How did the Nicene Creed come together and why?
Everybody get ready to sing Happy Birthday with me… The Nicene Creed is 1,700 years old this year! The Nicene Creed is the statement of faith that we proclaim at Sunday Masses, and it was created in its first form at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD.
This was the first of the great ecumenical (or “worldwide”) councils that helped to define Church teaching on matters like the Incarnation and the Trinity. After the initial explosion of Christian faith and evangelization, people were now trying to settle what it actually is to be Christian and a follower of Jesus.
So when Constantine, the first Christian emperor, took sole possession of the throne in 324, he soon called a meeting of all the world’s bishops to deal with one of the great theological controversies that was boiling at that time. (While not everybody could make it, it was still considered a representative group.)
The problem the Church faced was the teaching of a priest named Arius. Arius had criticized his bishop in Alexandria for not separating Jesus enough from God the Father.
To understand this claim, we have to imagine a time before the doctrine of the Trinity (one God in three Persons) had been formally defined. The early Church had to wrestle with details in the Scripture that were hard to reconcile with each other: On the one hand, God is one and there is no other God, but we also know that Jesus is clearly acknowledged in the Bible as Lord, the Son of God and one with the Father. How could God be one if Jesus is also divine?
Arius answered this question by denying that Jesus was Himself divine. Instead, he argued that Jesus was “like God” — a similar substance to God. This enabled him to say that we have one God who had a Son who was a being of lesser divinity, created from nothing (like an angel). One of Arius’ (incorrect) slogans appears to have been “The Son had a beginning in existence. There was a time when the Son was not.”
However, while this idea sounds plausible to a human way of thinking, Arius’ position makes it impossible for Jesus to offer us salvation. One of the most ancient and important ways of understanding salvation is as union with God. In the words of St. Gregory of Nazianzus: “That which is united to God, that will be saved.”
So if Jesus was not God, then He could not unite our humanity with the divine nature. He could only unite it with that similar (but lesser) substance that Arius posited. We would not be united to God, so we would not be saved.
Arius’ opponents prevailed at the Council of Nicaea and created a statement of belief — a creed — to show the correct way to understand Jesus’ divinity. He is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God. Begotten, not made (that is, not with a beginning in time) and consubstantial (that is, of one substance, not a similar substance) with the Father.”
So even 1,700 years later, we remind ourselves every Sunday, among other things, that Jesus is indeed one with the Father, and therefore we are united to the divine itself — not to any other lesser being!
Father Chris Schroeder is parochial administrator of Christ the King Parish in University City and St. Joseph Parish in Clayton.
