Opplyst liv
Why We Need the Creed
At this year’s summer conference at the Napa Institute, I was asked: ‘Why do we need not just the Word but also the Creed? Why does a 1700-year-old statement of faith matter right now, urgently for each of us?’ Below you can read my response.
In retrospect, considered in the time-traveller’s wing mirror, the Council of Nicaea seems inevitable. Like the crowning of Charlemagne or the Battle of Lepanto, it constitutes one of those cardinal events without which such a lot would have turned out otherwise that it seems, frankly, too much work to consider the chances it might not have happened. To contemporaries, things will have looked a little different. Sure, people were conscious that something momentous was at stake. The council had first been summoned to Ancyra, present-day Ankara, but was then moved to Nicaea, so the emperor could keep a closer eye on it.
Some three hundred bishops attended, making of Nicaea the most representative ecclesial assembly to date. Representation was geographically uneven. Almost all the bishops were Greek. Only a handful came from the West. This is significant, given that controversy regarding cultural-conceptual and linguistic difference lay at the heart of matters discussed. Still, the presence of a formal delegation sent by Pope Sylvester, that tireless builder of Roman churches, ensured that the Latins were fully involved: there was never any question of Nicaea’s legitimacy as an ‘ecumenical’, that is a ‘universal’ or ‘world-wide’ council. However, so violent were the quarrels that preceded and followed the council that it may have seemed destined to relative oblivion, as one dramatic exploit among very many in a tortuously awkward historic-doctrinal-political process.
Not so. Nicaea emerged as a lighthouse, establishing criteria by which both the things that went ahead of it and those that followed after could be evaluated and judged. To this day it is for Christians of almost all confessions an authoritative, incontrovertible reference. What, then, was the council really about?
It dealt with a number of different issues, more than most people who refer to it usually care to recall. If you look up the council’s Canons, its adopted resolutions, you will find them addressing a range of pastoral concerns: conditions for admission to the clergy; the moral standard expected of clerics (forbidden to live with women not their mothers, sisters, aunts, or likewise above suspicion); with procedures for consecrating bishops; with re-admission of the excommunicated; with bans on clerics who practise usury; and so forth. The Fathers further addressed a catechetical exhortation ‘to the Egyptians’. The churches of that area had got embroiled in some rather sterile and destructive controversies. Even back in 325 a national church might need the Catholic communion’s fraternal correction, a statement of the truth in love, to be recalled from a dead-end into which regional blinkeredness had led it.
Chiefly, of course, we remember Nicaea for its creed. It is not quite the one we recite still on Sundays. Nuances were added at the council of Constantinople 56 years later, in 381. But to speak of the ‘Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan Creed’ involves such a mouthful that Christians have long been pleased to reference the first council only. That is fair enough: it was at Nicaea that the decisive terms were hammered out and the creed’s architecture established. In a letter written after the Council Fathers had gone home, Constantine, obviously pleased, wrote that ‘all points which seemed to produce doubt or excuse for discord have been discussed and accurately examined’. He could not resist adding that he himself had taken active part in this ‘investigation of the truth’. That observation may have sprung from a degree of imperial wishful thinking. The historian Henry Chadwick maintained that Constantine never really got the hang of the subtleties of Christian faith, indeed that he was ‘not aware of any mutual exclusiveness between Christianity and his faith in the Unconquered Sun’. This may be a rather too critical approach. We shall likely find Constantine’s true contribution somewhere between the caricature of the blundering amateur and that of the expert witness. What is certain is this: his determination caused the council to happen. And that surely entitled him to bask a little in its glory, be it by reflection.
However prepared or unprepared the emperor was for refined theological debate, it has to be said: the issues treated at Nicaea were abstruse. Is Jesus Christ aptly defined as ‘Son of God’? In what sense can he be said to be ‘begotten’? Is he of like substance to the Father, or ‘consubstantial’ with him? If ‘consubstantial’, what does the word mean? To committed, ordinary Christians attracted by the Sermon on the Mount, eager to imitate the Good Samaritan, such word-splitting may seem pedantic and redundant. We read in Scripture that ‘God is love’. Is that not enough? Do we really need all these complicated, oh so clever definitions that seem to want to shoehorn the Gospel’s living, generous broadness into narrow, dead intellectualism?
Yes, we do. The definitions are crucial. Let me indicate why circumstantially. In the past few decades, Catholic discourse has been marked by a tremendous stress on agency. We have been challenged to think self-critically about social issues, justice and peace, inequalities embedded in societal and economic systems. We have been sensitised to the cry of the poor, reminded that the Christian call involves the creation of radical community. This is good. We can never permit ourselves to privatise our religion. Christian faith implies a clear ethical imperative. For our ethics to be well oriented, though, for it to be sound and specific, right faith must be in place first.
History yields examples aplenty, some profoundly tragic, of how putatively Christian ethics divorced from faith, or attempts to found communities upon some preliminary good or intermediary personage, can come to assume bizarre, even plainly perverse forms. The transformative potential of a Christian way of acting in the world does not spring from bullet points relayable in a YouTube video; nor is it a technique one might acquire at a weekend workshop. You see, ultimately it is not you and I who provide for the world consolation and light. Our vanity would like to pretend it is so; but we are but carriers of Another’s gifts, summoned to bear them lightly and graciously. Christ alone is the light of the world, its hope and pledge of healing. We shall contribute our widow’s mite to his work of recreation — ‘See, I make all things new!’ — in so far as we abide in him; in so far as he becomes the atmosphere in which we ‘live and move and have our being’. If we learn to live on these terms, it will be only natural to heed the wonderful counsel Antony the Great bequeathed to his disciples on his deathbed: ‘Let Christ be the air you breathe’.
‘He must increase, I must decrease’, said the Forerunner. St Paul wrote to the Galatians, prone to turn ‘to a different Gospel’ than the one of God’s salvation in Christ: ‘It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me’; at the end of the letter he added, ‘May I never boast in anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ’. Such affirmations may seem to us excessive, indicating heights attainable only by especially graced, extraordinarily called individuals. They are not. They spell out the criteria for Christian existence that apply to all of us. To be a Christian and to spread abroad the ‘sweet aroma of Christ Jesus’ is above all a matter of abiding in him. It ensues that in order to heed Jesus’s call to follow him and imitate him, we must first be able responsibly to answer his question, ‘Who do you say that I am’?
This is where the creed comes in. The Nicene confession of God three-in-one is chiefly christological. About the Father, it simply says: ‘We believe in God the Father all-powerful, maker of all things both seen and unseen.’ The Spirit is very lapidarily acknowledged: ‘And in the Holy Spirit’. More work was called for. The question of Pneumatology arose post Nicaea and was defined at Constantinople in 381, when the final clause of the creed as we know it today, about holy Church, was also added. The necessity of speaking who Christ is was foremost in the mind of the Nicene Fathers, inviting us to make of this jubilee year a time of radical Christ-centred conversion.
I have spoken of the creed as adding precision. Is it extra-Biblical? Did the Fathers add bits from their own minds to Jesus’s self-revelation in the Gospel? Their purpose was to add nothing. They believed in the authority of Scripture. They knew themselves accountable to it, mindful of the warning in the Apocalypse concerning those who add something to or take something away from sealed revelation. The Fathers’ purpose was to clarify and explicate aspects of divine being that the Bible states in images, or, as St Paul might say, ‘in mystery’. Thereby they continued the work of the Word made flesh, the Only-Begotten ‘close to the Father’s heart’, who came among us to make the unseen God known — or, if we want to stay closer to the Greek of the Prologue to St John’s Gospel, which I am citing, to ‘exegete him’:ὁ ὦν εἰς τὸν κόλπον τοῦ πατρὸς ἐκεῖνος ἐξηγήσατο.
Exegesis is literarily a ‘reading out of’. An exegete is skilled in the responsible reading of texts, equipped to reveal their hidden aspects or implicit messages, rather like a conservator in a museum might hold up an Etruscan vase to the light and show us fine, delicate patterns unapparent to the untrained eye. The purpose of God’s incarnation, by which, rightly, we mark time, was not just to pay the debt of our iniquity and to demonstrate a new lifestyle. The Son of God became man in order, in the Spirit, to ‘show us the Father’, bringing to completion the slowly unfolding epiphany begun at the burning bush when God, no longer content to be the object of human speculation about absolute reality, deigned to articulate himself in a comprehensible manner, entrusting us with his name. The name of Jesus means ‘God saves’. The Person of Jesus reveals who this saving God is.
When the Nicene Fathers identified Christ as ‘God from God, light from light, true God from true God’, they synthesised a series of Jesus’s self-designations into a poetic formula so that believers might keep present in their minds the gist of a whole catalogue of Biblical texts. When they stated that God’s Son is ‘begotten not made’, they fixed the metaphysical distinction between generation in eternity and generation in time. The most controversial part of the council’s work on the creed was the introduction of the word ὁμοούσιος to speak of the Son’s relation to the Father. Our English version of the creed translates ὁμοούσιος as ‘consubstantial’. You may ask whether that makes us much wiser. Until the revised English missal was published in 2011, we used to say ‘of one being with the Father’. That formula has the merit of using words we can readily grasp, but it lacks the subtlety of the Nicene definition. The revisers therefore resolved, wisely, to revert to the technical term.
It takes a great deal of theology to see exactly what ὁμοούσιος means. In fact, it emerged after 325 that not all the Fathers understood it the same way, although they had, bar a couple, signed the formula. The orthodox definition of consubstantiality was the chief post-conciliar theological task. The maintenance of the term in the creed reminds us that our joint profession of faith is underpinned by immense intellectual labour — that it is reasonable. We may make our profession sincerely without having personally examined all the nuts and bolts. The Fathers framed the creed in the first person plural ‘We believe’. At Constantinople, the creed came to wind up with the phrase ‘and in one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church’. The creed belongs to no one in particular; it is the Church’s creed. As such, it is given each of us that we might make it our own. In Antiquity the traditio symboli, ‘the handing-on of the creed’, was a rite whereby the bishop read the creed aloud to catechumens. They were exhorted to commit it to memory, to interiorise it as a personal statement of faith. Their public recitation of the formula learnt, their redditio or ‘handing back’ of the creed, preceded their admission to the sacraments. The role of the creed in our personal lives of faith is this, not least: it frees us of illusions that we own or manage our faith, reminding us that it is pure gift and that we are held to the creed’s standards, not it to ours.
I mentioned earlier that Pope St Sylvester, who reigned while the council of Nicaea was in session, built a number of basilicas in Rome. Among them were old St Peter’s, Holy Cross in Jerusalem, and the Lateran. Old St Peter’s is lost. It was pulled down when Bramante, Maderno, and Michelangelo clubbed together, under Julius II, to produce the grandiose edifice we know today. The interior of Holy Cross has been refashioned, leaving us only to guess what Sylvester’s decorative scheme may have looked like. St John Lateran, meanwhile, still substantially displays the fourth-century mosaic integral to its first design. The image of Christ found there is like a pictorial précis of the Nicene definitions. Surrounded by angels, Christ is depicted in heavenly realms as a haloed torso suspended between, underneath, a naked cross, the emblem of his work in time, and, above, a seraphic composition that symbolises the Father’s eternal throne. The Spirit, in the form of a diving dove, connects Christ’s apparition in glory with the earthly sphere, causing rivulets of water to gush down along the cross’s stem to form, at its base, a fountain from which deer quench their thirst and around which sheep pasture. The Christ of the Lateran mosaic prefigures an iconographic model that would, two centuries later, morph into the type we know as the Pantokrator, displaying Christ as the One who, in the cadences of the Nicene creed, ‘went up into the heavens [and] is coming to judge the living and the dead.’
In our church interiors now, in the songs and devotional texts, statuary, painting, and mosaics produced in recent decades, this motif has been all but eclipsed. The image of Christ on which we have focused is that of the Son of Man who ‘went about doing good’. We need to keep that image before our eyes; but we need no less to know that this outstanding human being whom even Pilate could admire (‘Behold the Man!’) is from everlasting, invested with substantial glory, the merest glimpse of which causes unaided human sensibility to faint. The Nicene creed safeguards reverential consciousness of Christ’s divinity. Appended to the creed is an anathema: ‘Those who say “there once was when he was not” [that is, who affirm that Jesus may sufficiently be understood and known with reference to his appearance in time, in the order of creation], these the catholic and apostolic church anathematises.’ Strong words! They should ring in our ears, heirs as we are to a largely this-worldly, unmetaphysical, tediously flat perception of Christian truth.
The creed which the Fathers entrusted to the Church has resounded on the lips of the faithful for 1700 years. It is a treasure, a guarantee that notwithstanding our slowness of mind and recalcitrant hearts, our confession of Christ will not be unworthy of him. The creed also helps us understand ourselves. For if our great task is to live in Christ, and if Christ is truly God, the assurance given in Scripture, that we are to be ‘sharers in divine life’, is no rhetorical extravagance but literal truth; then everything else, all our options and desires, must be weighed in the light of it.
The creed is like the musical pitch by which the rest of our life with regard to time and eternity must be tuned. This was brought home to me years ago when my goddaughter in Rome was preparing for First Communion. Her priest had had the inspired idea of introducing the creed to the children by teaching them to sing it. And so I found myself one night at bedtime, after the good-night story, hearing this little girl sitting up in bed singing in a bright soprano voice: ‘I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages’. Did she understand what she was reciting?
Yes and no. She may not have been able to define ὁμοούσιος. But she knew perfectly that these time-defying words express the truth of a Person she loved, and that her life’s task would be to make her confession ever more integrally with all her heart, all her soul, all her mind, and all her strength. She could rest in that task serenely. The music of it lived in her. She had but to listen out for it.
This is how the creed works. It lifts our lives into a symphony where our being is renewed in the one, trinitarian God, oriented heavenward, set as a new song fit to sound alongside the praise of seraphim and cherubim, ravished by divine beauty. Thus illumined we can commit to the archives, gently and with reverence, but without excessive remorse, the jingly superficiality of many a cheerful yet deficient confessional refrain, too trite standards of Christian faith and finality with which I dare say we are, most of us, for excellent reason, more than a little weary.
