The Creeds Connection to The Body of Christ

Despite belonging to a church where recitation of the creeds is an integral aspect of worship, I was for many years part of that group of moderns Pannenberg referenced who have wondered (sometimes silently, sometimes aloud) about the need for continued confession of the creeds with their ancient language and concepts.

Hearing church historian Jaroslav Pelikan interviewed by then Speaking of Faith radio host Krista Tippett on “The Need for Creeds,” however, has encouraged me to acknowledge the value of continuing to recite them. Even though Pelikan, a renowned professor from Yale, could have taken a more intentionally scholarly route to explain reasons for ongoing recitation of creeds, his disarmingly personal defense of these corporate confessions of faith compels us to reconsider the creeds and what it might mean to participate in the church catholic by reciting them out loud, in worship, and together with other Christians. Here is what he said:

My faith life, like that of every one else, fluctuates. There are ups and downs and hot spots and cold spots and boredom and ennui and all the rest can be there. And so I’m not asked on a Sunday morning, “As of 9:20, what do you believe?” And then you sit down with a three-by-five index card saying, “Now let’s see. What do I believe today?” No, that’s not what they’re asking me. They’re asking me, “Are you a member of a community which now, for a millennium and a half, has said, we believe in one God?”

Recitation of the creeds, in Pelikan’s vision, is one tangible way members of the body of Christ experience connection to that vast virtual body of Christ, one that connects us not just to other Christians around the world in the present but also to all previous incarnations of the body of Christ in the two-thousand-year history of the church.