ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONFESSIONS 1 CON1-Q011 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. * * * * >> DAVID: What is the significance and function of these creeds in the life of the church? From your experience, do you think all LCMS congregations place a similar value on the creeds? And how should I be thinking about the use of these creeds in my pastoral ministry? >> DR. KLAUS DETLEV SHULTZ: Thank you for that question, David. The significance and the function of the creeds in the life of the church, I have already spoken about that in my previous question, as you might recall. And there I said clearly that the functions are threefold. The first one, I said, is that the creeds serve as a form of doxology, that we trace, in the worship service as we confess the creeds, the acts of God in this world. And we thereby, as we confess them, praise him and bring that sacrifice to God in praise. The other function was that of rejecting heresy, of that what is not true, and those confessions that do not agree with that what is confessed in the Nicene Creed, the Apostles' or the Athanasian Creed and those of the 16th century. So it is very important that the Christian church today affirms the confessions unconditionally thereby saying that we agree with these creeds and are not willing to cede anything of them but accept them wholeheartedly as a true explication of scripture. I will return to that point just later on. And the third function that I said was to unite. That's actually the positive side of what I've just said in the second point. It's of uniting Christians, of bringing them together in the one true faith. And so Christians, when they express their faith through the creeds, want to express also that unity amongst each other, that unity with God in a vertical way and also that unity with one which they confess the unity amongst each other. The function of the creeds and the confessions of the 16th century is one of leading us to scripture. We must know that Christians in this world today would perhaps like to know, in a nutshell, what scripture says. And so the creeds themselves lead them to it and tell them the most important points as scripture confesses about Jesus Christ, about God the Father, and the Holy Spirit. There is a legend in the early church that goes back to saying that the creeds, the Apostles' Creed, emerged from the apostles themselves by saying that before the apostles were sent out into the world, they came together once more and said, why don't we just compile a common faith with each other. And so each apostle came together with the other one and said, I will compile one sentence and you the other. And together what emerged from those statements is the Apostles' Creed. And we can see that this legend, though it is not true and just a legend, tells us an important point; that the Apostles' Creed, like all the others, do point to scripture and tell nothing else than what is taken in scripture and said in scripture itself. Now, as we today read the confessions and the early church creeds, we probably find them rather redundant and boring. We say to ourselves, well, a thousand years lie between us and the early church creeds and 500 between us and those of the 16th century. The point is that we are to align our faith to those creeds, rather than the other way around. That is, we should make Christians aware of the faith that is contained and explained in those creeds and the value of them. It's our duties as pastors, as you have just asked, should be one of them, namely, to bring Christians back to the creeds and make it palatable to them. That means that we want them to again appreciate theologically what is being said in the creeds. And we can do this by pointing them out that those statements being made amongst other Christians in the churches today, do, in fact, say nothing else than that what is already contained in the three ecumenical creeds and those of the 16th century. The Proverbs say a very important point, I think, in this connection. They say, there is nothing new under the sun. And so I also believe that there is today nothing that being said against the creeds that has not already been addressed in the fourth, fifth, and sixth century and the 16th. It is perhaps clothed in a different archaic form, but we, again, have the obligation as pastors to make it relevant once again to us Christians today.