Editor’s Note: This essay is part of our extended series celebrating the 1,700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed.
Surely the animating concerns of bishops in Alexandria, Antioch, and elsewhere 1,700 years ago have little to do with our lives today. They knew nothing about large language models, blockchains, or SpaceX’s Starship. Why, then, should the faith of those Nicene fathers continue to animate our thoughts in the 21st century?
Consider a curiosity of early Christian reception of the creed of Nicaea. The creed approved by the 318 bishops gathered in Nicaea in 325 is not identical to the creed regularly recited in churches today. Instead, today’s common creed is recorded in the acts of the Council of Chalcedon in 451. The bishops gathered there to sort out, among other things, a theological controversy between the Archbishop of Constantinople, Nestorius (d. 451), and St. Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria (d.444)). The bishops at Chalcedon asserted:
We have driven off erroneous doctrines by our collective resolution, and we have renewed the unerring creed of the fathers. We have proclaimed to all the creed of the 318; and we have made our own those fathers who accepted this agreed statement of religion—the 150 who later met in great Constantinople and themselves set their seal to the same creed.
It is an intriguing claim, as the creed from Nicaea (325) is not identical with the creed produced at Constantinople (381) and recited in the acts of Chalcedon (451). Most notably, the later form of the creed includes a substantially extended treatment of the Holy Spirit. Whereas the creed of 325 simply included the phrase “And in the Holy Spirit,” the later creed expands substantially:
And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father,
who with Father and Son is worshiped and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.
In one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.
We confess one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We await the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the age to come. Amen.
The expansion is understandable. Emperor Theodosius’ purpose in calling a council in Constantinople in the year 381 was the controversy surrounding the Macedonians (also called Pneumatomachians) who denied the full divinity of the Spirit.
Variations in form between the creed of Nicaea in 325 and the creed of Constantinople in 381 were no obstacle to the conviction of the fathers at Chalcedon in 451 declaring they affirm “the same creed.” As Mark DelCogliano of the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota observes, “It appears that it was acceptable to express the Nicene faith with a mixture of phrases from the creed of 325 and phrases borrowed from some local creedal traditions. Accordingly, the creed of 381 was not intended to replace the creed of 325, but to restate the faith contained therein in new circumstances.”
This curiosity reflects the ancient conviction that the creed set down at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 captures “the Nicene faith,” though that faith might be expressed with some degree of variety. Indeed, as best we can judge, the creed of 325, through its use in a variety of locales, came to have minor variations, though they maintained a common structure and essential core.
Those of us who seek after some sure ancient foundation for our belief might take this as a comfort. The creed of 325 is, indeed, a means of transmitting the ancient faith to us, as it was for the fathers gathered in 381 at Constantinople and 451 at Chalcedon.
A Revealed Faith
But this is only one feature of Nicaea’s legacy. Creedal faith appears to many as restrictive, but this is superficial. While the Nicene faith does restrict the range of possible articulations of Christianity, it does so to disclose possibilities. The Creed is a font of the Church’s developing understanding of the God revealed in Scripture. After all, it was the affirmation of the Son’s consubstantiality with the Father that enabled the clarifying of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit for the Cappadocians. That clarification in turn led to both the rejection of the Macedonian position and the expanded treatment of the Spirit in the creed of Constantinople in 381.
To repeat, the Nicene faith is a font of Christian thought. But why is it so? One of the finest explanations is given by the 19th-century German Catholic theologian Matthias Joseph Scheeben. Scheeben, both in his early Mysteries of Christianity (Die Mysterien des Christenthums) and mature work Handbook of Catholic Doctrine (Handbuch der katholischen Dogmatik) is committed to idea that, as the English Dominican Aidan Nichols puts it, Christian knowledge of God is “essentially mysteric.” That is, the wisdom revealed by the missions of the divine Son and Spirit are beyond human comprehension:
If God had sent us his own Spirit to teach us all truth, the Spirit of his truth, who dwells in God and there searches the deep things of God, should this Spirit reveal nothing new, great, and wondrous, should he teach us no sublime secrets?
Although human reason, the natural operations of human minds and the deliverances therefrom, have their place in the task of theology, theological knowledge as a body of knowledge is necessarily mysteric, because it develops from supernatural revelation.
Theology, then, is essentially mysteric. Scheeben also observes that it is “connected” (Zusammenhang). In this affirmation, he seems to have in mind what the medievals intended when they argued that theology was a science (scientia)—an axiomatized deductive system with a unified object. The mysteries of faith revealed by the missions of Son and Spirit are not simply a series of disintegrated propositions. Instead, the mysteries reveal a unified body of knowledge, but not one constructed upon natural reason. Principal among these mysteries are the two established in early conciliar tradition—Trinity and Incarnation:
The Trinity is the supernatural, internal, essential, and total communication of the divine nature, and … the principle, ideal, and end of every supernatural communication of itself to the creature … The Incarnation is the highest and most intimate supernatural communication of God outside himself, and as the second principle, end, and ideal of the supernatural union of mankind with God, to be re-established by the redemption.
Thus, (1) the theological task emerges from and always in fidelity to these fundamental mysteries, and (2) it proceeds by exploration of the connections between these and the other mysteries (e.g., the indwelling of the Spirit, beatific vision). So it pursues the one, organic body of knowledge that is the theological science. For more on this subject see Nichols’ Romance and System: The Theological Synthesis of Matthias Joseph Scheeben.
What Does This Have to Do with Nicaea?
I submit that the creed of Nicaea, in establishing the doctrine of the Trinity, directs subsequent Christian theology to discover the interconnections between the mysteries established therein. Initially, this is manifest in the expansion from the Christology of the creed of 325 to the pneumatology of the creed of 381. And beyond that point, the Nicene faith has continued to bear fruit as theologians explore its interconnections.
To demonstrate the lasting significance of this proposal, let’s briefly consider two theologians, one medieval and one modern. First, the motor for the argument of Anselm of Canterbury’s Cur Deus homo is the conviction of God’s almighty nature (conceived in a classical manner), who the Father and Son are substantially, alongside the claim that the Son “for our salvation came down and became flesh, and was made man, suffered.” Indeed, it is the confluence of these convictions that motivated the influential discussions of necessity, freedom, and convenientia that would eventually shape Scheeben’s theological convictions.
More recently, McGill’s Douglas Farrow has connected Christ’s Ascension with other creedal desiderata—the judgment of Christ, the resurrection of the body, Communion, and the life everlasting. For Farrow, the Nicene Creed does not restrict but rather guides theological contemplation through the interconnections of the mysteries of faith. It does so today, as it will into the future.
Justus Hunter, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Church History and Director of the Doctor of Theology program at United Theological Seminary, Dayton, OH. He is the author of two books, including If Adam Had Not Sinned: The Reason for the Incarnation from Anselm to Scotus (CUA Press, 2020). His essays have appeared in several journals including The Thomist, Wesleyan Theological Journal, and Ecclesiology.
