What Motivated the “Nicene Creed”
[What follows are basically my organized notes for conducting an Adult Coffee Hour Forum in regards to the development of what we today call the Nicene Creed. Focusing on the Creed’s origins, how our understandings of it have evolved and, particularly, what may have gotten lost in either historic or cultural translation and transition, these Forums were designed to generate open consideration and conversation in light of these things and what we may each think and assume the Creed means simply because of what we have largely been popularly taught to “believe” it says. Though I am not a professional academic, I am an impassioned and disciplined amateur (a word descriptive of one who loves) student of history, scripture, culture, linguistics, and theology. By way of a personal disclaimer, a good deal of what motivates me in these endeavors can be likened to the notion that if it looks like a duck, it probably is a duck whereby, if something seems amiss, there probably is something amiss. I can only hope that by calling to attention what may be somewhat amiss, the course correction called for does not lead us further off the mark.]
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Let’s begin with some basic facts. The Nicene Creed is called such for two very different reasons. The first, revolving around its designation as “Nicene”, is because the process which initiated its development occurred in the year 325 C.E. at a town called Nicaea in what is modern-day Turkey. The Council of Nicaea, as it is known, was called for by Constantine, the then Emperor of the Roman Empire. The Creed, as we know it today (with the exception of a single addition centuries later - which we will address in future blogs), was not the product of Nicaea but of three successive councils over the course of nearly 125 years. Secondly, it is called a “Creed” not by any designation of any of those councils but only for reasons which we will consider in the next article. Those are the basic “facts”.
Now before we mistake the trees for the forest, as I believe most discussions of the “faith of Nicaea” do in their fascination with the personalities and supposedly conflicting theologies of those who attended, let us first consider the one person without whom there would have been no council at Nicaea - Emperor Constantine.
Whenever I contemplate the currents of human history, I like to view it through the lens of personal motivations which bring about changes that were consequential in both intended and, perhaps, not intended ways. Constantine’s personal motivations were the fulcrum upon which the Christian “Creed” initially comes to be, no matter what it becomes over time. So, risking the admitted over-simplification in such an approach, what was Constantine’s primary motivation and what helped to form that motivation?
Constantine can be imagined as wanting, above all else, to bring a spirit of unity to the entire Roman Empire. This was no small task. The Empire of Constantine’s day geographically encompassed most of Europe - as we understand it today, northern Africa, and a fair amount of the Middle East. The ethnic, cultural, linguistic, religious, racial, social, and ideological differences among the people living in the Empire was immense and, as we might imagine, continuously threatened the Empire with fragmentation and disintegration. Unity, perhaps not unlike emperors who preceded him, was the motivating goal of Constantine, but what was the means of Constantine’s vision of unity and how did it differ from previous emperors?
First, like those in power before him, Constantine had all too frequently experienced the very real and constant threat of disunity within the empire. Secondly, though, in a way that perhaps set him apart from all his predecessors, he had somehow obtained a rather spot-on insight into the potential which Christianity ideologically possessed to unify the entire world. Constantine was not a Christian, but his mother was (personally I find all the talk of his military victories under the banner of the cross and his supposed death-bed baptism historically suspect and re-representations of events people writing later would like to believe were true). His mother, Helena, may well have substantially influenced his understanding and consideration of the Christian faith. Constantine, her only child, was born while she was wed to a man who would become the emperor - of sorts. He, however, divorced her as she, being of an undesirable lower social standing, would have hindered his own political aspirations. The fact that society and politics considered and deemed her of little worth and that Christianity did not, may have compelled her, as it did many in similar contexts, to embrace Christianity despite the risks, of which there were many, considering that it was not exactly legal to claim a Christian allegiance. There can be, I believe, no underestimating the impact of Helena’s faith upon her son’s politically astute consciousness. However, before we follow that thread and the factors threatening to splinter the Roman Empire, let us take a brief aside into what historians have come to call the Great Persecution in regards to those of Christian persuasion.
About the year 250, it became the more-or-less official imperial policy of Rome to arrest and execute Christians who would not participate in the cult of the Emperor - while in some sense deifying the emperor, practically speaking, this just simply reinforced the divine-right of the king to force his subjects to pay taxes, serve in the military, etc. etc. Christians became notorious in their refusal to participate. When Diocletian came to the throne in 284, elevation of persecution against Christians eventually exploded such that, in the last two years of his reign, almost as many Christians had been killed under his command as had met a similar demise in all of the previous two and a half centuries (this was the world in which Constantine’s mother became a Christian).
By the time Diocletian resigned as Emperor in 305, having had no sons to succeed him, he had laid the groundwork for a rather unusual and questionable transfer of power. Having instituted four military commanders as senior and junior “emperors” over smaller geographical areas across the empire, his resignation only escalated the already existing civil strife among the four. When one of those senior “emperors” died a year later - who just happened to be Constantine’s father, his army declared Constantine emperor. Battles ensued and, needless to say, Constantine won every one becoming the sole Roman Emperor. Once victorious, he turned his energies to unifying all those disparate peoples and cultures.
It was Christianity which offered Constantine two potentially promising considerations in this task. First, Christianity claimed that there was but one God who in Christ was somehow actively reconciling the world, all its peoples and cultures, every tribe and nation and language, into one loving community. The other consideration, interestingly enough, was the Christian insistence that nobody, emperor or otherwise, had any claim to divine identity. There is but one God and it ain’t Caesar. Why was this significant and advantageous to a political authority? Odd as it may seem, for those who disagreed with him, Constantine had a ready appeal to a greater authority than himself. Rather astute.
As time progressed, Constantine by edict, if not in reality, endorsed Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. While this immediately changed the fortuitous standing of the Church, Constantine still had a problem. The Church was not exactly as unified in reality as it understood itself called to be. So, in 313 he called Christian leadership to a local council in Rome and then, a year later, another local council of leadership in Arles. These only resulted in the first organized persecution of Christians against Christians in the Church’s history. Later attempts at Alexandria and Ancyra also failed to unite the local factions in those communities. Finally, Constantine called all Christian bishops to an all-expense paid council at Nicaea in 325. Not far from his own imperial residence in Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), he himself would be present to facilitate the proceedings insisting that no one would go home until they reached a mutual agreement about what made the Church One. In the midst of such proceedings, it is quite imaginable to hear the emperor repeatedly saying to the boys that he had no interest whatsoever in what they disagreed about, he only wanted them to be clear about what they did agree about. It took them nearly two and half months and what they came up with was what would become the seeds of what we call the Nicene Creed.
That “Creed”, written in Greek, begins with the phrase [in my opinion, somewhat poorly expressed in our common English translation as “We believe” - more on that in the next article]:
“We trust ourselves…” or, perhaps more fully, “We entrust ourselves…in One God…”
