Have you been hearing as much as I have lately about "The Great Tradition?"  Besides sounding like some overwrought "Super-Secret Ancient Lost Mystery Symbol" from a Dan Brown novel, the Great Tradition also seems to have become something of a rallying point for those would like to see the theological differences between evangelicals and, well, pretty much anyone else, narrowed and submerged.

Simply put, the argument is that it is in the ancient creeds that we find the essence of what it means to be a Christian.  These creeds, it is said, are the ecumenical creeds, the universal creeds adopted by the church in its early years, and therefore they form a necessary and even sufficient ground of unity between Christians.  If you can affirm those ancient creeds, it's argued, then you have what is necessary to be counted and welcomed as a Christian.

I'll be curious to hear folks' thoughts on this, but my take on it is that while it's a nice thought, it finally doesn't work.  There are several reasons for this.  First, the creeds are only kind of ancient.  They are not as ancient as Scripture, and they themselves claimed only to be restating in systematic language what the Bible already taught.  Second, all the ancient creeds were written in response to specific heresies.  The Nicene Creed, for example, spends so much time on the idea that Jesus was "light from light, true God from true God" and all the rest because that's what was at issue when the creed was written.  It just doesn't deal in the same way with other truths.  Thus the AD325 version ends with the almost comically simplistic, "And we believe in the Holy Spirit."  Well, good!

That means that the creeds defined the full boundaries of orthodox Christianity only at the time they were written.  That does not mean, of course, that the creeds are not still useful to us; they are.  The ancient creeds defined several key truths of the Christian faith very well, and we'd be foolish not to heed them.  But we also have to remember that those creeds are not inspired, and they are unlike Scripture in that they do not contain everything we need for faith and godliness.  There were certain issues just as near to the heart of the gospel as those dealt with in the creeds, that were not challenged strongly until centuries later.  Take the doctrine of "justification by faith alone."  We understand that doctrine to lie at the very center of the gospel--salvation is wholly by virtue of Christ's life and death imputed to us, and not at all by virtue of anything in us.  To say otherwise is, at some level, to put one's faith in oneself rather than in Christ.  And yet that issue did not come to a critically sharp point until the 16th century (or perhaps slightly before).

The point is that there are people in all kinds of "Christian" traditions who could affirm the ancient creeds, and yet who we, as Protestants, would say have missed the biblical substance of the gospel.  If we throw away those distinctions and make our unity rest, not a little arbitrarily, on a few creeds from the 3rd and 4th centuries, I believe we will wind up throwing away the Reformation--and by extension, the gospel itself.