Nicene Creed

• 1. Introduction

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  The Nicene Creed owes an older name to a Greek word, symbolon, which first meant half of a broken object. Fitted against its other half, the fragment proved that the person carrying it was who he claimed to be. Early Christians borrowed the idea for a short statement of belief. Later the word passed through Latin into English as symbol, and only then came to mean an outward sign of something. A creed worked like a token of identity. Accept it, and you belonged. Refuse it, and you stood outside.

  Behind the Nicene Creed of 325 lie three questions. What dispute made such a token necessary? Where did its wording come from? And why do churches still argue over its smallest words, long after the councils that shaped it?

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• 2. The Arian Quarrel

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  In Alexandria, a clergyman named Arius took offense at his bishop, Alexander. Arius objected to Alexander's emphasis on eternal generation, which in his view blurred the difference of nature between the Father and the Son. His teaching spread widely. Emperor Constantine concluded that it threatened to destabilize the entire Roman Empire, and he called a council at Nicaea to settle the matter. That council opened on the 19th of June 325.

  The creed it produced answered Arius directly. It names the Father as the one God and the Almighty. It calls Jesus Christ the Son of God, begotten of the essence of the Father, and "very God of very God". Its decisive word is consubstantial, meaning that the Son is of the same substance as the Father.

  The Holy Spirit receives a single line in the creed of 325: "We believe in the Holy Spirit." The text does not call the Spirit God, and it does not call the Spirit consubstantial with the Father.

  After that line come the anathemas, formal condemnations of Arian claims. One of the condemned sayings is "There was a time when he was not." From then on, the teachings of Arius were marked as heresy.

  Where the drafters found their wording, however, is a puzzle that scholars have never fully closed.

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• 3. Borrowed Words

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  The scholars F. J. A. Hort and Adolf von Harnack proposed that the Nicene Creed was the local creed of Caesarea, an important center of early Christianity. In their view, Eusebius of Caesarea recited it at the council. Their case rested largely on one reading of Eusebius' own account of what happened there.

  More recent scholarship has not been convinced. The creed Eusebius quoted differs from the Nicene text in a large number of small ways. That makes it unlikely that the drafters began with it. Their starting point was probably a local creed from a Syro-Palestinian source, into which they inserted phrases that spelled out Nicene theology. The Eusebian creed may have been one of many nominations, or a second one.

  A reference work from 1911 records that the church did not stop writing after Nicaea. New formulas of faith appeared soon afterward, mostly variations on the Nicene text, to meet new phases of Arianism. There were at least four before the Council of Sardica in 341. At Sardica a new form was presented and inserted in the council's acts, but the council did not accept it.

  A far more consequential revision would come in 381, and it would prove much harder to trace than any of these.

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• 4. Phrases With Targets

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  Thomas Aquinas read the creed as a series of answers to old errors. He said the line "for us men, and for our salvation" refutes Origen, "who alleged that by the power of Christ's Passion even the devils were to be set free".

  The statement that Jesus was made incarnate by the Holy Spirit, Aquinas said, answers the Manicheans. Its purpose is "so that we may believe that He assumed true flesh and not a phantastic body".

  The phrase "He came down from Heaven" targets Photinus, "who asserted that Christ was no more than a man". Aquinas assigned the phrase "and He was made man" to Nestorius. According to Nestorius, the Son of God would be said to dwell in man rather than to be man.

  Aquinas was reading words that had stood in the text almost from the start. A later addition, made far from Nicaea, would cause a deeper rift than any of these four errors.

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• 5. The Creed of 381

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  At Constantinople in 381 the creed grew longer. It now speaks of the Holy Spirit as "the Lord and Giver-of-Life", worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son. A closing section adds belief in one, holy, catholic and Apostolic Church, one baptism for the remission of sins, and the resurrection of the dead. The new text also names Pontius Pilate and the Virgin Mary, says that the kingdom shall have no end, and drops the anathemas.

  Tradition credits the First Council of Constantinople with amending the creed. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 described the amended form as "consonant to the holy and great Synod of Nice". Saint Epiphanius of Salamis used a creed "almost identical in form" as early as 374.

  Since the end of the 19th century, scholars have doubted this tradition. The official acts of the 381 council were lost over time. A local council at Constantinople in 382 makes no mention of the creed, and neither does the Council of Ephesus of 431. Ephesus affirmed the creed of 325 and used it to denounce Nestorianism. No surviving document gives the longer text, or clearly mentions it, before Chalcedon in 451.

  At Chalcedon, many of the bishops had never heard of it and at first greeted it skeptically. It was then produced from the episcopal archives of Constantinople. The council accepted it "not as supplying any omission but as an authentic interpretation of the faith of Nicaea".

  Evidence inside and outside the text suggests something different from an edited Nicene Creed. The 381 creed was probably an independent creed, perhaps an older baptismal one, modified to resemble the Nicene text. Even so, it is considered most likely that it was introduced at the council of 381. The creed scholar J.N.D. Kelly adds a caution. Constantinople was not counted as ecumenical until Chalcedon, so the silence of the records does not require rejecting the amended creed as an expansion of the original.

  Canon 7 of Ephesus complicates the story. The council declared it "unlawful for any man to bring forward, or to write, or to compose" a different faith as a rival to the one established at Nicaea. The Greek word for different is more accurately rendered as contradictory than as another. Some read the canon as a ban on changing the creed or composing others, but not everyone accepts that reading. Some scholars suggest the 381 text was offered at Chalcedon as a precedent for supplementing Nicaea, a way around that ban.

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• 6. One Word, One Schism

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  In the late 6th century, some Latin-speaking churches added the word Filioque, meaning "and the Son", to the line about the procession of the Holy Spirit. Many Eastern Orthodox Christians later argued that this violated Canon VII of the Third Ecumenical Council. Neither Nicaea nor Constantinople had included the words.

  Rome made the addition part of its own liturgical practice in 1014. The East-West Schism followed in 1054, and Filioque is counted among its leading causes. It also figures in the failure of repeated attempts at reunion.

  The argument turns partly on grammar. The Greek verb ἐκπορευόμενον and the Latin qui procedit do not mean precisely the same thing. The Catholic Church teaches that adding "and the Son" to the Greek verb is wrong, though correct for the Latin. In 1996 the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity published a study of the question, titled The Greek and the Latin Traditions regarding the Procession of the Holy Spirit.

  Among Eastern Catholics, the Union of Brest excluded the addition. Ruthenian Catholics and Ukrainian Catholics nevertheless sometimes used it, and older Ruthenian liturgical books printed the phrase in brackets. In 1971 the Ruthenian scholar Casimir Kucharek wrote: "In Eastern Catholic Churches, the Filioque may be omitted except when scandal would ensue. Most of the Eastern Catholic Rites use it." In the decades after 1971, its use became rarer.

  Such differences of wording are not confined to Filioque. Every ancient liturgical version, even the Greek, departs a little from the text the councils adopted.

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• 7. Names and Versions

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  The Profession of Faith of the 318 Fathers is the name for the version of 325, because tradition says 318 bishops took part at Nicaea. The version of 381 is the Profession of Faith of the 150 Fathers, after the 150 bishops traditionally present at Constantinople. Orthodox churches call that later version the Icon or Symbol of the Faith, and it is the only creed in their liturgy. The plain name Nicene Creed can mean the 325 text, the 381 text, the Latin version, or the Armenian one.

  Both councils wrote in Greek, owing to where they met. Their texts say "we believe", "confess" and "await". The Churches of Byzantine tradition recite "I believe", "confess" and "await" instead, which stresses the personal nature of the recitation. Oriental Orthodoxy and the Church of the East may keep "We believe", as in the original.

  The Latin text also uses the singular. It adds "Deum de Deo", God from God, along with Filioque. The Latin word credo normally takes a direct object, but here it appears three times with the preposition "in", a literal copy of the Greek. Only once does it appear in the classical form without a preposition.

  The overtones of key terms differ between the languages. The Greek pantokratora means ruler of all, while the Latin omnipotentem means omnipotent. The Greek word for consubstantial rests on οὐσία, meaning stable being or true nature. Its Latin counterpart, consubstantialem, rests on substantia, meaning that of which a thing consists.

  The Armenian text carries many more additions. It includes "God from God" but not "and from the Son". The Church Slavonic version, used by several Eastern Orthodox churches, is practically identical to the Greek.

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• 8. In Worship and Belief

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  About 98.5% of the world's Christians are Nicene Christians, adhering to the creed's Trinitarian and Christological doctrines. The remaining 1.5% includes non-Trinitarian groups such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Jehovah's Witnesses, the Church of the New Jerusalem and Swedenborgians. A minority of Evangelical and non-denominational groups, among them some independent Churches of Christ, view the creed as a helpful summary of biblical truth but not as authoritative. They hold that only the Bible is.

  The Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, Methodist and other Protestant traditions require the creed in the profession of faith of those taking on important functions. In Western liturgical churches it stands beside two others. The Athanasian Creed came about a century later, is not the product of any known council, and is not used in Eastern Christianity. The Apostles' Creed apparently predates the Arian controversy and does not call the Son or the Holy Spirit God.

  At the Eucharist, an affirmation of faith, by default the Nicene Creed, usually follows the sermon or homily after the Gospel reading, at least on Sundays and major festivals. In the Roman Rite Mass, one of the two creeds is recited after the homily on Sundays and solemnities. The Byzantine Rite sings or recites it at the Divine Liturgy just before the Anaphora, and daily at compline. Choirs singing it in Latin call it by its first word, Credo.

  In the Catholic Church, reciting the Creed is among the requirements for the plenary indulgence. Reciting the Apostles' Creed or the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed is required for a partial indulgence.

  English worshippers have used several translations. The version in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer is still common among some speakers. The International Consultation on English Texts, later the English Language Liturgical Consultation, published a translation in 1970, with revisions in 1971 and 1975. The Catholic Church in the United States adopted the 1971 version in 1973, and other English-speaking countries adopted the 1975 version that year. Both were used until 2011, when the Roman Missal's third edition replaced them with a translation by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy.

  The 1975 version also entered the 1979 Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church in the United States. In the line "For us men and for our salvation", that book dropped the word "men".

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