Grace Notes 2025-10-15

You may or may not realize it, but many churches do not recite a creed at their weekly worship services. We join other liturgical churches in usually confessing either the Apostles’ or the Nicene Creed. Once a year, on Holy Trinity Sunday, we recite the third of the great three Ecumenical Creeds which is the Athanasian Creed. The length of this creed is why it is confessed sparingly.

So, is it a good thing to recite one of the three Ecumenical Creeds when we come together? I’ll bet you are going to guess that I think it is a good thing. And you would be right. But my advocacy for its inclusion is not because I believe it necessary to receive God’s grace, especially the forgiveness of sins that we so desperately need on a constant basis.

There are things that are not necessary, but they are beneficial.

The three Ecumenical Creeds are brief statements of agreed-upon Biblical truths held by a vast swatch of Christian Communions, including the Lutheran Churches. They provide an excellent summary of important Christian teaching. They have a teaching and formational role. They help us lend our voices together in what we believe, teach, and confess, hence having a unifying function. And they hold a plumbline, so to speak, to everything else that goes on in the worship service.

When you go to hang a picture in your home some people are pretty good at eyeballing it so that it is level. But it never hurts to use a level. And when your Pastor endeavors to preach the Gospel, rightly dividing law and gospel, it can be helpful to compare it to the creed we confess. That is perhaps one of the reasons that we confess the creed prior to, or just after, the sermon.

It can also be a source of strength to know that we are joining our lips to what “the communion of the saints” has been confessing for centuries before us.

Since You Asked

What is meant by the term “catholic” as when we confess, “I believe in the holy catholic Church?” 

The term “catholic” means whole and refers to a church which receives the Christian faith intact without alteration or selection of matters of the faith. The opposite of catholic is heretic, one who picks and chooses which parts of the faith to accept. Thus “catholic” is more specific than “Christian” and is not a synonym for “ecumenical” or “worldwide”. (from “Manual on the Liturgy” companion to the LBW, from Augsburg Pub.)

- often when the “C” is capitalized “Catholic” is referring to the Roman Catholic Church, and when the “c” is lower case “catholic” is referring to the Church receiving the whole of the faith.