The authors truly believe that The Lord’s Prayer is THE CREED OF CHRIST, first postulated by Gerald Heard (1889 – 1971), a well-known University of Cambridge trained historian and theologian, who wrote many articles and over 35 books, one of which is titled “The Creed of Christ: An Interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer” first published in 1940 by Harpers & Brothers.
The Lord’s Prayer is the authentication, the signature, the demonstrating formula of all his teaching; it is the master-recipe for producing his demands, for reproducing his acts, for adopting not only his method but, if we will make the system our life, his nature. Here, in epitome are the essential means and ends of his faith. Here is the practice, the exercise, whereby he was able to call himself the Son of Man, at last Man as God wills, and to call us through the same exercise and practice to rise to such sonship. By this prayer we may and must judge all Christianity, whether it is the millennial record of the Church or our own acts and thoughts of the last half-hour.
(Gerald Heard, “The Creed of Christ: An Interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer”, pg 29)
If the Lord’s Prayer is the Creed of Christ, then surely it has to be the creed of Christians as well.
The authors only became aware of G. Heard’s work after the publication of their book “The Lord’s Prayer: A Mathematician’s Creed” on 13 August 2018. An e-version can be downloaded here.
The authors truly believe that the Lord’s Prayer encapsulates Jesus’ Great Commandment (Matthew 22:35–40, Mark 12:28–34 and Luke 10:27), as postulated by George Herbert Palmer (1842 – May 7), who was an American scholar and author, a graduate, and then professor at Harvard University, in his book simply titled “The Lord’s Prayer” published in 1932 by The Pilgrim Press:
In both the Old Testament and the New Testament there is a climatic point: a passage, I mean, which so epitomizes all the teaching of that section of our Bible that we should be eager to save it were all else to be destroyed. In the Old Testament it is the Ten Commandments, which form a foundation of civil society. Society would go to pieces were not the Ten Commandments understood and usually obeyed. In the New Testament it is the Lord’s Prayer which lays foundations for the harmonious inner life as the Ten Commandments do for the outer. Here speaks the aspiring spirit to its Maker. This is the love-song of the Christian world.
(G. H. Palmer, “The Lord’s Prayer”, 1932)
The authors only became aware of G. Palmer’s work in October 2019.
The authors truly believe that the Lord’s Prayer is the prayer to God to save His people in the last days, postulated by Brant Pitre, Distinguished Research Professor of Scripture at the Augustine Institute in Denver, in his scholarly paper “The Lord’s Prayer and the New Exodus” Letters & Spirit, edition 2, pages 69 – 96, published 2006:
In this essay, I have tried to show that while the Lord’s Prayer is most certainly an eschatological prayer, it is also much more than that. It is also a typological prayer, a messianic prayer, and a Davidic prayer. That is, it is rooted in the eschatology of the Old Testament, which held that God would act in the future in ways that would parallel how he had acted in the past.
(Brant Pitre, “The Lord’s Prayer and the New Exodus”, Letters & Spirit 2 (2006), 69-96)
The authors only became aware of B. Pitre’s work in May 2019.
The authors truly believe that the Lord’s Prayer is Jesus’s summary of His Gospel (G. Heard, G. Palmer); hence, the Lord’s Prayer emphasizes the necessity and sufficiency Jesus’ cross for our salvation.
The authors truly believe that the Lord’s Prayer and the Last Supper constitute a necessary and sufficient form of worship, postulated by a well-known biblical scholar and theologian by the name Ernest Findlay Scott, who, in 1951, published a splendid book titled “The Lord’s Prayer: Its Character, Purpose & Interpretation.” In it he wrote:
Two things in our religion have come to us directly from Jesus himself – the Lord’s Supper and the Lord’s Prayer. He bequeathed to them these two ordinances which they were to preserve just as they had come from his hands – the Supper which tells us what he did for us, and the Prayer which sums up what he taught us. These two acts of worship have a place by themselves in our religion, and are like the two poles of which it turns. A Christian service would be complete if it consisted only of an observance of the Supper and a repetition of the Lord’s Prayer. Between them they represent everything that we believe, and they are necessary to each other. We cannot rightly say the Prayer without remembering the Cross, and we cannot celebrate the Supper unless we mean to follow the way of Jesus in our daily lives. In all times, men have been conscious that in these two gifts Jesus gave us everything, and the chief aim of Christian thought has been to discover the full significance of the Lord’s Supper and the Lord’s Prayer.
Dr. Jito Vanualailai
The Lord's Prayer: A Mathematician's Creed 