To Contend for the Faith

By David F. Watson

Jude 3 weighs on me: “Beloved, while eagerly preparing to write to you about the salvation we share, I find it necessary to write and appeal to you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints.”

We are not just to teach the faith, but to contend for the faith – and not just any faith. This is the faith once for all entrusted to the saints. What does that mean? It’s another way of talking about the witness of the Apostles. This faith was passed on through Jesus to the Apostles, and through them to trustworthy witnesses across the centuries. Over time, guided by the Holy Spirit, the church would develop in its understanding of this faith. It would come to rely upon a canon of Scripture and particular summaries of the faith, such as the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed. These beliefs form a minimum standard for what we call Christian orthodoxy.

I know God doesn’t need me to defend his church or the faith it professes. I’m not that important. I have no illusions about the fact that God could raise up stones to witness to him. Yet the Scriptures teach us to contend for the faith, and not just in Jude 3. Peter warns, “Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence” (1 Peter 3:15-16).

The Apostle Paul writes, “Guard the good treasure entrusted to you, with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us” (2 Timothy 1:14). He goes on further, “In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I solemnly urge you: proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths” (2 Timothy 4:15).

As uncomfortable as it may be at times, the Bible admonishes us to contend for the apostolic faith. To be clear, the Bible doesn’t admonish us to be jerks. But Jesus turned over tables! will come the response. Fine, but he only did it once, and you’re not Jesus.

Perhaps some reflection is in order before the table-flipping commences. As we read earlier, Peter urges us to make our defense with gentleness and reverence. To proceed in this way isn’t a sign of weakness. You’re not a squish if you don’t crush people on Twitter when they make heretical statements. You’re not simply succumbing to the rules of polite society. You’re being obedient. What’s more, just on a practical level, I can’t think of anyone who has been brought to an acknowledgement of the truth by being browbeaten or humiliated in public.

Generally speaking, I try to get along with people and to maintain friendships across ideological and theological lines. I also, however, try to speak truthfully, even if I do so imperfectly. Truthful speech will sometimes make people angry.

When reflecting on “Christian orthodoxy” or the “Nicene-Chalcedonian” tradition, we could use the language of Vincent of Lerins and refer to it as the faith confessed “everywhere, always, and by all.” We could use William J. Abraham’s language of the “canonical tradition.” I think, however, it would be best to go with Thomas Oden’s term, the “consensual tradition” – a consensus that has emerged regarding how best to understand the witness of the Apostles.

To stand within the consensual tradition is to hold a set of remarkable claims. Among these are that the God of all creation became human in Jesus Christ, who lived a perfect life. Jesus died on the cross, and when he did, he took all of the gone-wrongness of creation (sin) upon himself, and he created a bridge between humankind and God. We call this “atonement.”

After three days, God raised Jesus bodily from the dead, and he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.

To adopt this account of God’s saving work is to enter into an entirely new understanding of life. It is to take on a relentlessly optimistic and enchanted worldview. When God’s story becomes our story, life takes on depths of meaning we could never have imagined before. God’s story is greater than anything we could ever have made up in the best moment of the best day of our lives.

It would be utterly preposterous if it weren’t true.

The Church Got It Right. I was a church kid. I was in the children’s choir. I went to Sunday school, vacation Bible school, and of course weekly worship. I participated in United Methodist Youth Fellowship. I did all the church things.

Many of our family discussions were around matters of faith. Growing up in the 70s and 80s in Texas, faith and football were really the only two things worth talking about. Hal Lindsey was doing his thing. Most people in my neck of the woods were pretty sure Jesus was coming back soon, and it would have something to do with Russia, China, and the bomb. In the meantime, though, the Cowboys were winning, and Texas Stadium had a hole in the roof so God could watch his favorite team play.

I look back on this time with gratitude. My childhood in the church taught me the faith. It gave me a sense of identity and provided me with moral direction (which I’ve followed in varying degrees over the years). What’s more, the churches I attended taught me a basically orthodox version of the faith. During worship, for example, we recited the Apostles’ Creed. Week after week, year after year, the recitation of the creed was formative. The hymns we sang, including the Doxology and the Gloria Patri, and the prayers we prayed shaped my faith in ways that I could only see in retrospect. Lex orandi lex credendi – as we worship, so we believe.

When I got older, I came to understand that the faith in which I was raised was essentially consistent with the Great Tradition of Christian faith. I had learned about a God who was Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I had learned that this God loved me, but that my sin kept me separated from him. I had learned that God sent his son, Jesus Christ, that Christ had died for our sins, and that after three days he rose from the dead. He will come again in judgment, and the faithful will reside with him forever, while the wicked will go into eternal punishment. Nothing fancy here – just basic Christianity.

In the wild and wooly world of late twentieth-century American theology, though, this narrative of salvation was consistently under fire. It reflected an ancient worldview, one we could not with integrity accept today, went the argument. It assumed a vision of God and divine action that we could no longer believe. It was mythological, superstitious, naïve, and patriarchal to boot. It was steeped in platonic philosophy. It mimicked themes of Greco-Roman mythology, such as the dying-and-rising God. It could not reckon with the problem of evil. It had been debunked by critical biblical scholarship. The formation of “orthodoxy” was the result of a power struggle in the early church. The dominant figures in the early church had suppressed “gospels” that did not fit their preferred narrative. High christologies were later developments. The preaching of the earliest Christians (the kerygma) had been obscured by mythological accounts of Jesus’ ministry and significance. You get the idea.

Reading John Dominic Crossan’s Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography was a watershed moment for me. Crossan, a brilliant scholar and writer, argued that the church’s whole story of Jesus is wrong – no incarnation, no virgin birth, no healings, no exorcisms, no atonement. To understand Jesus, he wrote, we have to hear his message as one of “radical egalitarianism.” Oh, and he wasn’t raised from the dead, either. He was probably thrown in a ditch and eaten by dogs. So there’s that.

I hadn’t read enough biblical scholarship at that time to understand that Crossan was one of a long line of scholars, from Friedrich Schleiermacher to David Friedrich Strauss to Albert Schweitzer to Rudolf Bultmann to Robert Funk, etc., who made some form of this argument. The church had gotten it wrong, each said, but I’m here to show you how to get it right.

Fiction of the early church? Crossan was my introduction into radically revisionist biblical scholarship and, holy crow, did he make an impression on me. He forced me to confront a question I really wished to ignore: was the basic story of salvation, the one taught to me from my childhood, the one taught across the centuries to countless souls, some of whom gave their lives for it, simply a fiction of the early church? Had the church gotten it wrong for all of these centuries? Had she perpetuated a false narrative? Was the Great Tradition of Christian faith a lie?

I’ve met people across the years who have answered that question affirmatively. Yes, they say, traditional Christianity’s story of salvation is a lie. Its understanding of Jesus is a lie. And what’s more, many people have known about these lies but have perpetuated them for their own gain. Take the pastor who has gone to seminary, learned about critical scholarship, perceived the historical problems with early Christianity, and then enters the pulpit week after week to preach things he knows are untrue. Some people understand the clergy of their upbringing this way, and have thus developed considerable resentment.

It took me years to sort through all of this. In some ways, I’m still sorting through it. I remember sitting in a group of scholars and grad students whom the late William “Billy” Abraham had called together to work on something he would name “Canonical Theism.”

Billy made what was, in the theological world I had come to inhabit, an audacious claim: “The church got it right.” What he meant was, the church’s story, what philosopher C. Stephen Evans calls the “incarnational narrative,” is a true story. God really did become incarnate in Jesus Christ. Jesus really was born of a virgin. He really lived a perfect life and died an atoning death. He really did rise from the dead – in body, not just as a dream or apparition. And he really will come again to judge the living and the dead.

In some contexts, this claim – that the church got it right – would be uncontroversial. In the context of mainline Protestantism I was living in, it was a shot across the bow of the liberal consensus. Theological liberalism assumes that, in many of its basic truth claims, the church got it wrong.

The main point of difference between theological liberalism and the consensual tradition (theological orthodoxy) is the concept of divine agency. To insist that the church got it right requires a strong sense of divine action and divine revelation. Whereas theological liberalism conceives of God as lacking the power or will to work directly in this world, theological orthodoxy – the consensual tradition – bases everything on the idea that God has acted powerfully and decisively for our salvation. To put it more simply: God does things. Scripture tells us what God has done for our salvation, and the consensual tradition helps us to understand the witness of Scripture.

I recognize, of course, that the church hasn’t gotten everything right. The church has erred in many ways across the centuries. But in its basic story of salvation, in its conception of God and his work through Jesus Christ, the church got it right. Our story is a true story. It would take a lot of study, prayer, worship, conversation with friends, and annoying my professors, but I would come to believe this.

We’re the ones asking the questions here. When I was an ordination candidate, I was invited to interview before the Board of Ordained Ministry for my commissioning (a half-step toward ordination). With the group discussing theology and doctrine, one of my interviewers leaned in and looked at me with a mix of suspicion and irritation. “You said in your paperwork that the Nicene Creed is the most important creed. Who gets to decide which creed is the most important?”

“Yeah,” another interviewer chimed in, gazing quizzically as if beholding a caveman trying to make fire. “Who gets to decide?”

I promise you my response was a genuine question of clarification. I knew I was on thin ice and didn’t want to sink to the bottom of the pond. “What are the other options?” I asked. Did he mean the Apostles’ Creed? The Athanasian Creed? The Creed of the United Church of Canada? Apollo Creed? I just needed more information before I answered the question.

No creedal formulation has exerted more influence or shaped more theological discourse than the Nicene Creed. It provided a response to one of the most venomous and stubborn heresies in the history of the church – Arianism. It has shaped the faith of untold multitudes across the centuries. It was strange to me that my interviewers, presumably knowledgeable in matters of history and theology, wouldn’t take for granted its importance.

“We’re the ones asking the questions here,” he responded.

So that was awkward. Nevertheless, for reasons hidden within the mysteries of God, I passed my interviews and I was commissioned in spite of my archaic belief in the centrality of the Nicene Creed.

Betraying indifference. That memory has stayed with me, and not just because of the “We’re asking the questions here” flex. His question about the Nicene Creed betrayed an indifference to sound doctrine that has plagued the mainline and is increasingly prevalent among evangelicals.

Why should one statement of faith be any more important than another? With the emergence of theological liberalism in the late eighteenth century, many in the West came to think of the faith as something they construct for themselves, according to their own experience and standards of reason, rather than something they inherit.

At one church I attended, the confirmation class was charged with writing its own creed. That seemed like a tall order. Why would we ask a group of kids to write something as important as a creed? I’ve raised kids. Heck, I was a kid. I was interested in things like playing Donkey Kong and shooting my bb gun and scoring a cherry Dr. Pepper at the Dairy Queen.

It took the church hundreds of years to hammer out its creeds. Shouldn’t we just teach these kids one of the perfectly good creeds we already have, such as the Apostles’ Creed or (dare I say it?) the Nicene Creed?

Theology is hard. Talking about God is tricky business. Yes, saving faith is simple: we confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, we receive baptism, and we enter into the church with its attendant beliefs and practices. When we begin to give expression to the mysteries of our faith, however, things become more complicated. To articulate our truth claims about the nature of God, Christ’s saving work, the work of the Holy Spirit, the resurrection of the body, and the nature of the church is a delicate and difficult undertaking.

When I was a seminary student, we had to write a “credo,” a thirty-page account of the content of the Christian witness. In many seminaries it’s a capstone project. It’s supposed to demonstrate what you’ve learned in seminary and your ability to integrate ideas from various disciplines. I studied hard in seminary. I got good grades. I really took my theological education seriously. And guess what? My credo was hot garbage.

My professor was a merciful soul and he didn’t expect his students to be Thomas Aquinas, but I look back on this document with some embarrassment. All copies were tragically and accidentally shredded, incinerated, and immersed in acid.

Since that time, I feel like I’ve learned enough over the past three decades to teach Scripture without misleading people terribly and to talk about God with some degree of coherence and truth. Nevertheless I always tell my students at least 30 percent of what I teach is wrong. I just don’t know which 30 percent it is. The more deeply I’ve dived into study, the more I realize how much I don’t know.

This is one reason I lean so heavily on the Christian tradition. I trust the church’s collective wisdom more than my own wisdom. I trust the spiritual experiences, the discernment, the intellect, the wrestling of the great cloud of witnesses more than I trust any of these in me. Christian theology consists of a long, rigorous, prayerful conversation across the ages and throughout the earth.

Despite efforts in every age to undermine the consensus that began to emerge in the time of the apostles, a core set of truth claims has persisted. The faith once and for all entrusted to the saints has survived imperial persecutions, Arian emperors, bad-faith bishops, schisms, and wars. It has survived heretics from Marcion to Spong. It has survived the old atheists and the New Atheists. It will survive postmodernity, and whatever comes next. The Great Tradition of Christian faith frees us from the bonds of “presentism” – the assumption that the beliefs and values of our current moment are necessarily superior to those of the past.

How could this faith have survived so many attempts to destroy it, both from outside and within? Why hasn’t Christianity simply collapsed under the weight of human sin? Why is it that, despite periods in which the church has capitulated to the spirit of the age, God continually calls us back to something more profound than a single generation can discern? Perhaps God has guided us across the ages because he loves us, and this gospel, the consensual tradition, the faith once delivered, teaches us how to be saved. That is God’s will for us, after all – to be saved, to be plucked out of the clutches of sin and death and receive new life, even into eternity.

The God who so desires our salvation hasn’t left us to our own devices to figure out how this might happen. The saving faith first delivered to the apostles has been entrusted to the saints, who have entrusted it to other saints, and so on, across the ages. Now it is our turn. The faith once delivered to the saints has been delivered to us. Generations to come will remember our witness, for better or worse.

David F. Watson is Lead Editor of Firebrand. He serves as Academic Dean and Professor of New Testament at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. A version of this essay was first published in his Substack, www.davidfwatson3.substack.com. It is republished by permission. Image: Symbolum Nicaeno-Constantinopolitanum. Icon depicting the First Council of Nicaea with text of the Nicean Creed in Greek. Public domain.