The Assembly’s failure to formalize the Apostles’ Creed into any of its documents has been characterized as “verging on a separatist mentality” and risked placing the Synod “outside the historic Christian tradition.” Regarding the Catechism in particular, [Ian] Green stresses that in departing from an article-by-article treatment of the Creed in its catechisms, the Assembly departed from “the known practice of the first generations of Protestant catechists.” Robert Letham concludes that leaving the Creed out of the Catechisms was tantamount to “studied indifference and deliberate exclusion.” However, a distinction should be made between objections to the Creed as an authoritative doctrinal affirmation and the Creed as an historical expression of faith “agreeable to the word of God.” Concerns of conscience over phrases in the Creed, particularly on Christ’s descent into hell, prevented many of the divines from receiving the Creed as a whole; yet most had no objection to its substance. In its postscript appended to the Shorter Catechism, the Assembly explains that “the substance” of the Apostles’ Creed is “fully set forth in each of the Catechisms, so as there is no necessity of inserting the Creed itself.”

John R. Bower, The Larger Catechism: A Critical Text and Introduction, 21.