ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONFESSIONS 1 CON1-Q019 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: Why was there a controversy over the filioque, the phrase, �and the Son� in the Nicene Creed? How should we treat it today? >> DR. KLAUS DETLEV SHULTZ: Nick, the answer to your question is very clear, I think, that we as the Western church have received the filioque on a regional synod, actually, in Gaul in Spain in 589 in a little village called Toledo. There it has placed in the Nicene Creed the statement, �and the Son.� That means the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Admittedly, that is an insertion into the creed, and the Eastern Church has frowned at us, at the West, and said, how could you do that because that�s insertion into the original creed that we have affirmed in 381 and later in Chalcedon again in 451? So the West has answered and replied that may be so. But our concern is always to keep and maintain the status of Jesus Christ to God the Father as being of the same substance. We would like to maintain a unity of God, and not to draw as much a distinction between the three persons as, perhaps, the East is usually doing it. The East would rather argue for making God the source within the Trinity and highlighting, therefore, the person God the father as the one from whom the Holy Spirit proceeds. Truthfully speaking, the East makes a very important point that there is a source in the trinity, a source that is mysterious, that we do not understand. We have argued about Jesus Christ that he also, is by way of generation or being begotten from God the Father, that there is also within the mystery of the trinity an origin. However with the theology of the western theologians such as Augustine and Ambrose, we have clearly, in the West, decided for the filioque saying thereby, there is this unity that we would like to preserve. And for that very reason the filioque today remains in the Book of Concord as the one theological criterion for affirming the unity of God.