Why Is This 1,700-Year-Old Creed So Important?
(ANALYSIS) The Religion Guy’s answer: No text ever written can compare with the impact of the Nicene Creed in this way: Whenever the world’s two billion-plus Christians gather for their regular Communion services, most recite these ancient words to define their core beliefs affirmed across the centuries, in a multitude of nations and languages, in churches that may differ on many other matters.
This New Year marks the 1,700th anniversary of this credo, which was produced by bishops attending Christianity’s first recognized “ecumenical” (that is, universal) council, as opposed to regional councils and synods. They met in the town of Nicaea, present-day Iznik, Turkey, to decide nothing less than who is the Jesus Christ we worship, believe in, and follow?
Five weeks ago, Pope Francis formally invited Eastern Orthodoxy’s Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew to join him in marking the Nicene anniversary at Iznik, an encounter likely to occur in late May.
For the anniversary, the World Council of Churches is holding its first theological Conference on Faith and Order in 32 years, October 24-28 at an ancient Coptic Church monastery near Alexandria, Egypt. Conservative Protestant theologians will confer at an international “Nicea Conference 2025” October 22-25 in Istanbul. And there will be other observances.
In the beginning
From the faith’s very beginnings, Christians knew that Jesus was a human who had lived in their midst yet they simultaneously worshiped him as divine. This is evident in the New Testament and in the history elaborated by the late Larry Hurtado of the University of Edinburgh in his classic “Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity.”
However, exactly how to define the mystery of Christ’s two natures, human and divine, developed over centuries. This article can only sketch the Nicene particulars in that complex discussion.
The question reached a Roman Empire-wide crisis point with the 4th Century teaching of the popular heresiarch Arius (circa 250 – 336). “The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church” summarizes that Arianism “denied the full divinity of Jesus Christ.” Arius “appears to have held that the Son of God was not eternal but created before the ages by the Father from nothing, as an instrument for the creation of the world. He was therefore not God by nature, but a creature.”
The Nicene formula countered this by declaring that the “one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God” is “true God from true God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father.” The original creed concluded with the church’s anathema against any who teach there was ever a time “when He was not” or that the Son of God “is of a different hypostasis or substance” than God the Father. (These credal quotes use English translations by the late Anglican historian J.N.D. Kelly).
A new ending
This final version, familiar worldwide today, slightly reworded some of the Nicene text, deleted the concluding anathema, and added an important new ending. The original Nicene council text had ended abruptly by simply professing belief “in the Holy Spirit,” not otherwise explained.
The “Constantinopolitan” version elaborated Christians’ belief … in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and life-giver, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son is together worshipped and together glorified, who spoke through the prophets; [and] in one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. We confess one baptism to the remission of sins; we look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.”
Technically, scholars refer to the familiar Nicene Creed professed across history as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. The history is foggy but the creed was either rewritten by the second ecumenical council at Constantinople (381) or else the discussions there were part of a process that culminated in the permanent definition eventually affirmed by the fourth ecumenical council at Chalcedon (451).
Over subsequent centuries, western Catholicism came to profess that the Holy Spirit proceeds “from the Father and the Son.” This insertion was a major factor in the Great Schism betwen Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches finalized in 1054. The Orthodox opposed the substance and contended Rome had no authority to unilaterally rewrite the Nicene bishops’ formulation.
The Nicene language consolidated the central doctrine that the one true God existed eternally as three persons in the “Trinity” of Father, Son, and Spirit. Ever since, that has been the essential assertion uniting most Christians, though there were subsequent schisms over details on this and certain offshoots that consider themselves to be “Christian” reject the concept.
Nicene history must note the fact – remarkable by modern standards – that the Roman Emperor Constantine I, a.k.a. Constantine the Great (272? – 337), issued the summons for bishops to confer in A.D. 325, hosted the council sessions in his imperial palace, delivered the opening address, and attended the meetings, though he left most of the theologizing to the experts.
Pivotal historical figure
Constantine is a fascinating and pivotal figure in history for initiating the fateful medieval fusion of church and state, favoring the expanding Christian religion just after it had suffered the last wave of Roman persecution. He was not actually a baptized church member till his deathbed, perhaps due to unsavory aspects of his career, although late-in-life baptisms were common in that era.
He had succeeded his father to be proclaimed “Caesar” of the Roman Empire’s western sectors in 308. In 312, according to the church historian Lactantius, the night before crucial combat against a rival claimant Constantine experienced a dream saying his troops would prevail under the sign of the Cross. He thus attributed his victory to the Christian God and set about to build the religion’s prospects.
In 313, Constantine and the emperor over Rome’s eastern territories, Licinius, issued the precedent-setting “Edict of Milan.” It directed provincial governors to allow freedom of worship for the Christians, along with other religions, and ordered that Christian properties seized during the recent persecution be returned.
The year prior to the Council of Nicaea, Constantine defeated Licinius in battle to become sole Roman emperor over both the East and the West. He soon called the theologically decisive council, considering it necessary to unify the empire by unifying Christianity when it was emerging as the dominant cultural influence.
This piece has been republished with permission from Patheos.
Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.