The English word “creed” comes directly from the Latin “credo,” which means “I believe.” A creed is in fact any statement of belief, but among Christians the term is practically synonymous with the Creed generated early in the Church’s history by the pastors–the bishops–who met at the city of Nicaea (modern Iznik) in the northwest part of what is today Turkey—then part of the Roman Empire — and came to us in final form from the Council of Constantinople in A.D. 381. This was a time of great upheaval in the church when the central teaching of Christianity about who Christ was, and therefore also about his place in the Holy Trinity, had been brought into question by a church elder in Alexandria named Arius. The Christians had made the impossible claim before the world that Jesus was both wholly God and wholly man. This was an offense to both the logical and the religious mind, for God and creation, which included man, were so categorically different that no one could be both and once, and the religious mind would add that this idea was not only illogical but blasphemous, a morally contemptible lie about God. And yet, among the followers of Jesus, represented by St. Athanasius, the teaching persisted that he was both wholly God and wholly man.
Arius (A. D. 256-336) believed he had a solution to the problem, and his solution had, by the end of the 3d century, become so popular that some have said a majority of the Christian world came to believe it. It was this: that Christ was not, like God, eternal, rather he was the first and greatest creation. “There was a time when Christ was not,” Arius said, and his skill at composing slogans advertising his teaching was so great that Athanasius complained he couldn’t go down to the docks in Alexandria without hearing the longshoremen singing them as they heaved their loads on board.
To settle the controversy, Emperor Constantine, by now a Christian himself, in A. D. 325 ordered a council of the Christian world’s principal pastors to convene at his palace in Nicaea to come up with a statement authoritatively defining this the central tenet of Christianity—its teaching about how Jesus was related to God, to which all Christians would be expected to subscribe. At the center of the creed the bishops composed in Nicaea, was that Jesus, the Messiah of the Jews, the Christ, was very God of very God, who came from God the Father through an act of generation (begetting) and not creation—he was “begotten, not made, of one being or essence (Greek: homoousios) with the Father. Thus he was, contrary to what Arius was teaching, eternal. There was no time when he was not. His life as the eternal Son accompanied that of God his Father, and was therefore endless. The rest of the teachings of this creed support and follow this assertion about Jesus, who could give eternal life, the life of God, because he bore it from eternity himself.
More detail would follow in later church creeds, but the Nicene was the earliest universal (that is, “catholic”) restatement of Christian belief found in the Christian scriptures and believed in the whole Christian world. It has been so extraordinarily durable in defining the essence and center of the Faith that no religion which denies any part of it is credibly considered Christian. It came into existence before the major disagreements and divisions in the church– between the Latin Church and the churches of the East in the eleventh century, and between the Roman and the Protestant churches in the West at the Reformation of the sixteenth–none of these deny it. Even churches that call themselves as “non-credal” believe it entirely, so that Catholics, Baptists, Lutherans, the Amish and the Orthodox, among many others, understand what it says to provide an authoritative dividing line between true teaching and false (that is, between orthodoxy and heresies like Arianism). All of them believe it is “what the scriptures teach” in short form. Because of its antiquity, authority and brevity, it has been found useful wherever a universally approved summary of Christian belief is called for: in services of worship, instruction in Christian faith, and to serve as a doctrinal skeleton upon which to mount other creeds and longer doctrinal works. Its importance in the life of the Christian Church is difficult to overestimate, and there is good reason for every Christian to learn it by heart.
Dr. S. M. Hutchens
Senior Editor, Touchstone Magazine
