The Creeds: Faithfully Passing the Baton

Having just come out of Trinity Sunday and that incredibly long Athanasian Creed, it’s time to talk about creeds and why they’re in the liturgy.

The traditional creed for Sunday is the Nicene Creed, which comes from the Council of Nicea (325 AD) with a Third Article patch on the Holy Spirit by the Council of Constantinople (381 AD). Since “Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed” is too much of a tongue twister on a Sunday morning, we just settle for “Nicene Creed.” It’s the most ecumenical (universal) creed in Christianity, confessed by both the East (Orthodox) and the West (Rome and Protestantism), except for that little disagreement about the Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son (filioque), which the East takes issue with, but we’ll take that up another time.

The Apostles’ Creed, which was the baptismal creed of Rome from around 150 AD, is used during weekday services, daily devotion, and instruction. No, the apostles didn’t write the Apostles’ Creed, but it certainly reflects apostolic teaching straight from the New Testament, so it’s “apostolic” in all the right senses of that word.

The Athanasian Creed is usually reserved for Trinity Sunday, though it can be used at other times as well, if you’re into really long creeds with lots of uncreateds and incomprehensibles. It comes from 5 th century Gaul (France) and was used as a test of orthodoxy for the clergy at a time when Arianism was the favored flavor in Europe. Arianism is the teaching, named after Arius, that the Son is not God in the same sense as the Father, and before the birth of Christ, the Son didn’t exist. Try flying that past John 1:1 “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”

In the western liturgy, the Creed is one of five pillars of the Divine Service: Kyrie (“Lord, have mercy”), Gloria (“Glory to God in the highest”), Credo (“I believe,” the creed), Sanctus (“Holy, holy, holy”) and Agnus Dei (“Lamb of God.”) The Creed rests at the heart of the Service of the Word, either before the Sermon or after it.

So why is the Creed a part of the liturgy in the first place? There are two reasons:

First, the Creed provides a pattern of sound words (2 Timothy 1:13), a rule of faith (Romans 12: 3) that serves as a kind of fence or boundary for the Christian faith. It summarizes who God is as the Triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit— and what the three works of the Triune God are: creation, redemption, and sanctification. This is the basic playing field of the Christian faith. Stay inside these boundaries, and you’re Christian. Venture outside them, and we’re not so sure.

Second, the Creed is the confession of the whole Church at all times and in all places, which is what we mean by “catholic” or “ecumenical.” When we say the Creed together, we are confessing with our fellow Christians all the way back to the early Church across almost 2,000 years. The Creed is like the baton in a relay race handed on from one runner to the next, each generation handing on the faith to their children who will hand it on to their children, hopefully without dropping it.

The Creed expresses what we all believe together in common, the faith once delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3). We each believe individually and have a personal faith relationship with God in Christ Jesus. But that personal faith in Christ believes something objective that we share in common together with all other Christians. The creeds not only say “I believe,” they also say “we believe” and we confess all together as one voice. This is why we don’t write our own creeds. Creeds are not ours to write. It’s good to express your faith in your own words, but when we’re all together, we confess the faith with the words we’ve been given.

When the Creed comes before the Sermon, it serves as the voice of the whole Church proclaiming God and His works to us. We hear first from Moses and the prophets (Old Testament), then from the apostles (Epistles), and then from the evangelists (Gospels). Then we hear from the Church in the words of the Creed. Finally, we hear from our pastor, who preaches God’s prophetic and apostolic Word to our ears in our time and place, but whatever he says must stay within the boundary lines and conform to the pattern of the sound words of the Creed. The pastor has nothing new to say; he just says it in a new way.

When the Creed comes after the Sermon, it serves as a response to the Word that was read and preached, as the people of God confess the Faith together with all their fellow believers around the world and all those who came before them, saying back what God has said to them. The Creed is one of the greatest expressions we have of our unity in the Body of Christ. My congregation worships in both English and Mandarin Chinese. When we worship together, we recite the Creed together in our own languages. For me, it’s a very powerful experience to hear our common faith spoken in two different tongues. We even somehow manage to stay together! In the Creed, we are united in faith despite our differences in language and culture.

As with most liturgical rites, the speaking of the Creed has certain gestures that go with it. It’s helpful to keep mind and body working together. At the words of our Lord’s Incarnation (“and was made man”), it is customary to bow the head and keep it bowed until Jesus’ burial in view of His becoming man and His humbling in the flesh to save us. At the last phrase about the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting, it’s customary to make the sign of the cross, confessing the connection between our death and resurrection and Jesus’ death and resurrection through our Baptism. Liturgical gestures like these help us to focus on the words we are speaking.

When I say the Creed, I am saying that I believe what has always been believed in all times and all places where Christians have gathered—in one God, Triune—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: the God who makes us, the God who redeems us, the God who sanctifies us.

Rev. William M. Cwirla is the pastor of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Hacienda Heights, California, as well as a president emeritus of Higher Things.