'No continuation of the Gospel': the Nicene Creed at the Holy Communion

Having addressed the reading of the Epistle and Gospel at some length in his A Critical and Practical Elucidation of the Book of Common Prayer, Volume II (1801), John Shepherd has strangely very little to say about the Creed:

The Rubric does not authorise the priest to say, "Here endeth the Gospel." It only directs, that after the Gospel is ended, the Creed shall be sung or said. They that are determined to account for every thing, pretend that the omission has this reason for it, that " the Creed is a continuation of the Gospel. But the Creed is no more a continuation of the Gospel, than it is of the Epistle.

There is no exploration of the historical background to the saying of the Creed at the Eucharist, nor any theological commentary on its doctrinal significance. It is the case that the various ceremonies associated with the Creed - standing, facing east, bowing at the Holy Name - have been addressed by Shepherd in his commentary on Morning and Evening Prayer. That being so, it remains the case that here in his reflections on the Holy Communion, Shepherd has - unlike in his work on Matins and Evensong - remarkably little to say about the Nicene Creed.

The absence of such commentary, however, is itself significant alongside the point Shepherd does make: the Creed is not "a continuation of the Gospel". The ecclesial function of the Creed in setting forth Christological doctrine flows from but is not itself the saving Gospel. It does not have the status ("God's word written") or function ("make thee wise unto salvation") of holy Scripture. This being so, the focus of this part of the liturgy is the proclamation of Scripture, with the saying of the Nicene Creed clearly secondary to this, not substantively different to the saying of the Apostles' Creed at Morning and Evening Prayer.

This comparison is also suggestive of a modest understanding of the Nicene Creed. In not offering a doctrinal commentary on the Nicene Creed, we might interpret Shepherd as evoking the teaching of Jeremy Taylor, that the Apostles' Creed is the sufficient "rule of the faith", with the Nicene Creed "a further explication of the articles apostolical", not offering "any new articles" because "the faith of the apostle's creed is entire".

To confess the Nicene Creed at the Communion or in the Ante-Communion, therefore, was to acknowledge its "explication" of the Apostles' Creed. This interpretation, by the way, can also explain why the Church of England bishops, responding to the newly-independent PECUSA's proposed revision of the Prayer Book, merely required that the Nicene Creed be included in the text of the liturgy, but its actual use "left discretional". 

Shepherd's spare comments on the Nicene Creed in the Communion Office do invite, I think, this modest understanding of the Creed and its rightful liturgical use. Such modesty also reflects Article 8, which grounds the authority of this Creed not in conciliar decree but in "most certain warrants of holy Scripture".  The Nicene Creed, therefore, follows the reading of the Epistle and Gospel, not as a "continuation of the Gospel", but as a confession dependent upon the Scriptures.