The
Nicene Creed [is] the sufficient statement of the Christian faith.
– ‘Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral’ (1979 Book of Common Prayer,
p. 877)
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.
– The Episcopal Church Canon III.10.4.c.2
Doctrine
shall mean the basic and essential teachings of the Church and is to be found
in the Canon of Holy Scripture as understood in the Apostles and Nicene Creeds
and in the sacramental rites, the Ordinal and Catechism of the Book of Common
Prayer.
– The
Episcopal Church Canon IV.2
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 find ways to understand and
articulate what had happened and what it meant. 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 included language identifying
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 the
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 has 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. But it is
unclear that Constantine was directly involved beyond pressing for a “workable”
compromise between 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 actually have been the more
politically shrewd option. It was a popular position at the time. It was more
philosophically respectable. And it would have ingrained into to 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 official faith of the empire. The next 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 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 calling of the
Council of Nicaea. The debate roiling the church was not about the moral
teaching of Jesus, but who Jesus was and how he was related to God who 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 just 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. But Jesus had
received a lot 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 knowing 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 a
world do we live in? Any answers to these questions are not obvious. That they
seem obvious to many of us is due to the fact that our imaginations have already
been formed in a society shaped by the vision of Christianity reflected in the
Nicene Creed – even if we have largely 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 access to Jesus other than the Gospels which are soaked
in 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 that 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, getting rid of 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.
– John Burgess, ‘Going Creedless;
The Christian Century, June 1, 2004, pp. 24-28
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 always remember that even our best language cannot fully
comprehend God who is always beyond our comprehending. 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).
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 an
historical virgin birth to an 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 are assumptions and theological
falsehoods. 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 (see Virginal Conception and other Preposterous Things), 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? (see Little Floaty Things the Say "No")
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.
