Why do we need creeds? That might be a question you have asked or that a family member or friend has asked you after finding out you speak a creed in the Divine Service. However, in reality, there is no Christian without a creed.
As you may know, the word creed comes from the Latin word credo, which means “I believe.” If you ask someone what he or she believes, and the answer could begin with “I believe,” that person has a creed, even if it is not written down or spoken aloud each Sunday. Even when people think that they have constructed their “own” beliefs, they have compiled them from somewhere.
Thankfully, we do not have to create or make up our own creeds, continually reinventing our faith. In the history of the Christian Church, there have been many discussions and controversies over how to read the Scriptures. Instead of relitigating all those disagreements in every generation, the creeds are some of the means by which the Holy Spirit does what Jesus promised He would do: Guide [us] into all the truth (John 16:13).
In the Book of Concord, immediately after the Preface, the first items to appear are the Ecumenical, or universal, Creeds: the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed. These creeds contain the universal teaching of the whole Christian Church (the oikoumene, which originally meant the whole inhabited world and then was applied to the Roman Empire). Meaning, the creeds are catholic (from Greek words that mean “according to the whole”).
They appear first because, as the confessors say in the Preface, “in this work of concord, we have not at all wished to create something new or to depart from the truth of the heavenly doctrine, which our ancestors (renowned for their piety) as well as we ourselves, have acknowledged and professed” (Preface to the Book of Concord, Concordia: The Lutheran Confessions, p. 11). None of the other confessional documents in the Book of Concord deny or contradict the scriptural teaching in the creeds. So Lutherans, by definition, are scriptural, creedal, and confessional. These are our creeds, not because we produced them but because we see in them God’s truth, a summary of the words of the Scriptures, fulfilled and embodied in Jesus.
It is fitting that we learn the Apostles’ Creed in Luther’s Small Catechism. It is essentially a baptismal creed, which is appropriate to speak every day. Luther encourages us to “make the sign of the holy cross,” which reminds us of our Baptism, and then “kneeling or standing, repeat the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer” (Small Catechism, Daily Prayers). It is most likely that this basic form of the Creed comes from the form of the baptismal questions: Do you believe in God the Father? Do you believe in God the Son? Do you believe in God the Holy Spirit? Out of those basic questions, different churches had different baptismal creeds by which they taught people the Christian faith. From at least the end of the second century, there was a creed in Rome that resembles the Apostles’ Creed, usually called the Old Roman Symbol or Old Roman Creed. Other similar forms came from France and Germany. Most likely, what we call the Apostles’ Creed actually took its form in the fifth or sixth centuries and was finalized in the eighth century. It was probably Charlemagne who, in the ninth century, pushed the Apostles’ Creed toward its now-universal use in Baptisms.
The Nicene Creed did not come out of church practice but out of church controversy. In 318, Arius started a controversy that raged in the church for almost 70 years. The main point in developing this creed was to search the Scriptures for the best way to express the relationship of the Father to the Son (and later to the Holy Spirit). One way to find the points of controversy is to put the Nicene Creed next to the Apostles’ Creed and see which phrases were added. This creed was finalized, or formalized, at Constantinople in 381, and we have the written record of the creed from 381 in the records of the Council of Chalcedon in 451.
The Athanasian Creed, sometimes called the Quicunque Vult after its opening words, is the outlier among these documents. Although it contains some statements that are similar, especially to the Second Article of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, it is overall clearly a different kind of creed. It was not written by Athanasius but probably comes from France or Spain in the fifth, sixth, or seventh centuries.
We often use this creed on Trinity Sunday because it has a sustained defense of the nature of the Trinity. It functions much like a fence or boundary line: Here is the limit of what you can say about God. We say that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but there are not three Fathers or three Sons or three Spirits. Although we cannot say everything about the nature of God or the relationship of the persons, we can say these things, and they mark out the limits of what we can say from the Scriptures and what we cannot say. Thus, the Athanasian Creed is, as it says, catholic, or related to the whole Christian faith and confessed by the whole Christian Church.
All these Ecumenical Creeds serve their own purposes in the life of the church and of Christians, but all of them together hold us to the universal Christian faith, which we know from Jesus and the Scriptures, which testify to Him.
Scripture: ESV®.