The Nicene Creed: Some Questions & Answers on the 1700th Anniversary
“The Nicene Creed [is] the sufficient statement of the Christian faith.”
“In our canons, the formal definition of “doctrine” is “the church’s teaching as set forth in the Creeds and in An Outline of the Faith, commonly called the Catechism. ”
“Doctrine shall mean the basic and essential teachings of the Church and is to be found in the Canon of Holy Scripturee as understood in the Apostles and Nicene Creeds and in the sacramental rites, the Ordinal and Catechism of the Book of Common Prayer. ”
Introduction & Historical Setting:
2025 is the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, which established the Nicene Creed as the symbol and measure of the Church’s faith.
The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus had left his followers struggling to understand and articulate what had happened and its meaning. Paul and the other authors of what became the New Testament pointed the way. Those writings contained creed-like statements, e.g., 1 Corinthians 15:1-8. But even that needed interpretation. How could they make sense of the things Jesus had done and the things Jesus had said about humanity, God – and himself?
The Gospels and the other writings accepted as scripture, inspired by the Holy Spirit, include language that identifies Jesus with the God of Israel, including things He said Himself. His followers were convinced that his death and resurrection had reconfigured everything, bringing salvation from sin, death, and decay with the promise of a hitherto unimagined transformation of human persons and the world. Finding language to express that in ways that enabled people to experience that salvation and transformation was important. Was Jesus some sort of divine being sent by God at the mysterious heart of all reality? Was he something more?
They had the scriptures, they had the church’s language of prayer and worship, and they had the baptismal formulae that were already the seeds of a creed and which believers were expected to affirm. With all of that, theologians of the church struggled for decades – centuries – to make sense of and find a satisfactory way to articulate who he was and why he mattered. Some ways of articulating that were deemed unsatisfactory, misguided, or even dangerous. This struggle and the debates it provoked became more public and more intense once Christianity was declared legal by the Edict of Milan in 313.
Things came to a head with a priest in the city of Alexandria named Arius, who taught that, while Jesus was in some sense divine, he was still a divine creature of God. The God behind it all could not be apprehended and would surely not deign to be identified with the messy, chaotic material world by taking on mortal flesh. But his bishop, Alexander, preached otherwise – that Jesus was indeed the incarnation of that very God. Arius condemned his bishop’s teaching. In response, the bishop disciplined and exiled Arius. But this set up an intense controversy. The Council of Nicaea was called by the Roman Emperor Constantine to address disputes about how to understand the person of Jesus and, thus, God, creation, humanity, and salvation.
1. Wasn’t the Nicene Creed the product of the political machinations of Emperor Constantine?
It is true that Constantine called for a council of bishops to be held in Nicaea. His reasons for convening it were probably complex. He wanted order in the empire and probably saw the divisions within the church as a threat to that. And conflicting church parties had caused social disturbances in some places around the empire. As with most times and places before the modern era, this was an age in which politics and faith were seen as inseparable. The idea that whether the church was on the right track in its doctrine and worship could affect God’s blessing on the church and the empire might also have played a role. The pagan Roman emperors had assumed the role of “Pontifex Maximus” – the guardian of the Empire’s worship and piety. Constantine, who had sided with Christianity and was eventually baptized, might have understood himself as inheriting that role. This would mean he understood himself as at least the guardian of the faith with some responsibility for the church’s teaching. He is also recorded to have expressed concern that the disunity represented in different factions teaching different things about the nature of Jesus and of God was a potential scandal compromising the church’s witness and contradicting Jesus’ prayer that the church should be one.
The emperor opened and, to an extent, participated in the Council. However, it is unclear whether Constantine was directly involved beyond pressing for a “workable” compromise among various theological factions. It is the case that once the council “settled” on the Creed, Constantine did put the weight of the empire behind what was now considered the orthodox position. But he also eventually pardoned Arius. And his son, Constantius, promoted the teaching of Arius that the Nicene Council had condemned. Arianism might have actually been the more politically astute option. It was a popular position at the time. It was more philosophically respectable. And it would have ingrained into the cosmos an unquestionable hierarchy of all being—God, Jesus, emperor, people, that would have been helpful for shoring up power in an empire that had been fractured among multiple co-emperors. The idea of two, or three, co-equal persons in God didn’t have the same implications! For several decades, different emperors supported different church factions until 380, when the emperor Theodosius I declared Nicene Christianity the empire's official faith. The following year, he also convened the Council of Constantinople, which slightly revised the Creed into the form we affirm now.
The legacy of Christianity’s enmeshment with empire is, in many ways, problematic. But that does not necessarily compromise the legitimacy of the Council of Nicaea or the Creed it affirmed. One might even say that the clarity and unifying power of the Nicene Creed appears to be a work of the Holy Spirit.
2. Wasn’t the message of Jesus about what to do and how to be rather than what to believe. Why does the Creed focus on the latter?
The short answer to this question is that the life and teachings of Jesus were not in dispute. The early church already took the teaching and example of Jesus seriously. They were contained in the scriptures, which were already read in worship every week. The church put love and compassion at the heart of its life and teaching. It organized social services for the poor, hungry, and needy. It founded hospitals. Its teaching reflected the example of Jesus in critiquing wealth and violence. It advocated for hospitality to the stranger and foreigner. The dignity of traditionally marginalized groups like women, children, and the poor was honored in a way unprecedented in the ancient world (though, admittedly, the church did not embrace total equality of women and men). The church surely did not practice all of this perfectly, always, and everywhere. But none of the above was particularly controversial. It was the emphatic teaching of the theologians most often identified with the defense of the Nicene faith, e.g., Athanasius of Alexandria, Macrina the Younger, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, Ambrose of Milan, and others. And these teachers understood that the practice of the church is grounded in its belief.
Not everything that was decided by the Council of Nicaea is in the Creed. The Council also addressed issues of church organization and discipline, including penalties for clergy guilty of sensual sin (Canon 2) or greed and usury (Canon 17). Canon 12, reflecting the church’s commitment to peace, established penance for those who “having cast aside their military girdles, but afterwards returned, like dogs, to their own vomit.” Canon 17 did address a disputed question: to what extent were mercy and forgiveness possible for those who had denied their faith during a recent persecution? Imitating Jesus, the canon declared such people should be “dealt with mercifully.”
But those canons did not address the controversy that had led to the calling of the Council of Nicaea. The debate roiling the church was not about Jesus' moral teachings, but rather who Jesus was and how he was related to God, whom he called Father. And, with that, questions about the basic understanding of God. The answer to that question had implications for the salvation of humanity and the restoration of creation. The answer to that question also has implications for why the teaching and example of Jesus should matter more than any other human teacher.
3. Isn't one's faith about one's relationship with the living God and with God's children? Can’t we say, “Love God and love your neighbor,” and leave it at that?
That is indeed Jesus’ summary of the law, and that is no small thing. However, in his context (the time’s tradition and teachings), Jesus had received a great deal about the nature and purposes of God as a son of Israel. While there was no written creed as such, Jesus was part of a people who held certain ideas, i.e., doctrines, about God and humanity. As a faithful Jew, he would have recited the Sh’ma found in Deuteronomy 6:4-5: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”
There is no sufficient knowledge of God without some sort of creed. ‘God’ is a meaningless word until it is given meaning. To say, “Just love God with your whole heart, mind, and soul” only begs the questions, “Who, or what, is this ‘God’ I am to love, and what does it mean to love this ‘God’?” As for loving neighbors, who counts as my neighbor? Do strangers count? What about enemies? And why should I love them? And in what way, to what extent, and at what cost? Why is it so hard to do? Does it matter ultimately? Is there any divine reckoning for our failure and refusal to love? What does it mean to be human? And what kind of world do we live in?
Any answers to these questions are not obvious. That they seem obvious to many of us is because our imaginations have already been formed in a society shaped by the vision of Christianity reflected in the Nicene Creed, even if we have mostly forgotten the source of that shaping. And any answer to these questions takes us into the realm of belief and doctrine. The Creed is the basic Christian foundation for answering them. One might prefer other answers or make up one’s own, but one cannot talk about “god,” “love,” “creation,” or “human beings” without some sort of belief system, i.e., a creed.
It is inadequate to appeal to a simplistic pietism, whether in its more conservative or more liberal versions, that says, “Don't bother me with doctrine, just give me Jesus.” We have no direct access to Jesus other than through the Gospels, which are heavily influenced by the interpretation (doctrine) of who Jesus is and why He matters. The Creed is the Christian guide to understanding the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in light of Jesus. It affirms that, while God will always remain beyond our understanding, when we look at Jesus, we see God. And that God has so loved humanity as to enter into our physical reality with our rebellion, our sin, our brokenness, our unlove, and untruth to deliver us.
4. Can’t we just worship God without getting hung up with the Creed?
Again, that presumes some knowledge (creed) about God and what it means to worship that God rightly. In fact, part of what guided the developing understanding expressed in the Nicene Creed was the language of the church’s worship.
In any event, within the Episcopal/Anglican tradition, eliminating or ignoring the Creed would not resolve things for those who don’t like it. The rest of the liturgy is saturated with the same story and the same imagery.
Further, the Creed and worship are integrally related:
“Nicene Christianity has also understood orthodoxy in a richer and deeper sense: as right praise. To be orthodox is to strive to stand rightly with others before the mystery of the true God. To be orthodox is to join with a community of faith in adoration of God’s doxa (glory), which already casts light on the day when God will finally make everything right. Belief is never correct when it becomes nothing more than a political mechanism to ensure the unity of an institution. Belief is right only when it points us in the right direction: to glorification of the true God, who promises not to give us a secret wisdom, but to be graciously present to us, even and especially where our vision and knowledge are weak.”
5. But isn’t the language of the Creed poetic, rich in metaphors?
Theologically and philosophically, “metaphor” is a tricky concept, but we’ll use it for the moment. We should never forget that even our best language cannot fully comprehend God, who is always beyond our comprehension. In fact, you’d have a hard time finding a theologian of the early Church who did not say the same. They were not so naïve as moderns often suppose. Over and over again, the early theologians remind us that all our language for God is stammering. All images must be held lightly. Gregory Nazianzus, one of the more important defenders of the Creed, affirmed,“It is difficult to conceive of God, but to define him in words is an impossibility” (Fourth Theological Oration).
“It is difficult to conceive of God, but to define him in words is an impossibility” ”
And yet those same theologians also affirm that we must speak of God because God has spoken a Word to us in history, especially in Jesus Christ. Thus, while we must speak cautiously and humbly in the face of the mystery that is God, we can yet dare to say something about God because God has said something to us in Jesus, the Word made flesh. “The impossibility has become a possibility by the boundless excellence of the grace of God,” is how Origen put it in his treatise On Prayer.
Because it is about God, some of the Creed is indeed metaphorical. Certainly, referring to God as “Father,” while it reflects the language of Jesus and signifies something true about God, does not mean God is male. Gregory of Nyssa, another foundational theologian who defended the Nicene Creed, is clear on this in his commentary on the Song of Songs. Similarly, affirming that Jesus Christ is “seated at the right hand of God the Father” metaphorically signifies something about the relationship between Jesus and God the Father, but it is not a spatial relationship. There is no literal physical chair on which Jesus sits.
But, because the Creed is about the God revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus much of it is not metaphorical, but historical, e.g., he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary and was made man, for our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, he suffered death and was buried, on the third day he rose again, etc. That has always been the scandal of Christianity to the philosophers and Gnostics (ancient and contemporary) who want to keep God safely on the side of the metaphorical beyond the messiness of material reality in space and time (protecting God? themselves?). But Christians confess a historical virgin birth to a historical Mary of an historical enfleshment of God who died an historical death under an historical Pontius Pilate but lives again through an historical resurrection, leaving behind an historical empty tomb – all “for us and for our salvation.”
The Creed is part poetry, part prose. Indeed, one might say that in the incarnation, God (ultimately hidden in Mystery and Metaphor) has become prose – prosaic – in order to turn all to poetry. Trying to keep them strictly separate or make it all one or the other always gets us into trouble.
To say that our language about God’s essence is metaphorical is a theological truism. To conclude that, therefore, all metaphors for God are only human creations or that all metaphors are more or less equal is an assumption and a theological falsehood. To say that all language about God acting in history, e.g., the virginal conception, the incarnation, and the bodily resurrection as historical, physical events, is metaphorical and only true in some spiritual sense is to try to be more spiritual than the God we know through Jesus has chosen to be. This was the fundamental error of the Arians. Arius found it inconceivable and offensive to imagine the One beyond all things taking on human flesh and material reality. The God we know through Jesus and the Creed is a God who is prepared to get down and dirty in the material world to address and transform the very literal, tragic, and historical mess we have made of ourselves, others, and the world. And all so that we might be “become partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). As some of the bishops who were at the Council of Nicaea would say, the Son of God “became what we are that we might become what he is” (for example, Athanasius, ‘On the Incarnation’).
6. I read or heard somewhere that the root meaning of credo is to “give the heart” so intellectual assent is not the point.
I am not sure that is accurate, In any event, to say that the root meaning of credo is to “give the heart” and reduce its meaning to only that is like saying that every time the atheist, Richard Dawkins, says, “Good bye,” he really means, “God be with ye.” However helpful it might be in adding color to our understanding, the meaning of words and phrases are not reducible to their roots. The meanings of words evolve. What did credo mean to those who used it in the 4th century? One need only look at the historical context and development of the Creed to know that it was meant to delineate right belief from wrong belief as well as to shape the direction of the heart (and imagination).
Both are necessary. You cannot give your heart to something without some knowledge or belief about that to which you are giving your heart. And you cannot truly come to know something without giving your heart to it. Loving and knowing go together. Can I claim to love my wife but then believe whatever I want to believe about the kind of person she is, trying to fit her into some fantasy of my own making? Getting to know her as she is what it means to love her. And it is by attending to her in love that I get to know her.
We are not supposed to be able to say the Creed with integrity if we find it incredible (a related word). The very reason for trying to shift the meaning of credo from intellectual assent is self-contradictory in as much as it is based on the conclusion that some aspects of the Creed are no longer intellectually credible.
Continuing to say the words of the Creed without intellectual assent and meaning them in their common sense warps language. Either we mean it or we don’t. Or we stretch the meaning of words beyond all logic. What if we used the same approach to language with the marriage vows? Can I have an affair and then tell my wife she needs to get over her unsophisticated, literalistic interpretation of “forsaking all others?”
Reducing the Creed to “matters of the heart” to minimize its intellectual claims tailors it to the heritage of a naïve romanticism prioritizing feeling over reason. It is an odd thing to do for those who (as Episcopalians sometimes love to do) pride themselves on being in the “thinking person’s church”.
7. That doesn’t leave much room for doubt.
The issue is not about doubt or judging those who struggle with this or that aspect of the Creed. I have no problem with honest struggle with the Creed – historical or otherwise. I have my share, though as I've said elsewhere, there are implications of the Creed that I struggle with more than things like the virginal conception or bodily resurrection (the Sermon on the Mount for starters). Thankfully, it is not up to us to believe this or that bit of the Creed on our own. As we sometimes pray, “regard not our sins, but the faith of your Church” (1979 Book of Common Prayer, p. 395). Sometimes others believe for us. In spite of any personal doubts, the Creed is the standard of Church teaching. At the very least, it is what Christians aspire to believe and conform their lives to – however inadequately.
Doubts, whether about orthodoxy (right belief and worship) or orthopraxy (right behavior), arise when one way of understanding how the world works and how God engages the world comes into conflict with another. But that cuts both ways. Questioning the virginal conception and the bodily resurrection, for example, is unsettling to one way of understanding things. Believing that we live in a world where such things have happened is unsettling to others.
We might also wonder why we hold doubt in such high esteem. Are we prepared to doubt everything?
Conclusion
The Nicene Creed offers the foundation of a way of understanding the nature of reality and the God at the heart of it all. It presents a powerful, provocative, and evocative vision of God, humanity, and creation. The deepest truth about reality is personal and relational. The world in which we live is not an accident, but a creation delighted in by its Creator. In spite of human rebellion, sin, and brokenness; in spite of our failure to live lives of complete love and truth; that Creator, who is merciful, has entered into the mess we have made, bringing deliverance, forgiveness, healing, and transformation. It does not answer all questions and was not meant to. But those whose imaginations have been shaped by the Creed and have sought to inhabit the world it describes have found that it opens up thrilling vistas of life and hope. It is worth celebrating.
