My take away from the first two chapters of N. T. Wright’s How God became King: the creeds should not be professed where the gospels are not also read, and the other way around as well.
Wright starts with the hole in the creed. There’s nothing of what he calls “the middle part” there, what Jesus did and said between his birth and crucifixion. I suggested something similar in a post on the Apostles Creed some years ago. There are historical reasons for the structure of the creeds, and their authors could assume that the larger story was still being told.
The canonical gospels were, after all, read aloud in church. Christians said the Lord’s Prayer day by day, asking God to establish his kingdom on earth as in heaven. One might say that the creeds and the canon were intended to stand side by side, each interpreting the other, with the Lord’s Prayer as their obvious liturgical link. There was every reason to suppose that the faithful would understand the creeds as a framework within which these stories and this prayer brought everything into focus and made the sense they did. So all that material — the parables, the healings, the controversies with opponents, the great moral teaching, and above all the announcement of God’s kingdom — simply wasn’t mentioned in the official formulas. The gospels and their detailed teaching were taken for granted; they didn’t need to be referred to in the creeds as well.
Wright, N. T.. How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels
The consequences of affirming the ecumenical creeds or one of the Protestant confessions of faith apart from the gospels’ story of the kingdom are devastating to the church. Faith becomes assent to a certain set of ideas or principles instead of a way of life under the kingship of the creed’s triune God. And that, Wright says, is largely what happened.
But Wright also maintains that the bare gospels – especially taken selectively in self-serving bits and pieces – is equally devastating to the church and to the mission of God. The Enlightenment and its heirs have tended to give us a Jesus in which the creedal bits – the virgin birth, the saving death, the resurrection, ascension, and future coming in power – are either denied or pushed into the background. Even more significantly, the central claim of the gospel – that God in Christ has invaded the world and intends to rule over it – gets pushed aside in favor of some other cause.
Mitchell Lewis 