Introduction

The Nicene Creed, or the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, is the product of the Council of Nicaea, held in the year AD 325. There have been many church councils held since that time. However, I daresay that there have been few church councils that have left such an impact on the trajectory of the Christian church as the Council of Nicaea. The Council of Nicaea ranks among the greatest ecclesiastical assemblies since the time of the Jerusalem Council to the Synod of Dordrecht (1618–19).

Many have described the events of Nicaea as a victorious triumph of the Christian faith. That is a very apt description of the event that was the Council of Nicaea. It is fitting that we consider that the main issue of debate around the time of the council concerned the deity of Christ. It is fitting for us because there is no greater consideration in all the world than the identity of Jesus Christ. We considered this last time in connection with the Apostles’ Creed. Christ’s question “Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?” (Matt. 16:13) is the most important question that confronts the entire world.

The truth of the salvation of mankind was at stake at the Council of Nicaea. Christ’s person and his work are inseparably connected. This was the heavenly gospel message of the angel, that his name should be called Jesus, “For he shall save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21). Man cannot save himself. God alone must save man—so utterly hopeless is man’s condition by nature. For Christ to be the savior, he must be both fully man and fully God.

Additionally, the deity of Christ is a fitting topic for us to consider because just as there was no room for Jesus in the inn, so also there is no room for such a fiery and intense controversy in the church world today, especially over doctrinal matters. We live in a very affluent age. We have not yet suffered unto blood. And yet present at the council were men who bore visible marks of the Great Persecution, which had lasted for nearly a decade and was fresh in the minds of many confessors. Men came to the council with severed body parts, gouged eyes, lacerations, and burn marks from their wicked tormentors.

There was a tremendous gulf between truth and lie present at the Council of Nicaea. Despite the efforts of an emperor, who encouraged the council in whatever way he saw the majority would unanimously agree to for the sake of merely earthly peace, and despite the cunning craftiness of some bishops to disguise their unbelief of the truth beneath pious-sounding confessions, the orthodox refused to settle for anything less than a confession that would leave the opponents of the truth unable to subscribe to it honestly. What resulted was a faithful confession of the deity of Jesus Christ. This can only be attributed to the work of the Holy Spirit, whom Christ promised to send, who guides his people into all the truth (John 16:13).

I mention all this by way of introduction with the intention that the reader not become lost in the history. There is some fascinating and gripping information available about the history of the council that I will not discuss in this article. However, I will remark on the key events and characters of the history as they serve the purpose of the article, which is to reflect on the Nicene Creed and its place among the minor confessions.

A Brief History

As I briefly mentioned, there were men present at the Council of Nicaea in 325 who bore visible marks of their sufferings at the hands of their persecutors. While Christians in the Roman Empire occasionally experienced brief periods of respite, often they were hunted down and persecuted on account of their confessions of Jesus Christ. This came to a head in what became known as the Great Persecution. Churches were destroyed, and Bibles were burned. If we were to measure the Great Persecution in terms of cruelty and martyrdom, we must conclude that this period, which lasted just short of a decade (c. 303–11), far surpassed anything that had been experienced by the Christian church up to that point. The persecution was a systematic effort to suppress or to eradicate entirely the perceived threat of Christianity within the Roman Empire. The persecution ended in 311 when Emperor Galerius begrudgingly issued an edict that tolerated the Christians’ assemblies.

Roman Emperor Constantine is known for being the first emperor to enter the ecclesiastical affairs of Christianity. After a somewhat controversial and wonderful conversion experience on the field of battle, Constantine issued the Edict of Milan (313), which declared that the Christian religion not only ought to be tolerated, but that Christianity would be given equal rights and position with that of the pagan religions within the empire. This is one of the earliest examples in the new dispensation of a blurring of the line of separation between the church and the state. This ultimately created an interesting setting for the Council of Nicaea.

Further, I would be remiss if I did not mention the Arian controversy, which became the main catalyst for the council and the production of the Nicene Creed. The great question for some three hundred years in the Christian church was whether Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was indeed very God with the Father.¹ Arianism, named after Arius, an Alexandrian presbyter in Antioch, answered the question by teaching that Christ, although the creator of the world, was a creature of God, even the highest of all created reality, somewhat God-like, but not actually divine.² This teaching sparked an intense and bitter controversy, the two main opponents of which were Arius and Alexander, the chief bishop of Alexandria. Alexander taught the eternal generation of Jesus Christ and deduced from it the doctrine of homoousios, or the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father. Homoousios is a combination of two Greek words and means of the same essence or substance. The controversy broke out about 318 or 320. The result in 321 was that a council of one hundred Egyptian and Libyan bishops at Alexandria deposed and excommunicated Arius and his followers for their views.

While Arius sought to proliferate his views in other parts of the empire, Alexander was firm in his convictions and sent letters to warn the churches against the apostates. Church historian Philip Schaff describes the Arian controversy very vividly when he writes,

Bishop rose against bishop, and province against province. The controversy soon involved, through the importance of the subject and the zeal of the parties, the entire church, and transformed the Christian East into a theological battle-field.³

News of the controversy reached the throne room of Emperor Constantine, who was alarmed by all the unrest and felt it necessary, probably under the advice of bishops who were his friends, to call a council of bishops to meet at Nicaea in the hope of restoring peace to his realm. Constantine sent out invitations to all the bishops of the empire, summoning them to appear at the council and guaranteeing that they would be reimbursed from the public treasury for their travel and residency expenses.

Most of the Eastern provinces were strongly represented at the council. Among the members present were Alexander of Alexandria and his friend and archdeacon Athanasius (a young man who rivaled the eldest members of the council in zeal, intellect, and eloquence and gave promise as the future leader of the orthodox party). The council began with a brief greeting from one of the bishops, followed by an address from Constantine, who oversaw the affairs of the council. From thence the council began to conduct its work. The council was divided into three parties: the orthodox majority, which firmly held to the deity of Christ, being headed by Alexander of Alexandria; the Arians, who formed the heretical minority; and the semi-Arians, who attempted to be a bridge between the two parties. A bishop named Eusebius of Caesarea was one of the leading figures in the semi-Arian faction.

The Arians were the first ones to propose a creed, which was met with tremendous disapproval and was publicly torn to pieces. Most of the men who had signed the Arian document had seen the proverbial handwriting on the wall, and they abandoned the cause of the Arians, leaving only Theonas and Secundus, both of Egypt, in the Arian minority.

Eusebius, a friend of the emperor, had proposed an ancient Palestinian confession, which was like the future Nicene Creed, acknowledging the divinity of Christ but avoiding the crucial term homoousios. Unsurprisingly, this confession had been approved already by the emperor, who was interested mainly in producing a confession that all the delegates could agree to unanimously for the sake of peace. However, the men in the orthodox party were rightly suspicious of this confession and were unflinching in their insistence on a creed that included the expression homoousios, which the Arians despised and declared to be unscriptural.

Eventually, there was a creed produced. This creed was immediately subscribed to by almost all the bishops present at the council, including Eusebius (with some reluctance). This was the first instance of such signing of a document in the Christian church. Theonas and Secundus refused to sign and were banished along with Arius to Illyria. Arius’ books were burned, and he and his followers were branded as enemies of Christianity. Constantine viewed the first edition of the Nicene Creed as a product of “divine inspiration,” while many others viewed the outcome of the council as a necessary victory over against every heresy.

Unfortunately, the battle was far from over. While the outcome of the council was of tremendous importance in preserving the truth, nevertheless in many ways it was merely a triumph in outward appearance. Alas, there were bishops who subscribed to the Nicene Creed who only reluctantly received the confession of homoousios. Under the influence of Eusebius of Caesarea, Constantine’s sister Constantia, and a somewhat obscure confession by Arius, Constantine experienced a change of mind about Arius and recalled him from exile. It became evident then that Constantine understood little of the seriousness of the issue. Arius was acquitted of all charges of heresy and was to be received back into the fellowship of the church at Constantinople.

During this time Alexander of Alexandria died (April 328), leaving behind a vacancy in the office of chief bishop of Alexandria, which vacancy was assumed by the young Athanasius. Athanasius refused to restore Arius to his former position. Thus Athanasius was condemned and deposed by two Arian councils for “false accusations” and sent away by the emperor into exile in Gaul in 336. That same year Arius suddenly died. While Athanasius was later recalled from his exile, he was again deposed. This pattern of being deposed, exiled, and then recalled from exile became a recurring pattern in the life of Athanasius and many other bishops. So-called orthodox and Arian emperors rose to the throne, appearing to change the tides of the controversy repeatedly. At times the cause of the truth appeared triumphant, and at other times the cause of the truth appeared very small.

The next significant event in this brief history was the second ecumenical council in Constantinople (381), where the original Nicene Creed was improved with a most important addition regarding the deity of the Holy Ghost. At the Council of Constantinople, Emperor Theodosius I enacted a law that all churches “should be given up to bishops who believed in the equal divinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” and “the public worship of heretics was forbidden.”⁴

Finally, the Western church added to the article on the procession of the Holy Ghost the words “and the Son” (filioque) at the Council of Toledo in 589.

Jesus Christ: Of the Same Essence with the Father

The Nicene Creed, or the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, is organized according to the biblical doctrine of the Trinity, much like the other ecumenical creeds that are included in our Reformed standards (see Belgic Confession article 9). The early church understood that the goal of all the study of Christian doctrine is the true knowledge of God.

God decreed all things in time and history with Christ and his elect church at the center. God’s decree of predestination stands at the heart of all world history as the goal. Election is not some cold blueprint according to which all things just happen. Instead, election is God’s living will according to which God performs all things in time and history. Election is the beating heart of the church and explains everything about her. Election explains the church’s place in the world. Election explains why some men are saved and others are damned. Election explains why heresies and false doctrine ceaselessly trouble the church, for heresies must come. Election is God’s eternal good will and pleasure for the salvation of certain individuals whom he loved in Jesus Christ and to whom he determined to make known the mystery of the kingdom of heaven and to realize his eternal covenant of grace in Jesus Christ unto the praise of his own glory.

The issue of Nicaea was the true and saving knowledge of God. It was the saving knowledge of God in Jesus Christ. “This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3). God sovereignly used Arius as an instrument in God’s hands to derive from the early church an answer to that most fundamental question of the Christian faith, who is Jesus Christ? Apart from the correct answer to that question, all future doctrinal development and, indeed, the church’s very identity would be lost. With thanksgiving to God every true church confesses that she believes

in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God; Light of Light; true God of true God; begotten, not made, being of one essence 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 Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried; and the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again, with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end. (Nicene Creed, in Confessions and Church Order, 11)

It is unlikely that the church today could give such a beautiful and an unmistakable testimony to the truth. Stopping for a moment to consider the creed’s language, it is striking. It is beautiful. It is lovely. It is altogether spiritual. God of God. Light of Light. True God of true God. Begotten, not made. And then the heart of the Nicene Creed: Jesus Christ, “being of one essence with the Father.” Not a creature of time but begotten of the Father before all worlds. Not the highest of all created reality, but the one by whom all things were made and without whom there was not anything made that was made.

The terms person and essence were confused in the early church. Oftentimes, those two terms appeared in writings and were used interchangeably to refer to being or person. The Nicene Creed helped to distinguish and give meaning to the church’s terms. The Arians, however, howled that these terms were unscriptural and even condemned them as being heretical. Certainly, the church must take extreme care in her use of terminology when explaining doctrine. However, nowhere in scripture is the church prohibited from creating and using terminology to explain her doctrine. This belongs to the freedom of the church of every age to confess the truth in her own language and to harmonize the truth of the sacred scriptures in her confessions. Predestination in scripture refers simply to the doctrine of election, and yet we confess sovereign, double predestination, election and reprobation, two sides of the one eternal decree of God. Nowhere in scripture will you find the word Trinity, and yet we confess that God is one in being and three in persons.

It became abundantly clear at the Council of Nicaea that the opponents of the truth were not so much offended by the words being and substance as they were with the phrase of the same essence with the Father (homoousios). Essence, or substance, simply refers to all the qualities and powers that constitute a being. However, the Arians were so offended by the confession that Christ was of the same essence (homoousios) with the Father that they proposed their own terminology, homoiousios, which means of a similar essence. The division could not have been sharper than it was at Nicaea. Over one little letter i, or iota in the Greek, the most fundamental truth of the Christian faith was at stake. Is Christ very God, or is Christ a created being?

Athanasius warred most vehemently against the Arian heresy and insisted upon the language of the Nicene Creed because he understood the fundamental connection between the deity of Christ and man’s salvation. Man’s condition by nature is so utterly hopeless that only an act of God could save him. The Nicene Creed includes this idea as part of its confession when it says, “who, for us men and our salvation, came down from heaven.” God must come down to us and assume our flesh in order to bear the burden of his own wrath against our sins. That this is also the Reformed understanding of the necessity of Christ’s divinity is taught in Lord’s Day 6 of the Heidelberg Catechism:

Q. 17. Why must He in one person be also very God?

A. That He might, by the power of His Godhead, sustain in His human nature the burden of God’s wrath; and might obtain for, and restore to us, righteousness and life. (Confessions and Church Order, 88)

And then consider also article 19 of the Belgic Confession:

Wherefore we confess that He [Jesus] is very God, and very man: very God by His power to conquer death; and very man that He might die for us according to the infirmity of His flesh. (Confessions and Church Order, 46)

Herein lies the danger of every form of conditional theology. Conditional theology turns the doctrine of the Nicene Creed on its head, teaching rather that salvation consists in God’s coming down to just the right level, to where man, by an act of his free will or by his works, might lift himself from the misery into which he willfully plunged himself. This is the horrible wickedness of the Protestant Reformed doctrine, which teaches that in order for man to be saved, there is that which he must do, and that God cannot and may not forgive the sinner until and unless that sinner repents. Conditional theology in all its forms makes Christ something less than God and makes man something more than a sinner saved by grace alone. Man really saves himself at that point. And that is too gross a blasphemy.

The Holy Ghost: The Lord and Giver of Life

The later addition of the article regarding the deity of the Holy Ghost was a necessary addition to the Nicene Creed by the Council of Constantinople in 381. It was necessary because the article explicitly affirmed the divinity of the Holy Spirit as coequal and coeternal God with the Father and the Son, thus rounding out the doctrine of the Trinity. This addition was a necessary response to a rising heresy called Macedonianism. Macedonians, otherwise known as Pneumatomachians (spirit fighters), believed that the Holy Spirit was a creation of the Son and was subordinate to the Father and the Son. Besides the fact that this false doctrine corrupted the entire economy or organization of the Trinity, which teaches that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, the significance of this addition to the creed was also to teach the personality of the Spirit as “the Lord and Giver of life.”

The Spirit is the Lord and Giver of life as the third person of the Holy Trinity. The Spirit is the very life of the triune God as that life is a life of covenant fellowship and friendship. Life in God does not exist in a vacuum but is the most intimate life of living communion between the lover and the beloved. It is the life of eternally begetting and eternally being begotten. The Spirit is the life that is generated from the Father to the Son and reciprocated back to the Father. Apart from the Spirit, life in God is an impossibility.

Life for the creature is to be taken into that covenant life of God. Life is to know God and to have and enjoy fellowship with him. It is a life in which men and women are consecrated with the entirety of their beings, with all their qualities and powers, to the glory of God. Since this is impossible for man by nature, God the Holy Spirit must give that to a man by uniting him with Jesus Christ by a true faith, thus making him a partaker of all Christ’s riches and gifts.

The Filioque

Filioque is a Latin term that was added to the Nicene Creed by the Western church at the Council of Toledo in 589. Filioque, a combination of two Latin words meaning and the Son, was added to the confession of the Holy Spirit, who “proceeds from the Father and the Son.” Originally, I had intended to write more about the addition of filioque by the Council of Toledo. I am currently making a note to discuss this further, perhaps as part of an introduction to the Athanasian Creed, which also alludes to the double procession of the Holy Spirit. However, it is important to note that the addition of this phrase to the Nicene Creed became a major source of contention between Eastern and Western Christianity and is often charged with being one of the key factors that led to the Great Schism between the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches (1054). Until next time, the Lord willing.