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Celebrating the Nicene Creed, Part 2

God the Father and the Person of God the Son

I was fifteen when I first saw those creepy life-size models of famous people, hands and faces of painted wax. Too often people handle Jesus Christ as a wax mannequin, to be reshaped and adjusted to suit their own ideas and desires.

Anti-theologian Barbara Thiering taught that Jesus was the natural child of Joseph and Mary and that he did not die on the cross but rather swooned and was revived to consciousness in the tomb.

Sixteen centuries prior the heresiarch Arius taught that Jesus was not the self-existent and eternal Creator of all, but was himself created in time.

There has been no end to this wretched remodelling.

About 300 bishops at the Council of Nicaea in 325 refused to do this. They recognised Jesus as a true and historical person described in the Bible with all the depth and complexity that God wanted us to know and own.

He is not to be shaped by us. Our will, our present and future, must be moulded by him. He is the Pearl of Great Price: he is not to be fabricated but discovered and joyfully seized, known, and trusted.

The Nicene Creed, like the Apostles’ Creed, is Trinitarian, with sections devoted to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Like the Apostles’ Creed the middle section presents a definition of the person and work of Christ – which is longer than the first and third sections.

Thus, the Nicene Creed is Christocentric in both arrangement and proportion.

In Part 1, I explained the importance of creeds and introduced the Nicene Council of 325. In Part 2 I look briefly at the section devoted to the Father before more closely examining the first part of the second section, which describes the Person of Christ.

Watch how the Nicene Creed presents Jesus not as the wax figure of our unworthy hopes and corrupted imaginations, but with reverent precision as the living LORD of the Bible.

Section One: God the Father

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty,

Maker of heaven and earth,

of all things visible and invisible.

The first two sentences repeat the opening of the Apostles’ Creed. I believe (credo) in one God.

Christianity is monotheistic. The church shouts Amen! to the opening fanfare of the Shema: “Hear Israel! YHWH our God YHWH is ONE” (Deut. 6:4). In the medieval Leningrad text of the Hebrew Bible the last letters of the first and last words of this sentence were writ extra-large to emphasise its colossal importance. Israel was not, like the Egyptians and Canaanites, to devolve into irrational polytheism, which gives its devotees wicked carte blanche to live as they please.

Israel must worship and obey the One True and Living God as he is.

The Creed describes this One God as the Father Almighty. “Father” immediately shows that the One God exists not as a solitary person, but that he relates to another person within the unity of the godhead as Father to Son. It was rightly said that “Paternity is an essential attribute of God the Father, as eternal as his essence.”

“Almighty” means that there is no power above him, no impediment to his will. He rules his creation as sovereign, the Supreme, Highest, and Chief.

“Heaven and earth” encompasses all creation. Yet the Nicene Council added an emphatic statement to the Apostles’ Creed, from Colossians 1:16, that God is the maker “of all things visible and invisible”; all that is material and visible, spiritual and invisible.

All that is exists is God and what God has made. There is no “third party”, no rival being or power:

Revelation 4:11 You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honour and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being.

Section Two: The Person of Christ

I believe in one LORD Jesus Christ

The Creed places Jesus Christ emphatically at the same rank as God the Father by announcing that he too is “One.”

He is not a second god – monotheism is the reality – but the One True God.

The Father is the One God and LORD. The Son is the One God and LORD. There is, as we will see, no distinction in their God-ness, though there is a distinction of person.

LORD translates Kyrios (κυριος, L. dominus), by which the Greek Old Testament translated God’s sacred proper name YHWH (יהוה). By calling Jesus Kyrios the New Testament identifies him with YHWH.

Peter declaimed that when David “saw the LORD always before me”, he saw Jesus himself (Acts 2:25). Jesus intoned before the unbelieving Pharisees, “Very truly I tell you, before Abraham was born, I AM!” (John 8:58) I AM is God’s sacred self-designation and the etymological root of YHWH (Exod. 3:14–15).

The only-begotten Son of God

Only-begotten (μονογενη, monogenē, L. unigenitum) – is a famous New Testament word which is especially dear to John:

John 1:14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the only begotten, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

John 3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

1 John 4:9 This is how God showed his love among us: he sent his one and only begotten Son into the world that we might live through him.

Though as Creator, God is the father of all people, Jesus bears a unique relationship to the Father as “his only begotten Son”, begotten of the Father in the way no one else is.

Begotten of his Father before all worlds

Begotten (γενναω, gennaō) means that Jesus came from the Father, but the Creed immediately stresses that this was not at a point of time, but “before all worlds.” aiōnos (αἰωνος) refers to time without beginning or end.

Contrary to Arian heresy, there was never a time when Christ did not exist. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1).

Jesus Christ was begotten, but not like us sexually and at a moment of time. Nor was he created like the angels:

Hebrews 1:5 For to which of the angels did God ever say, ‘You are my Son; today I have become your Father’? Or again, ‘I will be his Father, and he will be my Son’?

Jesus comes from the Father, but he is not created by the Father in time. He is, in Latin, a se, from himself: self-existent and self-sufficient. Theologians describe this as “the eternal and necessary generation” of the Son.

In a careful discussion of eternal generation, John Frame cautions against extrapolating anything from “begotten of his father” beyond that “the Father is eternally Father and the Son is eternally Son” (Systematic Theology, 2013).

In his brilliant defence of Nicene Trinitarianism in his Theological Orations, Gregory of Nazianzus (329–390) urged the same humble circumspection:

The begetting of God must be honoured by silence. It is a great thing for you to learn that he was begotten. But the manner of his generation we will not admit that even angels can conceive, much less you.

God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God

This underscores that Father and Son bear the same God-ness, the same Divine Light. Jesus is therefore “very God of very God.” “Very” translates the adjective alēthinos (ἀληθινος, L. verus), “truly.” There is nothing about the existence, being, and attributes of God the Father that do not truly and equally apply to God the Son.

Begotten, not made.

This again stresses, against the Arians, that though the Son is in some mysterious sense eternally begotten of the Father, he is by no means made or created by the Father. He is emphatically Creator not creature:

John 1:3–4 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. ⁴In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.

Colossians 1:15–17 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. ¹⁶For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. ¹⁷He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

Hebrews 1:10–11 “In the beginning, Lord, you laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. ¹¹They will perish, but you remain.”

Being of one substance with the Father.

Substance is not a beautiful word. It brings to mind a laboratory. The Latin substantia means “being” or “essence.” In this context “same-substance” (ὁμοουσιον, homoousion, L. consubstantialem) is a technical word which precisely defines Jesus as an identical kind of person to God the Father. He bears not a different or lesser “God-ness” to the Father. This rules out any notion that Christ is a demigod – half-God half-creature.

The incarnation of the Son did not lessen his God nature, but rather added a second nature. Gregory again: “What he was he continued to be; what he was not [flesh] he took to himself.”

So the un-beautiful “same-substance” says a beautiful thing: when you look to and call upon Jesus Christ you are looking to God the Son, the Creator and Sovereign LORD.

By whom all things were made.

This complements the confession that Jesus is “begotten, not made.” He is the unmade Maker, the uncreated Creator.

God forbid that Jesus Christ be a figure of wax, a figment of our hopes and dreams. The Nicene Creed presents him in precise and diamond-hard reality, the only and necessary object of saving trust, obedience, and worship.

– Campbell Markham