“I believe in one God, the father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.”
Like many Anglicans, I’ve been reciting some version of the Nicene Creed since I was old enough to sit through a church service with the grown-ups. And thanks to the smattering of church history I still retain from my time at Ottawa’s Augustine College, I have at least a basic idea of where it came from and what it means—a council of bishops from across the 4th century Christian world brought together by the Roman emperor Constantine to discuss the Arian heresy and nail down some specifics about the nature of Christ. But, also like a lot of Anglicans, I feel less sure about many things surrounding this foundational text which is a regular part of my worship life—a text which also marked the 1,700th anniversary of its writing this year.
Some of those questions came up earlier this spring in an impromptu round table discussion on the creed’s anniversary with some other parishioners during coffee hour at my home parish, Little Trinity in Toronto. “It was the last time Christians all agreed on something,” joked one parishioner. “It’s a list of all the important things that make up the Christian faith, isn’t it?” asked another. Other questions included: Is it true the creed is a list of all the basic things a Christian needs to believe to be called a Christian? Does that mean you can use it as a litmus test to see if a breakaway sect still counts as Christian? Is it true Santa Claus decked a guy at the council? And perhaps most importantly, what value does the creed have to us as Christians today?
Freshly loaded up with these questions, I went off to pester some theologians for answers.
All of the sources interviewed for this story agreed on one vital piece of context Christians should know in determining the Council of Nicea’s significance: the bishops did not arrive with the intention of setting out a total declaration of all Christian teachings. Instead, Constantine called the Council together in a town conveniently near his then-capital of Nicomedia to deal with a specific theological controversy which had grown to threaten public order in the Roman Empire: the Arian heresy. The council dedicated to settling this question would run from May 325 all the way to the end of July, with May 20 traditionally celebrated as the anniversary of its start date. The exact number of bishops in attendance is a matter of some debate, with Athanasius of Antioch calling it 318, a number which mirrors the 318 members of Abraham’s household mentioned in Genesis. However, contemporary written sources give numbers ranging from 250 to 300. Named for its founder, Arius, Arianism taught that rather than being God himself, Jesus Christ was instead the first creature God the Father brought into existence before the beginning of time.
That may sound like an esoteric distinction to modern ears, but upon closer inspection, it raises critical questions about the content of the gospels and, most importantly to a fourth century Christian, how salvation works. During the council, the question was expressed in terms of whether Jesus was of the same substance as God the Father—in Greek, homoousios—and not a different substance altogether (heteroousios), as Arius proposed; or whether he was of similar substance, homoiousios, as a third group led by Eusebius of Caesarea suggested—the point being to avoid implying the Father, Son and Spirit are the same person.
It’s the difference of just one letter, the Greek iota. But that letter is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this case, explains Bishop of the diocese of Ontario William Cliff.
“Have you ever heard that something makes ‘not one iota’s worth of difference’? One iota’s worth of difference is the difference between salvation and not,” says Cliff, who holds an honorary doctorate in divinity and a master’s degree in historical theology and is currently teaching an online course in early church History at Huron College. “The purpose of the creed is, if he wasn’t God, he couldn’t have done it. And if he wasn’t human, it wouldn’t have mattered.” And so homoousios it was.
The Christian understanding of how Christ’s sacrifice defeats death and offers eternal life to humans, he says, is predicated on the belief that God, the creator of the universe, chose to become subject to his own creation and descend into death in order to take humanity’s sins with him and provide a precedent for resurrection. That is, God had to become fully human to die and the human who died had to be God to get back up. This is also what distinguishes the faith from other belief systems like, for example, Greek mythology, which have half-human, half divine figures like Heracles, he says.
Because this idea is the necessary underpinning of the Christian idea of salvation, Cliff says, it functions as a sort of backstop or bare-minimum belief for all of the versions of the faith which follow. He describes the definition as a vast paddock with a fence around it: there is a lot of space inside for people to believe or not believe various other doctrines about what is and isn’t true about the faith, but the Nicene Creed does form an outer boundary on what fits with the core premise of Christianity.
“I wouldn’t say it’s the last time the church agreed on something,” he says. The later Council of Chalcedon established more of the dual nature of Christ, including his full humanity, for one example. “But it is one time. We generally think that the first six or seven councils are all agreed.”
At the council of Nicea, members from each of the three factions spoke in defense of their perspectives, attempting to defend their views in terms of how well they harmonized with Scripture.
Father Geoffrey Ready is an Eastern Orthodox priest and director of the Orthodox School of Theology at the University of Toronto’s Trinity College. He adds that while the creed does say something true about the nature of Christ, it’s also vital to see it as piece of highly contextual fourth-century theology (couched in fourth-century Greek, which loses much in the translation to English) written as a response to a particular wrong statement about Christ. Not all the decisions made at Nicea outlasted the fourth century; some of what was decided at there was further refined and altered at the Council of Constantinople in 381, Ready says, leading to the creed we use today being more precisely called the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. The creed formulated at Nicea is that moment’s attempt to articulate something that is true and important about an infinite being using the finite tool of human language.
“Although it does have enduring importance for us all, we forget that [particularity],” he says. “We can kind of universalize it in a way that is not helpful.”
There is much more to who Jesus was and is that can ever be summed up in a single statement, Ready says. From the historical context of the nation of Israel in the Old Testament to the lived experience of the church over centuries, to the ministry, actions and teaching of Jesus’s actual life as recorded in the gospels, there’s much more needed for a full understanding of the nature of Christ—let alone a full description of the core of Christian teaching.
Because I am a huge nerd, I offer Ready an analogy from pop culture in our interview to see if I’m getting his point. Could I say trying to get an idea of what Jesus is like from the Nicene Creed would be like basing your idea of who Superman is on a review of a bad movie adaptation? You might learn what mistakes the movie made, and the review might tell you what it failed to reflect about the character. But it wouldn’t give you the experience of who the character is the way you could get by going to the source and opening a comic book.
That adds up, says Ready. In similar fashion, the Council of Nicea got together to point out what Arius had gotten wrong about Jesus, though Ready adds they were a community discussing it in full, not just a single negative critic writing a bad review.
“But otherwise, that’s exactly it. You never would have had to say anything about what the values or virtues of the character of Superman were because that was known by experience, by the way the story was told, et cetera,” Ready replies. In the same way, he says, present-day Christians can still heartily confess the content of the creed, but it’s best if they fill the words with their own experience of the scriptures, the liturgy and ideally their own communion with the living God. “[The council] wouldn’t have needed to happen except that somebody came to challenge what was an indefinable thing that didn’t need to be articulated, but now something has to be done to prevent that way of talking about it,” he says.
One other thing modern Christians can carry with them about the council today is its method for settling a disagreement, Ready says. The process of holding a council with all involved present to discuss the issue and come to a resolution laid the pattern for how the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Anglican churches would continue to work on their disagreements going forward, he says. They even invited Arius himself to give him the chance to defend his ideas, rather than simply anathemize him in absentia.
“This idea that no one bishop or presbyter or leader or charismatic figure can hold sway, that the only way to govern the church is by council, by everybody getting together—I think that’s probably the most important part of what went on,” he says.
Even today, the Anglican Church of Canada calls its triennial governance gathering a synod, the Greek word for council. That name reflects a connection to a tradition dating as far back as the Book of Acts, when early Christians gathered to discuss whether new converts should be required to abide by Jewish traditions. Nicea was the first time representatives were invited from the entire church throughout the known world—in theory at least; a significant majority came from the eastern part of the Roman Empire—but it wouldn’t be the last by a long shot. Throughout much of that history, only bishops could vote at the councils (though many more people were in attendance, even at Nicea). However, there were exceptions, such as the late medieval Council of Constance in 1414, which healed the schism between competing papacies in the Western church and at which lay people were also allowed to vote. The Church of England, for its part, was founded partially on the idea that the lay leaders of England—that is, royalty and parliamentarians—should have more authority in church proceedings. It was not until the 20th century that regular parishioners replaced parliamentarians as members of the House of Laity. The Anglican Church of Canada’s General Synod, meanwhile, followed several other colonial churches, including those of New Zealand, Australia and Ireland, by including laity and clergy from its first meeting in 1893.
There’s another side to Nicea, Ready adds. The council was called not by the leaders of the church itself but the head of a secular state, Constantine, who had his own agenda to quell the infighting that threatened his empire’s order. That began a centuries-long association between Christianity and imperial power, he says. While tying the church to secular national powers did much to help carry its message around the world, it has also undermined its message throughout history, corrupting the attempts to share that message by coupling them with attempts at conquest and the pursuit of earthly wealth, Ready says.
Cliff also comments on this relationship, pointing out that Article 21 of the Anglican 39 Articles of Faith says that general councils may not be gathered without the consent of the will of princes—an echo of Constantine’s involvement in Nicea reverberating all the way to the Reformation era. “We went from being a persecuted church to being an arm of the empire and only in the last hundred years have we begun to think, ‘Was that the right idea?’” he says.
At this point, I felt I had a much stronger idea of the historical context surrounding the Nicene Creed, what it was intended to do—and just as importantly, what it wasn’t. But the question I was left with is: if it’s not a complete understanding of Jesus or the whole Christian faith, why is it so important that we keep reciting it in church? For help navigating the distinction between the creed as a response to a fourth century theological question and as a vital part of the church’s history, I went to Joseph Mangina, a professor of systematic theology at Wycliffe College.
He tells me the creed doesn’t list all or even most of the core Christian beliefs—as Ready acknowledged, it contains none of the Old Testament’s historical context and skips straight from Jesus’ birth, past his life ministry and miracles to his suffering under Pontius Pilate. But it does contain some core elements which perform a very real function when spoken aloud.
By speaking the creed aloud, he says, what we are doing is affirming our belief in the statements it makes and thus our stance on the divinity of Christ and his role in creation. With the opening line calling God the Father Almighty, he says, we are acknowledging him as the father of Jesus Christ specifically. “Right off the bat, we are affirming the reality of God, the unity of God and what I’d call the concrete identity of God,” he says.
It also mirrors the opening line of the Shema, the ancient Jewish declaration of faith, which begins “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord,” implicitly tying the Christian faith to its origins in Judaism, he says. As such, it functions as a statement of loyalty to the God who called Israel to him, brought the Israelites out of Egypt and promised a messiah, he says.
In some ways, though, the key phrase in the creed, says Mangina, is “I believe.” This is a form of language which linguists call “performative,” he says, because the act of speaking it performs a function in the world, and we see it at work in phrases like, “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” or “I hereby pronounce you guilty.” Just as a priest can make two people married by saying the words, Mangina argues, every time a Christian recites the creed, the statement “I believe” takes root a little more deeply. The words are thus simultaneously aimed at making “propositionally true statements about God,” and also play a role in forming and directing the belief of the one who utters them, he says.
The other function the creed can serve is one of bridging gaps across different denominations of the Christian faith, Mangina says. Despite later-emerging differences in doctrine, practice and aesthetics, he says, Christians who subscribe to the faith which was one unified church at the time of the council can use the words to recognize one another. It describes what he calls a common grammar, or pattern of faith, which Anglican writer and theologian C.S. Lewis called “mere Christianity.”
Mangina hastens to point out this should not be taken to refer to a “lowest common denominator.” Rather, he says, “What [Lewis] meant was there’s a deeper structure there that unites us. It can be articulated in different legitimately different ways, Orthodox Christians, [Roman] Catholic Christians, Anglican Christians, we don’t all have the exact same creed, confessions, theologies. And yet we are united by a common confession of God the Father, faith in Jesus Christ, belief in the Holy Spirit’s work among us.”
Another consequence of affirming the creed as true, he adds, is that doing so necessarily involves disavowing claims that contradict it. In conversations with friends about faith and philosophy, I’ve found that’s a proposition which can be tough to contemplate. Everybody has beliefs about what’s true, but nobody wants to be the jerk telling others their beliefs aren’t also valid; that sounds dangerously close to judging those who don’t share your outlook. As I heard more than once while preparing previous work for the Anglican Journal, many people have legitimate reasons for being angry at the Church. And some of those reasons involve the way some Christians have treated those who disagree with them, both within and without the church, on issues of doctrine and interpretation—sometimes using Scripture as a stick to bludgeon those they see as morally impure. I and many Christians like me would argue that this kind of conduct is fundamentally unchristian, but it has led to a definite wariness—both among Christians afraid of sounding judgemental and among people outside the church sick of feeling judged— about any truth claim that sounds like it might exclude an alternative perspective. As one parishioner in the basement of Little Trinity pointed out to me, if I’m going to claim that a post on X warning Christians to avoid “the sin of empathy” is wildly out of step with Christian teaching, how do I respond to the poster’s claim that someone like Bishop Mariann Budde who calls for mercy for people living in fear is a “snake in the grass” and a “deceiver” who real Christians should hate? How can we be sure there’s a right version and a wrong version of the faith? And would the same logic apply in the fourth century? Would it have been possible for fourth-century Christians to agree to disagree with Arius rather than debating the issue with him? Could they have simply declared that a big-tent church has room for a lot of different interpretations of what Jesus was or is?
Both Cliff and Mangina weigh in on these questions. “It’s very easy as a 21st century Christian to spiritualize Jesus into an experience of warmth and inclusion,” Cliff says. “But he was a real guy who walked the sands of Galilee, suffered. Really suffered. Really died and really was raised.” Early Christians believed this with such certainty that they were willing to let the Roman government kill them for affirming it. In other words, if Jesus was a real person who lived in a real place and time in history, there are things about him which are true, and things about him which are false, just as there are with any historical or contemporary figure. That’s part of the reason Pontius Pilate comes up in the creed, says Cliff; the mention of him ties Jesus to a historically attested governor of Judea.
If we take that specificity seriously, says Cliff, we have to deal with the consequence that he either was or wasn’t God. Therefore, any claim about him or the faith he preached must be evaluated based on how well it matches the actual records we have of his life and teaching.
Mangina adds that the church does not demand absolute uniformity on beliefs—cultural, intellectual and theological diversity are part of Christianity. But that doesn’t mean there is no outer limit on what is and isn’t part of it, he says. In fact, it’s the fact that there is a central truth to tie it all back to that makes room for a wide range of beliefs, practises, cultures and subcultures to exist while still calling themselves Christian, he says.
“That universality, that catholicity, converges around the particular identity of Christ the Lamb,” he says. “We live in a pluralistic society and we have a Muslim neighbour, a Sikh coworker, a Jewish brother-in-law and people get anxious about making claims that seem to say that Christians are better than other people. But this is not a question of a moral value or superiority. It’s about the uniqueness of God who reaches out to save the lost and the broken across the whole human family.” Lest anyone should think Christianity is about claiming to be superior, he adds, we should remember that confessing sin, both as individuals and as the whole body of the church is a core part of the identity.
Some churches, he adds, deliberately do not use creeds because they are wary of seeming exclusionary. Today, this doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t share the same faith, but it is an excellent opportunity to inquire further and learn about what they do believe, he says.
The Nicene Creed may not sum up everything about Christianity—and it may not be the litmus test some people are looking for to make sure another Christian’s beliefs are on the level. But it does provide a starting point for dialogue across denominations.
But wait! What about my personal favourite question from the discussion in Little Trinity’s basement? Is it true that Saint Nicholas of Myra, the historical inspiration for the character of Santa Claus, got so worked up about the nature of Christ that he personally smacked Arius in the face at the council?
To spare you the full details of a deep rabbit hole of research I went down: opinions differ. Very little contemporary information is available about Nicholas himself. Some sources take his presence at Nicea as fact. Others say that Nicholas likely wasn’t present at the council at all. I found one blogger, Roger Pearse, who claimed to have traced the story of the violent incident to a 14th century hagiography which embellished the story to include slapping “an Arian” and this slowly mutated to be Arius himself.
Despairing of finding the answer by deadline, I ask Cliff. He loves the annual December tide of memes about Santa Claus, he says. “He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake. He knows if you believe in the hypostatic union of the divine and human natures of Christ, so be good for goodness’ sake.”
But is it true?
“I don’t know,” he replies. “I love it. I always make sure to share those memes [in] December.”
In researching this article, I’ve learned a great deal about the place of the Nicene Creed in worship and the place of the council in theology—not to mention the importance of setting ideas formed and expressed in 4th century Greek in their appropriate historical context. But the other thing that has come to light as I look into what followed the council is that even ideas we now think of as having been settled and finalized at one point in history may have continued to be points of huge contention long after the “final” decision was made. When the council ended, almost all present signed on to the new creed, endorsing the divinity of Christ, with the exception of Arius himself and two bishops, who were exiled. Constantine issued an edict that any of Arius’s writings found were to be burned on pain of death, “so that not only will the wickedness of his teaching be obliterated, but nothing will be left even to remind anyone of him.”
But Arius’s beliefs didn’t disappear easily. For decades after the church made its decision at Nicea, Arian bishops attempted to overturn it, convening 10 or more local councils of their own to denounce it. Constantine himself would later adopt a more conciliatory tone with the Arians as they once again grew in popularity and his son, Constantius, would go on to openly support them. Throughout the 50 years that followed, Nicene Christians, including Athanasius the bishop of Alexandria, would prolifically defend the decision laid out in the Nicene Creed, up until the emperor Theodosius called the first council of Constantinople in 381 aiming to restore Nicene Christianity. (See you in 56 years for that anniversary if I’m still around!)
One final takeaway that jumps out to me as a 21st century Christian is that this all sounds awfully familiar. The church comes together, has a vote, makes a decision and then finds itself talking about the same issues all over again. It can be an exhausting and frustrating process, seeking consensus over decades or longer. But then again, if, as some say, we’re supposed to think of the early church as a role model, we can at least console ourselves by thinking that maybe we’re not doing such a bad job of following its example.
This article has been corrected to reflect that Bishop William Cliff holds an honorary doctorate of divinity.
