Why It Is Rarely Recited Now

For most of a thousand years this creed was said regularly in the Western church, at the office on Sundays in many uses, and the Book of Common Prayer of 1662 appointed it on thirteen feast days of the year. Lutheran and Anglican formularies count it with the Apostles and Nicene creeds among the three ecumenical creeds, and confessional Lutheran bodies still subscribe to it. Yet it is now heard in very few congregations.

The reason usually given is the damnatory clauses. The creed opens by saying that whoever wishes to be saved must hold the catholic faith, adds that whoever does not hold it whole and undefiled will perish everlastingly, and repeats the warning at the end. Nineteenth-century Anglican controversy over precisely those sentences was fierce enough to produce commissions and resignations, and the result in most revised prayer books was to make its use optional or to drop it.

There is a second reason that gets less attention. The creed is difficult. Its balanced clauses on the Trinity are exact, and read aloud at speed they can sound like a series of contradictions rather than a set of careful distinctions. A text designed to prevent clergy from misstating the doctrine is not necessarily one a congregation can follow. Its survival in the confessional books, alongside its disappearance from services, is a fair summary of what it is now: a standard that is subscribed rather than sung.