Explainer

Creed

3 January 2025

5 min read

Creator or creature – a centuries old question of identity

Why does a 1,700-year-old creed still matter?

Frances Young

Frances Young is Emeritus Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham.

An abstract depiction of The Creation shows an aperture in a cloud like formation over water.

The Creation, James Tissot.

James Tissot, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

2025 will be the 1,700th anniversary of the Nicaea Creed. In October 2024, Prof. Frances Young gave the inaugural lecture of the McDonald Agape Nicaea Project at St Mellitus College.

In the year 325CE the first ever “ecumenical” (= “worldwide”) council of bishops assembled at Nicaea near Constantinople (now Istanbul). It was summoned by Constantine, the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity and patronize the Church. Why does this seventeenth centenary of an obscure discussion around complex words matter to us today?

The outcome of the Council was agreement to the text of a creed, and banishment of a pesky priest named Arius, whose bishop disapproved of his teaching. Unfortunately, some other bishops remained sympathetic to something like Arius’ viewpoint, and for political reasons Constantine was desperate for Church unity. Argument over the issues went on for half a century, until another Council in 381CE reaffirmed the position established in 325CE and agreed the version labelled “the Nicene Creed” and still used in Church liturgies across the world today.

The controversy was basically about the identity of the pre-existent Word or Son of God incarnate in Jesus Christ. Nicaea established that the Son was “of one substance” (homoousios) with the Father – in other words, he was fully God in every sense of the word. But for many traditional believers at the time this was difficult to accept.

The common sense of the culture thought in terms of a “chain of being.” Most people in the Roman Empire were polytheists – there were loads of gods: Mars, god of war, Nepture, god of the sea, and so on. Each city, each ethnic group, had its own god, as did every family, every interest group, every burial society – you name it. But generally there was a sense that above all these was the Supreme God, who was worshipped indirectly through worship of these lower gods, and below them were all sorts of nature spirits, daemons, benign and malign, then souls incarnate in human persons, then animals, even vegetables as living entities, and finally inert matter like earth and stones, at the bottom of the hierarchy or chain of being.

Jews identified their God with the Supreme God and insisted the one God alone should be worshipped. But they also imagined a heavenly court of archangels and angels, then below that the souls of the righteous, and so on in a somewhat parallel hierarchy. No surprise then that Christians assumed a similar picture: God, then the Son of God, then the Holy Spirit, then archangels and angels, then souls, and so on in a hierarchical ladder.

But in the second century Christians had argued their way to the idea of “creation out of nothing.” Many non-Jewish thinkers, including some early Christians, followed Plato, conceiving creation as the outcome of Mind (the Demiurge or Craftsman) shaping Matter into whatever Forms or Ideas were in mind. But other Christian thinkers argued that God was not a mere Craftsman who needed stone or wood to work on like a sculptor – God produced the Matter in the first place. This then triggered a full-blown critique: God did not create out of pre-existent Matter or there would be two first principles; God did not create from God’s own self or everything would be divine; so God must have created out of nothing.

Now try to fit that to the chain of being: where do you draw the line between God the Creator and everything else made out of nothing? This was the issue which surfaced in the so-called Arian controversy. What we might call the “mainstream” remained wedded to the hierarchy, not least because of earlier controversies about God’s monarchia. The word did mean “monarchy” – single sovereignty; but arche could mean “rule” or “beginning,” so monarchia also referred to the single first principle of all that is. It was natural to attribute monarchia to God the Father, a view that worked OK with the hierarchy. But some had suggested that the one God 'changed mode', as it were, appearing now as Father, now as Son, now as Holy Spirit, taking different roles in the overarching scriptural story. This suggestion was mocked as all too similar to the pagan god, Proteus, who in mythology kept changing shape. It is even possible that that key word homoousios had been condemned along with this “Modalist” view.

Traditionalists were suspicious. The first historian of the Church, Eusebius of Caesarea, was present at Nicaea, and wrote a somewhat embarrassed letter to his congregation explaining how he had come to agree to this formula. Even Athanasius - the one who would come to be regarded as the staunch defender of Nicaea - largely avoided the term for a quarter of a century, though that does not mean he did not identify the principal issue. He campaigned hard and ended up in exile five times over. The fundamental issue was whether Christ was God incarnate or some kind of divinised superman, or a semi-divine mediating figure, a created Creator. Arius is supposed to have said, “there was a when he was not,” even though he was “the first and greatest of the creatures” through whom God created everything else.

So why does it still matter? Four simple reasons:

Because it was basically about identity, and the question of Christ’s identity still matters.

Because we still find people treating Jesus Christ as superhuman – not really one of us, or semi-divine – not God in the same sense as the God the Father. If we are to be ecumenical, across different denominations today but also across time, we need to affirm that God’s Son and Spirit are truly of the one God. As early as the second century the first great Christian theologian, Irenaeus, characterized the Word and the Spirit as God’s two hands – we can imagine the Trinity reaching out first to create and then to embrace us with God’s redeeming love.

Because it means we can look to Jesus and there catch a glimpse of God’s very own loving face - not just a dim image but the reality itself.

And because only God could recreate us in God’s own image and raise us to new life.

To find out more about the McDonald Agape Nicaea Project being held by St. Mellitus College in London, come and join the public lectures, or look out for other Nicene celebrations in 2025.

For more information or to register for these events, you can visit the Nicaea Project website

The Nicaea Project

Watch the lecture

Explainer

Belief

Culture

22 August 2024

7 min read

The questions that nobody can escape

Seeking answers about beginning, meaning, and of the end, explain why religion refuses to disappear.

Silvianne and Barnabas Aspray

Silvianne and Barnabas are theologians.

An arm and hand stretch out in front of some, a narrow street is the background.

Andrik Langfield on Unsplash.

In the twentieth century many people thought that religion was on the way out. As the political scientist Francis Fukuyama put it, it was broadly assumed that “religion would disappear and be replaced solely by secular, scientiﬁc rationalism.” But few people now believe this anymore. Fukuyama himself has changed his mind and says that the disappearance of religion “is not going to happen.” But why is religion refusing to disappear?

A core reason for the persistence of faith is that there are questions that everyone asks at one point or another that lead in the direction of religion. Religion, or faith, addresses questions that nobody can escape: Why is there something rather than nothing? Where does it all come from? Is there meaning to this life? And what happens after death? Faith traditions are experts in such ultimate questions. Consider the following examples.

These questions of beginning, of meaning, and of the end, are the questions that religion deals with.

When people experience the beginning of life, they are often caught up in wonder. How can it be that a whole new person is growing inside a woman? Even Friedrich Nietzsche, the great critic of Christianity, who famously declared that “God was dead”, also wrote, “Is there a more sacred state than pregnancy?” There is something deeply moving around the beginning of life. Many who become parents, or in some way experience the beginning of life, are led to wonder: isn’t something more than just biology happening here, something deeper? A new life, a whole new person – and our love for that new person – where does all of that come from?

Another group of questions that most people will face at some point in their lives revolves around meaning. What’s the point of growing up, a teenager might ask? What’s the point of my work, we may ask later on. Especially when we face frustrations, failures, challenges we might wonder what difference we are making to the world. Would anyone miss me if I was not here? Will anyone remember me if I die?

Finally, we all at some point come in contact with death. Even if we are spared the pain of friends dying young, it is the natural course of the world that our grandparents and our parents will one day die. What do we do in the face of such loss? It is hard not to ask: Where is my loved one now? And is there hope of seeing them again one day?

These are the kinds of questions that nobody can entirely avoid in their lives: they never fail to arise and press themselves upon our consciousness. Yet these questions of beginning, of meaning, and of the end, are precisely the questions that religion deals with. And here lies one important answer to why faith won’t just go away: Because scientific rationalism cannot really address them.

Faith offers a space in which people can ponder the ultimate questions and find other people who want to do it with them.

To be sure, secular scientific rationalism does offer some answers as to how life begins – we know the biology of it all astonishingly well. And yet, biology is not everything, and in fact, it is not the biological aspects of it all that touch us. The wonder, the hope, the love that we experience when we are faced with the beginning of life is more than what can be rationally or scientifically accounted for.

Similarly, scientific rationalism is not well equipped to answer questions of meaning. Science is great at answering how something works or how it should be done, but why-questions fall into a different category. Many chatbots, when asked about the meaning of life, will answer “42” - which is a reference to the comic sci-fi series “the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and we intuitively understand that this answer is nonsensical. It is funny precisely because it is nonsensical.

And again, around the end of life: Scientific rationalism cannot and will not, based on its methods and approaches, say anything about the afterlife.

So, the questions of beginning, meaning and end cannot be answered solely by scientific rationalism. And yet they come up in all of our lives. Right here lies an important reason why faith has not gone away. Faith deals with just these questions. It is good at dealing with them – they are the core domain of faith.

Faith offers answers to questions of beginning, meaning and end, but just as importantly, it offers a community in which such questions can be addressed and discussed. It offers a space in which people can ponder the ultimate questions and find other people who want to do it with them, perhaps showing them ways in which they can find answers. Different faiths and different expressions of faiths do this very differently: organised religions do it differently to loose association of the “spiritual but not religious”, but in all cases, it is faith – broadly understood – that addresses and deals with the questions that niggle away and are not otherwise addressed. Faith won’t disappear, because faith’s questions won’t disappear.

But why does this need saying? Is it not obvious that religion is about ultimate questions that concern everyone?

The problem is that modern Western life is full of opportunities to distract us from these questions. We are wealthy, comfortable, bombarded with entertainment, and often very busy with careers and children as well. All these things help us to repress the deeper questions about the origin and purpose of our existence.

Many people treat the question of life’s meaning like a school or University essay that they can procrastinate from indefinitely: “One day I’d like to figure it out: what it’s all for and where it’s all going: but today there’s another episode on Netflix, Instagram to browse, or tennis on the TV.” The entertainment industry offers alluring enticements to money, sex, fame or success. Wealth is particularly useful because it helps us get what we want, when we want it, and prevents us from facing the harsher realities of life. Making ourselves busy is easy, and we can leave ourselves no time for deep reflection on the bigger questions. All of this adds up to what we might call the “narcotic of everyday life” – the ways in which daily life and society act as a drug to cloud our vision, confuse our thinking, and prevent us from clearly facing up to the things in life that matter most.

The “narcotic of everyday life” – the ways in which daily life and society act as a drug to cloud our vision, confuse our thinking, and prevent us from clearly facing up to the things in life that matter most.

But the problem is that even ordinary everyday life is lived according to (at least provisional) answers to those big questions. Every daily decision we make displays our values, what we think matters. If we work late instead of coming home to play with the children – if we fly to New Zealand for a vacation, or buy beef, massively increasing our carbon footprint and contributing to climate change – we are making choices that have an impact on the planet. All our choices are based on values which reveal our beliefs about what makes life worth living and what we want out of life. You cannot be an agnostic. Your life displays belief in one thing or another. Consider one stark example. A pregnant teenage girl simply cannot be agnostic about abortion for very long. She has only two options: abort, or give birth. The choice she makes will be a practical consequence of her beliefs and value judgments. There is no agnosticism, no “not answering” the question.

Like every religious tradition, Christianity calls us to live lives that are rooted in things of ultimate and lasting value, rather than superficial or self-centred concerns. It challenges us to fight against the narcotic of everyday life by constantly drawing our attention back to the things that most matter. Through worship, Bible reading, and prayer, it incessantly asks us those vital questions: Is it really about making money? Is it about getting promoted? What are our ultimate values and how do we show them in our lives? The real power of secularism is not that it offers alternative answers to these questions but that it distracts from the question. All we need to do is un-distract.

Christianity is not just a set of easy answers to these questions. It is a way, a journey towards the truth. To be a Christian means to belong to a community that trusts what Jesus has revealed about our life’s origin, meaning and end. In that community there are some implicit answers to get us started. We live in the belief that life is meaningful, that selfishness and personal pleasure are not the most important thing. There’s plenty of room for debate and discussion, but let’s at least start talking about the things that matter.