Full Text for Confessions 1- Volume 3 - What Makes a Creed or Confession Different from other Writings? (Video)

ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONFESSIONS 1 CON1-Q003 JANUARY 2005 CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY: CAPTION FIRST, INC. P.O. BOX 1924 LOMBARD, IL 60148 * * * * * This text is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communications Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. * * * * >> JOSHUA: Hello, professors. My name is Joshua. I have a question for you. What makes a creed and confession different from other statements of faith, or from books written by theologians? >> DR. CHARLES P. ARAND: That's not a bad question. Because on the one hand, they share quite a few similarities with books written by individual theologians. The most readily evident characteristic is the fact that both creeds, as well as books written by individuals, are documents or texts written by human beings and not written under the direct inspiration of the scriptures, as were the apostles and the prophets. That's probably the thing that immediately jumps to mind in terms of what they have in common. Having said that, and therefore, on the other hand, the major difference between creeds and, say, books written by, say, Luther, *Melangthen, or C. F. W. *Walther is that creeds are texts that have been adopted, and you might say confessed by the whole church, and not simply by an individual. Now I certainly find a great deal of guidance when I read the work of St. Augustine like his �Confessions� or his "City of God." I find some tremendous insights when I read Luther�s �Bondage of the Will,� or more recently a book like Dietrich *Bonhoeffer�s �Ethics.� And to some extent they provide me with insights into the scriptures, and they help me in terms of my own theological development. But in another sense, they don't possess the same authority or occupy the same position of prominence of the creeds and confessions because in the creeds and confessions, there we have not the voice of a single individual, but the voice of the entire church. And when we join our voices by reciting the creeds, say on Sunday morning, we are joining that great cloud of witnesses, past and present, within the church all times and within the church of all places. We are joining our voices with them in confessing the same faith in Jesus Christ. Books by an individual theologian may be just as biblical as the texts that we have in the creeds and the confessions, but they are not going to occupy the same position of prominence as creeds and confessions because they are not, you might say, the voice of the entire church. I can illustrate this also with the creeds themselves within the Lutheran tradition. We tend to say the confessional texts that have the highest authority for us as Lutherans are the so-called ecumenical creeds. We'll be learning about those later. These are the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed. These have the highest authority within the church, higher than Luther�s �Small Catechism,� higher than the Augsburg Confession. But after the creeds, we would then say the Augsburg Confession has the highest authority among Lutherans or a higher authority than, say, the Formula of Concord. The question arises, how can something have greater authority, or how can one text have greater authority over another text if they're both equally biblical, if they both equally set forth the same teaching of scripture? Well, here I might have to say concede authority isn�t the best word to go with, although it is the most common word used. Maybe another way of saying it is the ecumenical creeds have the highest authority within the church because they have the pride of place within the church. That is to say, the ecumenical creeds have the greatest consensus from the church, especially the Nicene Creed. It is the creed that is confessed by the Eastern Church and the Western Church alike. It is the creed that you might say defined the boundaries of Christianity over against non-Christianity because it provides the way that Christians talk about God as trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So it has pride of place because it carries with it the consensus of the entire church. On the other hand, the Augsburg Confession has pride of place among Lutherans because it is the document which defines what it means to be a Lutheran. Anyone who calls themselves a Lutheran, be they Scandinavian, African, European, or American, is going to identify themselves by means of the Augsburg Confession. To put it another way, all Lutherans acknowledge, accept, and confess the Augsburg Confession as their own faith. They don't all do that, say, with respect to the Formula of Concord. In the Scandinavian countries in the 16th and 17th century did not necessarily adopt the Formula of Concord as their own because they felt it dealt with issues that were current and controversial within Germany, not within the Scandinavian countries. So on one hand, all the different confessions, in fact, are equally authoritative in the sense that they are equally biblical. But in another sense, they possess a different authority based upon the consensus that they have received within the wider church. We can even push this further down, you might say, to statements that have been adopted by the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. We may regard those statements as thoroughly biblical and consistent, congruent with the scriptures. But I would not put them on the same level as the Augsburg Confession or the ecumenical creed because, at least to date, only we in the Missouri Synod have acknowledged them as biblical. Other Christians have not adopted them as their own statements of biblical teaching as well.