A Wroot Press reference

Doctrine

An annotated reference for the Great Christian Tradition and the Wesleyan Tradition.

The creed is the spine; each phrase is a door into translation history, controversy, interpretation across traditions, and pastoral use. Written for those who pray the creeds and want to know what they are praying. A companion to Difficult Passages.

Ecumenical Creeds

  1. The Apostles' Creed — Symbolum Apostolorum

    Old Roman Symbol c. 215; Textus Receptus c. 750

    The baptismal creed of the Western church — the shortest, oldest, and most widely prayed.

  2. The Nicene Creed — Symbolum Nicaeno-Constantinopolitanum

    Nicaea 325; Constantinople 381; Western received form (with filioque) by c. 1014

    The conciliar creed of the undivided Church — the most widely shared confession of Christendom.

  3. The Athanasian Creed — Quicumque vult — Symbolum Athanasianum

    Latin; southern Gaul, c. 500 (5th–6th century); attributed to Athanasius by medieval tradition but not his work

    The West's most precise — and most contested — Trinitarian and Christological symbol, framed by the warning clauses that kept it out of American Methodism.

Wesleyan Tradition

  1. Wesley's General Rules — The Nature, Design, and General Rules of the United Societies

    English original, Newcastle, 1743; American recension from 1789; constitutionally entrenched by the First Restrictive Rule, 1808

    The strangest of the Methodist doctrinal standards — a binding standard with almost no doctrine in it, a rule of life whose one condition of membership is not a belief but a desire.

  2. The Articles of Religion — Wesley's 1784 abridgment of the Thirty-Nine Articles, for the Methodists in North America

    Thirty-Nine Articles, Church of England, 1571; abridged by John Wesley to 24, sent in the Sunday Service, 1784; adopted with a 25th (the Rulers of the United States) at the Christmas Conference, 1784; constitutionally entrenched by the Second Restrictive Rule, 1808

    American Methodism's constitutional doctrinal standard: the Thirty-Nine Articles as one man abridged them — and what he cut, above all predestination, is as much the confession as what he kept.