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Celebrating the Nicene Creed, Part 1

Christians confess their faith in God as He Is

This year (2025) marks seventeen centuries since the writing of the Nicene Creed which is, with the Apostles’ Creed, one of the two most important extra-biblical documents that the Christian church possesses.

Creed derives from the Latin credo, “I believe.” It is the first word of the Nicene Creed and identifies it as a statement of Christian belief.

In this article I look at the history of the Nicene Creed and why it is critical that Christians confess right belief in Christ. In the following three articles I plan to look in turn at the three main sections of the Nicene Creed, focussing especially on its Christology: its definition of the person and work of Jesus Christ.

The Council of Nicaea, AD 325

“Theology is never written in a vacuum.”

Theology typically responds, rather, to crises and challenges to the truth. The Nicene Creed was written in response to the errors of Arius, a presbyter who died in AD 336. Working in Alexandria, he was renowned for his asceticism and dynamic preaching. From the year 319 Arius openly denied that Jesus Christ is the eternal God the Son and Creator of all, and taught instead that he was a non-eternal being created by God. This heresy came to be known as Arianism.

Arians contended that “There was once when Christ was not”, and “Before his generation Christ was not” (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, 4:160). Arius himself said that “Christ is made for us, that God may create us by Him, as by an instrument . . . . His nature is subject to change” (NPNF2 4:70).

The primary defenders of Bible truth were Alexander the bishop of Alexandria, and his young secretary and successor Athanasius. Alexander excommunicated Arius in 321 – he declared him outside of the true Christian church and its saving beliefs.

In 325 the Emperor Constantine, who had professed faith in 312, called an ecumenical council – a council with wide-ranging representation – to deal with Arianism. About 300 bishops met in Nicaea, which is today within the Turkish city of Iznik, 140 kilometres south of Istanbul. Though they were mainly from the Greek-speaking East, there was a small but significant delegation from the Western Latin-speaking church.

For Constantine the unity of his “Christian empire” depended upon unity of belief, so he bankrolled the council. A number of the delegates bore the permanent injuries and disfigurements of the cruel Imperial persecutions of Christianity which had immediately preceded Constantine.

Three views were presented:

Arius contended that Jesus was an un-eternal created being who was “divine” – godlike – because of his obedience, not because he is in essence God.

Eusebius of Caesarea argued that Jesus is eternal, but had a different essence, or substance, to the Father.

Athanasius (who would not have spoken at the Council, but supported his bishop, Alexander) maintained that Jesus is both eternal and of the same essence and substance as the Father.

Athanasius ultimately prevailed in his contention that Arius’s views were against Scripture and true Christian belief, and were deadly to salvation. “The deity of Christ is the essence of Christianity. No one understood this better than Athanasius” (Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 1:128).

The Council condemned Arius and banished him to Ilyria.

The Three Versions of the Nicene Creed

The Nicene Creed has three articles devoted respectively to God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There are three overlapping versions of the Creed:

1. The original Nicene Creed was written in Greek by the Council in 325. It concludes abruptly with the words “[We believe] in the Holy Spirit” but adds a stern anathema – a curse of damnation – against the Arians:

But those who say: ‘There was a time when he was not’ and ‘He was not before he was made’ and ‘He was made out of nothing’ . . . they are condemned by the holy catholic and Apostolic church (Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, 1:29).

Eusebius of Caesarea’s important report on the Council notes that “no divinely inspired Scripture has used the phrases” of Arius (NPNF2 4:76).

2. After Nicaea the Creed’s doctrines were severely challenged and even some of its signatories expressed confusing ideas. Orthodoxy was defended by Athanasius (who died in 373), and later by Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory Nazianzus at the Second Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 381. During this period Athanasius was persecuted and repeatedly condemned and exiled for maintaining the truth.

The Nicæno-Constantinopolitan Creed, also in Greek, makes minor changes to the first two articles, adds substance to the third article, and leaves off the anathema. (The same Council also defended the deity of the Holy Spirit against such heretics as Macedonius, Bishop of Constantinople.) The Nicæno-Constantinopolitan Creed was ratified at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which also settled the doctrine that Jesus Christ is one person with two distinct natures: one divine, one human.

3. The third iteration of the Nicene Creed, a Latin translation of the Greek, first appears at the Council of Toledo in 589, which represented the Western Latin-speaking church. In the third article concerning the Holy Spirit they added the word Filioque – “and the Son” – after the words “who proceeds from Father.”

A 226-word English translation of this Latin version is printed in the Trinity Hymnal (1990). This is the version generally confessed in Protestant and Roman Catholic churches throughout the West.

The Precision of the Nicene Creed

Up until 325 the church struggled to precisely define, from all that the Bible teaches, who Jesus Christ is in relation to God the Father. Many formulas and ways of explaining things were put into the crucible and the fire of Scripture was applied: “What precisely does God’s Word teach us about Christ?” By the fourth century the final impurities were refined away, leaving the pure gold of Bible truth.

That the process took three centuries proves the caution of the church and its determination to find and articulate Bible truth with scientific exaction. Under God’s governance the threat of heresy drove the church to a precise confession of the true Christ.

In fact, the addition of the so-called “Filioque Clause” in 589 became one of the causes of the Great Schism of 1054, when the churches of the East and West anathematised each other – damned each other to hell for their “heretical beliefs.”

We should not scoff that what might seem to be such a trivial difference divided the worldwide church. What we believe and say about God is never trivial but is of the utmost importance. Though the different views about the Filioque Clause do not really put either party outside of the church and inside hell, we should care enough about God to fight, with goodwill and courtesy, for precision in our conception of him and our statements about him. All mistaken ideas about God, whether large or small, wilful or inadvertent, are idolatrous.

Salvation is also at stake, for soteriology (the doctrine of salvation) depends upon Christology (the doctrine of Christ). The Nicene Creed does not present philosophical curiosities but soteriological necessities.

The Importance of Creeds

Whereas the Bible is the norma normans (the rule that rules), a creed is a norma normata (a rule that is ruled). The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) explains that Scripture alone is “The supreme Judge, by which all controversies of religion are to be determined.” All other church decrees, opinions, and doctrines must be determined and examined by “nothing other than the Holy Spirit speaking in the scripture” (1.10).

So what place do such confessions as the Nicene Creed have in the church?

When Jesus asked Peter: “Who do the people say I am?” this was not a matter of curiosity but of life and death. Our sin can only be taken away by the blood of Christ, and we can only receive everlasting life by the resurrection of Christ. We are joined to Christ and his saving work by faith: by believing in him and entrusting our souls to him. This means believing in the true and actual Christ, not an idolatrous figment of our imagination. That is why Jesus made the question personal with his disciples: “But you; who do you say I am?”

To be a Christian is to know the true Christ, and to believe in him, and to profess our faith in him:

Romans 10:8 If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

Confessing falsehoods about Jesus removes us from salvation. It makes us, as Bishop Alexander said, “enemies of God and destroyers of souls” (NPNF2 4:71).

Creeds are important because they teach us to confess true saving belief:

Confessions, in due subordination to the Bible, are of great value and use. They are summaries of the doctrines of the Bible, aids to a sound understanding, bonds of union among their professors, and public standards and guards against false doctrine and practice (Schaff, 1:8).

We ought then to celebrate the Nicene Creed. It is one of the church’s greatest treasures: a true, scriptural, and saving confession of faith in the living Jesus Christ.

– Campbell Markham