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

Creed

Football

Providence

Sport

Trust

19 August 2023

7 min read

Thrill and trust in an unpredictable world

When Saturday comes, Graham Tomlin is enthralled by sport's unpredictability. Yet in an uncontrollable world, he finds a need for trust.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Two footballers run in step as one tries to tackle the other

Spain and England: finalists in the 2023 Women's World Cup.

FIFA

Sport was once something you did for fun. Now it has become one of the world's great industries. 'Sportswashing' is a thing now - nations buy up clubs, franchises or invest in sporting ventures from LIV golf to football clubs to Formula One, to make their regimes look good.

But why is it that sport engages us so? Why do we bite our nails as the ninetieth minute draws near, we are only 1-0 up and the opposition threatens to score an equaliser any minute? Surely it is because this is one area of life where the outcome remains stubbornly out of our control.

You can never quite predict the result of any match. And the best games always exist on that knife edge. This summer, after five Ashes Tests, with five days for each Test, 3 sessions a day, so 75 sessions of cricket in total, when the players went into the very last session with the result of the whole series still in the balance, it was the best of sporting enjoyment, precisely because no-one could predict what would happen.

And the exceptions to that statement prove the rule. When the result is almost certain - if Manchester City were to play Forest Green Rovers for example - then it takes the fun out of it. In fact, much of the disillusionment that creeps into modern sport comes when money appears to skew the unpredictability of it all. When clubs are backed with the resources of an entire Gulf State in an attempt to control the outcome of a league by the use of something not intrinsic to sport itself, then something seems wrong.

A couple of years ago, the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa wrote an intriguing book called The Uncontrollability of Life. Modern life, he argued, is marked by a drive to master and control as much of the world as possible. We manage the economy to try to ensure constant growth; we corral all the information we can, so it sits in our pockets available at any moment; we minimise risk by actuarial calculations; we develop algorithms that deliver exactly the content that the consumer wants. When we see a mountain, we want to climb it; when we get on the scales we want to lose weight; when we have a headache want to get rid of it. Life has become an endless to-do list. We try to control life from birth through to death, through contraception and abortion, managing our children’s education to ensure success in life, even trying to control death by ‘assisted dying’ that enables us to choose the time and manner of our own demise.

We try to manage and control everything, but life, and joy, remain elusive and tantalisingly out of our control.

And yet, he argues, it is the very unpredictability and uncontrollability of life that makes it interesting. It’s when we are surprised – by a sudden fall of snow, or by the smell of freshly cut grass, or a joke that makes us laugh – that we feel the delight and joy of life. If we were able to make it snow whenever we chose – as when a machine pumps out fake snow in a ski resort going through a warm spell – there is no great enchantment in that. If we knew the result of every football match before it started, there would be little point in playing at all.

We try to manage and control everything, but life, and joy, remain elusive and tantalisingly out of our control. You can pay for tickets to a concert but never quite know whether the music will stir your soul or leave you cold. You can pay for a holiday but can’t ensure it doesn’t rain, that there isn’t a ten-mile traffic jam on the way, or that the neighbours in the next apartment aren’t noisy.

Yet it is exactly the moments that we don’t control that make life worth living – chancing on an unexpectedly stunning sunset, meeting a friend by surprise, falling in love, hearing a new song that touches your heart. And the point is you can’t control these things. If you could, they would lose the magic.

And that, Rosa says, is the problem and tension at the heart of modern life. On the one hand we try to control everything, to make the world safer, more fair, more predictable. And that’s not a bad thing. We want to make the world more just, to eliminate random accidents or stupid mistakes. Yet the more we control, the more we evacuate the world of what makes it enchanting and enthralling.

Yet it’s more than just unpredictability. We need, he suggests, to feel that the world out there responds to us, ‘calls us’, talks back to us in some way - so that we feel what he calls ‘resonance’ with it. We need to establish a relationship with the world, or events that happen to us, that lies somewhere between us controlling everything, or us being totally at the whim of what is out of our control.

Wisdom, it seems, comes from getting the boundary right between the controllable and the uncontrollable.

Perhaps in the infancy of the human race, we were totally at the mercy of climate, wild animals, infertile soil, struggling to survive against the odds. Now we are in danger of going to the other extreme of trying to manage everything, so the world becomes an inert, controlled, docile thing. Wisdom, it seems, comes from getting the boundary right between the controllable and the uncontrollable.

It's a fascinating and persuasive analysis of modern life. But let me take his thought a little further.

If we need the world to be responsive to us, for it to surprise us by ‘talking back’ as it were, it is hard to imagine such a thing happening if the world is simply an inert substance with nothing behind it. However much we may want a responsive relationship with the world, it is difficult to conceive of this on a purely materialist understanding of things.

For all the new age talk of ‘mother earth’ or the ‘Gaia hypothesis’ which attributes some kind of will and intention to the earth, surely we can only have a relationship with the world if there is someone (not just something) there to have a relationship with, some mind, heart or intelligence behind it all. After all, even the Greeks thought Gaia was not just another word for planet earth, as modern ecological secularists have it, but a god who shaped the universe to her liking. If it’s true that we flourish best when there is a resonant, reciprocal relationship between us and the world outside, then does it not make more sense to believe there is someone, not just something out there, calling to us, responding to us?

Even more, what if the world is a cold, heartless, meaningless place? What is there is no order or structure behind it? What if it is coldly indifferent to us and our plight? If we are to establish a relationship with what is out there, rather than being at the mercy of it, or seeking to control it, then we need to be able to trust that what we are reaching out to is at least friendly to us. Rosa’s optimistic outlook, beckoning us to resonance, a relationship of mutual discovery, able to be touched or moved by the world, seems to assume that what we will discover out there is fundamentally to be trusted rather than feared.

Christians have always held that behind the appearance of things, there is someone out there to ‘talk back’ to us, with whom we can resonate, and that that ‘someone’ is fundamentally good, because, despite the confusion of the world, the mixed messages it sends us due to its brokenness, we have seen the clue to what lies behind the mystery in the face of Jesus Christ.

Living in this unpredictable world, one where we cannot control everything (nor should we try to) means, as Rosa points out, learning to accept it, not getting frustrated when we can’t control everything; learning the ability to take the vagaries and vicissitudes of life as they come, without getting angry or annoyed. Yet we can only do that with a degree of confidence when we can trust that what is out of our control is ultimately under the hand of a God who has our best interests at heart.

I may not be able to predict the result when Bristol City play on Saturday afternoon. Much as I'd like to, I’m actually glad I can’t as it would hardly be worth watching. But it makes a difference when I can trust that behind the changes and chances of what happens to us (and this, thankfully, stretches far beyond football) there is a mind and a heart that knows me and cares what happens to me – and not just me, but my neighbour and the future of the entire universe.