Take again the doctrine of justification by faith. It is not expressed in the Creed. This of itself makes nothing against it; for the Creed does not pretend to set forth all Christian doctrines; it is an outline simply of what Christianity is in its primary, fundamental facts; leaving room for much to follow in the way of confessional superstructure. It is enough, if the doctrine before us be in the symbol by implication. But this at once serves, as we may readily see, to limit and define at the same time its proper conception. To be true at all, the doctrine must be held in union with the general system of the Creed, and not as something independent of it, and bearing to it only an outside relation. To conceive of justification by faith as a thing having no connection whatever with the objective world of grace brought into view by the Creed, a thing pertaining to the general idea of man’s relations to God in the order of nature, instead of being bound in any way to the mysterious organization of the Church—the common error of the Puritanic mind—is to turn the doctrine into a fiction, which contradicts the symbol, and virtually sets aside its authority, bringing in indeed a new scheme of Christianity altogether. There can be no true faith, in the view of the Creed, which does not begin by owning and obeying the mystery of godliness proclaimed in its own articles; no true justification, which does not come from being set thus in real communication with the objective righteousness of Jesus Christ, as the power of a new creation actually present in the Church. No wonder, the theory which makes justification by faith to be a mere abstraction, and that also which resolves it into justification by fancy or feeling, find little or no satisfaction in the old Christian confessions. Their theology here, most assuredly, is not the theology of the Apostles’ Creed.

John Williamson Nevin, “Thoughts on the Church,” Second Article, The Mercersberg Review, vol 10, pp. 394, 395.