Here We Stand, pt. 3

Apostles' and Nicene Creeds: A Brief Introduction

the Rev. John Green

June 16, 2013

The oldest creedal statement of the Christian faith is also the simplest: “Jesus is Lord.” The two second-oldest creedal statements of Christendom, the Nicene and Apostles' creeds, are a good bit longer and a great deal less simple. They are familiar to most church-going Christians, in most churches in most countries of the world. But that doesn't mean that we church-going Christians actually understand much of what these creeds say, nor what they mean, on either a scholarly or personal level.

The first question that comes to mind is, “Why two such similar statements of belief?” Would not one or the other have been sufficient? Both are concerned with answering the question, “Who is Jesus,” but they do so in different ways. Neither is much concerned with details of Jesus's life and ministry – reduced to a comma in the Apostles' Creed, a period in the Nicene. It is the person of Jesus and the office of the Son that are of concern in both creeds, not the Beatitudes nor the Parables.

The chief difference between the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed is that they came into existence in very different ways.  The Apostles' Creed is the product of centuries of use and acceptance into the proclamation and practice of the faithful. Its use is closely tied to the Baptismal rite of the early church, and it contains what was considered the irreducible minimum of information that a new Christian was expected to know and understand.

The Nicene Creed, on the other hand, is the product of a purposeful enterprise initiated by the Roman emperor Constantine and performed by two separate meetings of all the bishops to bring order and uniformity to the church's teaching. The Apostles' Creed evolved within the life of the church; the Nicene Creed was created by ecumenical councils.

Rather than try to understand the meaning of “substance” and figure out why the “filioque” is important, let's step back and look at what Constantine and the bishops were really up to, and up against.

The Hebrew faith is firmly and unequivocally monotheistic: Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. There are no assistant gods or associate gods, demigods or oh-my-gods, and the angels are never clearly defined: Adonai echod, the Lord is one. But to Romans, such a limitation on their thinking would be fundamentally incomprehensible and decidedly unwelcome. Romans were deeply and enthusiastically polytheistic: They loved gods, adopted and celebrated the gods of their neighbors, the gods of people they conquered, gods they made up on the spur of the moment. Apollo, Mithra, Isis, the more the merrier, bring them all, and welcome, every one.

So you see the problem: How do you knit together two such utterly opposite understandings? God is one, God is many, can we have it both ways? As it turns out, yes we can ... (that has a strangely familiar ring). Yes, we can have it both ways, but we're going to have to do some mental gymnastics in order to get there. Bear with me a moment.

The Romans were also wildly favorable toward anything that was Greek: architecture, sculpture, drama, poetry, philosophy, spanakopita, Romans couldn't get enough. So, as it happens, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were well known and admired by the Roman intelligentsia. The philosophical system we know as Platonic-Aristotelian divided the world into two parts: material and spiritual. The spiritual world was the habitation of the ideal, the perfect, the eternal. The material world was the opposite: imperfect and temporary.

In the language of Plato, the substance of a thing was its perfect, eternal quality that exists in the spiritual realm. The bishops decided that it could prove to be a handy device for proclaiming that there was only one God but three persons of the same substance. The Platonic-Aristotelian system divided reality into two parts, ideal and spiritual on the one hand, physical and material on the other, the former superior to the latter. In contrast, the Hebrew mind – the mind of Jesus – knows only one reality. By introducing the concept of substance into the language of faith the bishops created a division in reality, idealized the spiritual realm and diminished the material world in a way that would never have occurred to Jesus. A temporary and admittedly almost unsolvable problem – the blending of a monotheistic faith with a polytheistic culture – was managed, but in a way that leaves a genuinely unsatisfactory taste in our modern, post-Enlightenment minds. The Platonic solution created a greater problem, the cleaving of the world into two parts, spiritual and material. The damage caused by this “solution” is in many important respects the subtext of the Reformers, who sought to repair the damage done to the faith and message of Jesus by the introduction of the Platonic world view into Christian proclamation. And so we turn now to the Reformation. David, it's all yours.