An introduction to the Adult Christian Formation class: Learning & Living The Nicene Creed
To enter deeply into the riches of the Nicene Creed will take time, effort, and patience. North Americans tend to have a very short attention span. Robert Wilken, a world-class expert on the church fathers, believes we are “bred by our culture to expect immediate, accessible, and simple answers to questions or issues that by their intrinsic nature demand a slower, broader, and deeper analysis. Christians who have grown up in this cultural context frequently lack the patience—and often the training—to slowly, reflectively, painstakingly work our way through the intricacies of a sophisticated, theologically dense text” such as the Nicene Creed.
“‘Get to the point,’ we say to ourselves. If the point is not readily or easily apprehended, we are apt to move on to less demanding and often less rewarding teachers and texts. We surely are more comfortable, and happy with sound bites than extended, complex discourse.”
Occasionally in our time together we will discuss theological models of God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit that the ancient church ultimately deemed to be heresies: Arianism, Sabellianism, Gnosticism, Marcionism, and Manichaeism, among others. If you don’t know much about these religious ideas or the figures behind them, don’t worry. We’ll discuss these issues and people at the appropriate time. The reasons why the church finally decided to reject each of them will become clear.
We will study the heated debate between Athanasius and Arius, taking things slowly, pondering and praying through the important issues at stake. It was Arius and his followers who denied the full deity of Jesus, a belief that threatens the very heart of the gospel. Arius is a name we will want to remember.
In the Nicene Creed we find key topics, issues, and affirmations. Before we begin to examine each affirmation, let’s ask a series of fundamental questions:
- Why should we devote our time and attention to the Nicene Creed?
- When we recite and affirm the words of a credal statement such as the “We believe” or “I believe” of the Nicene Creed, what exactly are we doing? What are we affirming and denying?
- How did the Christian community reach these specific doctrinal affirmations, each of which is logically connected to each other in theologically and spiritually enriching ways?
- What characterizes the relationship between a creed like that of Nicaea and the Bible?
- How can the Nicene Creed help us to understand the Bible and vice versa?
- What kind of person am I called to be to understand, be nourished by, and educated in Christian thinking and living by the creeds?
Exactly what are we saying and doing when we recite the Nicene Creed as members of Christ’s body, the church? We are affirming our trust in the Holy Spirit’s guidance and empowerment of the church as it studied, contemplated, practiced, and articulated the meaning of the gospel as expressed in the Bible.
When we affirm our belief in the church’s guidance and empowerment by the Holy Spirit as it formulated key statements of Christian faith, we are not required to deny the liveliness and occasional messiness of the church’s deliberations. The formation of the creeds in the ancient church was an intricate, turbulent, complicated, Spirit-empowered and -guided process; politics and personalities as well as theology and biblical interpretation played a part in the formation of the Nicene Creed. As is the case today, the only people God had at his disposal to lead his church were sinful ones, and human sin sometimes manifested its presence in church deliberations concerning the meaning of God’s wondrous acts in Christ on behalf of his precious image-bearers.
Yet during what were sometimes rancorous proceedings, ancient Christians sensed the Holy Spirit’s guidance and empowerment of their discussion, debates, and ultimate conclusions. As church leaders plumbed the depths of the Scripture and attempted to express the Bible’s redemptive storyline in the precise, succinct language of the Nicene Creed, the Holy Spirit was at work, guiding and directing this interpretive process.
Read through the Nicene Creed slowly, line by line. As you read, did particular emphases in the Creed grab your attention or raise questions or concerns? Read it again. Perhaps there are phrases that are unfamiliar or words you have yet to learn. For instance, why does the Creed say that the Son of God is “begotten, not made”? What does the Creed mean when it says the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son”? What’s the difference between “begotten” and “proceeds”? When the Creed mentions “one holy catholic and apostolic Church,” is it referring to the church we know today as the Roman Catholic Church? Why does the Creed connect baptism with the forgiveness of sins? Other questions might come to mind. They are all worth pondering carefully.
One way to start our study of the Nicene Creed is to picture it as a short, succinct, authoritative memory device, designed to help Christians understand the gospel and identify falsehoods that began to appear during the years after Jesus’ ascension into heaven and the deaths of the apostles in the first century CE. In its concise statements, the Nicene Creed summarizes the heart of the Christian faith: who God is and what God has done to save human beings from the ravages of sin; the nature of the church; and what we can expect to happen in the future.
Each word, phrase, and sentence is related to a specific text or major theme we find in the Bible. The “We believe” (Lat. credimus; Gk. pisteuomen) we find in the first sentence of the Nicene Creed reflects the Christian community’s absolute trust in the Bible’s inspiration and authority. The church fathers believed that when the Bible speaks, the church must listen and obey. Of course, as ancient Christians clearly understood, to affirm the inspiration and authority of Scripture is one thing; to determine the Bible’s meaning is quite another.
Just as the church fathers sensed the guidance of the Spirit while they pondered and practiced the Christian faith, so also they trusted the Holy Spirit’s guidance as they interpreted the Bible and discussed what words they should use to express the Bible’s meaning in a formal credal statement. For instance, the fathers understood that the language they employed in the Nicene Creed to summarize the biblical witness must be both concise and precise. The point of the Creed was to express and protect the Bible’s meaning, not to confuse or muddle it.
In summary, when the church formulated the Nicene Creed, a communal “We believe” that took years to articulate clearly, the church affirmed as precisely and concisely as possible that its reflections, words, and actions in council at Nicaea were guided by the Holy Spirit, regardless of how complex and conflicted the personalities and process may look from a modern historical perspective.
In the midst of the debate, personalities, and politics, God was at work. A firm, heartfelt “We believe” trusts the empowerment and guidance of the Holy Spirit in the church’s community life, worship, and interpretation of the Bible. As we faithfully recite the Nicene Creed’s “We believe,” we declare our faith in the Holy Spirit’s guidance, empowerment, and protection of the church through a crucial series of questions concerning God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, the church, and the future.
