Full Text for Confessions 1- Volume 16 - How Do the Creeds Help Us Talk about God? (Video)

ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONFESSIONS 1 CON1-Q016 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. * * * * >> PAUL: As I see the creeds, they appear to be, simply put, talk about who God is and how he saves us. How do they help us understand God and the way we talk about Him? >> DR. KLAUS DETLEV SHULTZ: Paul, I think we could speak of God in two ways. First is that we could speak of God by way of description. We could say God is doing something. He is someone. And in the creeds, we generally have that language being expressed very clearly. It speaks about God being the creator. It speaks about Jesus Christ who came to this earth, who died, who suffered, and who was resurrected from the dead. We speak of the Holy Spirit who sanctifies us. These are descriptive terms speaking about what he does, the triune God. We then also have attempts that are being made, and successful, of course, of describing God of who he is. We talk of ontology here. Who is God? And we will presuppose to ever talk about describing God by first making clear that we relate them equally to one another, that we can see this most clearly being said in the Athanasian Creed, for example, every quality, every attribute being made of one God that is eternal, it also has to be said of the other person in the trinity. That is ontological talk. It's very difficult to comprehend it at times. It�s part of the mystery of the Trinity. It's absolutely crucial nonetheless. Today, we might consider the talk of the Nicene Creed of God as being of the same substance, something of a less important statement into that what God does for us, namely, having died on the cross, having resurrected and died for our sins. But, we have to see that one flows out from the other or see it as circular statements that one leads to the other and flows out from it again. One important absence that is often said in literature that exists in the creeds is a reference to Jesus who performed the miracles, certain aspects of his ministry that have been clipped out of the creeds. Now, the important thing here to know is that creeds do not want to be exhaustive. They very often address a certain situation and want to do so with a plausible theology, one that is derived from scripture. They will never, however, be able to embrace the entire statements made in scripture so our expectations would be far too high to say that we need to find in them a solution to every problem we have today in the church. So in this case here, we would have to say that the doctrinal reflection made in the creeds is one that speaks to a situation and wants to address it clearly from the words of scripture and draw us back to scripture again and point to us where we should go in order to find such statements being made therein.