Constantine I, accompanied by the bishops of the First Council of Nicaea holding the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381

1 Preliminaries

Every Sunday — more or less — we recite together a creed, as a statement of our common faith. At communion services we most often use the Nicene Creed, or more pedantically the Niceno- Constantinopolitan Creed. At other services, such as baptism, or at “Services of the Word”, we tend to use the rather shorter Apostles’ Creed. There is also the Athanasian Creed, which we hardly ever use at all. The eighth of the Thirty-Nine Articles appears to give equal importance to all three of these creeds.

1.1 What is a Creed?

As suggested earlier, a creed is a statement of our common faith, and we shall shortly see why we might need such a thing. The word “creed” derives from the Latin credo, which simply means “I believe”.

1.2 Why are there Christian Creeds?

Briefly, creeds exist for two reasons. On the one hand, they summarise the fundamental beliefs of our faith, and help to remind us of them; on the other, they steer us away from ideas about God that have been judged to be inadequate or incorrect.
Creeds are a fairly uncommon thing in religions. Historically, relatively few religions have been much concerned about the beliefs of their adherents; in most cases, right behaviour, or correct ritual — we often speak of orthopraxy, meaning right behaviour, as opposed to orthodoxy, meaning right belief — was the crucial issue. The three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, do not wholly privilege practice over belief in this way, though both Judaism and Islam have more religious requirements and prohibitions than Christianity — indeed, the core of Jewish identity arguably lies in the observance of Torah, rather than in doctrines. But both the Hebrew summary of belief, taken from the Shema, and the Islamic summary of belief, the Shahada, are terse and simple by comparison with the Nicene Creed.
So important within Christianity is correct belief that the concept of heresy may be regarded as a fundamentally Christian one, though it was later incorporated into both Judaism and Islam.
It makes an appearance in the Pastoral Epistles, in Titus 3:10, where there is a warning about thehairetikon anthrōpon, the factious person. In the second century Justin Martyr described a treatise against all the heresies, which he may have written, but which is now lost, and not long afterwards Irenaeus of Lyon wrote a five book work Against Heresies, which is still extant; heresiology was off to a flying start.
When we come to look at the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, and to compare them, we shall see that the parts of the Nicene Creed without parallels in the Apostles’ Creed are generally there for the second reason, guarding the believers against heresy. Other differences between the creeds are less likely to be intended to correct errors, as the Nicene Creed was based upon an earlier creed that was similar to the Apostles’ Creed, but not identical with it. We shall also see later why these clauses were included in the Nicene Creed, and against exactly what beliefs, widely prevalent when it was created, they were meant to safeguard believers.

1.3 Why are there Multiple Creeds?

The simplest answer for the existence of the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed is that the former was a creed for the laity, who were learning what it meant to be a Christian, while the latter was a creed for bishops and teachers, to help them guard against certain inadequate understandings of the faith that were prevalent in the late fourth century. At that time the main disagreements were about the best language for describing the relationship of Jesus to God the Father, and so the ideas ruled out by the Nicene Creed mostly come under the heading of Trinitarian theology.
The Athanasian Creed is a later text. It was written when some of the old views opposing Trinitarianism had vanished, but others had developed into new forms, and when controversies had arisen over the best way of understanding the relationship between the divine and the human in Jesus himself. These latter disagreements mostly appeared, and became pressing, in the fourth century, after the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed had been set out and agreed upon, and the branch of theology dealing with them and with Jesus himself is termed Christology.
We shall say more about the history of the creeds later.

1.4 Why are the Christian Creeds so Long-winded?

It is a commonplace in some Christian circles to say that “Jesus is the answer”. For this particular question, that is absolutely true.
For one thing, everyone - or almost everyone - wanted there to be only one God. At the same time, they wanted to accord a special status to Jesus; indeed, they wanted to say that he, like his Father, was God. There was also the matter of the Holy Spirit, but they could address that later, when they had solved the Jesus puzzle. One problem at a time is normally quite enough.
But why, if the orthodox believers were so keen on monotheism, did they think of Jesus as God?
And was that the whole story? Of course, it wasn’t - they believed him to be human, too.

1.4.1 Reasons for thinking Jesus is God

Multiple New Testament texts that speak about him, and which give his words, or the words of his followers about him, seem to imply that he must in some way be God. Here are just a few of the many places where this implication may be found.
He overrules Torah In the course of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus six times takes a precept from the holiest of texts, the Jewish Torah, and amends or overrules it, telling his listeners, “You have heard it said … But I say to you …”.
This happens in Matthew 5:21–22,27–28,31–32,33–36,38–41,43–44.
He forgives sins In Mark 2:5–12 (and in a parallel passage in Luke 5:20–26) Jesus tells a paralytic that his sins are forgiven, provoking scribes (and Pharisees in Luke’s account) to criticise his words as blasphemous. “Who can forgive sins but God alone?”, they quite reasonably ask. But so that they “may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”, Jesus tells the paralytic to stand up and go home - which he does.
Jesus greater than the Temple The Temple was held to be the dwelling-place of God on earth, but in Matthew 12:1–8, when the Pharisees object to Jesus’ disciples plucking (and therefore technically harvesting) grain on the Sabbath, Jesus tells them that “something greater than the temple is here” (Matthew 12:6), implying that God more truly dwells in him than in the Temple.
The “I am” Passages In John’s Gospel there are seven occasions in which Jesus appears to identify himself with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. When the latter appeared to Moses in the burning bush (in Exodus 3:14), he gave his name as “I am who I am” (in the Greek Septuagint, Egō eimi ho ōn, literally “I am the one-who-is”) and instructed Moses to tell the sons of Israel that “I am” had sent him to them. Jesus uses the same phrase, Egō eimi, in Greek.

• I am the bread of life (or living bread) — John 6:35,48,51
• I am the light of the world — John 8:12
• I am the gate — John 10:7,9
• I am the good shepherd — John 10:11,14
• I am the resurrection and the life — John 11:25
• I am the way, the truth, and the life — John 14:6
• I am the [true] vine — John 15:1,5

The confession of Thomas In John 20:28, Thomas, seeing the risen Christ for the first time and being invited by him to inspect the wounds of the crucifixion, says “My Lord and my God!”
Christ Jesus was in the form of God … Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. (Philippians 2:5–7)
Jesus as kyrios Paul uses the Greek word kyrios, generally translated into English as “Lord”, when speaking of Jesus. This is the same word that Greek-speaking Jews used to refer to God: the Septuagint version of Deuteronomy 6:4, the first part of the full Shema, effectively means “Hear, Israel, kyrios our God is one kyrios”. Furthermore, in 1 Corinthians 8:6, Paul seems to draw a parallel with the Shema: “there is one God, the Father… and one kyrios , Jesus Christ”.
The Sanhedrin accused Jesus of Blasphemy When Jesus said that he would be seen sitting on the right hand of the Power [of God] the Sanhedrin immediately concluded that he was blaspheming, by placing himself upon the same level as God.

1.4.2 Reasons for thinking Jesus is a Man

There are plenty of reasons for seeing Jesus as human. Both Matthew and Luke give a long list of his ancestors, and though their lists differ, all of the people in them are unimpeachably human.
Again, Jesus was born, as humans are, he grew and learned, he was tempted, and he died, just as the rest of us do. Between being born and dying, he ate and drank, and he grieved, even to the point of weeping over the fate of Jerusalem and for his dead friend Lazarus - as any human being might.
From his fervent prayers in the Garden of Gethsemane it is clear that he was not at all eager to die, and from some of his words on the cross it appears that he felt that he was dying alone, forsaken even by God. It has been said that “everyone dies alone”; this was evidently how even the Son of Man felt when his hour of death came.

1.4.3 Why does it matter whether Jesus is God or Man?

The Church has concluded that it is important for two reasons, both connected with our salvation.
First, because only God can bring about salvation; only God has the authority and the power to achieve and grant this. Second, because humans can only receive salvation on the level of their humanity; what takes place on the divine level alone is too far removed from our plane of existence to affect us, for good or ill. If human beings are to be saved, it must be through one who is also human. As Paul wrote, in 1 Corinthians 15:21–22, “since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ”.
Other early Christian writers took up this second principle. Irenaeus of Lyon, in the latter half of the second century, wrote of divine Recapitulation, that is to say, of a going again through the important aspects of our humanity; Christ took on human life, but although tempted, as our first ancestors were, he lived that life as it always ought to have been lived. One of the Cappadocian Fathers, Gregory of Nazianzus, expanded the principle thus: “Whatever has not been assumed, cannot be redeemed”. So unless the redeemer shares our lives in every way, is born like us, grows and learns like us, is tempted like us, and dies like us… - and is capable of feeling entirely alone like us - then these parts of our common humanity cannot be redeemed. But equally, unless the redeemer is the sinless God, then he has not the power to save anyone.
The church, however, stumbled and fumbled its way towards these understandings, often coming up with inadequate ways of trying to talk about God as a whole, or about Jesus in particular, and frequently avoiding one error only by falling headlong into another.

 

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John Gibson is studying for a PhD in theology with a focus on changing ideas of the immediate afterlife in the early church (first millennium). John is also currently undertaking the ALM Preaching Elective.

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