Nicene Creed

The original Nicene Creed was first adopted at the First Council of Nicaea in 325. According to the traditional view, forwarded by the Council of Chalcedon of 451, the Creed was amended in 381 by the First Council of Constantinople as "consonant to the holy and great Synod of Nice". Further, a creed "almost identical in form" was used as early as 374 by St. Epiphanius of Salamis. The amended form is presently referred to as the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed.

Creedal scholar J.N.D. Kelly suggests that since the First Council of Constantinople was not considered ecumenical until the Council of Chalcedon in 451, the absence of documentation during this period does not logically necessitate rejecting the amended creed as an expansion of the original Nicene Creed of 325.

The Nicene Creed is part of the profession of faith required of those undertaking important functions within the Assyrian Church of the East, Ancient Church of the East, Oriental Orthodox Churches, Eastern Orthodox Church, Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, Methodist, and other Protestant traditions including the Waldensian and Reformed (Continental Reformed, Presbyterian), Congregationalist, and Baptist. Nicene Christianity regards Jesus as divine and "begotten of the Father". Various conflicting theological views existed before the fourth century, and these disagreements would eventually spur the ecumenical councils to develop the Nicene Creed. Various non-Nicene beliefs have emerged and re-emerged since the fourth century, all of which are considered heresies by adherents of Nicene Christianity.

In the liturgical churches of Western Christianity, the Nicene Creed is in use alongside the less widespread Apostles' Creed and Athanasian Creed. An affirmation of faith, by default the Nicene Creed, is usually said immediately after the sermon or homily following the Gospel reading at the Eucharist, at least on Sundays and major festivals.

In musical settings, particularly when sung in Latin, this creed is usually referred to by its first word, Credo. On Sundays and solemnities, one of these two creeds is recited in the Roman Rite Mass after the homily. In the Byzantine Rite, the Nicene Creed is sung or recited at the Divine Liturgy, immediately preceding the Anaphora (eucharistic prayer) is also recited daily at compline.

The current authoritative English translation in use in the Catholic Church since 2011 was done by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy.

History

The purpose of a creed is to provide a doctrinal statement of correct belief among Christians amid controversy. The creeds of Christianity have been drawn up at times of conflict about doctrine: acceptance or rejection of a creed served to distinguish believers and heretics, particularly the adherents of Arianism. For that reason, a creed was called in Greek a σύμβολον, symbolon, which originally meant half of a broken object which, when fitted to the other half, verified the bearer's identity. The Greek word passed through Latin symbolum into English "symbol", which only later took on the meaning of an outward sign of something.

The Nicene Creed was adopted to resolve the Arian controversy, whose leader, Arius, a clergyman of Alexandria, "objected to Alexander's (the bishop of the time) apparent carelessness in blurring the distinction of nature between the Father and the Son by his emphasis on eternal generation". Emperor Constantine called the Council at Nicaea to resolve the dispute in the church, which resulted from the widespread adoption of Arius' teachings, which threatened to destabilize the entire Roman Empire. Following the formulation of the Nicene Creed, Arius' teachings were henceforth marked as heresy.

The Nicene Creed of 325 explicitly affirms the Father as the "one God" and as the "Almighty", and Jesus Christ as "the Son of God", as "begotten of [...] the essence of the Father", and therefore as "consubstantial with the Father", meaning, "of the same substance" as the Father; "very God of very God". The Creed of 325 does mention the Holy Spirit but not as "God" or as "consubstantial with the Father". The 381 revision of the creed at Constantinople (i.e., the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed), which is often simply referred to as the "Nicene Creed", speaks of the Holy Spirit as worshipped and glorified with the Father and the Son.

The Athanasian Creed, formulated approximately a century later, is not the product of any known church council and is not used in Eastern Christianity. It describes in much greater detail the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The earlier Apostles' Creed, apparently formulated before the Arian controversy arose in the fourth century, does not describe the Son or the Holy Spirit as "God" or as "consubstantial with the Father".

Thomas Aquinas stated that the phrase for us men, and for our salvation was to refute the error of Origen, "who alleged that by the power of Christ's Passion even the devils were to be set free". He also stated that the phrases stating Jesus was made incarnate by the Holy Spirit was to refute the Manicheans "so that we may believe that He assumed true flesh and not a phantastic body", and He came down from Heaven was to refute the error of Photinus, "who asserted that Christ was no more than a man". Furthermore, the phrase and He was made man was to "exclude the error of Nestorius, according to whose contention the Son of God ... would be said to dwell in man [rather] than to be man."

Original Nicene Creed of 325

The original Nicene Creed was first adopted at the First Council of Nicaea, which opened on 19 June 325. The text ends with anathemas against Arian propositions, preceded by the words: "We believe in the Holy Spirit" which terminates the statements of belief.

F. J. A. Hort and Adolf von Harnack argued that the Nicene Creed was the local creed of Caesarea (an important center of Early Christianity) recited in the council by Eusebius of Caesarea. Their case relied largely on a particular interpretation of Eusebius' account of the council's proceedings. More recent scholarship has not been convinced by their arguments. The large number of secondary divergences from the text of the creed quoted by Eusebius make it unlikely that it was used as a starting point by those who drafted the conciliar creed. Their initial text was probably a local creed from a Syro-Palestinian source into which they inserted phrases to define the Nicene theology. The Eusebian Creed may thus have been either a second or one of many nominations for the Nicene Creed.

The 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia says that soon after the Council of Nicaea the church composed new formulae of faith, most of them variations of the Nicene Symbol, to meet new phases of Arianism, of which there were at least four before the Council of Sardica (341), at which a new form was presented and inserted in its acts. However, the council did not accept it.

Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed

What is known as the "Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed" or the "Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed", received this name because it was adopted at the Second Ecumenical Council held in Constantinople in 381 as a modification of the original Nicene Creed of 325. In that light, it also became very commonly known simply as the "Nicene Creed". It is the only authoritative ecumenical statement of the Christian faith accepted by the Catholic Church (with the addition of the Filioque), the Eastern Orthodox Church, Oriental Orthodoxy, the Church of the East, and much of Protestantism including the Anglican communion. (The Apostles' and Athanasian creeds are not as widely accepted.)

It differs in several respects, both by addition and omission, from the creed adopted at the First Council of Nicaea. The most notable difference is the additional section:

And [we believe] in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver-of-Life, who proceedeth from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spake by the prophets. And [we believe] in one, holy, catholic and Apostolic Church. We acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of sins, [and] we look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.

Since the end of the 19th century, scholars have questioned the traditional explanation of the origin of this creed, which has been passed down in the name of the council, whose official acts have been lost over time. A local council of Constantinople in 382 and the Third Ecumenical Council (Council of Ephesus of 431) made no mention of it, with the latter affirming the 325 creed of Nicaea as a valid statement of the faith and using it to denounce Nestorianism. Though some scholarship claims that hints of the later creed's existence are discernible in some writings, no extant document gives its text or makes explicit mention of it earlier than the Fourth Ecumenical Council at Chalcedon in 451. Many of the bishops of the 451 council themselves had never heard of it and initially greeted it skeptically, but it was then produced from the episcopal archives of Constantinople, and the council accepted it "not as supplying any omission but as an authentic interpretation of the faith of Nicaea". Despite the questions raised, it is considered most likely that this creed was introduced at the 381 Second Ecumenical Council.

Based on evidence both internal and external to the text, it has been argued that this creed originated not as an editing of the original Creed proposed at Nicaea in 325, but as an independent creed (probably an older baptismal creed) modified to make it more like the Nicene Creed. Some scholars have argued that the creed may have been presented at Chalcedon as "a precedent for drawing up new creeds and definitions to supplement the Creed of Nicaea, as a way of getting round the ban on new creeds in Canon 7 of Ephesus". It is generally agreed that the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed is not simply an expansion of the Creed of Nicaea, and was probably based on another traditional creed independent of the one from Nicaea.

The Third Ecumenical Council (Ephesus) reaffirmed the original version of 325 of the Nicene Creed and declared that "it is unlawful for any man to bring forward, or to write, or to compose a different (ἑτέραν) faith as a rival to that established by the holy Fathers assembled with the Holy Ghost in Nicaea" (i.e., the 325 creed). The word ἑτέραν is more accurately translated as used by the council to mean "different", "contradictory", rather than "another". This statement has been interpreted as a prohibition against changing this creed or composing others, but not all accept this interpretation. This question is connected with the controversy whether a creed proclaimed by an ecumenical council is definitive in excluding not only excisions from its text but also additions to it.

In one respect, the Eastern Orthodox Church's received text of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed differs from the earliest text, which is included in the acts of the Council of Chalcedon of 451: The Eastern Orthodox Church uses the singular forms of verbs such as "I believe", in place of the plural form ("we believe") used by the council. Byzantine Rite Eastern Catholic Churches use the same form of the creed, since the Catholic Church teaches that it is wrong to add "and the Son" to the Greek verb "ἐκπορευόμενον", though correct to add it to the Latin "qui procedit", which does not have precisely the same meaning. The form generally used in Western churches does add "and the Son" and also the phrase "God from God", which is found in the original 325 Creed.

Comparison between the creed of 325 and the creed of 381

The following table, which indicates by square brackets the portions of the 325 text that were omitted or moved in 381, and uses italics to indicate what phrases, absent in the 325 text, were added in 381, juxtaposes the earlier (AD 325) and later (AD 381) forms of this creed in the English translation given in Philip Schaff's compilation The Creeds of Christendom (1877).

Filioque controversy

In the late 6th century, some Latin-speaking churches added the word Filioque ("and the Son") to the description of the procession of the Holy Spirit, in what many Eastern Orthodox Christians have at a later stage argued is a violation of Canon VII of the Third Ecumenical Council, since the words were not included in the text by either the Council of Nicaea or the Council of Constantinople. This was incorporated into the liturgical practice of Rome in 1014. Filioque eventually became one of the leading causes for the East-West Schism in 1054, and the failures of the repeated union attempts.

Views on the importance of this creed

Nearly all Christian denominations, including Catholic, Orthodox, and most Protestant churches (e.g., Lutherans, Anglicans, Methodists, Continental Reformed, Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Baptists), regard the Nicene Creed as a foundational and authoritative statement of faith. Thus approximately 98.5% of the world's Christians are Nicene Christians, adhering to the Nicene Creed's Trinitarian and Christological doctrines. The remaining 1.5% include non-Trinitarian groups such as the LDS Church, Jehovah's Witnesses, Swedenborgians, etc. (see below).

As mentioned above, there are a minority of Evangelical and non-denominational groups, such as some independent Churches of Christ, certain neo-charismatic congregations, or some fundamentalist churches, who view the Nicene Creed as a helpful summary of biblical truth but not authoritative, emphasizing that only the Bible is authoritative and rule of faith and practice. Furthermore, certain non-Trinitarian groups explicitly reject the Nicene Creed's Trinitarian doctrines: examples include the Church of the New Jerusalem and Jehovah's Witnesses, whose theologies are incompatible with the Creed's teachings on the Trinity and Christ's divinity.

The view that the Nicene Creed can serve as a touchstone of genuine Christian faith is reflected in the name "symbol of faith", which was given to it in Greek and Latin, when in those languages the word "symbol" meant a "token for identification (by comparison with a counterpart)". In the Roman Rite Mass, the Latin text of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, with "Deum de Deo" (God from God) and "Filioque" (and from the Son), phrases absent in the original text, was previously the only form used for the "profession of faith". The Roman Missal now refers to it jointly with the Apostles' Creed as "the Symbol or Profession of Faith or Creed", describing the second as "the baptismal Symbol of the Roman Church, known as the Apostles' Creed".