Historic Creeds and Confessions, electronic ed. (Oak Harbor: Lexham Press, 1997).

Are Creeds even Biblical? Would they have to be in the New Testament for it to be considered 'Christian'? The truth is that there is no mention of creeds or needing to confess one to belong to a certain denomination/church. However, there is one scripture that God used to define Israelite faithfulness in the Tenach/Old Testament that could meet the Christian creed criteria.

"The initial source of all Christian creeds was a statement from well over a millennium prior to the time of Christ and the apostles. In Deuteronomy 6:4, the Lord says through Moses, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.”

"The Shema of Deuteronomy 6 is the explicit affirmation of what is implicit in Genesis 1:1: there is the one true God, and there is everything else. It is as if the Bible is drawing a hard line between God on one hand and all else that exists on the other."

"This metaphysical line is ineradicable and unbridgeable, and its presence shapes everything about the Jewish (and later Christian) faith. We are in a dependent position with respect to God the Lord. We do not try to bend him to our will; we exist to serve his will. We do not manipulate him; he directs us. But we are also in a confident position with respect to the Lord. He is the only one out there, and he has no division of will within himself, so we need have no divisions in our loyalty to him. We never need to wonder whether there is another god waiting in the wings whom we need to buy off or appease. We are free to serve the one, undivided God with our own undivided loyalty. This was the lesson that Israel had to learn in the midst of the pagan, polytheistic world of the ancient Near East, and above all else, the Shema encapsulated this lesson. It rightly stood at the very center of Israel’s faith."


Donald Fairbairn and Ryan M. Reeves, The Story of Creeds and Confessions: Tracing the Development of the Christian Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic: A Division of Baker Publishing Group, 2019), 21–23.