Nicene Creed

The Crisis That Produced It

Early in the fourth century a presbyter of Alexandria named Arius began teaching that the Son of God, however exalted, was not eternal. His reasoning was simple enough to fit on a banner, and in fact circulated as popular songs: if the Son is begotten, then there was a moment before he was begotten, so "there was when he was not." On this view Christ was the first and greatest of all creatures, the one through whom everything else was made, worthy of enormous honor — but a creature nonetheless, not God in the way the Father is God. The argument had real appeal. It protected the oneness of God against any suspicion of two gods, and it could point to verses like "the Father is greater than I" (John 14:28) and the Greek text of Proverbs 8:22, where Wisdom says the Lord "created" her.

The dispute tore through the eastern churches, and Constantine the Great, who had only recently ended the persecutions and had no wish to preside over a fractured church, summoned bishops from across the empire to the city of Nicaea in AD 325. Somewhere between 250 and 318 bishops came — many of them, within living memory of the persecutions, missing eyes or hands. The council rejected Arius's teaching almost unanimously; only two bishops refused to sign. What they produced was a short baptismal-style confession with one contested word at its center.

One Word: Homoousios

The hinge of the whole controversy was the Greek word homoousios — "of one substance," or in older English translations "consubstantial" with the Father. The council declared the Son "begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father," and added "true God from true God" and "light from light" to make the point unmistakable. Begetting, in this account, is what God eternally is rather than something God once did: the Son is not a product of the Father's will at a point in time, the way creation is, but is what the Father is, eternally.

The obvious objection, raised at the time and repeated ever since, is that homoousios is not a biblical word. Nobody at Nicaea denied that. The council's defenders — Athanasius of Alexandria most tenaciously — argued that this was exactly the point. Every scriptural phrase they proposed, the Arian party was willing to sign, because each could be given a reading in which the Son was still a creature: "of God," "the image of God," even "the Word was God" could be softened. Homoousios could not be softened. It was chosen not because it was found in Scripture but because it was the one formula that could not be signed in bad faith by someone who believed Christ was made.

What was actually at stake was less abstract than the vocabulary suggests. Christians prayed to Christ, were baptized into his name, and believed he had saved them — and if only God can save, and only God may be worshiped, then the question of whether the Son is God is not a technicality about metaphysics but a question about whether Christian worship is idolatry and whether the cross accomplished anything. That is why a single word could hold a council for weeks.

The Revision at Constantinople (AD 381)

The creed of 325 gave the Son several careful lines and then stopped almost immediately: "And in the Holy Spirit." That silence became the next battleground, as a group later nicknamed the Pneumatomachians ("Spirit-fighters") argued that the Spirit, whatever else he was, was not fully divine. More than half a century of contested imperial policy later, the emperor Theodosius I convened a second council at Constantinople in AD 381, which reaffirmed Nicaea on the Son and greatly expanded the article on the Spirit: "the Lord and Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets." It also added the clauses on the church, baptism, the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come, and appended "whose kingdom shall have no end."

The result is what scholars call the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, and it is what almost every church that recites "the Nicene Creed" is actually reciting. Nicaea gets the name; Constantinople wrote most of the text now in use.

What the Creed Actually Says

The creed has three movements, one for each person of the Trinity, and then a short fourth on the church and the age to come. It opens with "We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible" — a deliberate refusal of any view in which the material world is the work of a lesser or hostile power.

The longest section is on the Son: "one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made; who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; he suffered and was buried; and the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father; and he shall come again, with glory, to judge both the living and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end." It is worth noticing how much of that is plain narrative. The creed's answer to a metaphysical controversy is largely a story with a date in it — the reference to Pontius Pilate pins the whole confession to a particular Friday under a particular Roman governor.

Then the Spirit, in the expanded 381 form quoted above, and finally: "one holy catholic and apostolic Church; one baptism for the remission of sins; and we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come." One point regularly trips up modern readers: "catholic" here is the ordinary Greek word for "universal," not a reference to the Roman Catholic Church as a denomination, which is why Protestant congregations can and do recite the line unchanged. Some print "christian" or "universal" in its place to avoid the confusion.

The Filioque and the Split Between East and West

One clause divides the churches that otherwise share this creed. Where Constantinople said the Spirit "proceeds from the Father," Latin-speaking churches came to say "proceeds from the Father and the Son" — in Latin, filioque, "and the Son." The phrase appears in Spain by the late sixth century, spread through the Frankish churches under Charlemagne, and was accepted at Rome by the early eleventh. Today it is retained by the Catholic Church and by most Protestant churches that use the creed at all; the Orthodox churches have never accepted it.

The Western case is both scriptural and theological. Jesus says he will send the Spirit (John 15:26; 16:7), Paul calls him "the Spirit of his Son" (Galatians 4:6), and Augustine's account of the Trinity understands the Spirit as the bond of love between Father and Son. On this reading the clause does not add a new doctrine but makes explicit the relation the New Testament already describes, guarding against any picture in which the Spirit's work is detached from Christ's.

The Eastern objection has two parts, and it is important that they are distinct. The first is procedural, and many Eastern theologians consider it the weightier of the two: the creed is the text of an ecumenical council, agreed by the whole church, and no local church — not even Rome — has the authority to amend it unilaterally. Whatever the merits of the theology, altering a conciliar text by regional custom was, on this view, a breach of how the church decides things. The second is theological: Eastern tradition holds that the Father alone is the single source or "origin" within the Godhead, and that having the Spirit proceed from the Father and the Son either introduces two sources into God or quietly subordinates the Spirit to the other two persons. Photius of Constantinople pressed this case most forcefully in the ninth century.

The filioque was one of the standing grievances in the estrangement that culminated in the Great Schism between East and West in AD 1054, though historians generally regard the political, jurisdictional, and cultural causes of that break as at least as weighty as this clause. Modern dialogue has narrowed the theological distance considerably — a 1995 Vatican clarification distinguished the Greek and Latin senses of "procession" and acknowledged the Father as sole origin, and popes have on occasion recited the creed in Greek without the clause — but whether the addition was ever legitimate remains a genuinely open question between the traditions, and this app does not attempt to settle it.

The Creed in Worship Today

Sixteen centuries on, the creed is recited at every Catholic Mass on Sundays and feast days, at every Orthodox Divine Liturgy, and regularly in Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian and Reformed services. Many evangelical, Baptist, and nondenominational churches do not recite creeds at all, usually out of the conviction that Scripture alone is the church's rule of faith and that no human summary should compete with it — but the overwhelming majority of them affirm what the creed teaches, and it is not unusual to find its language quoted in a doctrinal statement by a congregation that would never read it aloud.

That near-universal reach is the creed's real significance for an ordinary churchgoer. Christians disagree about a great many things — baptism, church government, the end times, the filioque itself — but a Catholic in Manila, an Orthodox believer in Athens, and a Presbyterian in Idaho can say almost all of these same sentences and mean the same thing by them. It also functions as a check: the creed is not a set of extra rules added to Scripture but a compressed summary of what the church, under pressure and after long argument, concluded that Scripture had been saying all along about who God is. See the Trinity for how that conclusion developed, and Arius and Athanasius of Alexandria for the two men whose argument forced the question.

Scripture references

• John 1:1-3 — "The Word was God... all things were made through him"
• John 1:14 — "The Word became flesh" — the creed's "was made man"
• John 14:28 — "The Father is greater than I" — a text the Arian party leaned on
• Colossians 1:15-20 — Christ as image of the invisible God, in whom all things were created
• Philippians 2:5-11 — The pre-existent Son who "emptied himself" — an early confession in hymn form
• Hebrews 1:3 — "The very image of his substance" — language close to the creed's own
• John 15:26 — "The Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father" — the disputed clause's source text
• Galatians 4:6 — "The Spirit of his Son" — a key text in the Western case for the filioque
• Matthew 28:19 — Baptism in the one name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit

Further reading

• Nicene Creed (325 and 381) — full text at CCEL
• Encyclopaedia Britannica: Nicene Creed
• Encyclopaedia Britannica: Filioque
• Got Questions: What is the Nicene Creed?