ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONFESSIONS 1 CON1-Q002 JANUARY 2005 CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY: CAPTION FIRST, INC. P.O. BOX 1924 LOMBARD, IL 60148 * * * * * This text is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communications Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. * * * * >> NICK: Thanks. That was helpful. Isn't it better to read the Bible directly, rather than through the lens of a creed or with the assistance of a confession? Doesn�t the adherence to creeds by a church suggest that the Bible is somehow? >> DR. CHARLES P. ARAND: Now, I'm certainly not going to disagree with the value and importance of everyone sitting down and reading the scriptures themselves. As I indicated earlier, the confessions and the creeds are not replacements for scripture. They are not to supplant the scriptures. Instead, they are guides, introductions. When I think about it, people read study Bibles, and very often the study Bible is an introduction with an outline highlighting the major topics and themes. Well, that's performing a similar function. I would also read concede it's possible that if someone had the time and sat down and read the scriptures from cover to cover and inwardly digested them over a fairly lengthy period of time and then I was to ask them, so, what�s the message of scripture? What are the major themes? What does it talk about? Their answers to those questions would end up being very similar, if not identical, at least in content, to the answers that we have in the creeds and confessions themselves. Now, the question regarding whether or not possessing or using creeds and confessions casts some doubt about the clarity of scriptures is a very good question. But I would probably throw it back at you, or turn it around at least, and argue just the opposite. The very fact that we have creeds and confessions is a terrific or an incredible indication of the clarity of scriptures themselves. Now, how or why is that? It is this: By having creeds and confessions, ecumenical creeds going back to the early church, the Lutheran Confessions back to the 16th century, we are saying as a church, more or less, the following: The message of the scriptures was clear in the year 325. It was clear in the year 451. It was clear in the year 1530, and it was clear in the year 1580. And it's clear today. In other words, the message has not changed. What the creeds said in 325 and set the Nicene Creed over against *Arius. It was clear then. It was clear in the 16th century. It is clear today, and it is clear tomorrow. Put it another way. By saying that we can't have creeds and confessions because biblical scholarship might yield new insights tomorrow, isn't that more of a declaration or ore of an indication that one doesn't think the scriptures are clear? That's almost to me saying, well, they're clear to me today, but new scholarship and new research might yield new insights tomorrow that, what overturn and overthrow our understanding or our reading of the scriptures today? That almost implies, then, the scriptures are somewhat unclear and dark. They need the light of new research or future research to bring them into clearer focus. But see by staying with the same creeds and Confessions, we�re saying, that message hasn't changed, and it's been clear for 2000 years. Now, I'm not against further research or scholarship by any means. After all, I teach at a seminary, and I love research. But I think we would argue that new research into the texts of scripture and into the background of scripture to the language of scripture, is not going to yield new insights that overthrow the major teachings of scripture. If anything, that research would simply shed further light on the teachings that are already clearly evident and presented in the scriptures, and, hence, reflected within the creeds and confessions.