Editor’s Note: This essay is part of our series, appearing through June, marking the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea.
I once had the privilege of explaining the Nicene Creed to an adult Sunday school class for a period of several months. Amid lectures introducing concepts of consubstantiality or eternal generation, and despite practical discussions of trinitarian prayer or how the Church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, I repeatedly found some members of the class struggling to understand why Nicene trinitarianism was important.
Yes, they all grasped the basic importance of affirming Jesus’ deity, but why dig so deeply into apparently antiquated philosophical frameworks to explain Christ’s deity? What they seemed to need, what I believe many Christians need, is a framework for understanding the crucial issues that surround an affirmation of the Nicene Creed.
Though I already had a basic outline of this framework after years of teaching undergraduates, this experience of Sunday school drove me toward a more robust understanding of Nicaea for the Church. Simply put, Nicene doctrine is necessary to be faithful to Scripture, to preserve the Church’s witness to Christ’s saving work, to protect our knowledge of God through divine revelation, and to understand the structure of Christian worship. In this essay, I hope to explain these four dimensions of Nicene trinitarianism, but first I’ll offer a prelude on the theology of Nicaea.
Much nuance is possible when explaining the theology of the Nicene Creed, thanks to the complexities of theological debates about it. Then there are the modifications made to the creed, affirmed later at the First Council of Constantinople in 381. In this space, however, I’ll need to simplify some by presenting Nicene theology in a straightforward manner and I’ll rely on Lewis Ayres’s helpful classification of “pro-Nicene” theology.
Three Principal Concerns
As Ayres explains in his important 2004 book, Nicaea and Its Legacy, supporters of Nicaea had three principal concerns. Outlining these principal concerns will help us see how the creed was born from biblical exegesis, and serves as an on-ramp for the church to continually engage with Scripture. The first principal concern for these pro-Nicene theologians is a clear distinction between person/hypostasis and substance/being. Put simply, the triune God is one divine being eternally existing as three distinct persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Second, pro-Nicene theology explains the distinction between the Father and the Son in terms of “eternal generation,” in which the Son is eternally related to the Father, consubstantial with him, and distinct from him by this generation, which occurs within the indivisible divine nature. Of course, Nicaea uses the language of “proceeds” to describe the Spirit’s eternal origination, but this term was less clearly understood in the fourth century. Also, it’s more contentious today, given the division in the church over whether this procession is from the Father “and the Son” (filioque in Latin).
The third principal concern for pro-Nicene theologians is the doctrine of inseparable operations. The idea is that all divine work of the Father, Son, and Spirit toward creation is done inseparably. All three create, sustain, providentially guide, redeem, and sanctify. All three work together through their singular shared will, power, and operation. The Incarnation allows for the Son’s human actions to be uniquely his, a fact clarified through several more centuries of Christological debate after the Council of Constantinople (381).
These three aspects of pro-Nicene thought—the triune God as three distinct persons in one being, the eternal generation of the son, and the doctrine of inseparable operations—will help us understand the connection between Nicaea and its implications in Scripture, salvation, revelation, and worship. But first, let’s tend to Scripture.
Nicaea and Scripture
A practical, Church-oriented understanding of Nicaea should begin with the understanding that the creed is meant to serve as our rule of faith, a way to help us read the Bible. In other words, the creed was born from biblical reflection and functions as an on-ramp to Scripture. Yes, philosophical concepts influenced the Nicene deliberations, but biblical exegesis was always central to the debates between those for and against Nicaea. Indeed, the principal concerns of the pro-Nicene theologians help us understand certain puzzles within Scripture.
The distinction between person and being provides a philosophical framework that enables us to understand how there is one Lord God according to the Shema (Deut. 6:4), but how the Son can be incorporated within the Shema’s affirmation of that Lord God in 1 Corinthians 8:6. There is only one divine being, yet that being eternally exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Similarly, a robust theology of inseparable operations helps us to see all three persons in the biblical narrative. Pro-Nicene thought understood these inseparable operations to proceed from the Father, through the Son, to the Holy Spirit, a pattern we see in the respective emphases of the divine persons not only across the canon, but within the narrative of the Gospel of John or across the argument of the Letter to the Hebrews. Inseparable operations help us to see the trinitarian structure of Scripture. Yet if what I have written is true, then much work can be done in the Church teaching believers to read the Bible in a trinitarian way.
Nicaea and Salvation
Let’s turn our attention to the way Nicaea and its creed intersect, at a practical and pastoral level, with our grasp of salvation. The doctrine of the Trinity as described in the Nicene Creed preserves Christian account of salvation. Without Nicene trinitarianism, there could be no later models like Anselm’s satisfaction theory, which required a God-man to satisfy the human obligation toward the Father whom sin dishonored. Yet even in earlier patristic theology, pro-Nicene trinitarianism had tremendous implications for salvation.
Jesus is the beloved Son of God, the one who pleases his Father (Matt. 3:17). If Jesus is eternally consubstantial with his Father, as the creed outlines, this good pleasure is also eternal. God is not taking good pleasure in a mere creature, but from his only begotten Son. If the Arians were right in seeing the Son as merely an exalted creature, then salvation might be seen as something earned or merited, and our conformity to Christ (Rom. 8:29) could simply require that we will and do as Jesus willed and did so that we might be saved. Jesus would simply be an exemplar or model from which we learn, rather than a savior. Arianism and Pelagianism’s denial of the need for grace in salvation can easily become bedfellows.
Similarly, if there is no eternal generation, there is no eternal divine Father-Son relationship. Our adoption as sons and daughters would be something extrinsic to (beyond or outside) who God is. Without that eternal Father-Son relationship, we lose the invitation to participate by grace in an eternal feature of the trinitarian God. In other words, we are left as sad beggars at the doorstep.
The doctrine of inseparable operations protects us from understanding the cross as simply the loving Son saving us from the wrathful Father. A faithful biblical account is that wherever God is wrathful or loving toward creation, this is a shared work of Father, Son, and Spirit. Here also preachers and teachers are challenged to proclaim a gospel that is clearly trinitarian in its understanding of salvation.
Nicaea and Revelation
The doctrine of revelation is also closely linked with Nicene orthodoxy. If the Spirit does not proceed from the Father searching the “deep things of God” (1 Cor. 2:10), then we must wonder how the Spirit’s guidance of the prophets (2 Pet. 1:21) or guidance of the other authors of Scripture (2 Tim. 3:16) can be trusted. After all, two barriers keep us from knowing God: (1) our human finitude, which struggles with knowledge of an infinite creator who is eternal, immaterial, immutable, uncircumscribed, and not subject to the laws of physics, and (2) the sin that stains all of creation such that we cannot see the face of a perfectly holy God and live. Without the teaching contained in the Nicene Creed that the Spirit is one with the Father and the Son Christians would have reasonable doubts about the Spirit’s ability to reveal God to us.
Nicaea’s doctrine of inseparable operations also informs our understanding, again at a practical and pastoral level, of revelation—We cannot divide the persons in the act of revelation. Historically, this means that Old Testament prophecies under the Spirit cannot be discarded now that the Son has spoken authoritatively. The Son was, in other words, there when the Triune God inspired the Prophets. This is a safeguard against the heresy of Marcionism, which claims Jesus is a major rupture with the Old Testament instead of the target and culmination of God’s dealings with his people Israel.
Likewise, the world has witnessed in recent decades, especially in the Global South, an explosion of Pentecostal, charismatic, and other purportedly Spirit-oriented movements. The clear Nicene teaching about inseparable operations provides a check against the problematic pitting of contemporary revelation from the Spirit against purportedly “outdated” revelations from the Son. The takeaway point is that all three divine persons spoke indivisibly in the past, speak together today, and will continue to speak to the Church until the eschaton, when we will know even as we are known.
Whether such speech is through miraculous gifts or only through Scripture is a matter one might debate, but not in this essay. While we can appropriate different aspects of revelation to a singular divine person who is seen most clearly in those particular acts, Church leaders must train members of Christ’s body to develop a Nicene understanding of their religious experience that avoids such dangers.
Nicaea and Worship
Pro-Nicene theology is also essential for the church’s worship. The liturgical structures of worship—such as baptism in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Matt. 28:19), triadic benedictions (2 Cor. 13:14), and trinitarian hymns—played an important role in fourth-century debates, as the works of Basil of Caesarea or Athanasius of Alexandria prove. Such practices implicitly assume the distinction between person and being, such that we worship one God but in a threefold way. Many non-liturgical traditions would do well to question whether their forms of worship impart similar trinitarian sensibilities, but even those Christians with a robust trinitarian liturgy need to catechize the faithful about the theology that undergirds the liturgy to prevent mere rote repetition.
Sacramental theology, despite all the disagreements across Christian traditions about the substance of these practices (double meaning intended), can nevertheless delight in the general significance of eternal generation for sacramental thought. If Christ’s mission, his coming to us, is an extension of eternal generation into creation, then the Son’s coming to us in his presence in the Eucharist, in whatever way we choose to articulate that presence, cannot be understood as a coming severed from the divine being. This is because generation is within the single, simple divine essence. Rather, as the Son’s presence is manifest in the bread and wine in some manner, the Son also draws creation into the inner trinitarian fellowship, a link between the koinonia of the church, the table (1 Cor. 10:16), and the trinitarian God.
Practical Theology
Despite appearing antiquated or irrelevant to some faithful churchgoers, the Nicene Creed is not a dusty relic of history preserved for the sake of sentimentality but otherwise too opaque to be relevant. Rather, with Nicaea stands the Church’s witness to the Son’s saving work, as testified to in Holy Scripture, a book that preserves revelation from God so we may properly worship.
A truly Nicene Church is therefore not a community that happens out of some accident of history to recite the creed when gathered to worship. Rather, a Nicene Church is one whose very identity as a community is rooted in the truths pro-Nicene convictions defend. Or, to speak more properly, the church is a community called, redeemed, and nourished by the God of whom Nicaea spoke truthfully, a God whose revealed Word assures us of our salvation and prompts our reverent worship.
Glenn Butner, Ph.D., is a guest writer. He is Associate Professor of Theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and the author of Jesus the Refugee (Fortress, 2023) and Work Out Your Salvation: A Theology of Markets and Moral Formation (Fortress, 2024). Dr. Butner has two forthcoming books, Trinitarian Dogmatics and Christological Dogmatics. Previous appointments include eight years on the theology faculty of Sterling College, Kansas.
