Anglicanism is . . . 4. Creedal

“The golden rule is only gilt without a creed to guide it.”
– Geoffrey Anketell Studdert-Kennedy (1883-1929), I Believe: Sermons on the Apostles Creed
 
“There has been a common, a universal, faith of Christendom, which has, most authoritatively, expressed itself in the Catholic Creeds, the Apostles' and the Nicene Creeds. There are, indeed, features in the common faith, such as the belief in Atonement, in sacramental grace, in the inspiration of Scripture, which are only slightly or by implication touched on in these formulas of faith; but at least in what they contain they represent what has been universal Christianity. . .
“[That means that faithful engagement with Christianity will wrestle with the] “whole set of ideas about sin and redemption and the Incarnation and the Trinity which belong to the Catholic Creeds and are the commonplaces of historical Christianity.”
– Charles Gore (1853-1932), The Permanent Creed
 
“Modest and well-disposed people take it for granted at starting that the orthodox judgment will turn out to be right; and they set themselves to school to learn why the artists and poets of great name are great, till their own judgment becomes enlightened, and they understand what at first they took on trust. It was the instinctive perception of this function of authority which made the Church insist so much on the principle ‘credo ut intelligam’ [I believe in order to understand]. The Creed represents the catholic judgment, the highest knowledge of God and the spiritual life granted to man by the Divine Revelation. Let a man put himself to school in the Church with reverence and godly fear, and his own judgment will become enlightened.”
– Charles Gore (1853-1932), The Holy Spirit and Inspiration in Lux Mundi
 
“The Creed is no mere academic document, no mere list of ‘dogmas.’ It is an account of that which is; and every word it contains has a meaning at once universal, practical, and spiritual within the particular experience of each soul. It irradiates and harmonizes every level of our life, not one alone. All great spiritual literature does this to some extent; but the Creed, the condensed hand-list of those deep truths from which spiritual literature is built up, does it supremely.”
– Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), The School of Charity
 
“All I try to do is tell people that the creeds are not arbitrary formulae; that they were intended to mean something, and do still mean something.”
– Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957), in a letter to Karl Barth, 1939)
 
“Prayer and dogma are inseparable. They alone can explain each other. Either without the other is meaningless. and dead."
– Austin Farrer (1904-1968), Lord I Believe, Suggestions for turning the Creed into Prayer

“Though God be in me, yet without the creed to guide me I should know neither how to call upon God, nor on what God to call. God may be the very sap of my growth and substance of my action; but the tree has grown so crooked and is so deformed and cankered in its parts, that I should be at a loss to distinguish the divine power among the misuses of the power given. Were I to worship God as the principle of my life, I should merely worship myself under another name, with all my good and evil. So I take refuge in that image of God which we have described as branded from outside upon the bark. Here is a token I can trust, for he branded it there himself; he branded it on the stock of man when he stretched out his hands and feet and shed his precious blood. The pattern of the brand was traced on me by those who gave the creed to me; God will deepen it and burn it into me, as I submit my thoughts to him in meditation."
– Austin Farrer (1904-1968), Lord I Believe, Suggestions for turning the Creed into Prayer
 
“The Nicene Creed matters, because it affirms the Trinitarian shape of the Christian faith into which every baby, child, young person, and adult being brought into the faith is baptised. It is also the most important and obvious example of legitimate development from scripture: a development that brings out what is implicit in scripture, enfolding it in a form of corporate speech that every generation takes up as its own.
 
The Spirit works beyond Pentecost in the tradition of the Church, and it is by imitation and repetition that we are formed in faith. Dogma, as has often been said, following a rabbinical saying, is a ‘fence around a mystery’. To lose the Nicene Creed risks a descent into an endlessly quarrelsome individualism, at the same time as making us vulnerable to control by whatever constitutes the current church hierarchy.”

– Angela Tilby (1950 - ), Let us sing the Creed, Church Times, 05 June 2020
 
“Christian doctrine is not just useful, it is beautiful. If we cannot give thanks for God’s great glory, the glory of the eternal Trinity, the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, it will not even be useful for long, because it will not compel and involve us. Moralism with a sentimental gloss of mythology does not, as far as I can see, radicalize our perception of each other very deeply for very long.”
– Rowan Williams, (1950 - ) Living Tradition: Affirming Catholicism in the Anglican Church
 
“Doctrinal statements may stretch and puzzle, and even repel, and yet they still go on claiming attention and suggesting a strange, radically different and imaginatively demanding world that might be inhabited.”
– Rowan Williams (1950 - ), No life, here – no joy, terror or tears Church Times 17 July 1998

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5. Liberally Catholic and Generously Orthodox