Editor’s Note: This essay is part of our extended series celebrating the 1,700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed.
The Creed of Nicaea-Constantinople is normative for any Christian who seeks the fullness of the revealed faith. And yet, for most Christians who are not “professionals” working in seminaries, theological schools, research institutes, religious studies departments, and the like, the “technical” language forged by theologians and councils remains at best incomprehensible abstractions, at worst some gibberish mumbled “by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
The Nicene faith that Athanasius labored hard to defend can and has also been articulated in a different idiom. Indeed, besides the language of ousia and homoousios (and hypostasis and energeia and enypostaton, and so on), when the Church is not concerned with defending its faith against misinterpretation and heresy, it speaks the language not of legal paperwork among spousal partners, but of poems exchanged by Lover and Beloved.
This is the language of hymns and icons, which flourished in the Christian East and West during the second half of the first millennium, and remains with us to this day. What is more, hymnography and iconography constitute the companion of the theology defended by the councils and its best interpretive key.
Christians used to learn their faith mainly through sermons, hymns, and icons, within a cyclical liturgical life. Christology received in this way centers on the identification of Jesus of Nazareth not only as the all-wise teacher, divine healer, and crucified and risen Savior of the Gospel narratives, but also as the Lord of Paradise, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Existing One who spoke to Moses in the burning bush and gave the Law on Sinai, the Lord whom Ezekiel saw riding upon the cherubim, whom Isaiah saw enthroned and worshiped by the seraphim, whom Daniel discerned in the characters of both Son of Man and Ancient of Days.
In the celebration of the Transfiguration, for instance, Byzantine hymns bring together Christ’s manifestation on Tabor with his earlier apparition to deliver the Law to Moses on Sinai:
In the past, Christ led Israel in the wilderness with the pillar of fire and the cloud [Ex. 14:19]; and today ineffably He has shone forth in light upon Mount Tabor (First Canon of Transfiguration: Ode 3 Sticheron)
The mountain that was once gloomy and veiled in smoke has now become venerable and holy, since Your feet, O Lord, have stood upon it (Great Vespers of Transfiguration, Sticheron at Lord I have cried).
What Moses once saw in darkness he now sees, on Tabor, in the blazing light of the Transfiguration: the same glory, the same “most pure feet,” the same Lord:
You have appeared to Moses both on the Mountain of the Law and on Tabor: of old in darkness, but now in the unapproachable light of the Godhead (Second Canon of Transfiguration, Ode 1 Sticheron);
He who once spoke through symbols to Moses on Mount Sinai, saying, “I am He who is” [Ex. 3:14], was transfigured today upon Mount Tabor before the disciples (Great Vespers of Transfiguration, Apostichon).
In the hymns of Epiphany, John the Baptist is shaken with awe, knowing that he is to baptize the Creator of Adam, the God of Jacob, the God of Moses, the very God who drowned the Egyptian army in the Red Sea:
The Maker saw the man whom He had formed with His own hand, held in the obscurity of sin, in bonds that knew no escape. Raising him up, He laid him on His shoulders [Luke 15:5], and now in abundant floods He washes him clean from the ancient shame of Adam’s sinfulness (Second Canon of Theophany: Ode 5 Sticheron);
Thus spoke the Lord to John: “O Prophet, come and baptize Me who created you, for I enlighten all by grace and cleanse them. Touch my divine head and do not doubt” (Eve of Theophany: Sticheron at the Sixth Royal Hour);
Today the prophecy of the psalms swiftly approaches its fulfillment: the sea looked and fled, Jordan was driven back before the face of the Lord, before the face of the God of Jacob [Ps. 113/114:3-7], when He came to receive baptism from His servant (Eve of Theophany: Sticheron at the Sixth Royal Hour);
[John the Baptist speaking to Jesus]: “Moses, when he came upon You, displayed the holy reverence that he felt: perceiving that it was Your voice that spoke from the bush, he forthwith turned away his gaze [Ex. 3:6]. How then shall I behold You openly? How shall I lay my hand upon You?” (First Canon of Theophany: Ode 4 Sticheron);
If I baptize You, I shall have as my accusers the mountain that smoked with fire [Ex. 19:8], the sea which fled on either side, and this same Jordan which turned back [Ps. 113/114:5] (First Canon of Theophany: Ode 4 Sticheron);
He who in ancient times hid the pursuing tyrant beneath the waves of the sea, now is cloaked and hidden in the stream of Jordan (Forefeast of Theophany Canon: Ode 1 Irmos).
On the Eve of Nativity, Byzantine hymns composed in the second half of the first millennium proclaim that
[It is] He who rained manna down on the people in the wilderness [that] is fed on milk from His Mother’s breast (Ninth Hour of the Eve of Nativity: Glory Sticheron).
On Good Friday, the one hanging on the cross is revealed to be none other than “He who hung the earth upon the waters” and “the Lord who divided the sea … smote Egypt with plagues … rained down manna” (Good Friday: Antiphon 15; Antiphon 6).
This kind of Christological exegesis of Old Testament theophanies, rooted in the writings of the New Testament (e.g., 1 Cor. 10:4; 10:9; John 8:56; 12:41; Jude 5; Rev. 1:13-14), is generally seen as a preoccupation of pre-Nicene writers, and assumed to have been made obsolete during the conciliar era’s development of a more sophisticated argumentation and more precise doctrinal articulation. In fact, however, the straightforward identification of Jesus Christ as the Lord God in Old Testament theophanies with the Lord of Christian worship never ceased to be recognized as a vital element of the theological tradition.
St. Athanasius of Alexandria (d.373), at least, who counts as the definer and defender of Nicaea’s proclamation of faith in the Son “born, as unbegotten, of the Father (that is, from the ousia of the Father) … one-in-essence (homoousios) with the Father,” uses it in defending the Nicene faith.
In Book 1 of Contra Arianos, against those who would have it that Christ is exalted to divine status only because of the Incarnation and Passion, Athanasius establishes that Christ was always the object of human and angelic worship. As biblical proof texts he adduces the Mamre theophany, the burning bush episode, and the vision of Daniel:
If He received His worship after dying, how is Abraham seen to worship Him in the tent, and Moses in the bush? And, as Daniel saw, myriads of myriads, and thousands of thousands were ministering unto Him? (CA 1.38.5)
The argument is reprised in the second book. Against those who “suppose that the Savior was not Lord and King even before He became man and endured the Cross, but then began to be Lord,” Athanasius invokes the decisive witness of the Scriptures:
He is Lord and King everlasting, seeing that Abraham worships Him as Lord. … It is plain that even before He became man, He was King and Lord everlasting, being Image and Word of the Father (CA 2.13).
For Athanasius, homoousios “is a proper term, and is suitable to apply to the Son” (Syn. 53.1.5) because it reflects and secures the conception of the Son as the Father’s “very” Word and Wisdom, his “proper” radiance, just as radiance is the inherent property of sunrays. To show that the metaphysical conception encapsulated in the term homoousios is a faithful expression of the revealed truth, he invokes the theophanies at Peniel and Sinai, the call of Jeremiah, and Christ’s pronouncement at John 5:37 (“his form/eidos you have never seen and you do not have his word/logos abiding in you”):
The Patriarch Jacob, having seen this, was blessed by him and called Israel, instead of Jacob, as divine Scripture witnesses, saying, ‘now the Sun rose unto him as the Form-of-God passed by’ (Gen. 32:31). And this was he who said, ‘He who has seen Me has seen the Father, and I in the Father and the Father in Me and, I and the Father are one’ (John 14:9–10) (CA 3.16).
For this it was that was seen by the Patriarch Jacob—as Scripture says, ‘The sun rose unto him when the Form of God passed by’ (Gen. 32:31); and the beholding this … the holy prophets say, ‘The Word of the Lord came to me’ (Jer. 1:2, 4, 11, 13); and … they made bold to say, ‘The God of our fathers has appeared unto me, the God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob’ (Ex. 3:16) (Syn. 52.2).
Simply put, to Athanasius it is biblical texts such as Gen 32:31, Ex. 3:16, or Jer 1:2, 4, 11, 13—read, of course, as “Christophanies”—that provide the semantic content of the Nicene formula. Homoousios simply seeks to capture the theophanic reality to which biblical accounts bear witness. The link between Church doctrine and the biblical-theophanic witness is even made into the object of methodological reflection:
This being so, why do we hesitate in calling homoousios him who alone is with the Father”? Why, when perceiving the fact, do we decline to use the phrase conveying it? (Syn. 52.3)
This question, posed more than once, illustrates quite well the understanding that the “technical” language forged by theologians and councils is, fundamentally, a conceptual translation of the biblical witness, imposed by the need to clarify and defend the Christian faith against pernicious misinterpretations.
Considering the defense of the Nicene faith from a Christo-phanic perspective anchors the teachings of the Church in the living experience of Israel’s walk with God, so that we may never forget Who it is that we are talking about: Christ, the Glory of Israel, the God of Abraham, of Isaac and Jacob, the Lawgiver and “God of our fathers.”
The Very Rev. Bogdan Bucur, PhD is a Guest Writer. He is Associate Professor of Patristics at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary and an archpriest of the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese (AOCANA). His publications include Scripture Re-Envisioned: Christophanic Exegesis and the Making of a Christian Bible (Brill, 2019). Previously he served on the Theology Faculty of Duquesne University and in parish ministry.
