Jesse Sharpe PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

Introduction 15
phrasing is the result of the desire to create a statement of faith that would not allow any
room for the Arian heresy and its emphasis upon Christ ‘as a creature’ to continue in the
Christian religion. 19
The statement then makes the more intellectually difficult assertion
that Jesus Christ was both man and God and places any attempts to assert the divinity over
the humanity or the humanity over the divinity as acts of heresy. The Roman Catholic and
the primary Protestant churches of the seventeenth century are affirming their continued
acceptance of this belief through adopting the creeds as a part of their central statements of
faith.
The final creed affirmed by the ‘39 Articles’ is the Athanasian Creed. Though less
used today, it still has wide acceptance in the Church as it also did in the seventeenth
century. In addition to the inclusion in the ‘39 Articles’, this creed is also to be found in
the Lutheran ‘Book of Concord’, Zwingli’s Fifei Expositio, the Callican Confession, the
Belgic Confession, the synod of Dort, and Pope Pius V confirmed its place in the Roman
Catholic mass. 20
The strong Protestant and Roman Catholic support that the creed
received is important due to the emphasis it places on the importance of the Incarnation to
the Christian faith with the creed explicitly stating that not believing in the Incarnation and
its proper place in the Trinity is a damnable offence. The creed is long, but the precision
of the language is important due to its attempt to define the Trinity and the Incarnation in
such a way that will not allow those who would deny the divinity or humanity of the
incarnate Jesus any room to use the creed for support. For this reason the complete creed is
provided here.
19 Christian Theology, pp. 15-17.
20 J. N. D. Kelly, The Athanasian Creed (London, 1964), pp. 48-51.