Might the Nicene Creed Not Be a “Creed” At All

We started our adventurous examination of the Nicene Creed by identifying the major motivating factors which prompted what is understood as the first “ecumenical” council of the Church at Nicaea in 325 C.E. (ecumenical, taken from a Greek word meaning “the whole household”, can be understood as making reference to the whole worldwide Church). Those motivating factors revolved around questions of unity, particularly since disunity was threatening both the Roman Empire and the churches. In this article I want to look back at that time from the perspective of future generations which may have clouded our understanding of what we now call the “Creed” of Nicaea (which didn’t really reach a form we might recognize until a fourth ecumenical council at Chalcedon in 451).

First, I believe it is worth briefly examining the development and eventual 8th century acceptance of another authoritative creed which we know as the Apostles Creed. This creed was developed from various Latin statements which preceded it and were associated with the church at Rome. Without diminishing the way in which this creed has been adopted within many of the Western churches as a personal baptismal covenant, its early life can be seen as a bit of a control-seeking power play by the Latin speaking church at Rome. First, its very name obviously attempts to attribute it, without evidence, to the original twelve disciples - who, in all likelihood, did not speak, write, or think in Latin. Secondly, its usage never did catch on in the Eastern churches now associated with Orthodox Christianity; and, considering that its adoption occurred at a time when the more centralized Western church was beginning to have issues with the less centralized Eastern churches…well, we can surmise the possibility of motivations at work here that were less than gracious. Simply put, the Apostles Creed was never entertained at any official ecumenical council of the Church for consideration much less endorsement.

There is, however, one thing in the Apostles Creed itself which may expose its own one great motivating factor and that is its first word. The first word of this creed, in Latin, is Credo. Credo is the word which transliterates into the English word creed and, I would propose, has deeply influenced how the Western Church (Roman Catholic and Protestant) have come to understand all such “creeds” ever since. We have already identified the first words of the Greek “creed” of Nicaea to read: “We entrust ourselves (in)to One God…” The Latin Credo, in English, reads: “I believe…”; or, somewhat amplified, “I personally hold these things to be credible…” Now I believe we would all do well to reflect and converse on the differences we hear expressed in these two fairly diverse perspectives on what is being claimed in each in regards to approaching Christian being. Whatever else we might surmise about this, the Apostles Creed - because its Latin composers saw fit to declare itself such - is indeed a creed. This, of course, begs a question: How or in what way did the Greek speaking folk make reference to the statements coming out of the ecumenical councils of the 4th and 5th century? They called them “symbolou tou pistis” - which is best translated as “symbols of trust”. I would argue that this designation is less about tenets of or directives for belief than about symbolic signs pointing out the way we are to embody the trust in God we are called to exercise. Nicaea, echoing the Jesus of the Gospels picking up on the witness of the Jewish scriptures and given theological expression in Paul, is claiming that our trust in God is symbolically embodied (or not) to the extent in which we can trust that the oneness of God is embodied everywhere. This premise, I believe, is the light by which every word of the Nicene “Creed” can and should be understood.

This brings us to the threshold of the second evolving response to an issue within the Church which I believe has clouded our understanding of the creed of Nicaea and that is the Church’s struggle to understand and respond to what we call heresy.

Linguistically speaking, the words for heresy are more or less the same as they get transliterated from the Greek into Latin and subsequently into English (I will not address other languages here but I am sure that would make an interesting study). However, not surprisingly, as the word migrated though the sway of time and culture, its meaning altered in subtle but significant ways. In Greek understanding, heresy is simply a matter of choice. In Latin understanding, heresy identifies the affiliation one has with different trades of schools of thought. Thus, the Latin Credo (I believe) becomes a way of identifying one’s allegiance to a particular given set of teachings - initiating, in many ways, what we will come to claim is the dogmatic tradition of the Church. Having clearly defined terms by which one can pledge allegiance does make it easy to identify who is in and who is out. However, once we endow that tradition with authority - or, more precisely, those who claim that they have become defenders of some body of belief - that authority can and certainly has used its authority (through excommunication or worse) to sever the presence and influence of those who are perceived to threaten that unity which comes through conformity. However, the creeds of Nicaea, as we might recall, were developed to assure unity where division existed. Constantine locked those boys away, refusing to let them out, until they came up with a mutual understanding of what held them in common. He was not interested in what divided them. Heresy, being in Greek a choice, was - in its most benign form - simply a reflection of the diversity of opinion within a unified Church. However, there were some within the churches - as there still are - who insisted that certain understandings and opinions were so critically important that without them one could not be within the “true” Church. The issue for the Church, and continues to be for a Church which seems to be always infiltrated with various intolerant opinions about who’s in and who’s out and why, is: How can we effectively create an atmosphere of tolerance even for the intolerant among us? Nicaea claimed, no matter how the Church goes about that, we must start with an acknowledgement that we, altogether, trust our very unity, our very oneness as something greater than whatever we ourselves may claim in regards to the relevant importance of our individual opinions, beliefs, allegiances, and/or convictions. That unity is a given regardless of the diversity and whatever form it takes among us. “We” begin “entrusting ourselves (in)to One God…”