Primary Authors & Sources
CRED-101 builds its reading list from required primary and classical sources in apostolic symbols to modern protestant confessions and councils. The authors below are read as teachers across the centuries, not as entries in a bibliography. Philip Schaff serves as the great historian of creeds and councils, making confessional documents accessible in their historical context, notably in The Creeds of Christendom: The History of Creeds and The Creeds of Christendom: The Greek and Latin Creeds. Zacharias Ursinus contributes Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism, offering firsthand access to the arguments, methods, and assumptions that shaped this period of study.
Taken together, these readings form a coherent conversation across centuries — students encounter real arguments, not flattened summaries. Charles Hodge represents American Reformed scholarship at its most rigorous, integrating exegesis with confessional systematic theology, notably in A Commentary on the Confession of Faith. Thomas Pownall Boultbee contributes A Commentary on the Thirty-Nine Articles, offering firsthand access to the arguments, methods, and assumptions that shaped this period of study.
What You Will Study
Students trace the development of Christian creeds and confessions from the Apostles' Creed and Nicene-Constantinopolitan Symbol through Chalcedonian Christology, the Augsburg Confession, Westminster Standards, and modern evangelical statements. The course examines how councils, catechisms, and confessional documents summarized Scripture for worship, instruction, and ecclesial identity across centuries. Readings include primary confessional texts alongside historical narratives explaining the controversies that prompted each formulation. Students analyze the relationship between creedal subscription, liberty of conscience, and the sufficiency of Scripture in Reformed Protestantism. Particular attention falls on how the Florida Keys house church movement can honor confessional heritage while maintaining Scripture as the supreme rule of faith and practice.
Course Objectives
Objectives include identifying major ecumenical creeds and Protestant confessions, explaining the doctrinal issues each addressed, comparing Lutheran, Reformed, and evangelical confessional trajectories, and articulating a biblical rationale for confessional subscription in local church life. Students will evaluate claims that creeds replace Scripture or that confessions are unnecessary for gospel faithfulness. Written work requires summarizing confessional articles on Trinity, Christ, salvation, and church with exegetical support. The course cultivates confessional literacy so graduates can teach historic Christian doctrine with precision. Students will assess how subscription to the Westminster Confession or similar standards shapes preaching, discipline, and membership in Reformed congregations.
Ministry & Life Application
Confessional knowledge protects congregations from doctrinal drift and equips elders to teach the whole counsel of God with clarity inherited from tested generations. Ministers who know their confessional heritage preach with authority grounded in Scripture and the church's faithful witness. House church leaders gain vocabulary for explaining what their fellowship believes and why it matters for worship and discipleship. This course strengthens unity in truth among believers scattered across the Keys who need shared doctrinal anchors beyond individual interpretation. Pastoral ministry flourishes when leaders can recite, explain, and apply the creeds and confessions that have sustained Reformed churches through centuries of challenge.