The original Christians regarded the deposit of faith, as finally inseparable from the very living substance of the Gospel in the saving event of Christ crucified, risen and glorified, but as once and for all entrusted to the church through its apostolic foundation in Christ, informing, structuring and quickening its life and faith and mission as the body of Christ in the world... While the deposit of faith was replete with the truth as it is in Jesus, embodying kerygmatic, didactic and theological content, but its very nature it could not be resolved into a system of truths or set of normative doctrines and formulated beliefs, for the truths and doctrines and beliefs entailed could not be abstracted from the embodied form which they were given in Christ in the apostolic foundation of the church without loss of their real substance. Nevertheless in this embodied form "the faith once for all delivered to the saints" constituted the regulative basis for all explicit formulation of Christian truth, doctrine and belief in the deepening understanding of the church and its regular instruction of catechumens and the faithful. app is
Thomas F. Torrance, Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Faith
christian, church, doctrine, nicene, orthodoxy