Saying the Creeds in Worship

Icon of the First Council at Nicea
image from wikipedia.org

One way to make a worship service meaningful is to include a corporate affirmation of faith. On most Sundays at my churches we say the Apostles Creed, but we use some others from time to time. These statements remind us why we meet together at all: it's all about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. (See 1 Corinthians 15:12-34.) Saying the creeds reminds us of that central truth, even if the songs, prayers, or sermon on a given Sunday don't explicitly mention all those historical events.

The creeds connect us to other Christians across the world (the church universal), and they also connect us backwards through time (the church apostolic). If your church says the creeds regularly, it can be easy to forget how intentional the words are. Many of us don't realize that the biggest rift in the Christian church is (partly) over three words in the Nicene Creed: "and the Son." Christianity Today recently profiled this issue, centered around the words that make up this clause known as the filioque . This so-called Great Schism between the Greek-speaking eastern (Orthodox) church and the Latin-speaking western (Catholic) church is usually dated to a 1054 smackdown between church leaders in the city of Constantinople. But the filioque clause (and the use of yeast in communion bread) had been causing problems between the western (Latin) and eastern (Greek) churches for centuries prior to that. Finally events in Constantinople (today Istanbul) during the Fourth Crusade (13th century) broke the church apart into the Catholic-Orthodox division that remains today.

Although relations between these two branches of the church have warmed a bit in the past few decades, the use of the extra words in the Nicene Creed continue to hinder reconciliation. This should remind us that the words in the creeds matter, and that's why we say them. They reflect what we believe, including important assumptions about how God exists in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.