Nicene Creed (eBook)

INTRODUCTION

The Historical Setting

The Nicene Creed originated because ancient Christians were appalled. A teacher in one of the most influential churches in the world was trying to get them to speak of Christ and say things like “there was once when he was not” and “he came to be out of nothing.” They had good reason to be appalled. Christians worship Jesus Christ as Lord, exalted at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. To say “there was once when he was not” would be to say that he is not eternal like God the Father—that he came into being from non-existence just like all God’s creatures. That would mean he is not really God at all, but one of the things God made. To say this would be to say that what Christians have been doing all along, worshiping Jesus as Lord, is the kind of thing pagans do: worshiping something that is not fully, truly, ultimately God. The Nicene Creed was written to say no, in the strongest possible terms, to that kind of Christian paganism.

It said no by saying yes to who God really is, and who Jesus is. It states the essentials of Christian faith in God the Father and his eternal Son, Jesus our Lord, and it adds some essentials about the Holy Spirit as well. And sometimes it says who God is by saying what he has done to make us who we are: God’s creatures whom he raises from death to everlasting life in Christ. So the Creed is a fundamental statement of the gospel of Jesus Christ, who is God in the flesh coming down from heaven for us and our salvation, so that we may share in his kingdom that has no end.

The no is important because of the yes. To say no is to draw a boundary and say: We’re not going there, because that’s not who Christ is. False teaching about who Christ is leads us away from faith in the real Christ and gives us a bogus substitute. It means preaching a different gospel from the one that comes to us from our Lord’s apostles, which is why the apostle Paul goes so far as to say: Let anyone who teaches differently be anathema, accursed (Galatians 1:9). Heeding the apostle, the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 composed a creed that is the precursor to the one this book studies, and added anathemas—solemn curses against anyone who teaches things like “there was once when he was not” or “he came to be out of nothing.” It did not name Arius, the man who taught this, because its purpose, like Paul’s, was not to condemn a particular man but to exclude what he taught. Arius was always free to change his mind, to repent, to submit to the judgment of the Council and teach the same truth. But real heretics are stubborn (you can’t be a heretic just by being mistaken; you have to persist in teaching your mistake to the church even after being corrected), and eventually the doctrine that took shape in opposition to the Council of Nicaea came to be known as Arianism, one of the most famous heresies in the history of the church.

But this book is not about a heresy but about the truth: the gospel of Jesus Christ taught by the Creed that grew out of the faith of Nicaea. It’s a book for Christians who want to understand their own faith better, and thus to grow in the knowledge of God, by learning what the ancient teachers of the Nicene faith had to give us.

The Council of Nicaea, after which the Nicene Creed is named, was a gathering of bishops in ad 325. They met in the city of Nicaea in Asia Minor, which is now the town of Iznik in Turkey. It is a little more than fifty miles as the crow flies from Istanbul, the city that used to be called Constantinople back when it was the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Rome itself was defeated a century or so after the Council of Nicaea and the Western Roman Empire gradually disintegrated, but the Eastern Empire remained for another thousand years and became what is known as the Byzantine Empire—after Byzantium, the earlier name for Constantinople. “Constantinople” means “the city of Constantine,” the Roman emperor who made it his capital in 330 and who had also called the bishops to come to the Council at Nicaea in 325.

Nicaea came to be recognized as the first ecumenical council, from the Greek noun oikoumene, or ecumene in Latin, meaning “the whole inhabited world.” An ecumenical council is a council for the church throughout the world, the church of the ecumene. This was a new idea, but meeting in councils was not. Christian bishops, the leaders of local churches, had been meeting for years in regional councils or synods (from synodos, which is just the Greek word for “council”). This was an important way of keeping order in the churches and of keeping the faith. A bishop had the job of preserving the faith as it was handed down in the church of his town since the time of its founding. The name for this handing down in Latin is traditio, from which we get the word “tradition.” It was a handing down that began in some places, such as Jerusalem and Rome and Antioch, in the earliest days of the Christianity, before the New Testament was written. If there was a serious discrepancy in teaching or church practice between one town and another, the bishops could meet in a synod to straighten things out. The Council of Jerusalem, for example, met to straighten out disputes about how the churches growing out of the missionary work of the church of Antioch were handling things (Acts 15:1–35). In that case, the burning question was how to incorporate believers in Christ who were not Jewish into the fellowship of the church. In this case, at Nicaea, the question was how to exclude the teaching of Arius from churches throughout the world.

The most important way the bishops did that was to produce a confession of the Christian faith—which is what a creed is. Prior to this time, creeds were handed down orally rather than written, as people coming to Christ were taught some form of confession to affirm when they were baptized. It was a way of saying what they were committing themselves to as they joined the Body of Christ. The confession of faith that we now know as the Apostles’ Creed, for example, took shape originally in Rome as an oral baptismal confession.1 Each town had its own traditional confession, handed down through generations of bishops, with many small variations. But they all followed a threefold pattern, so that everyone in the ecumene was baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, as our Lord commanded (Matthew 28:19). What evidently happened at Nicaea is that one of these unwritten local confessions was adapted, with some additions directed specifically against Arius’ teaching, to provide a single creed for the whole ecumene.

The Creed presented in this book is the most widely-used confession of faith in the Christian world. It is not the original Creed of Nicaea in 325 but an expanded confession formulated at the Council of Constantinople in 381 and officially accepted as a statement of the Nicene faith at the Council of Chalcedon in 451.2 In the interests of historical accuracy, scholars often give it a long name, like the “Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed,” but I will use the more familiar name “Nicene Creed,” which accords with the reason it was accepted by the church throughout the world: it is a fuller way of confessing the same faith as the Council of Nicaea. Thus for the purposes of this book, as well as in the ordinary usage of the church, the label “Nicene Creed” designates a different text from “the Creed of Nicaea.” Along with a number of small differences, the Nicene Creed omits some things in the Creed of Nicaea, including the anathemas, and adds a good deal to what is said about the Holy Spirit. The result is an expanded confession of the faith of Nicaea, and as such it has come to be accepted as the ecumenical Creed, the confession of the Nicene faith of the whole ecumene, and is incorporated into the regular worship of the vast majority of Christians around the globe, including Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, and most Protestants who use a regular liturgy.

It is worth saying a bit more about the unity and diversity within what we can now call the ecumenical church, the church of the ecumene that agrees in confessing the Nicene faith. It is the church that deserves to be called orthodox (small “o”) because it teaches the right faith and worship (orthe doxa in Greek). It is also catholic (small “c”), meaning “universal” (katholikos in Greek). And it is evangelical (small “e”) because it is the church of the gospel (euangelion in Greek). In the lower-case sense of these words, the one holy church of God, which the Creed teaches us to honor as the Body of Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit, is orthodox, catholic, evangelical, and ecumenical, and its faith is the faith of Nicaea.

The diversity within the one ecumenical church, which ought not to divide it, can be distinguished by names with capital letters. We will need to mark the distinction between orthodox (small “o”), which embraces the whole Nicene ecumene, and the Orthodox (capital “O”), including Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, and many others, all grouped under the heading “Eastern Orthodox,” whose heritage can be traced back to the Eastern Roman Empire, where the dominant language was Greek. And we...