The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

New Testaments, until the finished temple stands before us in the Bible; so
may the Church, as God shall show her her need, enlarge her Confession,
utter more fully her testimony, and thus "change her Creed," to express
more amply her one unchanging faith. If the Rule of an unchanging faith
can be added to, the Confession of an unchanging faith can also be added
to.
The identity of the Church faith resembles not the sameness of a
rock, but rather the living identity of a man. The babe and the adult are
identical. They are the same being in different stages of maturity: that
which constitutes the individual does not change. The child does not grow
to adult maturity by any change in personal identity--but retaining that
identity grows by its attraction to itself, of what is consonant with its own
unchanged nature. Adult perfection is reached not by amputations and
ingraftings, but by growth, in which the identifying energy conforms
everything to its own nature. The faith of the Church now is identical with
what it was in the Apostolic time, but the relation of identity does not
preclude growth--it only excludes change of identity. That faith must
always be its essential self--whether as a babe receiving milk, or as a man
enjoying strong meat. In a word, the advances are wrought, not by change
in the Church faith, but by the perpetual activity of that faith, a faith which
because it is incapable of change itself, assimilates more and more to it the
consciousness of the Church, her system of doctrine, her language, and her
life.
Growth of the Creed.
To subtract from a pure faith differs as largely from a healthy
development of that faith in enlarged statements, as the cutting off of an
arm differs from the expansion of its muscles, by healthful exercise. The
whole history of the Church illustrates the truth of this principle. The
creeds recorded in the New Testament were generally confined to one
point. The Apostles' Creed, in the earliest form known to us, is a change
of these primal creeds, in so far that it adds to their statements to make the
faith itself more secure. The Apostles' Creed, as we have it now, is a
change of the earliest form, adding to its