the law, and the prophets, did write, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph" (John 1:45). Nathaniel is at once provoked to skepticism by the confidence of Philip. But, after his brief experience with Jesus, Nathaniel himself exclaims to Jesus: "Rabbi, thou art the Son of God: thou art King of Israel" (John 1:49). Thus the first disciples made the good confession.

Mark reports Jesus as beginning his Galilean ministry with the words: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of heaven is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel" (Mark 1:15). Jesus had a "gospel" which he preached and this, as he sent them forth, he charged his disciples to