4
June 2021
Credo
But
here on earth the praise of God with its implied confession of belief in Him is
accompanied by a declaring of the content of this faith, of simple judgment of
fact, of articles of faith which the believer holds to be true. “Born of the
Virgin Mary,” “of one essence with the Father,”—those are statements that one
cannot pray and cannot sing unless one believes them to be true, even as one
should not sing, “Blest and Holy Trinity, Praise forever be to Thee!” if one no
longer believes this doctrine. The fact that modern Protestants do this
nevertheless is a symptom of the decline of the evangelical churches and
explains the greater strength of Catholicism. There is no church on earth
without a real confession that it takes seriously. The Liturgy itself is an
outgrowth of such a confession, and the Pope was perfectly right when in his
encyclical Mediator Dei he reminded the liturgical movement of the Roman Church
that the familiar dictum “Lex supplicandi lex credendi” [the law of praying is
the law of believing, i.e., what is prayed is believed] not only can but must
be inverted. Just as it is certain that in the history of the Church a dogma is
usually first prayed and then defined as an article of faith, just so certainly
the liturgy is preceded by confession of faith in the original Church.
Hermann Sasse
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