ABSTRACT
That Christianity is a tradition of faith and life which is ‘credal’ is a claim whichis easily demonstrated. It is, though, a claim which bears several distinct layers of meaning, and an understanding of its truth with respect to our period demands some careful disentangling of these. In this chapter we shall explore the senses in which early Christianity was ‘credal’, paying attention to the occasions for, and the nature and development of, emergent confessional formulae in the church. As we shall see, ‘creeds’ in the proper sense of fixed declaratory formulae ‘summarizing the essential articles of . . . religion and enjoying the sanction of ecclesiastical authority’ (Kelly 1972: 1) were born well into the period with which we are concerned, but their conception and gestation may be traced in ‘credal’ antecedents of various sorts reaching as far back as our sources for the history of Christianity will take us. Consideration of more developed credal forms will of necessity entail some account of those local and ecumenical councils of bishops and other clergy1 which, as a vital part of the process whereby Christian ‘doctrine’ or ‘dogma’ developed and came to be expressed and defined, were instrumental in the drafting and interpretation of confessional formulae of various sorts. Finally we shall inquire briefly into the pattern of doctrinal development in the early centuries, and consider some quite different views of the relationship between developed credal orthodoxy and its biblical roots.
