Making Sense of the Nicene Creed

A sermon preached at Faith Episcopal Church, November 20, 2005.

There’s a quiet mutiny going on in the church. It has been slowly simmering for the last 30 years or so. Kay Lindahl told me that as she travels around the country leading workshops on prayer she hears about it everywhere she goes. By golly, it’s even here. You can hear its little whispers on Sunday morning, especially if you are near those subversives in the choir. What on earth am I talking about? Is it about money? Or somebody misbehaving? No! It’s much more important than that. It’s about the creed. The Nicene Creed that we stand up and say every week. Some people are really having a problem with that.

I remember having a conversation with a priestly mentor about what I was going to promise in my ordination vows. Did those promises lock me into believing certain things as fact. Gordon, God love him, and I went over the ordination vows, and then we looked at the creed. He pointed out that sometimes in all in how you say it. There is a difference between “On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures” and “On the third day he rose again… in accordance with the Scriptures.” (Inflection is difficult in print.)

Robert Funk, the guy who created the Jesus Seminar wrote in his book Honest To Jesus about the creed with the empty center. He’s talking about that time in between “born of the Virgin Mary” and “suffered under Pontius Pilate.” He also points out that in the creed, Jesus is passive – things happen or are done to him, nothing he depends on his own initiative. As a savior, he is only a pawn of the divine plan. For me Funk is most on target when he points that the ethics of the gospels are missing. The creed tells us that believers only have to believe, we are in not called to live out what Jesus taught. The creed can make faith look passive.

Of course, then feminist theology hit the scene and people began to recognize that the feminine nature of God is somewhat absent. Some of us have been known to exercise our creativity while reciting this ancient formula and let at least the Holy Spirit get a she. And fortunately, we have the Bible to back us upon that. There’s a lot that is missing from the Creed.

There’s also a lot that is obscure at best. It’s a good idea to know why the creed says what it does. The truth is that it was written that way to shut people up. People like Marcion and the Gnostics and Arius and his back up band. Because Marcion and Arius were the losers in the theology wars of the early church, their positions are now known as heresies. As it turns out, heresies were necessary parts of the process of figuring things out.

Marcion believed that the world was an evil place, created by an evil god. There is also a good god of whom Jesus was the emissary. Some Gnostics went so far as to say that Jesus wasn’t really human, he only appeared to be and he only appeared to die. The creed responds to the Gnostics by saying clearly that we believe in One God who did indeed create the heavens and this world. In fact, the God in whom we believe created all that is – there is no random evil source.

The next section of the creed, the part about Jesus, not only continues to deny the Gnostic ideas, it takes on several other heretical Jesus theories. The two main players were named Arius and Athanasius. It wasn’t enough to say that the evil god of the Gnostics didn’t exist, because the church was struggling with the very legitimate question – “well, if Jesus is divine, does that mean that there are two Gods?” Arius and Athanasius both agreed that Jesus was divine but Arius claimed that the Son was created to be a divine being which would mean that there was a time before he was created. He even had a snappy slogan “There was a time when the Son was not.” It must lose some pizazz in translation. This may not seem like a big deal to us, but the bickering caused such a stir within the church, that the Emperor Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea in 325. Athanasius and his supporters won the day and the Nicene Creed is the result of their squabbles. The language in it specifically refutes Arianism. In the Bible, Jesus was not the first one to be called a son of God but in the creed, he becomes the “only Son of God.” He is eternal – Athanasius turned Arius’ little slogan around and said “There was never a time when the Son was not.” Jesus is “begotten of the Father…not made.” And he is “of one being with the Father.” This is technical language – making a distinction between being created on one hand and coming forth from the Father, existing out of the substance of God on the other hand. He is “true God from true God.”

All of this may be absolutely disconnected to how you think of and relate to Jesus. But it had everything to do with how the church developed. Power struggles led to hierarchy which led to doctrine and the definition of authority. Given the church’s struggles today, maybe there is some comfort in knowing our history. Heresies were ultimately good things – they caused Christianity to think about itself – to wonder about the nature of God and Jesus, the Holy Spirit and the church and the future.

The front page of the Times this week had an article about a new religion called Universism which has uncertainty as its basic belief. They might believe in God or they might not. We are here because we can stand up and with integrity say “We believe in God”

One important thing to get a hold of is the cloud of meaning that surrounds the word “believe.” In 21^st Century speak, we tend to think of it as “accepting something as a fact” or feeling sure that something happened. The framers of the creed, just like the people who wrote the Bible, were not taking about a list of facts that are true, they were talking about faith, which has to do with the heart, not the intellect and a set of facts. When we stand up and say Credo – We believe – we are saying that we give our hearts to God, the creator of all that is. We give our hearts to Jesus Christ, who is like us and yet so much more. We give our hearts to the Holy Spirit and to the church, broken though it may be. It’s a very different approach and one that we might keep in mind because giving one’s heart to something is to choose to be in a relationship. It doesn’t mean that you understand it completely, or that you always agree with it but that you are willing to give it the best you have which is your heart. St. Anselm was Archbishop of Canterbury over 1000 years ago and one of the greatest minds of the middle ages. He is known for having said, “I do not seek to understand so that I can believe, but I believe so that I may understand.”

When you love some one you believe in them. That’s very different from knowing everything about them. It means that you are always learning and growing in your understanding of them and who you are with them. For me to tell you that I believe in you means a whole lot of things. It means that I have faith in what we are doing here. It means that I think that you can accomplish more than you’ve ever thought you could. The creed, first and foremost, is a statement of love.

Our children today are going to help us think through the creed today. The words that they will share are an attempt to frame the ideas from long ago into statements that reflect the faith concerns of today. It’s an experiment – it is faith seeking understanding.