The Nicene Creed: Faith and Comprehension

Back from retreat in time for a very conflicted Saturday across the country. I see that many Catholic news services and websites, and hopefully your parishes, are addressing your emotions and conflicts, and I have nothing more to add except my prayers—and my one good ear if anyone needs consolation. You can reach me privately at the bottom of the Café home page, www.catechistcafe.com.
 
For my part, I had the opportunity to attend Mass Saturday night [14th] for the Feast of the Holy Trinity. Our celebrant is a retired priest who joins us on weekends, Father Augustine Clark, and I am not embarrassed to admit I stole his sermon material for today’s post. I have rarely heard a meatier ten-minute sermon in my life. Preaching on the Feast of the Trinity is no easy thing. The reality of God as “trinity” or three is such a paradox that we kind of despair of understanding and blow through the proclamation of the Nicene Creed—which defines the formal doctrine of Trinity—every week. Few are aware that this year is the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed, product of the Church’s first Ecumenical [worldwide] Council, Nicaea, in modern Türkiye.
 
The Council of Nicaea [325 A.D.] was convoked by the Roman Emperor Constantine [272-337 A.D.], who ended persecutions and legal restrictions upon Christians. Constantine was sympathetic to Christian belief and morals, though he did not convert till late in life. He could see that conflicting beliefs about Jesus were causing political as well as religious conflicts in his empire. Hence, he summoned all bishops of the known world and ordered them to formulate a universal definition on the identity of Jesus. It may be surprising to some readers that the identity of Jesus had never formally been stated prior to Nicaea. If you look at the four Gospels under a microscope you can see a development in the disciples’ understanding of Jesus’ death and future glory. St. John’s Gospel, the final Gospel to be written, gives us a taste of the state of mind of the early Church. Chapter 20 is particularly insightful. Curiously, St. John’s Gospel was one of the last to be accepted as an official book of the New Testament.
 
The villain of the piece was Arius [250-336 A.D.], an ascetic priest and a student of philosophy who preached that God is totally One, and that to speak of Jesus as a divine offspring of the Father was to say there are two Gods. Arius did not hate Jesus or deny the goodness of his works; rather, he denied Jesus’ identity as a divinity. Did the Holy Spirit create similar challenges to the idea of One God? No, because there was a long tradition dating far back in the Hebrew Scriptures of the Spirit of God interacting on earth among the Israelites. The classical prophets [Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, etc.], for example, were said to be seized or filled with God’s Spirit as an extension of the One God’s interventions, not as a separate being from the One God. At the time of Jesus, in fact, Jews lamented that there had not been a prophet raised up since Malachi in the fourth century; the common phrase for this absence of prophets was “the spirit had been quenched.” This is why many believed that John the Baptist, and later Jesus, were the return of the intimate presence of God’s Spirit.
 
The fathers at Nicaea needed just two months to formulate what we believe about Jesus from the liturgy of the Mass:
 
I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and became man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,
he suffered death and was buried,
and rose again on the third day
in accordance with the Scriptures.
He ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead
and his kingdom will have no end.
 
The term “consubstantial” in the Creed is critical in that it affirms Jesus is of the same being as the Father, and therefore divine. But at the same time, the Father and the Son are distinct; future councils would labor for a language that would do justice to God’s unity and diversity. Some theologians over the centuries defined the Trinity by function: God the Father created, God the Son saved, God the Holy Spirit sanctifies. But the Church has never endorsed this kind of division. In our prayers and in our theology, we embrace the mystery that the One infinite God chose to create us, love us, and sustain us.
 
I would be remiss if I did not at least mention the “filioque controversy” of the Nicene Creed which constitutes a major division between Roman Catholicism and the Orthodox Church. The definition that the Holy Spirit was a distinct divine person equal in substance to the Father and the Son and not subordinate to them came at the Council of Constantinople in 381 A.D. Look at this portion of the Creed:
 
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.
 
The Council of Constantinople finalized the Creed when it described the Holy Spirit as proceeding from "the Father and the Son.” The Eastern Churches objected to the language of the Holy Spirit proceeding from the other members of the Trinity. In Latin, “and the Son” is rendered filioque. The “Filioque Controversy” endures to this day. Why? Dating back to those early days of the Councils, some Church fathers found the filioque clause contradicted in the Gospel of John. For example, from John 15:26: “But when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me." [Emphasis mine.] It is also generally true that the Orthodox tradition is much more mystical in its theology and rites. We in the Western Roman Church tend to be more “just the facts” as our bloodline runs from the Roman European West, and our language reflects that.
 
That said, theologians of recent times are examining ways of mutually understanding the language and understanding of the Creed. On another front, Pope Leo XIV has expressed interest in listening to arguments for the celebration of Roman Catholic Easter on the same day as the Orthodox observe the feast. [This is the custom in Greece; Margaret and I celebrated Easter twice last year, the second time in the Roman Cathedral in Athens.] Incidentally, if your curiosity is piqued about Orthodox faith and practice, Peter Ware’s Penguin book, The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to Eastern Christianity, is an excellent introduction to our partners in faith. I found Orthodox theology and practice quite moving, as explained by Ware.
 
Our parish’s sermon from Father Augustine this past weekend underscored the riches that the prepared Sunday sermon can have in store for us. There is an old saying about writing that “the shorter the piece, the longer the preparation.” This is true with homilies and sermons. Brief but enlightening. I close with this instruction found in the official Roman Missal:
 
Para. 65. The homily is part of the Liturgy and is strongly recommended, for it is necessary for the nurturing of the Christian life. It should be an exposition of some aspect of the readings from Sacred Scripture or of another text from the Ordinary or from the Proper of the Mass of the day and should take into account both the mystery being celebrated and the particular needs of the listeners.
 
P.S. All the errors in today’s post are mine and mine alone. Father Augustine pitched a perfect game.