An important church creed is turning 1,700 years old. So?
January 15, 2025
When I served on a committee that helped to oversee the theological education of Presbyterian seminary students in my area, we would require those students to write a new "statement of faith" each year. (I'm not sure if that still is required, but I hope so.)
The idea was that the students' understanding of Christianity and its foundational beliefs should grow or mature in some way each year and that such growth could be expressed in such statements, or confessions (another word for what we were after).
The Presbyterian Church (USA), in fact, has a whole Book of Confessions that you can read it here. It contains a dozen different creeds, starting with the Nicene Creed, which is also seen in the graphic here today (though someone thought it would be good to scream the creed in all caps).
Presbyterians and other branches of Christianity often note that such creeds are a secondary witness to the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The Bible always outranks the confessions as such a witness. That's because the confessions in many ways are time-bound and sometimes reflect thinking and conclusions that the church -- or parts of the church -- have later discarded, changed or ignored.
I raise all of this to introduce this intriguing piece from Religion Unplugged about the Nicene Creed and its historic importance. As the article, written by Richard N. Ostling, a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, notes, this new year "marks the 1,700th anniversary of this credo, which was produced by bishops attending Christianity’s first recognized 'ecumenical' (that is, universal) council, as opposed to regional councils and synods. They met in the town of Nicaea, present-day Iznik, Turkey, to decide nothing less than who is the Jesus Christ we worship, believe in and follow.
"Five weeks ago," Ostling writes, "Pope Francis formally invited Eastern Orthodoxy’s Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew to join him in marking the Nicene anniversary at Iznik, an encounter likely to occur in late May."
Ostling also explains that "the Roman Emperor Constantine I, a.k.a. Constantine the Great (272? – 337), issued the summons for bishops to confer in A.D. 325, hosted the council sessions in his imperial palace, delivered the opening address and attended the meetings, though he left most of the theologizing to the experts."
It's always been my understanding that Constantine didn't really care much about the wording that would come out as the Nicene Creed. He just wanted those attending the conference to make a decision about the nature of Jesus so that Christianity, which at Constantine's order became the official religion of the Roman Empire, would not be divided by controversy.
I'd love to ask Constantine today how he thinks that worked out.
Well, the Christian church is a many-splintered thing today. And although the Nicene Creed has lots of buy-in from Christians around the globe, it is not unchallenged and not any sort of final word about church doctrine. Perhaps that's because Christianity -- like any of the world religions -- is a dynamic, changing, living organism that finds new ways to speak ancient truths and beliefs for each new generation.
What people of any faith must finally remember is that they don't worship creeds, no matter how historic. Rather, they worship God, whatever their sometimes-changing perceptions about the deity may be. It pains me to admit this as a writer, but words in the end are inadequate to capture the fullness of the divine, partly because all words are ultimately metaphors, pointing beyond themselves to some reality, or at least perceived reality. And metaphors always and everywhere can be misinterpreted or misused.
There is, by the way, one phrase of the Nicene Creed that I won't say when I'm part of a congregation reciting it. It's the part that says the Holy Spirit "proceeds from the Father and the Son," because, like early Orthodox Christian leaders, I think that makes one member of the Trinity subservient to the other two, whereas each member is said to be of the same substance and equal to the other two. So feel free to call me a heretic, a few of which the church needs now and then to keep it honest.
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A SMALL STEP TOWARD LGBTQ+ CATHOLIC PRIESTS?
The Vatican has approved a document that, as this RNS story explains, "cautiously opens the door for the ordination of openly gay men to the priesthood." And now, no doubt, begins the resistance to it. After all, the official church catechism teaches that homosexuality is "objectively disordered." So there is much within Catholicism to sort out here, and it's hard to imagine that it will happen without some serious conflict.
In fact, the conflict began shortly after media reports of the story about a possible change in policy. As this story makes clear, church officials insist there's been no change at all, though that seems like an overstatement, too.
Other branches of Christianity, including my own Presbyterian Church (USA), have wrestled with all of this and emerged with theologies that affirm the rights of LGBTQ+ people to be officers and ordained clergy in the church. The resistance to that move is almost always rooted in a misreading of scripture, and if you want to know details about all of that, you can find my take on that in this essay found elsewhere here on my blog.
For now, I am pleased that the Vatican at least seems to have taken this step (maybe we'll get clarity eventually) and I hope that eventually it becomes permanent church policy (just as I hope that one day women can be ordained as priests and deacons). I take that position because I think it would be good for all of Christianity, not just Catholicism.
So let's follow this story as it develops and hope that it will lead to a priesthood that represents all that is true and good in humanity.
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P.S.: After I published this blog post recently about the purposes of religion, my boyhood friend from India, Markandey Katju, who identifies as a Hindu atheist, wrote this piece in response. His conclusion: "All religions are superstitions and false. The truth lies in science, which continues to evolve and refine our understanding of the universe." I told him that I thought his response was just another example of the old "God of the Gaps" idea, to which I pay no serious allegiance. See if you agree with me.
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