The Nicene Creed E-Book

Phillip Cary

• Herausgeber: Lexham Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 187

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Understand and celebrate what we believe For centuries, the Nicene Creed has been central to the church's confession. The Nicene Creed: An Introduction by Phillip Cary explores the Creed's riches with simplicity and clarity. Cary explains the history of the Creed and walks through its meaning line by line. Far from being abstract or irrelevant, the words of the Creed carefully express what God has done in Christ and through the Spirit. The Nicene Creed gives us the gospel. It gives biblical Christians the words for what we already believe. And when we profess the Creed, we join the global church throughout history in declaring the name and work of the one God—Father, Son, and Spirit. Gain a fresh appreciation for the ancient confession with Phillip Cary's help.

Leseprobe

THE NICENE CREED

An Introduction

Phillip Cary

The Nicene Creed: An Introduction

Copyright 2023 Phillip Cary

Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225

LexhamPress.com

You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [email protected].

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the ESV®Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (NASB) are from the New American Standard Bible®, copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (NKJV) are from the New King James Version, copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (KJV) are from the King James Version. Public domain.

Print ISBN 9781683596332

Digital ISBN 9781683596349

Library of Congress Control Number 2022937322

Lexham Editorial: Todd Hains, Abigail Salinger, Danielle Thevenaz, Mandi Newell

Cover Design: Joshua Hunt, Brittany Schrock

In gratitude to the pastors and people

of the Church of the Good Samaritan, Paoli,

and St. Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

CONTENTS

Prayer

Introduction: The Historical Setting

We Believe [I Believe]

Article 1: God the Father

In One God, the Father, the Almighty

Maker of Heaven and Earth

Of All Things Visible and Invisible

Article 2, Part 1: The Eternal Son of God

And in One Lord

Jesus

Christ

The Only-Begotten Son of God

Who Was Begotten of the Father before All Ages

[God from God]

Light from Light

True God from True God

Begotten, Not Made

Having the Same Being as the Father

Through Whom All Things Came to Be

Excursus: The Word and Analogies

Article 2, Part 2: God Incarnate

Who for Us Human Beings and for Our Salvation

Came Down from Heaven

And Was Incarnate

From the Holy Spirit

And the Virgin Mary

And Became Human

And Was Crucified Also for Us under Pontius Pilate

And Suffered

And Was Buried

And Rose Again on the Third Day according to the Scriptures

And Ascended into Heaven

And Sits at the Right Hand of the Father

And Shall Come Again in Glory

To Judge the Living and the Dead

Of Whose Kingdom There Shall Be No End

Article 3: The Holy Spirit

And in the Holy Spirit

The Lord

And Giver of Life

Who Proceeds from the Father

[And from the Son]

Who with the Father and Son Together Is Worshiped and Co-Glorified

Who Has Spoken through the Prophets

In One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church

We Confess One Baptism for the Forgiveness of Sins

We Look for the Resurrection of the Dead

And the Life of the Age to Come

Amen

Epilogue: The Trinity in Simple Terms

Subject Index

Scripture Index

PRAYER

When the Spirit of truth comes,

he will guide you into all truth.

He will glorify me,

for he will take what is mine

and declare it to you.

All that the Father has is mine.

John 16:13–15

GLORY TO GOD in the highest,

and peace to his people on earth.

LORD GOD, heavenly King,

almighty God and Father,

we worship you,

we give you thanks,

we praise you for your glory.

LORD JESUS CHRIST, only Son of the Father,

Lord God, Lamb of God,

you take away the sin of the world:

have mercy on us;

you are seated at the right hand of the Father:

receive our prayer.

FOR YOU ALONE are the Holy One,

you alone are the Lord,

you alone are the Most High,

Jesus Christ,

with the Holy Spirit,

in the glory of God the Father.

Amen.

FATHER IN HEAVEN, who at the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan did proclaim him your beloved Son and anoint him with the Holy Spirit: Grant that all who are baptized into his name may walk in newness of life and boldly confess him as Lord and Savior; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

INTRODUCTION

The Historical Setting

The Nicene Creed originated because ancient Christians were appalled. A teacher in one of the most influential churches in the world was trying to get them to speak of Christ and say things like “there was once when he was not” and “he came to be out of nothing.” They had good reason to be appalled. Christians worship Jesus Christ as Lord, exalted at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. To say “there was once when he was not” would be to say that he is not eternal like God the Father—that he came into being from non-existence just like all God’s creatures. That would mean he is not really God at all, but one of the things God made. To say this would be to say that what Christians have been doing all along, worshiping Jesus as Lord, is the kind of thing pagans do: worshiping something that is not fully, truly, ultimately God. The Nicene Creed was written to say no, in the strongest possible terms, to that kind of Christian paganism.

It said no by saying yes to who God really is, and who Jesus is. It states the essentials of Christian faith in God the Father and his eternal Son, Jesus our Lord, and it adds some essentials about the Holy Spirit as well. And sometimes it says who God is by saying what he has done to make us who we are: God’s creatures whom he raises from death to everlasting life in Christ. So the Creed is a fundamental statement of the gospel of Jesus Christ, who is God in the flesh coming down from heaven for us and our salvation, so that we may share in his kingdom that has no end.

The no is important because of the yes. To say no is to draw a boundary and say: We’re not going there, because that’s not who Christ is. False teaching about who Christ is leads us away from faith in the real Christ and gives us a bogus substitute. It means preaching a different gospel from the one that comes to us from our Lord’s apostles, which is why the apostle Paul goes so far as to say: Let anyone who teaches differently be anathema, accursed (Galatians 1:9). Heeding the apostle, the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 composed a creed that is the precursor to the one this book studies, and added anathemas—solemn curses against anyone who teaches things like “there was once when he was not” or “he came to be out of nothing.” It did not name Arius, the man who taught this, because its purpose, like Paul’s, was not to condemn a particular man but to exclude what he taught. Arius was always free to change his mind, to repent, to submit to the judgment of the Council and teach the same truth. But real heretics are stubborn (you can’t be a heretic just by being mistaken; you have to persist in teaching your mistake to the church even after being corrected), and eventually the doctrine that took shape in opposition to the Council of Nicaea came to be known as Arianism, one of the most famous heresies in the history of the church.

But this book is not about a heresy but about the truth: the gospel of Jesus Christ taught by the Creed that grew out of the faith of Nicaea. It’s a book for Christians who want to understand their own faith better, and thus to grow in the knowledge of God, by learning what the ancient teachers of the Nicene faith had to give us.

The Council of Nicaea, after which the Nicene Creed is named, was a gathering of bishops in ad 325. They met in the city of Nicaea in Asia Minor, which is now the town of Iznik in Turkey. It is a little more than fifty miles as the crow flies from Istanbul, the city that used to be called Constantinople back when it was the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Rome itself was defeated a century or so after the Council of Nicaea and the Western Roman Empire gradually disintegrated, but the Eastern Empire remained for another thousand years and became what is known as the Byzantine Empire—after Byzantium, the earlier name for Constantinople. “Constantinople” means “the city of Constantine,” the Roman emperor who made it his capital in 330 and who had also called the bishops to come to the Council at Nicaea in 325.

Nicaea came to be recognized as the first ecumenical council, from the Greek noun oikoumene, or ecumene in Latin, meaning “the whole inhabited world.” An ecumenical council is a council for the church throughout the world, the church of the ecumene. This was a new idea, but meeting in councils was not. Christian bishops, the leaders of local churches, had been meeting for years in regional councils or synods (from synodos, which is just the Greek word for “council”). This was an important way of keeping order in the churches and of keeping the faith. A bishop had the job of preserving the faith as it was handed down in the church of his town since the time of its founding. The name for this handing down in Latin is traditio, from which we get the word “tradition.” It was a handing down that began in some places, such as Jerusalem and Rome and Antioch, in the earliest days of the Christianity, before the New Testament was written. If there was a serious discrepancy in teaching or church practice between one town and another, the bishops could meet in a synod to straighten things out. The Council of Jerusalem, for example, met to straighten out disputes about how the churches growing out of the missionary work of the church of Antioch were handling things (Acts 15:1–35). In that case, the burning question was how to incorporate believers in Christ who were not Jewish into the fellowship of the church. In this case, at Nicaea, the question was how to exclude the teaching of Arius from churches throughout the world.

The most important way the bishops did that was to produce a confession of the Christian faith—which is what a creed is. Prior to this time, creeds were handed down orally rather than written, as people coming to Christ were taught some form of confession to affirm when they were baptized. It was a way of saying what they were committing themselves to as they joined the Body of Christ. The confession of faith that we now know as the Apostles’ Creed, for example, took shape originally in Rome as an oral baptismal confession.1 Each town had its own traditional confession, handed down through generations of bishops, with many small variations. But they all followed a threefold pattern, so that everyone in the ecumene was baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, as our Lord commanded (Matthew 28:19). What evidently happened at Nicaea is that one of these unwritten local confessions was adapted, with some additions directed specifically against Arius’ teaching, to provide a single creed for the whole ecumene.

The Creed presented in this book is the most widely-used confession of faith in the Christian world. It is not the original Creed of Nicaea in 325 but an expanded confession formulated at the Council of Constantinople in 381 and officially accepted as a statement of the Nicene faith at the Council of Chalcedon in 451.2 In the interests of historical accuracy, scholars often give it a long name, like the “Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed,” but I will use the more familiar name “Nicene Creed,” which accords with the reason it was accepted by the church throughout the world: it is a fuller way of confessing the same faith as the Council of Nicaea. Thus for the purposes of this book, as well as in the ordinary usage of the church, the label “Nicene Creed” designates a different text from “the Creed of Nicaea.” Along with a number of small differences, the Nicene Creed omits some things in the Creed of Nicaea, including the anathemas, and adds a good deal to what is said about the Holy Spirit. The result is an expanded confession of the faith of Nicaea, and as such it has come to be accepted as the ecumenical Creed, the confession of the Nicene faith of the whole ecumene, and is incorporated into the regular worship of the vast majority of Christians around the globe, including Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, and most Protestants who use a regular liturgy.

It is worth saying a bit more about the unity and diversity within what we can now call the ecumenical church, the church of the ecumene that agrees in confessing the Nicene faith. It is the church that deserves to be called orthodox (small “o”) because it teaches the right faith and worship (orthe doxa in Greek). It is also catholic (small “c”), meaning “universal” (katholikos in Greek). And it is evangelical (small “e”) because it is the church of the gospel (euangelion in Greek). In the lower-case sense of these words, the one holy church of God, which the Creed teaches us to honor as the Body of Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit, is orthodox, catholic, evangelical, and ecumenical, and its faith is the faith of Nicaea.

The diversity within the one ecumenical church, which ought not to divide it, can be distinguished by names with capital letters. We will need to mark the distinction between orthodox (small “o”), which embraces the whole Nicene ecumene, and the Orthodox (capital “O”), including Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, and many others, all grouped under the heading “Eastern Orthodox,” whose heritage can be traced back to the Eastern Roman Empire, where the dominant language was Greek. And we must likewise mark the distinction between catholic (small “c”), a term we will meet in the Creed itself to designate the whole church, and Roman Catholics (capital “C”) who are Christians in full communion with the Pope, who is the bishop of Rome. Their heritage goes back to the Western Roman Empire, where the dominant language was Latin. Very early on, there was a standard Latin translation of the Nicene Creed that ended up—as we shall see—with a few differences from the Greek version, one of which is trivial, another interesting, and the third tragic. Protestants are heirs of this Western tradition, and most translations of the Nicene Creed used in the Protestant churches have their roots in the ancient Latin translation. The Latin Creed is still with us, familiar to lovers of church music by composers such as Palestrina, Bach, and Mozart.

The translation of the Creed I have made for purposes of this book does not have exactly the same wording as any version used in the churches, for unfortunately there is no one standard translation of the Nicene Creed in English. I assume that readers will continue to say the Creed in the version they’re accustomed to using on Sundays—I certainly hope so, for the opportunity to confess the faith together in worship is one of the great blessings of the Creed, and not something to tamper with. But because there are so many versions, some of which go back hundreds of years and use English that is no longer familiar, I will often need to comment on alternative translations and old wording that might be confusing. In my own translation I have tried to stay as close as possible to the original Greek.3 But I have also commented on the standard Latin translation when it diverges from the Greek, for this often explains variations in the English versions, giving us words like “consubstantial” and phrases like “was made man.”

To organize the phrase-by-phrase commentary, I have divided the Creed into its three “articles,” which is a technical term (from which we get the phrase “an article of faith”) for the parts of the Creed devoted to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In addition, it is convenient to divide the second article into two parts, the first centered on the divinity of the Lord Jesus and the second on his humanity.

As you may have noticed already, a great deal of this book focuses on words and their history. For the Creed consists of words that are much older than any of us who now say them. A richer and more accurate understanding of these words is therefore a way of arriving at a deeper understanding of our own faith, which we share with those who have confessed the Creed over the centuries of the Christian tradition. For with them we too have been given one Lord, one faith, and one baptism.

Because the words are old, they have layers. One aim of this book is to give you access to these layers, so that when you say a word like “incarnate,” you will hear beneath it the Latin word carnem and will think “flesh.” And then you can tune your ears to the way the word “flesh” echoes down the hallways and passages of Scripture and into the Creed, as well as into the language we use in church services. I will assume readers of this book are familiar with the Bible but not necessarily with the traditions of Christian theology, so I will spend a good deal of time on words like “incarnation,” which for theologians are very commonplace, but which for many churchgoers, I have found, are unnecessarily mysterious and easily misunderstood, because the words have never been explained to them. Getting our ears more fully tuned to hear these words gets us more deeply immersed in the richness of Christian worship.

It is another aim of this book to open doors to further study, and for that purpose I will often introduce theological terms that are not found in the Creed itself, but that have been used in the Christian tradition to expound the Nicene faith. I will frequently be dwelling on technical terms that theologians use without explanation—terms that I think are genuinely helpful not just for those studying the technicalities of theology but for ordinary Christians who want to understand their own faith. I will be very happy if this book serves some readers as a gateway to theological studies.

The book will also devote a great deal of attention to the apostolic roots of the Nicene faith as found in Scripture. The aim in this is to show biblical Christians how the Creed gives words to what they already believe, so that they can hear these words as gospel, the story of our God. In Martin Luther’s terms, the Nicene Creed gives us gospel rather than law, because it is not telling us what to do but telling us what God has done for us and our salvation—all the things we cannot do to save ourselves, transform our lives, and make ourselves good Christians, for they are things that only God can do. The good news is that in Christ, God has done these things, and by his life-giving Spirit he has made them ours. The Nicene Creed is a blessing and a joy, for it is a confession of faith in this good news.

THE NICENE CREED

(In a close literal translation, with alternative versions in brackets)

We believe [I believe]

in one God,

the Father, the Almighty,

maker of heaven and earth,

of all things visible and invisible;

and in one Lord,

Jesus Christ,

the only-begotten Son of God,

who was begotten of the Father before all ages,

[God from God,]

Light from Light,

True God from True God,

begotten, not made,

having the same being as the Father,

through whom all things came to be;

who for us human beings and for our salvation

came down from heaven,

and was incarnate

from the Holy Spirit

and the Virgin Mary

and became human,

and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate,

and suffered

and was buried,

and rose again on the third day according to the Scriptures,

and ascended into heaven,

and sits at the right hand of the Father,

and shall come again in glory

to judge the living and the dead,

of whose kingdom there shall be no end;

and in the Holy Spirit,

the Lord and Giver of Life,

who proceeds from the Father

[and from the Son],

who with the Father and Son together is worshiped and co-glorified,

who has spoken through the prophets;

in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.

We confess one baptism for the forgiveness of sins;

we look for the resurrection of the dead

and the life of the age to come.

Amen.

WE BELIEVE [I BELIEVE]

The interesting difference between the Greek and the Latin versions of the Creed, which was mentioned in the Introduction, is found right here in the first word: the Greek-speakers in the Eastern Roman Empire said “we” and the Latin-speakers in the West said “I.”4 This is in fact how we got the term “creed,” from the Latin word, credo—a one-word way of saying, “I believe.” Turn it into a noun, “the Credo,” and you have a standard term for the Creed. The standard Greek term, on the other hand, was simply “the faith,” he pistis. So in this sense the Nicene Creed is the Nicene faith. To repeat the Creed aloud is to confess the faith, in a double sense of the term: it is to give utterance to the Christian faith in the words of “the faith,” which is the Creed.

Another ancient term for the Creed, surprisingly enough, is “symbol” (from the Latin symbolum, derived from the Greek symbolon). It is a word with many meanings. To this day, the English word “symbol” can be used to designate a creed, and if you see a book in the theology section of the library on “Symbolics,” it is probably an old study of creeds and confessions.