The formation of creeds tends to create division and to perpetuate division. Caesar's maxim illustrates their history: "Soldiers will raise money, and money will make soldiers." So creeds will make sects, and sects will make creeds. "A creed or confession of faith is an ecclesiastical document—the mind and will of some synod or council possessing authority—as a term of communion by which persons and opinions are to be tested, approbated or reprobated." The sect churches are built on their creeds, although, of course, they affirm that their creeds are built on the Bible. In this case, however, it is usually apparent to the careful observer that the Bible is that part of the foundation which is buried out of sight below the ground. The creed is the real test applied to persons, the measure by which their opinions are judged. It is the creed upon which the sect is built that gives the denominational character and distinctiveness.
It is a fact of history that the primary purpose of the historical creeds was not to unite men but to separate them. The Nicene Creed was made to exclude the Arians. The Decrees of the Council of Trent were framed to exclude Protestants; the Westminster Confession, to exclude Arminians; and the Episcopal Articles, to exclude Catholics and Independents. To rally around a creed framed by human authority and make it the basis of union is but to teach a system—a sect system; but to rally around the person of Jesus Christ and make him the supreme object of our faith, hope, and love is to contend for what the Bible terms the faith, the truth, the gospel. This is infinitely better than any document proceeding from Nicea, Trent, Dort, Augsburg, or Westminster.
Power of the keys
Another cause, both for the origin of the sect system and its perpetuation, is the assumed "power of the keys" which has been carried over from the Church of Rome. The idea that the administrative rule and government of the church of Christ has been, by divine decree, centralized in a self-perpetuating clerical caste with authority to legislate for the church and then to enforce its decisions by judicial procedure, is foreign to the primitive church as recorded in the New Testament. It is a product of Papalism, and yet it has been, in its essential characteristics, transferred directly to the sects of Protestantism. The New Testament recognizes no such human positional authority. It recognizes only that divine authority which operates through God's chosen ministers and helpers by virtue of the Spirit-bestowed gifts and qualifications. The only governmental authority exercised by the New Testament ministers was in cooperation with Christ, the visible head, by putting forth, in accordance with the Spirit's gifts and qualifications, some portion of that moral power by which alone Christ governs.
The idea that to a clerical order has been committed the exclusive guardianship of the church, with full power to admit to or exclude from the worship and service of God all except those who come by way of their priestly mediation, is the basest assumption. It is a violation of the rights of individual conscience. Yet just such power has been and still is being exerted as a means of enforcing acquiescence in matters of opinion and submission to customs and practises which every unprejudiced man knows, or can soon see, is no part of the New Testament teaching and requirements. What a weapon has this ecclesiastical assumption been! One always ready for use. It makes no difference whether it is wielded by a Methodist conference, an Episcopal judicatory, a Presbyterian synod, or a Catholic pope, it is all the same in principle—"the power of the keys."
Lack of religious freedom
This assumed corporate power of the clergy has been one of the fundamental causes of sect-making. When a general clerical body assumes the right in its corporate capacity to prescribe rules of either faith or practise, written or unwritten, and then to enforce them by judicial action, it is a direct violation of the New Testament standard, and of the rights of individual consciences. It was because of this lordly, unscriptural rule that many sincere men of God have been forced to sever their connection with the older sects in order to find a place where a greater degree of light and truth could be experienced and proclaimed. In such cases it was not religious liberty that caused the formation of new movements and new sects, but the lack of religious liberty.
That "power of the keys," making and then enforcing the standards of creeds, has done violence to the conscience of both the clergy and the laity. Conscienceless persons subscribe to the creed without any particular hesitation, but the truly conscientious suffer the greatest embarrassment They must either refuse altogether and withdraw from all connection, or else subscribe with a mental reservation amounting practically to hypocrisy.
Inflexible character
This inflexible character of the sect institution has been a most fruitful cause for the production of new sects. No matter how spiritual the movement at its beginning, when its leaders were not longing for church power but were earnestly preaching the Word of the Lord as it came unto them, as soon as the sect machinery was thoroughly organized and was set in motion the inevitable tendency has been to throw around the movement a wall of creedal and ecclesiastical exclusiveness which shut out other true people of God; and then began a process of crystalization which ever afterwards precluded the unfolding of new truth. It is a well-known fact that the high tide of truth-discovery in every religious movement in Protestantism has been at the time of its beginning. A fixed law of immobility has ever afterwards prevailed. The reason is clear: whenever men grasp the reins of government and assume those prerogatives which belong to God alone, the rule of the Spirit ends. The unfolding of new truths by the operation of the Spirit is impossible within the limits of the old order where human ecclesiasticism reigns. But truth can not be permanently suppressed. If it can not find room for development within the existing order of things, God will raise up men who will, independently, proclaim the Word of the Lord. This he has done repeatedly, only to have the new movements end in the same manner—in a rule of human ecclesiasticism.