ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONFESSIONS 1 CON1-Q022 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. * * * * >> NICK: Unfortunately, it has been my experience that the Athanasian Creed is used infrequently within the church today. Is there an explanation for that? >> DR. KLAUS DETLEV SHULTZ: Nick, you are thereby almost repeating the question that has been previously said. But let me use this as an opportunity to summarize that what we have learned until now about the creeds. I think the Athanasian Creed is very lengthy. It has 40 theses, and it probably is not confessed in the church as much as we'd like it to be confessed. That is true. But then we also have to say that not all creeds can fulfill the same purpose, or not all creeds are alike. Many go a longer route, as we will see with the Augsburg Confession later and the Apology as well. So some creeds fulfill a purpose specifically to address doctrinal questions in a longer way and thereby becoming more cumbersome, but nonetheless still being the one single answer; namely, that Peter was asked, who do you say I am. The creeds themselves, then, are laying for us the basis on which we have then the 16th century confessions. As you will see later on, these confessions of the 16th century presuppose the early church creeds. They thereby want to say that they agree with them. And many of the articles, especially when it comes to God, they want to say that what has been confessed already at that early time of the church is something we also agree with. They did so over 500 to 1000 years later. We could say that as well, now that we also are looking back 500 years to The Reformation. That might seem a long time, but we could say just as much as the reformers of the 16th century said, we will go back to the creeds. We could say ourselves also, we will also go back. And thereby not just *represtonate them, but we would also like to bring forth their theology and to make it relevant into a time of today.