David Maxwell, associate professor of systematic theology and director of the graduate school at Concordia Seminary, Saint Louis, “The Nicene Creed in the Church”, in Concordia Journal 41 (2015), pp, 13–22.
Pastors often introduce the recitation of the Nicene Creed with the phrase, “Let us confess our Christian faith in the words of the Nicene Creed.” But what do we mean when we identify the content of the faith with the words of the creed? And how does that summary of the faith actually function in the church? After all, if we are to be creedal Christians in any meaningful sense, we would like to see the creed play a more profound role in the church than merely as a text to be recited. But, from the position of one sitting in the pew, it is not always clear what that role would be.
Therefore, I will identify and explore three of the ways the creed has functioned and still functions in the church. All three are legitimate, and all three have their strengths and weaknesses. First, the creed can function as a list of key Christian doctrines.
Second, the creed can function hermeneutically by providing an overarching plot summary of the Bible. Finally, the creed can function as an outline for catechesis or even college and seminary courses in theology.
The Creed as a List of Doctrines
We begin with the view of the creed as a list of key Christian doctrines. This view seems natural in a tradition like that of the Missouri Synod in which doctrine plays an important role. I often use the phrase “confess our Christian faith in the words of the Nicene Creed” in my seminary classes to illustrate the meaning of the dogmatic term fides quae creditur (the faith that is believed, i.e., doctrine). This is distinct from fides qua creditur (the faith by which it is believed, i.e., trust). When we say we are justified by faith, we mean fides qua. That is because we are justified by trust in God’s promises, not by intellectual knowledge of the doctrines themselves. But when we confess our faith in the words of the creed, we are articulating the fides quae, the doctrinal content of our theology. If the Nicene Creed gives us a summary of the fides quae, the implication is that doctrines such as creation, incarnation, and Trinity are key doctrines of the Christian faith, which they are.
So far so good, but what about the doctrines that do not appear in the creed? For example, the Nicene Creed makes no explicit mention of such important doctrines as justification by faith, original sin, the two natures in Christ, or the Lord’s Supper.
So, while I think that the creed does legitimately function as a doctrinal summary, it is important to state at the outset that the creed should not be approached with a fundamentalist mindset.
Now it may be somewhat ironic even to bring up a fundamentalist approach to the creed because self-identified fundamentalists tend to be anti-creedal. However, the term fundamentalist is appropriate here because it arises from the view that certain Christian doctrines are fundamental and cannot be denied without denying the faith. The Niagara Bible Conference of 1898 produced a list of eighteen such doctrines. The list was later reduced to five. They are: “1) the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible; 2) the virgin birth and full deity of Christ; 3) Christ’s death as a sacrifice to satisfy divine justice; 4) Christ’s bodily resurrection; and 5) Christ’s return in bodily form to preside at the Last Judgment.”1 Fundamentalists are people who identify these five doctrines as fundamental to the Christian faith.2 The implication is that other doctrines are more or less optional.
One can see this conviction at work in the website “Lighthouse Trails.” In the context of opposing what they call “contemplative spirituality” among Evangelicals, the authors of the website make the following claims: And those who disagree with any of the above doctrines are not Christians at all. Rather, they are the true heretics. So disagreements are perfectly acceptable within the confines of Christianity, because our salvation does not hinge upon doctrines other than the above five.3
In this quote, we see both halves of the equation. First, the five fundamental doctrines cannot be denied without denying the faith. Second, the five fundamental doctrines serve as a lowest common denominator, if you will, for church fellowship.
Doctrinal disagreements are unimportant as long as they do not touch these five. It would certainly be possible, then, to treat the creed in just such a fundamentalist fashion if one were to assume that the creed provides an exhaustive list of the most important Christian doctrines. Ironically, such a list would bear a striking similarity to the five doctrines that fundamentalists themselves identify. However, as I have noted above, the omission of doctrines such as justification, which Lutherans identify as the article by which the church stands or falls, would prevent us from treating the creed (or the five fundamentals, for that matter) in this way. Not only that, but the mindset that searches for a least common denominator or a bare doctrinal minimum is alien to the Lutheran desire to treasure all that the Lord has given to us.
Another problem with treating the creed as an exhaustive doctrinal list is that it fails to take into account the historical circumstances that gave rise to the creed in the first place. There is really one doctrine in particular that the Nicene Creed is intended to address: the divinity of Christ. The Council of Nicaea in 325 confessed the faith by taking a pre-existing baptismal creed and adding a few sentences to it to confess the divinity of Christ. One can see this by putting the Nicene and Apostles’ Creed side by side. The Nicene Creed is not a modification of the Apostles’ Creed per se, but it is a modification of some other baptismal creed that would have looked much like the Apostles’ Creed (which is the baptismal creed that was used in Rome). It is the second article in particular that interests us here.
Therefore, I will identify and explore three of the ways the creed has functioned and still functions in the church. All three are legitimate, and all three have their strengths and weaknesses. First, the creed can function as a list of key Christian doctrines.
Second, the creed can function hermeneutically by providing an overarching plot summary of the Bible. Finally, the creed can function as an outline for catechesis or even college and seminary courses in theology.
The Creed as a List of Doctrines
We begin with the view of the creed as a list of key Christian doctrines. This view seems natural in a tradition like that of the Missouri Synod in which doctrine plays an important role. I often use the phrase “confess our Christian faith in the words of the Nicene Creed” in my seminary classes to illustrate the meaning of the dogmatic term fides quae creditur (the faith that is believed, i.e., doctrine). This is distinct from fides qua creditur (the faith by which it is believed, i.e., trust). When we say we are justified by faith, we mean fides qua. That is because we are justified by trust in God’s promises, not by intellectual knowledge of the doctrines themselves. But when we confess our faith in the words of the creed, we are articulating the fides quae, the doctrinal content of our theology. If the Nicene Creed gives us a summary of the fides quae, the implication is that doctrines such as creation, incarnation, and Trinity are key doctrines of the Christian faith, which they are.
So far so good, but what about the doctrines that do not appear in the creed? For example, the Nicene Creed makes no explicit mention of such important doctrines as justification by faith, original sin, the two natures in Christ, or the Lord’s Supper.
So, while I think that the creed does legitimately function as a doctrinal summary, it is important to state at the outset that the creed should not be approached with a fundamentalist mindset.
Now it may be somewhat ironic even to bring up a fundamentalist approach to the creed because self-identified fundamentalists tend to be anti-creedal. However, the term fundamentalist is appropriate here because it arises from the view that certain Christian doctrines are fundamental and cannot be denied without denying the faith. The Niagara Bible Conference of 1898 produced a list of eighteen such doctrines. The list was later reduced to five. They are: “1) the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible; 2) the virgin birth and full deity of Christ; 3) Christ’s death as a sacrifice to satisfy divine justice; 4) Christ’s bodily resurrection; and 5) Christ’s return in bodily form to preside at the Last Judgment.”1 Fundamentalists are people who identify these five doctrines as fundamental to the Christian faith.2 The implication is that other doctrines are more or less optional.
One can see this conviction at work in the website “Lighthouse Trails.” In the context of opposing what they call “contemplative spirituality” among Evangelicals, the authors of the website make the following claims: And those who disagree with any of the above doctrines are not Christians at all. Rather, they are the true heretics. So disagreements are perfectly acceptable within the confines of Christianity, because our salvation does not hinge upon doctrines other than the above five.3
In this quote, we see both halves of the equation. First, the five fundamental doctrines cannot be denied without denying the faith. Second, the five fundamental doctrines serve as a lowest common denominator, if you will, for church fellowship.
Doctrinal disagreements are unimportant as long as they do not touch these five. It would certainly be possible, then, to treat the creed in just such a fundamentalist fashion if one were to assume that the creed provides an exhaustive list of the most important Christian doctrines. Ironically, such a list would bear a striking similarity to the five doctrines that fundamentalists themselves identify. However, as I have noted above, the omission of doctrines such as justification, which Lutherans identify as the article by which the church stands or falls, would prevent us from treating the creed (or the five fundamentals, for that matter) in this way. Not only that, but the mindset that searches for a least common denominator or a bare doctrinal minimum is alien to the Lutheran desire to treasure all that the Lord has given to us.
Another problem with treating the creed as an exhaustive doctrinal list is that it fails to take into account the historical circumstances that gave rise to the creed in the first place. There is really one doctrine in particular that the Nicene Creed is intended to address: the divinity of Christ. The Council of Nicaea in 325 confessed the faith by taking a pre-existing baptismal creed and adding a few sentences to it to confess the divinity of Christ. One can see this by putting the Nicene and Apostles’ Creed side by side. The Nicene Creed is not a modification of the Apostles’ Creed per se, but it is a modification of some other baptismal creed that would have looked much like the Apostles’ Creed (which is the baptismal creed that was used in Rome). It is the second article in particular that interests us here.
The Apostles’ Creed
And in Jesus Christ, his only
Son, our Lord, who was conceived
by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin
Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died and was buried.
He descended into hell. The third
day he rose again from the dead.
He ascended into heaven and sits
at the right hand of God the Father
Almighty. From thence he will come
to judge the living and the dead.
The Nicene Creed
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the
only-begotten Son of God, begotten of
his Father before all worlds, God of God,
Light of Light, very God of very God,
begotten, not made, being of one substance
with the Father, by whom all things were
made; who for us men and for our salvation
came down from heaven and was incarnate
by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary and
was made man; and was crucified also for
us under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and
was buried. And the third day he rose again
according to the Scriptures and ascended
into heaven and sits at the right hand of the
Father. And he will come again with glory
to judge both the living and the dead, whose
kingdom will have no end.
Son, our Lord, who was conceived
by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin
Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died and was buried.
He descended into hell. The third
day he rose again from the dead.
He ascended into heaven and sits
at the right hand of God the Father
Almighty. From thence he will come
to judge the living and the dead.
The Nicene Creed
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the
only-begotten Son of God, begotten of
his Father before all worlds, God of God,
Light of Light, very God of very God,
begotten, not made, being of one substance
with the Father, by whom all things were
made; who for us men and for our salvation
came down from heaven and was incarnate
by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary and
was made man; and was crucified also for
us under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and
was buried. And the third day he rose again
according to the Scriptures and ascended
into heaven and sits at the right hand of the
Father. And he will come again with glory
to judge both the living and the dead, whose
kingdom will have no end.
Note that the Apostles’ Creed says nothing about the pre-existence of Christ. It goes straight to the incarnation. The Nicene Creed, on the other hand, inserts a section on Christ’s eternal divinity, which I have placed in bold. This section stresses the full divinity of Christ. The key term is “of the same substance” (homoousios). This term reflects the particular way that Nicene Christians accounted for the unity of the Father and the Son. The Arians wanted to say that the Father and Son were united in their will, while the Nicenes wanted to say that they were united in their essence.4 Thus, it makes sense that the Nicene Creed would employ a term that refers to the essence of the Son.
The phrase “begotten, not made” makes a similar point. The word “beget” means to father a son. Arius objected to the idea that God the Father begat the Son in any literal sense because, to his ears, that would imply that the Father underwent a physical process of reproduction. A piece of the Father would have broken off and grown into the Son. Such a material conception of the Father was abhorrent to Arius. In order to reject this view, he understood “begotten” to be the same as “created.” For example, in one place Arius stated, “He begot him not in appearance, but in truth, constituting him by his own will.”5 Note that the term “begot” is glossed with the phrase “constituting him by his own will.” This has the effect of redefining the concept of begetting to be a figurative way of expressing an act of creation by God’s will. It makes the Son like the rest of creation, which also came into being by an act of the Father’s will. Arius’s motivation here is to defend the honor of God the Father by shutting down any notion that the Son derived his essence from him through some kind of material division.
When the Nicene Creed states that the Son is “begotten, not made,” it is rejecting Arius’s interchangeable use of these two concepts. “Beget” and “create” are not synonyms. To say that the Son is “begotten” is to say that he derives his essence from the Father; he is not created by an act of the Father’s will. That does not mean that Nicene theologians understood the Son’s begetting in a crass materialistic way, as the Arians had feared. Athanasius is careful to say that we cannot understand exactly how the begetting of the Son occurred, but we trust that it happened in a way that is fitting to God. Nevertheless, we do know that the end result is that the Son has the same substance as the Father.6
The phrase “Light of Light” should be interpreted along the same lines. This phrase is not a Hebrew superlative like “King of Kings” or “Lord of Lords.” Rather, it designates a relationship of origin. The Son is “Light of (ἐκ) Light.” Here the creed is identifying a term that the Scriptures use of both the Father and the Son. Jesus says, “I am the light of the world” (Jn 8:12), and James refers to the Father as “the Father of lights” (Jas 1:17). By using the same term for both the Father and the Son, the creed is implying that they are the same (in their substance). It connects the two with ἐκ to show that this sameness is due to the Son’s origination from the Father. The Son, who is Light, is of (ἐκ) the Father, who is also Light. The same analysis may be applied to the phrases “God of God”7 as well as “very God of very God.”8
The Nicene Creed does present doctrine, then, but since it arises out of the Arian controversy, its main concern is to address that controversy, not to provide an exhaustive list of doctrines. Another feature of the creed that makes it somewhat awkward as a doctrinal summary is the fact that it reads more like a narrative than a list of doctrines.
Phrases such as “under Pontius Pilate” or the detail that Christ “was buried” seem more like narrative details than phrases with a lot of doctrinal pay-off. Thus, it may be a genre mistake to treat the creed as a summary of doctrines. It may be better to treat it as a plot summary of the Bible.
The Creed as a Plot Summary of the Bible
Whenever a text is interpreted, it must be interpreted within the larger narrative of which it is a part. For example, the bare fact of Jesus’s resurrection does not mean anything apart from the larger Scriptural narrative. There are others who are said to have risen from the dead. In Greek mythology, Orpheus returns alive from the underworld. That “resurrection” story, however, has no connection to any notion of salvation. Rather, it serves as an explanation for why we have spring every year. So the meaning of the resurrection comes not from the event itself, but the role that the event plays in the larger story.
Therefore, it is crucial to know what that larger story is. One way to think of the difference between the Arians and the Nicenes is that they are operating with different versions of the biblical story. We can get at this difference by tracking Christ’s humility and exaltation. In the Arian story, Christ moves from a low position to a higher position. As a creature, he is lower than God the Father. He is then exalted to a higher position than he had at first (though still lower than God) in response to his obedience to the Father’s will. In the Nicene story, on the other hand, Christ starts off high, then moves low, and then moves back on high. He is of the same substance as the Father from eternity. But he lowers himself in the incarnation to the point of death on a cross and then is exalted once again at the resurrection.
One can see these two versions of the story at work in the exegesis of
Philippians 2. The Christ hymn in Philippians 2 is a major text for the Arians. Thismay seem unexpected because Philippians 2 is usually regarded as presenting a very high Christology. However, the Arian argument focuses on verse 9. After stating that Christ humbled himself to the point of death on a cross, Paul continues, “Therefore, God has highly exalted him.” (Phil 2:9). The Arian argument turns on the word “therefore.” If Christ’s exaltation is a reward for his obedience, then he must not have exaltation by nature, and he cannot be God. What sense would it make to exalt God?
For Nicene theologians like Athanasius, on the other hand, Christ’s exaltation in Philippians 2:9 presupposes that he humbled himself first. Thus, he was not exalted for himself as if he had some deficiency that needed to be overcome. Rather, he was exalted for us, just as he previously humbled himself for us.9 In each case, one can see that Philippians 2:9 is placed into the respective versions of the story of Christ. For the Arians, it marks the point at which Christ moves from low to high, thus proving that he started out in a lowly position. For Athanasius, it presupposes that Christ first humbled himself.
This same logic plays out in the exegesis of many passages throughout the Bible. Jesus says, “The Father is greater than I” (Jn 14:28). For the Arians, this is direct proof that Jesus is ontologically inferior to the Father. For Nicene theologians, such as Gregory of Nazianzus, this passage is to be explained by the incarnation. The fact that Christ is a man is what makes it possible for him to say such a thing.10 Once again, the Arian exegesis correlates the statement with Christ’s low starting point, while the Nicene exegesis places it after Jesus’ humbling of himself. Why does Jesus receive the Holy Spirit? For the Arians, this is proof that Jesus is not God, because if he were God he would not need the Holy Spirit. For the Nicenes, it is explained by the fact that he has humbled himself in the incarnation, which makes it possible for him to receive the Holy Spirit, even though he himself is the source of the Holy Spirit. He receives the Spirit, according to the Nicene view, not for himself but for us. The same logic may be applied to Jesus’ birth, his ignorance of the timing of the last day, his death on the cross, etc. For the Nicenes, the incarnation serves as the hermeneutical key that explains how the Son, who is above all such humiliating experiences, nevertheless undergoes them for our sakes.
The Nicene Creed encapsulates this way of telling the story by emphasizing first that the Son is homoousios with the Father and then moving to the incarnation. Thus, the Nicene Creed makes clearer than the Apostles’ Creed (or other baptismal creeds) that the movement is from high to low and then back to high. That plotline is critical for interpreting all the passages in the Gospels in which Jesus undergoes humiliating experiences.
This Nicene principle of interpretation has come under fire among some theologians of the twentieth century. In the wake of Karl Rahner’s axiom, “The immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity,” some theologians, like Catherine LaCugna, have criticized Nicaea for driving a wedge between the immanent and economic Trinity.
More specifically, LaCugna charges that Nicene theologians like Athanasius ascribe Christ’s suffering and death only to his human nature. By keeping this sharp separation between Christ’s human and divine nature, LaCugna maintains, Nicene theologians imply that what we have access to in Christ is not God himself, but only Christ’s human nature.11
The flaw in this reasoning is that it makes Nicene orthodoxy indistinguishable from Nestorianism. Athanasius’s move is not to sequester the humanity from the divine nature, but rather to insist that the incarnation brings about a new situation in which the Word can do things that he could not, as it were, do before. As God, he cannot suffer and die. But, because he is incarnate, the Word (not just his human nature) can now suffer and die. The Athanasian principle is that “the incorporeal Word made his own the properties of the body,”12 so anything that happens to Christ’s body ultimately happens to the Word. Athanasius maintains divine impassibility by distinguishing between the incarnate Word and the Word considered apart from the incarnation. The incarnation Nis what makes it possible for an impassible God to suffer.
The incarnation, then, is one of the central features of Nicene theology. That is not to say that the Arians rejected the incarnation. However, for them it was something more like the culmination of the Old Testament theophanies.13 For the Nicenes, on the other hand, the incarnation was fundamentally different than any other manifestation of God in the Bible. Therefore, it is not surprising that it played a more central role in Nicene exegesis than it did for that of the Arians.
After stressing the virtues of treating the creed as a plot summary of the Bible, we may also wish to inquire whether it is an adequate summary. What gets left out? In its treatment of the story of Christ, the events listed are the incarnation, the crucifixion, Nburial, resurrection, ascension, and return. What about the teachings or miracles of Jesus? They are not mentioned in the creed. Are they important enough to include in a summary?
In defense of the creed on this issue, I would point out that Paul’s summaries Nfocus on the cross and resurrection as well. For example, Paul says, “For I delivered toN you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day
in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the twelve” (1 Cor 15:3–5). Paul goes on to list more resurrection appearances, but, like the creed, he omits Jesus’ teachings and miracles during his earthly ministry.
Another way to handle this is to treat the creed as an intentional abbreviation. In his lectures to the catechumens, Theodore of Mopsuestia notes that many events in Jesus life, such as his baptism and his fulfillment of the law on our behalf, are not mentioned in the creed. Theodore explains this by saying that the fathers are giving us
the short version of the events “so that we might learn them with ease, and so that we might also learn thoroughly every one of them from the Sacred Books.”14 The creed provides the beginning (Jesus’s birth from Mary) and the end (the crucifixion and resurrection).
It leaves out the middle not because the middle is not important, but so that we may return to Scripture and learn the whole story. A more serious objection to the creed’s plot summary is that it omits nearly all of the Old Testament. It mentions creation in the first article and the prophets in the third, but what happened to Abraham and Israel and the Exodus, and the like? Does the creed flow out of some Marcionite notion that the Old Testament is not important to the Christian faith?
Not at all. Rather, the claim that the creed makes is that the story of Christ is the plot summary of the Old Testament. The creed specifies that Christ rose again “according to the Scriptures.” That does not mean that he “rose again, at least that’s what the Bible says,” as if the creed were distancing itself from the testimony of the Scriptures. Rather, it means that he rose in accordance with the Scriptures, echoing Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians 15, cited above. The term “Scriptures” here and in 1 Corinthians 15 refers specifically to the Old Testament. The meaning is that he rose again, just like the Old Testament said he would.
This is perhaps the most critical hermeneutical presupposition of all: the Old Testament is about Jesus. When Jesus appears to the two men on the road to Emmaus after his crucifixion, they are on their way home because Jesus had apparently failed. You can hear the disappointment in their voice when they lament, “But we had hoped
that he was the one to redeem Israel” (Lk 24:21). Jesus’s response is to provide them with an alternative explanation of the crucifixion. “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Lk 24:27). There are two choices: either the crucifixion means that Jesus failed and died the death of a criminal, or the crucifixion is a fulfillment of the Old Testament.
The Christian claim is that the crucifixion, along with the resurrection, is what the Old Testament is ultimately about.
This claim is reflected with crystal clarity in the exegesis and preaching of the early church. To take just one of the hundreds of possible examples, when Melito of Sardis preaches on Easter, his text is not from the Gospels, but from the book of Exodus. Since this is one of the earliest Christian homilies that we have, it gives us insight into the mind of the church in the first generations after Christ. Melito’s sermon is divided into two parts. In the first part, he retells the story of the Exodus: how God sent the plague against the first-born in Egypt to rescue the Israelites from slavery through the sacrifice of the Passover lamb. After recounting the story, Melito explains that this story is like a “preliminary sketch” or a “model” of a greater reality.15 He then retells the story on a cosmic scale: how God rescued the human race from captivity to Pharaoh (Satan) through the sacrifice of the paschal Lamb (Christ).
Note that the claim here is much more than that Christ’s death and resurrection are prophesied in the Old Testament. For Melito and most of the early church, Christ’s death and resurrection fulfill not only the prophecies of the Old Testament, but the narratives as well! This is in accordance with Jesus’s own statement in Luke 24 in which he finds references to himself in Moses and all the Scriptures.
Thus, it seems to me that the objection that the creed omits most of the Old Testament arises from a modern historical mindset that assumes that the meaning of the Old Testament is to be found in the original intent of the human authors as understood by the original readers. The early church, on the other hand, understood the meaning of the Old Testament to be found in the story of Christ. It is not that
they denied the historical particulars of the Old Testament, but rather they held that those particulars are ultimately included in the Scriptures because they testify to Christ. With that understanding, the creed can be seen as a plot summary of the Old Testament.
The Creed as a Pedagogical Outline
The creed has historically had a pedagogical use as well. We have a number of texts from the fourth century that use the creed to present the faith in the context of catechesis. The creed in question is not usually the Nicene Creed, but the local baptismal creed, which the candidates were required to memorize and which was part of the baptismal rite itself. Often, the early church did not employ the formula, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” but they actually used the creed as the baptismal formula. The priest would ask, “Do you believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth?” The candidate would answer, “I believe,” and the priest would immerse him. Then the priest would ask similar questions consisting of the second and third articles, with an immersion after each response, “I believe.” However, the creed not only was the baptismal formula, but in many
cases it also served as the basis for the catechetical instruction. For example, Cyril of Jerusalem and Theodore of Mopsuestia both have catechetical lectures that are structured around the creed. As an outline, the creed provides structure, but it is often supplemented with whatever the catechist feels it necessary for the catechumens to know.
Each part of the creed is a launching point into a doctrinal discussion. If we jump ahead some fifteen hundred years, we see that Francis Pieper’s Christian Dogmatics is structured the same way, except that it is far more expansive than the catechetical lectures from the early church. Pieper has three volumes, each volume corresponding to one of the articles of the creed. However, the work is not really a commentary on the creed because Pieper supplements the creedal material quite heavily in order to cover the points he wants to make. For example, the discussion on the three genera of christological communication of attributes finds a natural home in volume 2, though there is no particular line of the creed that elicits the discussion. Rather, the creed provides the overall structure of the work.
The success of using the creed as an outline for a course depends on the thoughtfulness and creativity of the teacher in drawing connections between lines of the creed and topics that need to be covered in the course. Berard Marthaler’s book The Creed:The Apostolic Faith in Contemporary Theology, is a good example. This book is intended as a textbook for a college-level class in theology and is written from a Roman Catholic perspective. Marthaler is quite successful at linking topics that need to be covered in such a course to specific lines of the creed. For example, the creedal phrase “Maker of heaven and earth” is the launching point for a discussion of other Near-Eastern creation accounts, as well as Gnosticism and a discussion of faith and science.16 When Marthaler wants to acquaint students with the quest for the historical Jesus, he locates the discussion under the phrase “suffered under Pontius Pilate” on the grounds that this phrase is a historical detail that serves to date the crucifixion.17 When the creed is used as a topical outline like this, it can provide pegs, as it were, on which to hang any number of topics. It is not a bad way to organize a course that attempts to give an overview of the Christian faith.
Conclusion
I have surveyed three ways the Nicene Creed is used in the church: doctrinally, hermeneutically, and pedagogically. This is not an exhaustive list, but I think it does highlight a fairly broad range of possibilities that moves us beyond treating the creed as a list of doctrines. Up to this point, I have emphasized the differences between these ways of viewing the creed. Now, however, I would like to sketch how the three views are in fact related.
The creed is first and foremost a plot summary of the biblical narrative. That is how it reads. Therefore, I believe that the hermeneutical function is primary. Doctrines, however, do arise from that narrative. For that reason, it does make sense to speak of doctrines in the creed. For example, the creed says, “I look for the resurrection of the dead.” That particular part of the plot summary does in fact affirm the resurrection.
A plot summary, however, is just a summary and not a complete retelling of the plot. That is where the pedagogical use of the creed comes in. As a summary, the creed can provide a structure for catechesis or college-level or seminary-level education without the expectation that the creed is exhaustive. The blanks can be filled it, as it were, with material that is appropriate for the level of education. Of course, this is not the only way to organize theological education, but the particular advantage that it does afford is that the course remains grounded in the biblical narrative.
To “confess our Christian faith in the words of the Nicene Creed” is to recognize that we are part of a story that is larger than ourselves. We are part of a church that has been telling that story longer than our nation or even our language has existed. And more than that, we are part of the story itself, which extends from the beginning to the eschaton and which hinges around the time when the Son, who is homousios with the Father, became incarnate for us and was crucified and rose from the dead.
Endnotes
1 R. Rutherford, “Fundamentalism” New Catholic Encyclopedia (Detroit: Thomson/Gale, 2003), 6:27.
2 More recently, the term “fundamentalist” has come to denote anyone who is perceived to be an extremist. Obviously an “Islamic fundamentalist” would hardly adhere to the five fundamental doctrines!
3 http://www.lighthousetrailsresearch.com/fivefundamentals.doc., accessed Novembe 2, 2014. The comment is attributed to the European-American Evangelistic Crusades.
4 Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 41.
5 Arius, “Confession of the Arians, Addressed to Alexander of Alexandria,” in Christology of the Later Fathers, ed. Edward R. Hardy (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1954), 333.
6 See Athanasius, “On the Council of Nicaea,” sec. 10 in Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius, The Early Church Fathers (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2004), 187–188.
7 The Father is called “God” throughout the Bible, and the Son is called “God” in Jn 1:1 and Jn 20:28.
8 “Very” is an archaic term for “true.” The Father is called “true God” in Jn 17:3, and the Son is called “true God” in 1 Jn 5:20.
9 Athanasius reports the Arian view and his own response to it in “Orations Against the Arians,” sec.
1:43 in Anatolios, Athanasius, 100.
10 Gregory of Nazianzus, “Third Theological Oration,” sec. 18 in Hardy, Christology of the Later Fathers, 172–173.
11 Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God For Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 42.
12 Athanasius, “Letter 59 (to Epictetus),” sec. 6 in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), 572.
13 Richard Paul Vaggione, Eunomius of Cyzicus and the Nicene Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 135–136.
14 Commentary of Theodore of Mopsuestia on the Nicene Creed sec. 3, trans. A. Mingana, Woodbrooke Studies 5 (Cambridge: Heffner, 1932), 63.
15 Melito of Sardis, “On Passover 35–38,” in The Christological Controversy, trans. and ed. Richard A Norris (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980), 37.
16 Berard Marthaler, The Creed: The Apostolic Faith in Contemporary Theology, rev. ed. (Mystic: Twenty- Third Publications, 2001),
The phrase “begotten, not made” makes a similar point. The word “beget” means to father a son. Arius objected to the idea that God the Father begat the Son in any literal sense because, to his ears, that would imply that the Father underwent a physical process of reproduction. A piece of the Father would have broken off and grown into the Son. Such a material conception of the Father was abhorrent to Arius. In order to reject this view, he understood “begotten” to be the same as “created.” For example, in one place Arius stated, “He begot him not in appearance, but in truth, constituting him by his own will.”5 Note that the term “begot” is glossed with the phrase “constituting him by his own will.” This has the effect of redefining the concept of begetting to be a figurative way of expressing an act of creation by God’s will. It makes the Son like the rest of creation, which also came into being by an act of the Father’s will. Arius’s motivation here is to defend the honor of God the Father by shutting down any notion that the Son derived his essence from him through some kind of material division.
When the Nicene Creed states that the Son is “begotten, not made,” it is rejecting Arius’s interchangeable use of these two concepts. “Beget” and “create” are not synonyms. To say that the Son is “begotten” is to say that he derives his essence from the Father; he is not created by an act of the Father’s will. That does not mean that Nicene theologians understood the Son’s begetting in a crass materialistic way, as the Arians had feared. Athanasius is careful to say that we cannot understand exactly how the begetting of the Son occurred, but we trust that it happened in a way that is fitting to God. Nevertheless, we do know that the end result is that the Son has the same substance as the Father.6
The phrase “Light of Light” should be interpreted along the same lines. This phrase is not a Hebrew superlative like “King of Kings” or “Lord of Lords.” Rather, it designates a relationship of origin. The Son is “Light of (ἐκ) Light.” Here the creed is identifying a term that the Scriptures use of both the Father and the Son. Jesus says, “I am the light of the world” (Jn 8:12), and James refers to the Father as “the Father of lights” (Jas 1:17). By using the same term for both the Father and the Son, the creed is implying that they are the same (in their substance). It connects the two with ἐκ to show that this sameness is due to the Son’s origination from the Father. The Son, who is Light, is of (ἐκ) the Father, who is also Light. The same analysis may be applied to the phrases “God of God”7 as well as “very God of very God.”8
The Nicene Creed does present doctrine, then, but since it arises out of the Arian controversy, its main concern is to address that controversy, not to provide an exhaustive list of doctrines. Another feature of the creed that makes it somewhat awkward as a doctrinal summary is the fact that it reads more like a narrative than a list of doctrines.
Phrases such as “under Pontius Pilate” or the detail that Christ “was buried” seem more like narrative details than phrases with a lot of doctrinal pay-off. Thus, it may be a genre mistake to treat the creed as a summary of doctrines. It may be better to treat it as a plot summary of the Bible.
The Creed as a Plot Summary of the Bible
Whenever a text is interpreted, it must be interpreted within the larger narrative of which it is a part. For example, the bare fact of Jesus’s resurrection does not mean anything apart from the larger Scriptural narrative. There are others who are said to have risen from the dead. In Greek mythology, Orpheus returns alive from the underworld. That “resurrection” story, however, has no connection to any notion of salvation. Rather, it serves as an explanation for why we have spring every year. So the meaning of the resurrection comes not from the event itself, but the role that the event plays in the larger story.
Therefore, it is crucial to know what that larger story is. One way to think of the difference between the Arians and the Nicenes is that they are operating with different versions of the biblical story. We can get at this difference by tracking Christ’s humility and exaltation. In the Arian story, Christ moves from a low position to a higher position. As a creature, he is lower than God the Father. He is then exalted to a higher position than he had at first (though still lower than God) in response to his obedience to the Father’s will. In the Nicene story, on the other hand, Christ starts off high, then moves low, and then moves back on high. He is of the same substance as the Father from eternity. But he lowers himself in the incarnation to the point of death on a cross and then is exalted once again at the resurrection.
One can see these two versions of the story at work in the exegesis of
Philippians 2. The Christ hymn in Philippians 2 is a major text for the Arians. Thismay seem unexpected because Philippians 2 is usually regarded as presenting a very high Christology. However, the Arian argument focuses on verse 9. After stating that Christ humbled himself to the point of death on a cross, Paul continues, “Therefore, God has highly exalted him.” (Phil 2:9). The Arian argument turns on the word “therefore.” If Christ’s exaltation is a reward for his obedience, then he must not have exaltation by nature, and he cannot be God. What sense would it make to exalt God?
For Nicene theologians like Athanasius, on the other hand, Christ’s exaltation in Philippians 2:9 presupposes that he humbled himself first. Thus, he was not exalted for himself as if he had some deficiency that needed to be overcome. Rather, he was exalted for us, just as he previously humbled himself for us.9 In each case, one can see that Philippians 2:9 is placed into the respective versions of the story of Christ. For the Arians, it marks the point at which Christ moves from low to high, thus proving that he started out in a lowly position. For Athanasius, it presupposes that Christ first humbled himself.
This same logic plays out in the exegesis of many passages throughout the Bible. Jesus says, “The Father is greater than I” (Jn 14:28). For the Arians, this is direct proof that Jesus is ontologically inferior to the Father. For Nicene theologians, such as Gregory of Nazianzus, this passage is to be explained by the incarnation. The fact that Christ is a man is what makes it possible for him to say such a thing.10 Once again, the Arian exegesis correlates the statement with Christ’s low starting point, while the Nicene exegesis places it after Jesus’ humbling of himself. Why does Jesus receive the Holy Spirit? For the Arians, this is proof that Jesus is not God, because if he were God he would not need the Holy Spirit. For the Nicenes, it is explained by the fact that he has humbled himself in the incarnation, which makes it possible for him to receive the Holy Spirit, even though he himself is the source of the Holy Spirit. He receives the Spirit, according to the Nicene view, not for himself but for us. The same logic may be applied to Jesus’ birth, his ignorance of the timing of the last day, his death on the cross, etc. For the Nicenes, the incarnation serves as the hermeneutical key that explains how the Son, who is above all such humiliating experiences, nevertheless undergoes them for our sakes.
The Nicene Creed encapsulates this way of telling the story by emphasizing first that the Son is homoousios with the Father and then moving to the incarnation. Thus, the Nicene Creed makes clearer than the Apostles’ Creed (or other baptismal creeds) that the movement is from high to low and then back to high. That plotline is critical for interpreting all the passages in the Gospels in which Jesus undergoes humiliating experiences.
This Nicene principle of interpretation has come under fire among some theologians of the twentieth century. In the wake of Karl Rahner’s axiom, “The immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity,” some theologians, like Catherine LaCugna, have criticized Nicaea for driving a wedge between the immanent and economic Trinity.
More specifically, LaCugna charges that Nicene theologians like Athanasius ascribe Christ’s suffering and death only to his human nature. By keeping this sharp separation between Christ’s human and divine nature, LaCugna maintains, Nicene theologians imply that what we have access to in Christ is not God himself, but only Christ’s human nature.11
The flaw in this reasoning is that it makes Nicene orthodoxy indistinguishable from Nestorianism. Athanasius’s move is not to sequester the humanity from the divine nature, but rather to insist that the incarnation brings about a new situation in which the Word can do things that he could not, as it were, do before. As God, he cannot suffer and die. But, because he is incarnate, the Word (not just his human nature) can now suffer and die. The Athanasian principle is that “the incorporeal Word made his own the properties of the body,”12 so anything that happens to Christ’s body ultimately happens to the Word. Athanasius maintains divine impassibility by distinguishing between the incarnate Word and the Word considered apart from the incarnation. The incarnation Nis what makes it possible for an impassible God to suffer.
The incarnation, then, is one of the central features of Nicene theology. That is not to say that the Arians rejected the incarnation. However, for them it was something more like the culmination of the Old Testament theophanies.13 For the Nicenes, on the other hand, the incarnation was fundamentally different than any other manifestation of God in the Bible. Therefore, it is not surprising that it played a more central role in Nicene exegesis than it did for that of the Arians.
After stressing the virtues of treating the creed as a plot summary of the Bible, we may also wish to inquire whether it is an adequate summary. What gets left out? In its treatment of the story of Christ, the events listed are the incarnation, the crucifixion, Nburial, resurrection, ascension, and return. What about the teachings or miracles of Jesus? They are not mentioned in the creed. Are they important enough to include in a summary?
In defense of the creed on this issue, I would point out that Paul’s summaries Nfocus on the cross and resurrection as well. For example, Paul says, “For I delivered toN you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day
in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the twelve” (1 Cor 15:3–5). Paul goes on to list more resurrection appearances, but, like the creed, he omits Jesus’ teachings and miracles during his earthly ministry.
Another way to handle this is to treat the creed as an intentional abbreviation. In his lectures to the catechumens, Theodore of Mopsuestia notes that many events in Jesus life, such as his baptism and his fulfillment of the law on our behalf, are not mentioned in the creed. Theodore explains this by saying that the fathers are giving us
the short version of the events “so that we might learn them with ease, and so that we might also learn thoroughly every one of them from the Sacred Books.”14 The creed provides the beginning (Jesus’s birth from Mary) and the end (the crucifixion and resurrection).
It leaves out the middle not because the middle is not important, but so that we may return to Scripture and learn the whole story. A more serious objection to the creed’s plot summary is that it omits nearly all of the Old Testament. It mentions creation in the first article and the prophets in the third, but what happened to Abraham and Israel and the Exodus, and the like? Does the creed flow out of some Marcionite notion that the Old Testament is not important to the Christian faith?
Not at all. Rather, the claim that the creed makes is that the story of Christ is the plot summary of the Old Testament. The creed specifies that Christ rose again “according to the Scriptures.” That does not mean that he “rose again, at least that’s what the Bible says,” as if the creed were distancing itself from the testimony of the Scriptures. Rather, it means that he rose in accordance with the Scriptures, echoing Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians 15, cited above. The term “Scriptures” here and in 1 Corinthians 15 refers specifically to the Old Testament. The meaning is that he rose again, just like the Old Testament said he would.
This is perhaps the most critical hermeneutical presupposition of all: the Old Testament is about Jesus. When Jesus appears to the two men on the road to Emmaus after his crucifixion, they are on their way home because Jesus had apparently failed. You can hear the disappointment in their voice when they lament, “But we had hoped
that he was the one to redeem Israel” (Lk 24:21). Jesus’s response is to provide them with an alternative explanation of the crucifixion. “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Lk 24:27). There are two choices: either the crucifixion means that Jesus failed and died the death of a criminal, or the crucifixion is a fulfillment of the Old Testament.
The Christian claim is that the crucifixion, along with the resurrection, is what the Old Testament is ultimately about.
This claim is reflected with crystal clarity in the exegesis and preaching of the early church. To take just one of the hundreds of possible examples, when Melito of Sardis preaches on Easter, his text is not from the Gospels, but from the book of Exodus. Since this is one of the earliest Christian homilies that we have, it gives us insight into the mind of the church in the first generations after Christ. Melito’s sermon is divided into two parts. In the first part, he retells the story of the Exodus: how God sent the plague against the first-born in Egypt to rescue the Israelites from slavery through the sacrifice of the Passover lamb. After recounting the story, Melito explains that this story is like a “preliminary sketch” or a “model” of a greater reality.15 He then retells the story on a cosmic scale: how God rescued the human race from captivity to Pharaoh (Satan) through the sacrifice of the paschal Lamb (Christ).
Note that the claim here is much more than that Christ’s death and resurrection are prophesied in the Old Testament. For Melito and most of the early church, Christ’s death and resurrection fulfill not only the prophecies of the Old Testament, but the narratives as well! This is in accordance with Jesus’s own statement in Luke 24 in which he finds references to himself in Moses and all the Scriptures.
Thus, it seems to me that the objection that the creed omits most of the Old Testament arises from a modern historical mindset that assumes that the meaning of the Old Testament is to be found in the original intent of the human authors as understood by the original readers. The early church, on the other hand, understood the meaning of the Old Testament to be found in the story of Christ. It is not that
they denied the historical particulars of the Old Testament, but rather they held that those particulars are ultimately included in the Scriptures because they testify to Christ. With that understanding, the creed can be seen as a plot summary of the Old Testament.
The Creed as a Pedagogical Outline
The creed has historically had a pedagogical use as well. We have a number of texts from the fourth century that use the creed to present the faith in the context of catechesis. The creed in question is not usually the Nicene Creed, but the local baptismal creed, which the candidates were required to memorize and which was part of the baptismal rite itself. Often, the early church did not employ the formula, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” but they actually used the creed as the baptismal formula. The priest would ask, “Do you believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth?” The candidate would answer, “I believe,” and the priest would immerse him. Then the priest would ask similar questions consisting of the second and third articles, with an immersion after each response, “I believe.” However, the creed not only was the baptismal formula, but in many
cases it also served as the basis for the catechetical instruction. For example, Cyril of Jerusalem and Theodore of Mopsuestia both have catechetical lectures that are structured around the creed. As an outline, the creed provides structure, but it is often supplemented with whatever the catechist feels it necessary for the catechumens to know.
Each part of the creed is a launching point into a doctrinal discussion. If we jump ahead some fifteen hundred years, we see that Francis Pieper’s Christian Dogmatics is structured the same way, except that it is far more expansive than the catechetical lectures from the early church. Pieper has three volumes, each volume corresponding to one of the articles of the creed. However, the work is not really a commentary on the creed because Pieper supplements the creedal material quite heavily in order to cover the points he wants to make. For example, the discussion on the three genera of christological communication of attributes finds a natural home in volume 2, though there is no particular line of the creed that elicits the discussion. Rather, the creed provides the overall structure of the work.
The success of using the creed as an outline for a course depends on the thoughtfulness and creativity of the teacher in drawing connections between lines of the creed and topics that need to be covered in the course. Berard Marthaler’s book The Creed:The Apostolic Faith in Contemporary Theology, is a good example. This book is intended as a textbook for a college-level class in theology and is written from a Roman Catholic perspective. Marthaler is quite successful at linking topics that need to be covered in such a course to specific lines of the creed. For example, the creedal phrase “Maker of heaven and earth” is the launching point for a discussion of other Near-Eastern creation accounts, as well as Gnosticism and a discussion of faith and science.16 When Marthaler wants to acquaint students with the quest for the historical Jesus, he locates the discussion under the phrase “suffered under Pontius Pilate” on the grounds that this phrase is a historical detail that serves to date the crucifixion.17 When the creed is used as a topical outline like this, it can provide pegs, as it were, on which to hang any number of topics. It is not a bad way to organize a course that attempts to give an overview of the Christian faith.
Conclusion
I have surveyed three ways the Nicene Creed is used in the church: doctrinally, hermeneutically, and pedagogically. This is not an exhaustive list, but I think it does highlight a fairly broad range of possibilities that moves us beyond treating the creed as a list of doctrines. Up to this point, I have emphasized the differences between these ways of viewing the creed. Now, however, I would like to sketch how the three views are in fact related.
The creed is first and foremost a plot summary of the biblical narrative. That is how it reads. Therefore, I believe that the hermeneutical function is primary. Doctrines, however, do arise from that narrative. For that reason, it does make sense to speak of doctrines in the creed. For example, the creed says, “I look for the resurrection of the dead.” That particular part of the plot summary does in fact affirm the resurrection.
A plot summary, however, is just a summary and not a complete retelling of the plot. That is where the pedagogical use of the creed comes in. As a summary, the creed can provide a structure for catechesis or college-level or seminary-level education without the expectation that the creed is exhaustive. The blanks can be filled it, as it were, with material that is appropriate for the level of education. Of course, this is not the only way to organize theological education, but the particular advantage that it does afford is that the course remains grounded in the biblical narrative.
To “confess our Christian faith in the words of the Nicene Creed” is to recognize that we are part of a story that is larger than ourselves. We are part of a church that has been telling that story longer than our nation or even our language has existed. And more than that, we are part of the story itself, which extends from the beginning to the eschaton and which hinges around the time when the Son, who is homousios with the Father, became incarnate for us and was crucified and rose from the dead.
Endnotes
1 R. Rutherford, “Fundamentalism” New Catholic Encyclopedia (Detroit: Thomson/Gale, 2003), 6:27.
2 More recently, the term “fundamentalist” has come to denote anyone who is perceived to be an extremist. Obviously an “Islamic fundamentalist” would hardly adhere to the five fundamental doctrines!
3 http://www.lighthousetrailsresearch.com/fivefundamentals.doc., accessed Novembe 2, 2014. The comment is attributed to the European-American Evangelistic Crusades.
4 Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 41.
5 Arius, “Confession of the Arians, Addressed to Alexander of Alexandria,” in Christology of the Later Fathers, ed. Edward R. Hardy (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1954), 333.
6 See Athanasius, “On the Council of Nicaea,” sec. 10 in Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius, The Early Church Fathers (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2004), 187–188.
7 The Father is called “God” throughout the Bible, and the Son is called “God” in Jn 1:1 and Jn 20:28.
8 “Very” is an archaic term for “true.” The Father is called “true God” in Jn 17:3, and the Son is called “true God” in 1 Jn 5:20.
9 Athanasius reports the Arian view and his own response to it in “Orations Against the Arians,” sec.
1:43 in Anatolios, Athanasius, 100.
10 Gregory of Nazianzus, “Third Theological Oration,” sec. 18 in Hardy, Christology of the Later Fathers, 172–173.
11 Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God For Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 42.
12 Athanasius, “Letter 59 (to Epictetus),” sec. 6 in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), 572.
13 Richard Paul Vaggione, Eunomius of Cyzicus and the Nicene Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 135–136.
14 Commentary of Theodore of Mopsuestia on the Nicene Creed sec. 3, trans. A. Mingana, Woodbrooke Studies 5 (Cambridge: Heffner, 1932), 63.
15 Melito of Sardis, “On Passover 35–38,” in The Christological Controversy, trans. and ed. Richard A Norris (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980), 37.
16 Berard Marthaler, The Creed: The Apostolic Faith in Contemporary Theology, rev. ed. (Mystic: Twenty- Third Publications, 2001),
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