By Lewis Ayres
This year of Nicaea’s 1,700th anniversary has been one filled with conferences exploring the century in which this first “Ecumenical Council” took place, and the decades of debate and argument that followed. These conferences have reinforced some of the basic principles that have been the mainstay of scholarship over the past half-century. It took decades (and a revising of its text) for the Christian community to treat Nicaea’s Creed as the universal creed of the Church, and it took decades to come up with an agreed family of ways to interpret its sparse language. The idea that this creed was somehow imposed on the Church by imperial compulsion is far too simplistic an idea to be repeated today. The idea that this creed involved a philosophical substitution for simpler, more “biblical” statements of belief similarly cannot stand.
This year has also seen a host of liturgical events, at which Nicaea has been celebrated as a foundation for the development of greater Christian unity. This is especially so between the Catholic Churches and the Eastern Orthodox Churches: we all confess Nicaea’s Creed as providential, and to its declarations on the dating of Easter we might plausibly return in the hopes of finding a common celebration. To understand why Nicaea’s Creed became so important, I want to think briefly about the creed within a development that lasted many centuries.
My most important observation is this: we misunderstand creeds when we think of them as isolated texts, rather than as texts that are intended to be interpreted within networks of theological commitments, and networks of scriptural texts. The Nicene Creed certainly offered a set of propositions: the Son and Spirit come from the Father in eternity as distinct but not separate realities, in ways that show God to be eternally loving and generative communion; God is not a thing in the world to be thought of in spatial and temporal terms. But even this last observation – which would have been taken as read by all of Nicaea’s defenders – is not stated clearly in the Creed itself. And thus, the Nicene Creed quickly came to serve as a cipher for many things it does not – could not – explicitly state. In this sense, I suggest, we might think of Nicaea’s Creed as the most fundamental exercise in the structuring and crystallising of the Christian imaginative universe.
That is a complex sentence that requires a little explanation. The earliest Christians thought about the world using the language of the Judaism of their time, many of them also influenced by a Judaism deeply infused with much of classical Greek culture. When they reflected on who was in Christ and what had happened, they turned to the language of Israel’s Scriptures, using its language, metaphors and narratives. You only have to look at Peter’s speech at the beginning of Acts, or Paul’s summary of what has happened in 1 Corinthians 15, to see this sort of thing. These passages which reinterpret terminology and imagery from Second Temple Judaism (the term scholars use for the Judaism that developed after the Temple in Jerusalem was rebuilt in the 500s BC) very often contain an expressed or implicit narrative which places Christ at the centre of history, and as its end and beginning, and thus providing a basic structure to the Christian use of Israel’s Scriptures and imagery.
In the last decades of the 100s AD we see emerging various versions of the “rule of faith”. These “rules” summarise those earlier narratives and, using the same imagery, draw out basic principles in the context of controversies besetting the Christian community. They insist, for example, that God is the Creator of all things, whereas in the New Testament texts that belief is more implicit. These “rules” aren’t simply, though, readings of Scripture; they are also summaries of the earliest preaching handed down over generations. And that preaching was the context in which the Scriptures were read. One simple truth of all these rules is that, once again, history is narrated with Christ at its beginning middle and end.
During the period between the late 100s and the early 300s, we see the gradual emergence of local statements of faith used in catechesis and baptism, local creeds, that look very similar although their wording differs a little. But how do these creeds function? Well, we have a number of surviving sermons in which bishops interpret these creeds for the catechumens who are to be baptised. In these sermons, phrases from the creeds are used, explained by referring to constellations of scriptural texts that have long been linked together to explain, for example, who was in Christ. Often the sparse words of the creeds highlight a key fact to be drawn from those scriptural texts – that, for example, texts about Creation should all be understood as talking about the Father as the Creator of all things. These creeds are thus ciphers, in the sense that they contain terms that stand in for fuller explanations, reminders of broader, deeper theological explanations.
During the fourth century, as Christians came gradually to treat Nicaea’s Creed as a providentially given universal creed, we find it used in very similar ways. The great figures of the century after 325 – Athanasius, the Cappadocian Fathers, Ambrose and Augustine, Cyril of Alexandria – all saw Nicaea’s Creed as a cipher for a family of interrelated principles, discussions and exegeses that constituted what they often term, “the faith of Nicaea”. Nicaea was the one text that they found suitable to point to what was truly central in Christian belief: that the Father eternally gave rise to the Son and the Spirit, showing God to be an eternally generative, loving communion, and that the one who walked in Galilee was that eternal Son or Word in his flesh. Nicene theology, then, developed beside and underneath the creed, and the growth of the idea that Nicaea should serve as a universal declarative statement of faith is in part the growth of the idea that only this statement can serve as a cipher for developing “Nicene” theology. One might think that a universal creed simply restricts diversity of belief. But while there is certainly a restriction – in that subordinationist theologies are certainly and intentionally excluded – under that sparse umbrella the creed serves as a cipher for many interrelated theologies, and becomes deeply generative over the next few centuries.
One of the ways in which it is easiest to see how the creed actually shaped debate is to think about the controversies that occupied so much energy in the period between 400 and 700 concerning the person of Christ. These controversies concerned how we should think about the person of Jesus Christ: put simply, if you had run into Christ in a first- century bakery in Jerusalem, would you have been speaking to two persons – the human Jesus with a divine person hiding inside – or would you have been speaking to the Word of God, the Son of God with his flesh (and soul)? It is this second option that became Christian orthodoxy, and Nicaea’s Creed played an important role in that journey. Cyril of Alexandria in the early 400s and those who followed him in the centuries that followed kept emphasising that Nicaea’s terse phrasing told a story with one central actor, the Son of God who took flesh and was crucified under Pontius Pilate. This emphasis is something that one finds in some key summary passages of the New Testament and in the early “rules of faith”. Cyril and his followers treated this emphasis as a cipher for their own far more developed theologies of Christ’s personhood, and once again the “Nicene faith” could be seen as the faith to which the creed points.
We should take one more step. During the fourth and early fifth century, Nicaea’s Creed does not seem to have been used liturgically. That seems to have begun towards the end of the fifth century and at the beginning of the sixth in different contexts. Now, when the creed is said or sung in a liturgical context and even ended with “amen”, have its words taken on a new significance? I’d like to suggest that the answer is, “not necessarily” … but a new dimension of this credal language now appears. One of the most fascinating themes found in Nicaea’s defenders is the balance they think vital between seeing credal language as embodying propositions to which we must hold, and recognising that this language speaks in spatial and temporal terms of the God who is transcendent mystery. To confess this language in the liturgy is, perhaps, to recognise the creed as hymn, and in so doing finally give the creed its true place. Because Nicaea’s Creed could, through providence, be all these things – a cipher for Nicene theologies of the Trinity, an embodiment of the Church’s most basic Christological confession and a concise hymn to the transcendent divine communion – it endures. – The Tablet
Lewis Ayres holds the McDonald Agape Distinguished Chair in Early Christian Theology at the Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas, Rome.
