Ditto Jason’s comments. Not sure what your friend is suggesting. There’s no possible way to use the Athanasian Creed to establish the Orthodox (capital ‘O’) status of ECT. The first question to ask when someone claims that this or that belief is ‘orthodox’ is, Whose orthodoxy are you talking about? Eastern Orthodoxy? Roman Catholic? Lutheran? Reformed? The Athanasian Creed is an important document no doubt, but it doesn’t define orthodoxy for, say, the Eastern Church (as Jason noted). Athanasius didn’t write it and neither he nor his contemporaries ever mention it; nor is it mentioned in any of the ecumenical creeds. So…
Even the Catholic West who is fond of this creed hasn’t in fact condemned every universalist in history. Catholics hold universalist St. Gregory of Nyssa in the highest esteem and even refer to him as Father of the Fathers.
Something else worth pointing out: this is the only one of the Big Three Creedal formulations which features threats of hopeless damnation for not accepting the doctrinal set. The closest the other two come is another commentary addition to the original version of the Nicene Creed: “But those who say: ‘There was a time when he was not;’ and ‘He was not before he was made;’ and ‘He was made out of nothing,’ or ‘He is of another substance’ or ‘essence,’ or ‘The Son of God is created,’ or ‘changeable,’ or ‘alterable’—they are condemned by the holy catholic and apostolic Church.”
That isn’t the same as being hopelessly punished by God, though; the phrase is still commentary on the Creed (not Creed itself); and the anathema commentary was removed for the Chalcedonian clarification a few decades later in 381.
Further note: the Roman Catholic Church itself doesn’t use the AthCreed any more for normal liturgical worship (although that was popular in medieval times). It uses the Nicean-Chalcedonian Creed.
I don’t have a copy of “City of God” right now, but I’d be very interested in that quote from Augustine.
More than anyone else, he was responsible for the doctrine of ECT being the majority view it is today, and I would be suprised if he said that God could deliver a soul from eternal torment?
What?? No, not as far as I can tell (or even have ever heard of). It contains the standard lines about the resurrection of the evil and the good, one to eonian crisis and the other to eonian life, but those are scriptural statements which obviously John had no problem affirming along with the millennial kingdom.
To affirm a doctrinal set without mentioning (pro or con) another proposed doctrinal set which has at least some scriptural basis (and with which the first doctrinal set is typically affirmed without tension), is not at all the same as denying the other proposed doctrinal set. The AthCreed says nothing pro or con either way on the topic of whether the general resurrection happens before the 1000 year reign, after it, or whether there is no special 1000 year reign; neither does it have the slightest thing to say pro or con about the rapture, whether it’s pre-trib or post-trib (or a-trib for that matter!) All it does is affirm the general resurrection and post-mortem punishment for the wicked who will be raised with the good (except to eonian crisis, not to eonian life).
The AthCreed does seem to deny the possibility of ultra-universalism, where there will be no post-mortem punishment at all. But since the AthCreed isn’t an ecumenically approved Creed, I don’t know why ultra-us would care. (And even if it was, the faithful deposit from which to work are the canonical scriptures; after all at least one Ecumenical Council was subsequently and quite vehemently revoked!–so the Councils are not in themselves inherently infallible, regardless of what people insisted back then or now on the matter.)
The Creeds are mainly useful for identifying ‘Orthodoxy’ as a socio-cultural group: what a large majority agrees in believing to be right-representation of God. I’m glad the Big Three don’t outright deny universalism, but even if one or more of them did, ultimately the authoritative documents we’re supposed to be interpreting are the scriptures, not the Creeds (or encylclicals or any other official non-scriptural church texts.) If I thought something in the Creeds was logically false or scripturally denied, I wouldn’t affirm the relevant Creed(s).
(This is why I don’t mind unitarian or modalist Christians refusing to profess one or more of the Big Three, so long as they believe they’re being faithful to the scriptural witness and thus to God by refusing so.)
So “at whose coming (adventum) all men will rise again with their bodies,” doesn’t exclude the possibility that the bodily resurrection of the unjust will ocur a thousand years after the bodily resurrection of the just?
I’d say the first few creeds and the first several councils are a great place for establishing the shape of orthodoxy.
Hi Jason,
Saying the creed is “Roman Catholic” is anachronistic, catholic means universal, this is before the schism with the East. Why have you introduced this arbitrary category of “wrapper”, it divides the content unnaturally and seem only to serve your final conclusion that the creed doesn’t speak against universalism. Also final judgement of works is standard Reformed doctrine.
Alex, is your friend Catholic? What’s is religious affiliation? Does he accept ALL the directives of the ecumenical creeds? Those are ‘creeds’ too, and authoritative. So does he accept ALL that’s in them?
Well, I was being partly humorous. But only partly: there are historical issues for the AthCreed per se.
Actually, scholars are pretty sure that the AthCreed per se wasn’t drafted until around the 8th century or so, after the Great Schism–not incidentally at a time when RCCs were gearing up on their version of ecumenical reintegration: agree to RCC doctrine where this differs from whatever it is ‘you’ believe (the filioque being a key issue here, and prominently featured in the AthCreed, though also issues about universal salvation on occasion!), or you can just be perma-damned over there for dying outside the real Church. (I can quote chapter and verse from RCC dogmatic sources on this topic; my quick informal summary there is in no way principly inaccurate, unfortunately.)
There’s some dispute as to who exactly drafted it (Ambrose and Hilary are the most famous of the proposed authors, but the current leading theory involves a guy none of us have ever heard of, who was pretty well known back in Western Europe during the middle of what’s called the Dark Ages), but the dating of the document itself can’t possibly go back any farther than Augustine’s work because it’s using phraseology from things we know he wrote. And as Alex summarized from source and text studies on the topic (reported in Wikipedia, but I’ve read enough to know those reports on the analysis are accurate), we have every reason to believe the AthCreed first showed up in the 8th century and not before then. (Though there was probably some informal local variant usage preceding it.)
My point isn’t that Protestants (including Anglican Catholics) haven’t or can’t use the AthCreed–obviously various Protestant Creedal statements have themselves referred to it either explicitly or implicitly. My point in bringing up its RCC promotional context, is only that leaning on it as a chief arbiter in what constitutes an orthodox doctrinal set is ironic once the original context is counted in.
I thought I commented on this in some detail afterward in the same post.
But to lick that calf again in yet a little more detail: we Protestants started Protesting largely (though not solely) because the RCC had gotten into a salvation-by-works mindset. (A critique that the RCC came to agree with pretty quickly in the Counter-Reformation, although it took a while for them to implement reforms–and they still have problems with this in practical outworking, though technically they know and teach better.) The holding of precisely correct doctrinal knowledge in order to be saved is a doctrine of salvation by works, specifically the work of affirming correct doctrinal knowledge, i.e. the heresy of gnosticism broadly speaking. The AthCreed’s wrapping commentary VERY EXPLICITLY and insistently affirms this notion. Which isn’t surprising, considering what was (and had been, and would be) going on in the RCC when the Creed was drafted. Ergo, the wrapper is pretty explicitly gnostic in theology.
Protestants ought to have been the first people jumping up and down complaining about this. Instead, historically we picked it up and ran with it. Probably because Protestants at the time thought it was the only way to successfully compete with what the RCCs were claiming. ‘Look, this Creed says we only have to believe this set of a few dozen doctrines in order for us to get God to save us!–not those other doctrines the RCCs tell us we also have to believe and hold to in order for God to save us. Where is papal primacy in the AthCreed, huh? Or indulgences? Or transsubstantiation? Etc.?? These are the only things we have to believe in order to be saved!–not those other things! The RCC uses this Creed, right? We’re only doing what they themselves agree is all that has to be believed in order for God to save us!’
But an appeal to gnostic salvation against a more detailed gnostic salvation is still gnostic salvation.
Obviously, various RCC and Protestant (not EOx!–so not in fact accepted by all the ‘orthodox’ church!) communions have historically accepted the statements about the Creed as also being Creedal statements. I can’t and don’t deny that. But the statements themselves do not treat themselves as being part of the Creed. They talk about the “Catholic Faith”, they don’t present themselves as the “Catholic Faith”.
Otherwise the Creed would have run something like this: “The Catholic faith is this: Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary for him to hold the Catholic faith. Which faith, except everyone do keep it whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. One God in Trinity should be worshiped, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance. Etc.”
Instead of how it actually runs: “Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary for him to hold the Catholic faith. Which faith, except everyone do keep it whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. And the Catholic faith is this: that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance. Etc.”
Another point is that the doctrinal details match up (with some clarification) to details from earlier versions of the Apostle’s Creed (through the Nicene formulations.) The statements I have called “wrapping” commentary do not.
A related point: they can be removed without affecting the theological statements about God, including Christ, at all. Nor can they be derived from the other theological statements. Nor do those other theological statements imply questions or issues that the “wrapper” commentary addresses. The “wrapper” statements (which certainly do wrap around and bridge the two portions of the Creed, whether they themselves should be considered Creedal statements of the Catholic faith or not) address one and only one doctrinal point, very much distinct from anything else in the Creed: that in order to be saved a person must first and foremost hold and keep those other doctrines, and unless a person does this he or she will be permanently damned. That is quite literally the whole point to those wrapping and bridging statements. “He that would be saved must think thus about the Trinity. Furthermore in order to be saved it is necessary for him to also rightly believe etc.”
So the wrapping statements:
1.) are in fact wrapping and bridging statements (and might as well be called that regardless of whether they are themselves proper Creedal statements of the Catholic faith, too);
2.) do not even call themselves part of the Catholic faith that must be believed in order to be saved, but introduce and claim something the doctrinal details of the Catholic faith;
3.) exist in historical isolation from prior developments of the Apostle’s Creed;
4.) and exist in theological isolation from the trinitarian and Christological doctrines of the AthCreed…
5.) …except for the purposes of adding one more doctrine to the set…
6.) …which doctrine is expressly and repeatedly formulated (throughout all three parts of the wrapper) as not only being a doctrine of holding to doctrinal beliefs in order to be saved…
7.) …but actually goes the distance and insists that holding such doctrines IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING in order to be saved…
8.) …which could not be any more plainly a doctrine, not only of gnosticism, but of the primacy of gnosticism unto salvation.
If anything, it is the wrapper that has been “arbitrarily” “introduced”. Not my categorization of it, which is based on inferences from the external and internal details.
I will add in passing that I was quite convinced of this back when I was a non-universalist, too. It’s pretty obvious, of course, that some details of the wrapping statements (not all of them even then!) deny universalism. But I didn’t need them to be a non-universalist before, and I sure as hell don’t need them now. I rejected them along with (and as) gnosticism before, and I still do now.
It’s also a standard RCC and EOx doctrine (and a standard doctrine of other trinitarian communions; and a standard doctrine among non-trinitarian Christians generally); and a Biblical doctrine; and makes perfectly fine metaphysical sense.
Consequently, I have never once denied a final judgment of works; nor of people either!
What I mean by final judgment is certainly somewhat different from standard Protestant and RCC interpretations of the doctrine (though not necessarily different from common, if not standard, EOx and other trinitarian interpretations of that doctrine). But I am trying to mean what the canonical texts mean by final judgment, taken as a composite testimony, thus hopefully what God means by final judgment.
This all reminds me, btw, that it’s been a while since I caught up with the thread(s) on whether various soteriologies (Calv, Arm or Kath) can be derived from orthodox trinitarian theism. Mental note to get back to that this week…
It occurs to me that, although it has been a while since I went through the various Protestant catechisms and creedal formulations, I don’t clearly recall any that teach that the material doctrine of the wrapping statements of the AthCreed are themselves proper doctrines of the “catholic faith”, or even specifically affirm that doctrine (which is that above all things a person must profess x-doctrinal set in order to be saved).
I just paged through the Westminster Catechism (Long Form), since that’s a hugely influential Calvinistic set (thus seeming pertinent to discussing the propriety of the wrapping statements with a Calvinist–though admittedly it’s a Puritan text and not Anglican per se), and much to my not-surprise, the wrapping statement was neither mentioned as being a creedal doctrine in itself, nor that above all things a person must profess x-doctrinal set in order to be saved.
On the contrary, as expected it taught that Christ alone saves us and brings us to faith, including sooner or later to the knowledge of true doctrine. The closest it comes (so far as I could find) to talking about what we have to do to be saved, wouldn’t be out of place in a typical Armianian doctrinal set:
i.e., insofar as God requires anything of us to be saved from His wrath, it’s repentance from sin and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ. NOT HOLDING TO A COUPLE DOZEN DOCTRINAL POINTS!
But I’m curious about whether I missed anything there, and about which (if any) other Protestant catechism/creedal sets include the wrapping doctrine of the AthCreed (and if so to what extent).
You haven’t mounted a convincing case for why the Athanasian Creed shouldn’t be accepted as a rebuttal of universalism.
The Roman Catholic church evolved, check your history and it’s only convenient for your argument to pick a late date for the creed. Besides has the Anglican church got it wrong when it uses the Athanasian Creed, does someone need to point it out to them that it actually a “Roman Catholic” creed, come on!
Again a final judgment of works issue isn’t controversial, it’s just a smokescreen.
Your “wrapper” is still pure conjunction, it’s not as though we have conflicting revisions, you’ve only introduced this difference inside the creed to support your final argument.
The accusation parts of the creed are gnostic is quite strange given the way the church fought long and hard against that particular group of heresies, besides without some sort of evidence your only asserting that it’s gnostic.
All,
The creeds are a starting point for defining orthodoxy, a common definition (deja vu, where have I had this type of debate before?) of faith, otherwise we’re all just lone voices adding to the further fragmentation of the church.
That’s daring 
