The Nicene Creed —

By Ryan Danker –

The Nicene Creed, as it is commonly called, is much more than a basic outline of the Christian faith, although it is that. In fact, it is the universal outline of the faith used by Christians everywhere. It can rightly be called the outline of the orthodox faith.

The council that put together the first major sections of our creed met in the year 325 in Asia Minor in a town called Nicaea during the months of May and June. This year, 2025, marks the 1700th anniversary of this lasting statement of Christian belief and so this issue of Good News is dedicated to the creed. Our hope is that faithful believers everywhere not only know the creed, but the Triune God it describes. To know him is everything.

How we acquired the creed is a fascinating story with wonderful twists and turns. At times, the story reads like a novel. In Dan Brown’s blockbuster, The DaVinci Code, Brown uses some of the story correctly because it’s so good, but one thing he got fundamentally wrong was the idea that the Nicene council declared Christ divine at the council. The reality of the situation was that the council affirmed what the church had always taught, but clarified it due to new challenges. Once you know the actual story, though, the creed is much more than an outline. The remains of the battles that necessitated the calling of the council can still be seen in it. The bishops who gathered there 1700 years ago were not only affirming Christian belief, but also guarding it against false claims.

We have to go back into the first centuries of the Christian faith to understand the need for the Nicene Creed. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus changed everything. It was a revolution with cosmic effect that can also be described as an explosion. No one expected the Messiah to rise from the dead in the middle of history. And, in fact, many expected the Messiah to establish a temporal kingdom. Jesus, while fulfilling the prophecies in every respect, blew this away. Not only was his kingdom not of this world, but after he died a sacrificial death, he rose again on the third day, launching the new creation in the middle of history itself. Much of the early church’s discourse is an attempt to grasp this reality.

In the pages of the New Testament, we can see the earliest Christians grappling with the reality of what had taken place in Jesus. There are misunderstandings that needed to be addressed and we can see them in Paul’s letters and in the letters of John, Peter, and Jude, among others. So as the faith continued to expand beyond the earliest followers of Jesus to the far reaches of the Roman Empire and beyond, it needed to continually clarify its message. Once it had become both tolerated and preferred within the Roman Empire under Constantine, the clarity of the church’s message took on even greater importance. This is why Constantine asked the bishops to convene at Nicaea.

But the debate that ignited this meeting didn’t start in Nicaea or with the emperor, but with a popular and charismatic figure named Arius who was a priest in Alexandria, Egypt. The church in Egypt traces its inception to the preaching of Mark, the same who wrote the gospel that bears his name. And so a Christian community had existed in Egypt for many centuries before this time. The church there was intellectually rich, having produced one of the church’s greatest early theological minds in Origen. Egypt was also one of the early birthplaces of monasticism, often linked to the demon-fighting recluse Antony. The church was strong in Egypt and the gospel heard very clearly.

Heresy, the name that the church give false teaching on foundational matters, was first named by the church father Irenaeus. He fought against the Gnostics, a movement that claimed that salvation was given by secret knowledge, often denying the tangible nature of the faith. Heresy is rarely malevolent, though, at least at the beginning. It usually sets in when attempts to describe the mysteries of the faith are taken too far. The description rather than the reveal truth of God takes center stage. And this is what happened with Arius.

Without getting too far into the weeds, Arius accepted the idea that God is immutable (i.e. unchanging) and transcendent. And this is true! God in his nature, his character, his fundamental qualities, does not change. Also, God is beyond comprehension. But Arius took this truth and denied the reality of who Jesus is. If we are to understand the need for the Nicene Creed, to clarify the faith, we must understand that at the center of the entire conversation was the question, “who is Jesus?”

For Arius, if God cannot change and is beyond all things, then God cannot become man. In other words, the incarnation was not “God with us,” but something else. At the same time that Arius wanted to demote Jesus, he didn’t want to claim that Jesus was simply a man. So while God the Father was God, Jesus for Arius was something between God and man, what was called a “demiurge.” In Arius’ teachings, Jesus — or to be accurate to the argument, the Word — was a created being even if God used him to create everything else.

I hope at this point that you have the first chapter of John’s gospel in your mind because it refutes Arius clearly: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” But there are other passages that Arius used to support his argument such as Luke’s mention that Jesus grew in favor with God and with others. Or when Paul calls Jesus the “firstborn of creation.” It’s easy to misinterpret scripture.

Arius, though, was not only a great preacher but he put his teachings to music including a line referring to the Word that still has a ring to it in English “there was a time when he was not.” Arius combined scripture, philosophy, and song to spread his message. And it was hugely popular. In fact, had the church held a poll to see which way its members wanted the council to go, it would have supported Arius.

The bishop of Alexandria, a man named Alexander, opposed the teachings of Arius. But it took another man, Athanasius, to stand up against this popular heresy. His story is fascinating in and of itself. He has sometimes been thought to be short in stature and darker skinned, but it is known that he came from what we might call “the wrong side of the tracks.” He was not of the elite. But he became an educated and forceful figure in the debates. Most of his writings, though, came after the council. He was the council’s great defender.

For Athanasius, following scripture and the teachings of the church, only Christ, fully divine and fully human, could have brought about the salvation of the world by dying on the cross. Only one who is fully God, and therefore capable of such a thing, and fully human, redeeming us as one of us, could have made such an eternal impact.

But let’s get back to the council. The bishops had initially intended to meet in the city of Ankara both to celebrate Constantine’s victory over Licinius and to come to agreement on the date of Easter. But Constantine wanted to be part of the proceedings, so he ordered the bishops to meet in Nicaea, not far from his palace. He also wanted them to clarify the church’s teachings on Christ’s relation to the Father.

Bishops gathered from all over the Christian world, from Spain to Persia. It’s likely that about 200 attended the council. Given the fact that the persecution of Christians had only ended a few years before, some of these bishops arrived with scars and other physical marks of their faith. Neither Arius nor Athanasius spoke at the council. They weren’t bishops, although Athanasius would become one in the years following. The council was organized so that every bishop could speak. Many brought local creeds used in their dioceses, but none of these addressed the fundamental issue that brought them together.

So they turned to scripture as they began to formulate a universal creed. This is why we see language such as “begotten,” “light,” and “Son of God” in the text. But more clarity was needed. So they turned to philosophy and introduced language such as “being” and “substance” in order to describe the scriptural claims of the church. The council used the Greek word homoousion meaning one substance or same being to describe the reality that Jesus and the Father are of the same being, both equally divine. The introduction of this language bothered some as the term is not in scripture, but it was deemed necessary to clarify the faith. In the end, all but 17 of the bishops endorsed the council’s statement, which included calling on Arius to either renounce his teachings or be banished. He chose banishment.

The historian Robert Louis Wilken provides a translation of the original creed of the Nicene council in his book The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity:

“We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible.

“And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten from the Father, only begotten, that is from the substance of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father, through whom all things were made in heaven and one earth; who for us men and our salvation came down and became incarnate, becoming man, suffered and rose again on the third day, ascended to the heavens, and will come to judge the living and the dead.

“And in the Holy Spirit.

“Those who say there was a time when he was not, or before he was begotten he was not and that he came from non-being, or from another substance or being, of that he was created, or is capable of moral change or mutable — these the catholic and apostolic Church anathematizes.”

We can see from this text that it is not exactly the same as what we recite in our church services today, but the core is there. Another council, this time in Constantinople in 381, was called to address the Holy Spirit because Arian sympathizers tried to demote the Third Person of the Trinity just as they had tried with the Second. So again, clarity was needed. The creed that we have today is actually the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed.

It would take many centuries to expunge the teachings of Arius. But the church stood fast. As did Athanasius, who for decades fought against Arians after the Nicene council, being exiled from his diocese numerous times became of his efforts. One of his books, On the Incarnation, became a standard for Christian thought. He was rightly described at one point as Athanasius Contra Mundum, Athanasius against the world. He stood fast.

And the church stood fast, to proclaim the true reality of Christ, the savior, the only one who could be, “God from God, Light from Light, true God of true God.” The only one who could save us. As we mark the 1700th anniversary of the council we can be thankful for the faithful voices who stood firm both then and now. We can also be thankful for the continued guidance of the Holy Spirit in the church. It is right that we mark this milestone anniversary.

Ryan Danker is the publisher of Good News.