ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONFESSIONS 1 CON1-Q017 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: In the way you described to us the doctrine of the Trinity as the creeds confess, they truly confess the Gospel, don't they? >> DR. KLAUS DETLEV SHULTZ: Clearly, by definition, what we would say the Gospel is, Joshua, would be to say God does something for us. The creeds reflect that, I think, in a very clear way that they want to speak of God as someone who comes to us humans, those of us who are all in need of salvation. So they glorify the acts of God. They clearly express them. They want to say thereby, that this God is one of love. Although we might not find necessarily the aspects of love reflected clearly in the creeds, they, however, presuppose it. Because speaking of who God is always embraces the concept of love. God is love, as we know. And that love expresses itself such as in the verse of John 3:18 and 16, especially, that God loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son. So that idea of love, of Gospel, really what it is, wants to be expressed in the creeds in between the lines seen as the background while we confess the creeds in the first place. The Nicene Creed expresses that love in a different way. It says there, who for us men in, or human beings, and our salvation. So we see there, clearly, that the whole idea of Christ's incarnation, the whole idea also of our creation is the one purpose of us to be saved through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And our whole sanctification is expressed in the third article of the creed, the references to the forgiveness of sins, to the church. That all is understood in the context of God loving us, of the Gospel itself. That means that we as Christians have to understand that the creeds point to a very important fact. And that is that we are always in need of someone outside of us to bring us that salvation, that we are always in need of someone who loves us. And it bases itself on that concept of God. For if we do deliver the word and sacraments to Christians, we always have to say the source from whom these word and sacraments come from, the one God loves us all.