Named by Name: How the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles Formally Received the Apostles' Creed

Most of the connections this network draws between different creeds and confessions are thematic — shared doctrine, parallel historical pressures, echoing vocabulary. Occasionally, though, a later confession names an earlier creed directly, in its own text, and formally receives it as authoritative. Article VIII of the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles does exactly this for the Apostles' Creed, over a thousand years after the creed itself took shape.

What Article VIII Actually Says

Article VIII states plainly that "the Three Creeds, Nicene Creed, Athanasius's Creed, and that which is commonly called the Apostles' Creed, ought thoroughly to be received and believed: for they may be proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture." This is not a vague gesture of respect toward ancient tradition. It is a formal, textually explicit act of reception — the Elizabethan church, in the very document settling its own Reformation-era doctrinal identity, reaching back across thirteen centuries to bind itself to a baptismal formula that had emerged, gradually and anonymously, from the house churches of second-century Rome.

Why This Mattered for a Reformation Confession

This explicit reception served real theological and political purposes for the English Reformation. Critics of Protestant reform, both Catholic and otherwise, sometimes characterized the movement as a rupture with the historic church, inventing new doctrine untethered from Christian tradition. Article VIII pushes back against exactly that charge, and does so specifically by name: the English church's Reformation-era confession is not discarding the ancient creeds in favor of something new, but explicitly affirming its continuity with them, on the specific grounds that their content "may be proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture" — the same scriptural standard the Articles apply to every other doctrine they affirm.

A Deliberate Choice of Standard

This last clause is worth pausing on. Article VIII does not receive the Apostles' Creed merely because it is ancient or because church tradition has long used it — an argument from authority alone, the kind the Reformers were generally suspicious of when applied to claims not grounded in Scripture. It receives the creed because its content, on examination, holds up against Scripture's own testimony. This reflects the broader Reformation principle of sola scriptura applied even to documents the Reformers had every reason to want to affirm: even beloved ancient tradition gets measured by the same scriptural standard as everything else, and only receives formal confessional status because it passes that test, not merely because it is old.

A Rare, Direct Bridge

Most of the connections traced across this network's confessions are inferential — shared themes, parallel historical circumstances, echoing theological vocabulary developed independently in different eras. Article VIII offers something rarer: a direct textual bridge, one confession explicitly naming and formally receiving another across more than a millennium of separation. It's a reminder that the Reformation, for all its genuine breaks with medieval church practice, consistently understood itself as recovering and continuing the church's most ancient, scripturally grounded confession — not inventing a new one from scratch.

Read the Anglican side of this same direct textual link at AnglicanConfession.com.