The Nicene Creed: a 1,700-year-old game changer

Why we should celebrate the Council of Nicaea today.

Jane Williams

Jane Williams is the McDonald Professor in Christian Theology at St Mellitus College.

A ink drawing of Constantine the Emperor on a throne listening to people showing him books.

Constantine and the council.

Wikimedia Commons.

The are not many 1,700-year-old documents that are read out loud every week and known by heart by millions of people across the world. The Nicene Creed is one of them. In 2025 it will be 1,700 years since the Council of Nicaea was called by the Emperor Constantine, and came up with the first version of the Creed. Next year will be full of conferences planned to interrogate and reassess but, mostly, to thank God for the Nicene Creed

But many people will be bewildered, which is a polite way of saying ‘indifferent’ or even ‘hostile’, to this outpouring of Nicaea-mania. Lots of people don’t know the Creed at all, or, if they do, they see it as dogmatic, exclusionary and couched in the arcane language of fourth century classical philosophy, which seems to have little relevance to the world we live in today. Is it really worth celebrating? Let me suggest some reasons why I think it is.

Suddenly, Christians had a chance to shape the world, to shape culture, from the top down as well as from the bottom up.

First of all, 325 marked a period of huge transition for the Christian faith. For the previous 300 years since the time of Jesus, Christianity had been spreading surprisingly rapidly, but generally without support from the wealthy or powerful, and suffering regular persecution. But at the beginning of the fourth century, the Emperor Constantine declared himself to be a ‘Christian’. There is a lot of debate about what he meant by that – it didn’t stop him from murdering most of his family, for example. But Constantine ascribed his victorious Imperial campaign to the protection of the Christian God, and began to offer safety and privilege to Christians and their leaders. It was Constantine who called the Council of Nicaea, wanting to assert his own authority but also wanting this nascent ‘institutional’ Church to get a grip and unite behind him. Suddenly, Christians had a chance to shape the world, to shape culture, from the top down as well as from the bottom up. Whether this is a good thing or a bad one, and what it did and does to the character of Christian faith in the 1,700 years since Nicaea is undoubtedly something that 2025 will have to examine.

Secondly, the Council of Nicaea offered a model of decision-making that has been profoundly important in Christian life ever since. Nicaea was deliberately chosen as the place to hold this council because it sat roughly on the dividing line between the Eastern part of the Roman Empire, where Greek was the lingua franca, and the Western part, where Latin was the language of public discourse. Constantine was seeking to establish himself as sole emperor over both parts, and he called together at Nicaea Christian leaders from across the Empire. We have a good idea of who was there because of the signatories to the resolutions of the Council.

Leaders came from some of the most sophisticated, wealthy and educated parts of the Roman Empire, like Alexandria, with its famous school and library. But they also came from some of the simplest parts, where peasant life was the norm for both the bishop and the congregations. St Spiridion, now the patron saint of Corfu, was one of the signatories; he maintained his hard life as shepherd while leading his human flock; St Nicholas of Myra, whom we now know as Santa Claus, was there, too; altogether there were probably 200 to 300 bishops there, highlighting the extraordinary spread of Christian faith across the Roman Empire. That is why the Council of Nicaea is called the First Ecumenical or world-wide Council. This was the first opportunity for the Church to take stock of itself and to notice and learn from its diversity.

This is a game-changing concept, both for theology and for anthropology.

This model of ‘conciliar’ discussion has remained key to the way in which Christians try to resolve conflict and make decisions, by meeting, discussing, praying and hearing from voices and experiences that represent the whole diversity of humanity. No one can pretend that the Council of Nicaea was exactly such a process – no women were part of the consultation, for one thing – but the intention was significant. In our own time of deep disagreement between Christians, a commitment to the Nicene method of consultative decision-making would be a good focus for examination of 1,700 years of trying to listen to each other, even if we often fail.

Thirdly, and most importantly of all, of course, the Council of Nicaea produced the Nicene Creed, a succinct statement of what Christians affirm about God and the world because of the paradigm-changing life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus. The short, clear statements of faith in the Creed were hard-fought for and not accepted by everyone, then or now. They became necessary as people tried out different descriptions of who Jesus is in relation to God, which brought out more and more clearly how fundamental this question is for our understanding of God, and so our understanding of our own purpose and destiny. Some suggested that Jesus was just an exceptionally gifted human being, favoured by God. But the world has been full of great prophets, most of whom receive lip-service at best, but make no actual difference. Others proposed that Jesus was God, wearing a disguise but not really, actually, human, suggesting that God can’t really commit to the created order. The most popular suggestion in the fourth century, put forward by a learned teacher called Arius, was that Jesus is something in between, not the eternal God, but not just a human being either. But that’s the worst of all worlds: we can’t trust what Jesus shows us either about God or about human beings.

All of these ‘solutions’ protected God’s transcendence and otherness – God is above and beyond created existence and divinity cannot or will not sully itself with the earthly, historical lives that human beings live.

The radical suggestion of the Nicene Creed, trying to be faithful to the witness of the Bible, is that Jesus is really God, living among us, but also really a human being, born into a particular time and place in history and dying a real, historical death. And that must mean that the Almighty God doesn’t think it compromises God’s power and majesty to come and share our lives. Imagine the dignity that gives us and our lives – God loves and honours the world and thinks that a human life is capable of showing us the nature of God. But it also means that the full life-giving power of God is not just ‘outside’ but ‘inside’ the world.

This is a game-changing concept, both for theology and for anthropology.

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.

Participants will hear from some of the world’s leading scholars on various issues related to Nicaea, including Professor Khaled Anatolios, Dr. Beverly Roberts Gaventa, Professor Ilaria Ramelli, Professor Bruce McCormack, Dr. Willie James Jennings, and many more.

A significant part of the Nicaea conference in 2025 will be a call for papers, expanding dialogue on the topic and hearing from a wide array of voices.

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

The Nicaea Project

Article

Creed

Football

Sport

22 April 2024

5 min read

Killing Joy: VAR's search for objectivity is flawed

Why this Man United fan wishes his team had lost.

Graham Tomlin

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

A TV screen shows a football match with a superimposed diagonal line dividing the pitch.

VAR draws the line.

BBC Sport.

I am a Manchester United fan. But I wish Coventry had won the FA Cup semi-final.

I have supported United alongside my hometown team, Bristol City, ever since the days of George Best, Bobby Charlton and Denis Law. (Bristol City never win anything so it’s nice to have a team that does win things occasionally – or at least used to).

In case you’ve had your head under a pillow over the weekend, or just avoid anything football-related on principle, Manchester United won an FA Cup semi-final replay on penalties by the skin of their teeth. 3-0 up and cruising after 70 minutes they somehow capitulated to allow Coventry, a team in the division below, to score three goals in the last 20 minutes. With virtually the last kick of extra time Coventry scored a fourth. Cue scenes of sheer unbridled ecstasy and abandon among the Coventry supporters.

What they experienced at that moment is what every sports fan longs for. Beating your intense rivals or mounting an astonishing comeback, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat - when it happens there is nothing like it. It is what United fans experienced when they beat Liverpool with a last-minute winner in the quarter final, or in the never-to-be-forgotten 1999 Champions League Final when they scored twice in injury time to beat Bayern Munich. Now it was Coventry’s turn.

But then the VAR (Video Assistant Referee), like a killjoy schoolteacher, telling the kids they should calm down and not get so excited, spoiled the party, by pointing out that in the build-up, a Coventry player’s foot was about three inches in front of the nearest body part of the last Man United defender, and so was offside. The offside rule exists to stop attackers gaining an advantage. Quite how those three inches gave the Coventry player an advantage is beyond me. Before VAR, the rule was that, if the attacker was basically level with the defender, it was deemed to be onside. Let’s face it, it was a perfectly good goal. Coventry should have won. They deserved to.

This would have been one of the great comebacks in FA Cup history. For a second-tier team to come back from 3-0 down with 20 minutes left against a team of that fame and pedigree to potentially win the game was extraordinary. The sheer joy and ecstasy on the faces of the Coventry fans, incredulous that their team could perform such a feat against the great Manchester United made every fan of every other club just wish something like that would happen to them.

VAR was introduced to eliminate human error and to bring a more scientific and measurable accuracy to decisions like this. The reality is that it's done nothing of the kind and in fact has made things worse.

Yet the worst thing of all this is that it denied Coventry fans their moment of ecstasy, a moment they would bask in for the rest of their lives.

It is part of a general fallacy in our culture, that science and objectivity give us all the answers we need. So, we try to reduce the role of human instinct, on the assumption that only what can be measured and exactly delineated is of any value. Hence Boris Johnson's mantra “follow the science” during the COVID pandemic.

The reality is that ‘following the science’ still leaves a place for human decision. Science doesn't necessarily tell you what to do. During the pandemic it could tell us about the rate of spread of the virus, but it didn't dictate that a lockdown of the severity which we endured was necessarily the right way to deal with it. There was a human choice to be made, balancing the effect on the economy and the potential loss of life with the mental impact upon young people that is now becoming apparent.

In football, VAR doesn't solve every issue. It can tell whether the ball hit a defender’s hand in the penalty area, but it still requires a subjective judgement by the referee or VAR official. Over the weekend’s semi-finals, it was decided to not award a penalty against Manchester City's Jack Grealish, but to do the opposite for Manchester United's Aaron Wan-Bissaka, for virtually identical actions. VAR has not taken refereeing decisions out of the equation. It hasn’t made it any better.

Yet the worst thing of all this is that it denied Coventry fans their moment of ecstasy, a moment they would bask in for the rest of their lives. It was the kind of moment for which football fans live – the experience that makes the years of watching 1-0 defeats away from home, trudging around the country following your team, worthwhile. A moment that, even as a Man United fan, I would not want to deny them. Of course I'll support United in the final against the robotically efficient Manchester City, but in that moment, VAR destroyed joy. And if that joy is caused by a marginal human error, who cares? Better to have the possibility of joy than a world where it gets taken away by a spoilsport official in a darkened room watching screens and drawing fine lines across the pitch.

Thinking that we can rely on the seen and not the unseen is fundamentally flawed.

Blaise Pascal once famously wrote that “The heart has its reasons of which Reason knows nothing.” His point was that we have a deep instinct for things which we just know are right, that we cannot prove and just have to assume, and the attempt to reduce everything to rationality, to scientific explanation, to what can be measured, thinking that we can rely on the seen and not the unseen is fundamentally flawed. Ever since the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century we have lived with this dream of a perfectly scientific world where everything can be reduced to numbers, mechanisms and measurements. In such a world there is no room for God, no room for miracles. It even conspired to rule out the joy of Coventry fans celebrating a wildly unlikely winner.

It tries to delude us that it takes subjective human or moral judgement out of the equation. but it can never do that. And in doing that, it sucks the joy out of life. Science is a great gift, and it can tell us a lot about our world. But it cannot tell us everything. It was never meant to bear such weight and the sooner we realise that it has its limits, and doesn't overstep its boundaries, the better.