---
title: 'Miller on the Necessity and Importance of Creeds and Confessions'
type: post
author: 'R. Andrew Myers'
date: 2025-07-02
url: https://confessional.org/blog/2025-miller-on-the-necessity-and-importance-of-creeds-and-confessions
---

# Miller on the Necessity and Importance of Creeds and Confessions

“The necessity and importance of Creeds and Confessions appear from the consideration, that one great design of establishing a church in our world was, that she might be in all ages, A DEPOSITORY, A GUARDIAN, AND A WITNESS OF THE TRUTH.

Christians, collectively as well as individually, are represented in Scripture as witnesses for God among men. They are commanded to maintain his truth, and to “ hold forth the word of life,” in all its purity and lustre before a perverse generation, that others may be enlightened and converted. They are exhorted to ‘buy the truth, and not to sell it;’ — to ‘contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints;’ — to ‘hold fast the form of sound words which they have received; — and to ‘strive together for the faith of the Gospel.’ These, and many other commands, of similar import, plainly make it the duty of every Christian church to detect and expose prevailing heresies; to exclude all such as embrace radical heresy from their communion; and to ‘lift up a standard’ for truth, whenever ‘the enemy comes in like a flood.’” — [**Samuel Miller**](/authors/samuel-miller), *The Utility and Importance of Creeds and Confessions: An Introductory Lecture Delivered at the Opening of the Summer Session of the Theological Seminary of the Presbyterian Church, Princeton, July* 2, 1824 (1824), p. 15