20/11/2025
The slogan "No creed but Christ, no book but the Bible" (or variations like "No creed but the Bible" or the one being quoted: "No creeds but Christ, no tradition but Scripture") is very popular in Restorationist, Stone-Campbell Movement, and many low-church evangelical/Baptist circles.
It sounds very pious and biblical at first glance, but from a classic Reformed perspective it is self-defeating:
1. The slogan itself is an extra-biblical creed
Nowhere does Scripture say “have no creeds but Christ” or “reject all creeds and confessions.”
The moment you assert “No creeds but Christ” as a binding principle, you have just created a creed—a man-made summary of what you think Christianity requires. You are requiring people to subscribe to your creed about creeds.
Reformed theology points out the irony: the people who say “no creed but the Bible” always have a creed; they just refuse to write it down and examine it in the light of church history.
2. “Christ” in the slogan is not the biblical Christ but an interpreted Christ.
Saying “No creeds but Christ” assumes everyone already agrees on who Christ is.
But Arians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Oneness Pentecostals, and liberal Protestants all claim to follow “Christ” while denying the Trinity or the two natures of Christ.
The only way the church has ever been able to say “This is the real Christ, not a counterfeit” is by using extra-biblical language hammered out in the ecumenical creeds (Nicaea, Constantinople, Chalcedon).
So when someone says “No creeds but Christ,” the Reformed response is: “Which Christ? The one defined by the Nicene Creed, or the one defined by Arius, Joseph Smith, or your own private interpretation?”
3. Sola Scriptura never meant “no creeds” or “no subordinate standards”
The Reformers themselves vigorously affirmed sola scriptura, yet every single one of them wrote lengthy confessions and catechisms (Three Forms of Unity, Westminster Standards, Heidelberg Catechism, 39 Articles, etc.).
For the Reformers, sola scriptura meant:
- Scripture is the only infallible rule of faith and practice.
- Creeds, confessions, and church traditions are authoritative only insofar as they accurately summarize and apply Scripture.
They are useful, necessary, and binding on the conscience when adopted by the church, but always reformable by Scripture.
So the Reformed understanding is not “Scripture alone and nothing else,” but “Scripture alone is infallible; everything else (including our confessions) is subordinate and ministerial.”
4. Rejecting all creeds and confessions inevitably leads to theological chaos.
History proves this. Every group that has adopted “no creed but the Bible” as a formal principle has fractured into dozens or hundreds of denominations within a generation or two, because there is no agreed-upon way to settle disputes or define orthodoxy.
The Stone-Campbell Movement (“Christians only, but not the only Christians”) split into three major groups (Churches of Christ, Independent Christian Churches, and Disciples of Christ) in less than 100 years, despite starting with the explicit rejection of creeds.
Summary of the Reformed critique
The slogan “No creeds but Christ, no tradition but Scripture” defeats itself because:
- It is a creed that says you can’t have creeds.
- The “Christ” it appeals to can only be known with clarity through the very creeds it rejects.
- It misunderstands the historic Reformed doctrine of sola scriptura, which always used faithful confessions as a bulwark against heresy and division.
That is why classic Reformed theologians (and confessional Presbyterians, continental Reformed, etc.) regard the slogan not as more biblical, but as naïve, ahistorical, and ultimately self-contradictory.
