WTH?! Nobody ever told me

Faith & Science Conversation
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  • I came across this Youtube yesterday and was very surprised by it.
    • The Creed Nobody Wrote (And Why It’s Still Used Today)
    • The reason for my surprise? I was raised a Missouri Synod Lutheran during my teens and attended an LCMS boarding school during my Junior & Senior years in High School. And the Athanasian Creed was in every LCMS hymnal I owned or remember seeing.
    • That “nobody wrote the Athanasian Creed” struck me as strange as “Neither God nor Moses wrote Genesis”.
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  • Maybe a better way to put my reaction is this: it felt a bit like finding out that George Washington didn’t actually chop down a cherry tree. It’s not that the underlying figure or significance disappears—it’s that something long presented as straightforward turns out to be more of a later attribution or tradition.
  • That’s how the Athanasian Creed landed for me. I don’t have a problem with anonymous authorship either. What surprised me was that, growing up, it was presented as one of the major confessions of the Church without any clear explanation that it wasn’t written by Athanasius of Alexandria and developed later in the Western tradition.
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I was totally unfamiliar with the creed, being a good Baptist, who has no creeds but the Bible. Or maybe the 1963 Baptist Faith and Message, but not of course the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message, especially with the 2023 amendment. (ironic font)

However, I know how you feel, when in studying the Bible, I find that it does not really say what I have been taught it said for many years. The examples are numerous, and often due to translational bias, but it still gives me a sense of betrayal to discover my pastors and teachers failed to teach what was there, but instead just taught the one perspective they held.

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I was brought up with the Nicene and Apostles creeds,and only came across this one while on another forum. It is very wordy and includes the anathema taken out of the Nicene creed. I see little need for it, but maybe that is just upbringing.

Richard

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FWIW, one grad school prof made us memorize the thing in Latin.
Certainly made me wish no one wrote it!

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