In 1 Cor. Paul is optimistic that the church will arrive at a common understanding of God s Word. He makes them hermeneutically sound. He grants us new spectacles so that which was once fuzzy now becomes progressively clear and distinct. The consequence of the work of the Holy Spirit is that the church, over time, arrives at a common understanding of Scripture.
Ecclesiastical creeds are the result.
Creeds are wonderful teachers Creeds are, in a certain sense, the distillation of the church s exegetical discoveries from the past. It is the arrogance of modernity that thinks that we can reinvent the wheel without the biblical insights of generations past. To reject creeds is to believe that wisdom is born and will die with the present generation. Imagine, for a moment, that all we had was the Bible and no teaching tradition. Imagine that we had to begin our study on any particular doctrine without any background materials or tools.