For Orthodox Christians, the Council of Nicaea is the most significant post-biblicalevent. This is true not only because of its advancement of a particular theological vision (i.e., that Jesus Christ is God) but because Nicaea enshrined an ecclesial administrative structure that remains largely intact seventeen hundred years later. Perhaps even more than these historical connections, Nicaea functions for Orthodox Christians as a powerful symbol of how believers think about orthodoxy, synodality, and the necessity of conforming to the traditions of the early Church.

While historians of Christianity are well aware that Nicaea was one just one moment in a long process of theological reflection, the average Orthodox Christian tends to collapse the multi-century history of Trinitarian and Christological reflection into that singular, providential moment in the year 325. That the institutional Church and the faithful consistently refer to the Creed of the Council of Constantinople in 381 as the “Nicaean Creed” offers only the most obvious evidence of this sort of transcribing “Nicaea” onto the totality of Orthodox theological teaching. And, even if the original articulations of orthodox teaching at Nicaea were somewhat tentative and unrefined by later standards, Nicaea did, for the first time, express the centrality of the Incarnation to Christian teaching as well as the claim of Christ’s divinity as constitutive aspects of the one, universal, and apostolic faith.

Perhaps just as important as the actual Trinitarian claims, the Council of Nicaea was equally significant because it established the model by which subsequent generations of Orthodox Christians would seek to resolve theological disputes and questions. Even if we now know that most of the Ecumenical Councils were engineered by imperial forces seeking theological unity, the Orthodox Church quickly embraced the idea that all major theological decisions required a conciliar model in which all bishops in apostolic lineage were invited to participate. It is noteworthy that this notion of episcopal conciliarity developed before the need to justify it with claims of apostolicity or the later notions of Petrine and Andrean primacy. In the modern world, the Orthodox Church’s episcopal/conciliar model is frequently advanced as a distinguishing characteristic that differentiates it from the Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions.

Because Orthodox Christianity is, first and foremost, a ritualized, liturgical tradition, we can look to the church’s liturgical practice for evidence of its Nicaean character. The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (of 381) was introduced to the Constantinopolitan liturgy in the early sixth century, and it has remained a fixed element of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom since that time. Equally important is the fact that the Eastern Christian tradition liturgically commemorates the fathers of the First Ecumenical Council (i.e., the Council of Nicaea) on the seventh Sunday of Easter, which is the Sunday before Pentecost. This positioning is significant, because it occurs on the only Sunday between the commemoration of Christ’s ascension and Pentecost, thereby bridging a celebration of Christ’s divinity with the sending of the Holy Spirit.

While most scholars tend to emphasize the Arian controversies or the role of Constantine in the historic gathering at Nicaea, one of the most impactful outcomes of the gathering was the establishment of a common date for the celebration of Easter. Because the modern Christian world fails to maintain this universal celebration, it is often forgotten that all mainline Christian traditions actually follow the exact formula established at Nicaea. Indeed, Christians of both East and West celebrate Easter on the first Sunday after the first full moon, after the first day of Spring. The difference today is that Christians cannot seem to agree on when the first day of Spring actually is. At the time of the Council of Nicaea, the Roman government adhered to a calendar now known as the Julian calendar, which employed a 365-day year arranged according to twelve months; and it understood the need for a leap year every fourth year. But the Julian calendar was flawed; the precise problem lays in its calculation of leap-year. Scientifically speaking, it takes the earth 365.2422 days to travel around the sun, not the crisp 365.25 days the Julian calendar prescribes. That slight difference amounts to 11 minutes a year and in the 1700 years since the Council of Nicaea, this discrepancy has led to a 13-day difference. The net result is that, according to the Julian calendar, the Spring solstice no longer occurs on March 21 as it did at the time of the Council of Nicaea. It now occurs on April 3. So, if one calculates the date of Easter according to the Julian calendar, it begins with the latter and not the former. Although there are many calls from within the Orthodox Church to join Western Christians and use the more astronomically-accurate Gregorian calendar, those calls have not yet been successful. Thus, it remains the case that even though the Orthodox Church technically adheres to the Nicaean formula, they do not celebrate Easter on the same day as other Christians.

Finally, when one considers the legacy of the Council of Nicaea and the Orthodox Christian tradition, one cannot help but reflect on Nicaea as a key step in the integration of church and state that occurred for the Christians of the Eastern Roman (i.e., Byzantine) Empire in late antiquity. As is well known, Eusebius provides the best surviving source on what transpired at Nicaea, but the majority of his account is little more than an encomium of Constantine’s support and guidance. Given the general perception of Eastern Christianity as a tradition that not only embraced church/state integration but also one that now celebrates several Byzantine emperors as saints of the church, it might be surprising to learn that this is largely a post-Byzantine phenomenon. Constantine was the only emperor regarded as a saint by the Byzantines, and there is no real evidence of a Constantinian cult until the tenth century, when it was actively promoted by the Macedonian dynasty as a way to advance its own dynastic interests. Nevertheless, it was very much the case that the Byzantines understood Constantine’s role at Nicaea to be providential and as evidence that the imperial office was a sacred one, even if individual emperors were not. Thus, Nicaea and Constantine stood as important symbols within Eastern Christianity for a common political presumption about the suitability of empire as a productive Christian polity. This model was influential not only for the Byzantines but also for the medieval and early-modern Slavic kingdoms. It continues to be a political force through Eastern Europe today, even if many in the Church are now beginning to highlight the ways in which medieval and modern rulers alike have exploited Orthodox Christian teaching and piety for their own purposes.

Nicaea set the theological and doctrinal preconditions for the development of Protestantism in general and Pentecostalism in particular. Pentecostals here refer to a diverse, indigenously inspired, internationally linked expression of Christianity that emphasizes the work of the Holy Spirit in the believer.Footnote ¹² While “movements of the spirit” have been present throughout Christian history, the twentieth- and twenty-first-century Pentecostals discussed here articulate elements of their practice in ways that differ from historical precedents. One notable feature is the emphasis on a post-conversion religious encounter responsible for supernatural experiences inspired by the Holy Spirit. These transcendent experiences include glossolalia, faith healing, exorcism, and prophetic utterances.Footnote ¹³ Pentecostals tend toward a literal application of Biblical narratives and are fervently committed to evangelism. Their diverse histories and theologies implicitly undermine any attempt to fit them into narrow categories. My interest in Pentecostals stems from over a decade of research into the movements, as well as years of close contact as an “insider” having served as a director of missions and worship in charismatic churches in Nairobi.

Though the early creeds are largely absent from their regular worship, Pentecostals resonate with the ancient doctrinal statements through their profound appreciation for the person of Christ and the concrete role of the Holy Spirit in people’s lives. Pentecostals reach back to narratives in Acts as a primary source of inspiration, doctrine, and practice. Despite this New Testament emphasis, the Nicene and other councils seldom feature in Pentecostal discourses. Thus, on the face of it, Nicaea 325 seems ancillary to Pentecostal commitment to the early church. In this reflection, I examine ways in which Pentecostals affirm aspects of Nicene orthodoxy long resident in mainstream Christianity. I also consider appraisals of contemporary Pentecostal practice from a Nicene perspective.

“Mennonites are not credal.” This assertion has been repeated in my circles in the more than half-century I have spent within Mennonite church institutions. “We have confessions, which speak to how we discern Christian faithfulness for particular contexts.”Footnote ¹⁸ As a scholar, I had come to a reasonably nuanced view on the theological and historical questions surrounding the fourth century of the early Christian movement. Yet now I turned “homeward” to reflect on how my faith community might consider the anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. In response to my search for “creeds” in the Global Anabaptist-Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, GAMEO replied with this helpful question: “Did you mean creeks?”

A quick glance over the entries that included “creeks” revealed that the question is not out of place. Agrarian Euro-American Mennonite settlers, beginning in the eighteenth century, situated themselves near creeks. Thus entries about their history provide names such as these for their communities: Black Creek (British Columbia), Deer Creek (Oklahoma), Pequea Creek (Pennsylvania), Twenty Mile Creek (Ontario), Walnut Creek (Ohio), and Yellow Creek (Indiana). Indeed, my own Swiss-German Anabaptist ancestors first settled near the Pequea Creek.

A more specific GAMEO search, for “Nicaea,” brought up two links. The first, “Michael Servetus,” profiles the sixteenth-century Spanish theologian, burned at the stake in Calvin’s Geneva for his arguments against the Trinity. The article notes that Dutch Anabaptist David Joris entered “a plea for the accused during the trial.”Footnote ¹⁹ The second entry, “Christology,” includes a 2018 overview, a 1990 survey of Mennonite approaches, and a 1957 entry on the “Incarnation of Christ.”Footnote ²⁰ This last article surveyed sixteenth-century Christological debates, including Menno Simons’s adherence to “celestial flesh” Christology,Footnote ²¹ an embarrassment that most modern Mennonite theologians have downplayed or tried to explain away.

Considering the more ancient story, Mennonites have spelled out two fundamental problems with Nicaea: the role of Emperor Constantine in the making of the creed, and the creed’s seeming omission of references to Jesus’s life and teachings. Many theologians and seminarians under their guidance have tried to find a path forward by claiming that “a theological ethics which understands Jesus’ life and teachings as definitive of what it means to live a human life will be … ‘more radically Nicene and Chalcedonian than other views.’”Footnote ²² A few were intrigued by Leithart’s Defending Constantine. Footnote ²³ Yet the apparently missing ethics in Nicene and Constantinopolitan creeds continues to worry Mennonite thinkers, even in 2025.Footnote ²⁴

Perhaps anecdotal entry into the Mennonite-Nicaea question could help. I searched my memory of the 2006 meeting of the Mennonite World Conference (MWC) General Council, over which I presided together with my colleague, Bishop Danisa Ndlovu of Zimbabwe. At that meeting MWC adopted a Statement of Shared Convictions to guide our life together, as well as our participation among the Christian World Communions. The statement had been ten years in the drafting, including collecting the particular confessions of member bodies, exchanging myriads of drafts, and a series of debates in previous General Council gatherings. The minutes of the meeting report that I offered an opening meditation on the importance of “gathering in council,” which I likened to New Testament, fourth-century, and the sixteenth-century Anabaptist communities.

The Shared Convictions statement opens: “As part of the one body of Christ at all times and places, we hold the following to be central to our belief and practice.” This phrasing clearly grew out of the MWC’s several ecumenical dialogues, including that with Roman Catholics from 1998 to 2003. The minutes of the 2006 gathering, however, disappointed. In my memory the most vigorous debate before our adoption of the statement was over the second conviction: “Jesus is the Son of God.” The minutes, however, simply state that after discussion the statement was adopted. I remember, though, that in the midst of that spirited discussion I declared to the delegates: “We are discussing the most important question that Christians have debated throughout the centuries.”

Turning in another direction also offers insight. It is commonly claimed among Mennonites that we sing our theology. Already in the sixteenth century, a hymn in the Anabaptist collection, the Ausbund, “provided the faithful … with the opportunity to rehearse the creeds.” The hymn quotes from both the Apostles and the Nicene Creeds, including “the description of Christ as ‘begotten, not made’ and ‘of one substance with the Father.’”Footnote ²⁵ A scan of more recent hymn collections, from the 1822 Harmonia Sacra through the 2021 Voices Together, show consistent inclusion of hymn texts and tunes referencing the Trinity. The vibrant Christmas hymn “O Come All Ye Faithful/Adeste Fideles,” with its own complicated textual history, appears in hymnals from the Harmonia Sacra forward. However, the most Nicene of its stanzas, “True God of True God…” is omitted in several editions. The powerful nineteenth-century Trinitarian hymn, “Holy, Holy, Holy,” matched with the tune name “NICAEA” composed specifically for that text, is present in Mennonite hymnals from the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Mennonite-Anabaptist family, small among the families of Christian World Communions, now has many more members in Africa, Asia, and Latin America than in Europe and North America. Without doing any kind of survey, I confidently assert that neither the Council of Nicaea nor the creed that emerged in fourth-century Asia Minor plays a regular formal and audible role in the liturgy or practice of our worldwide family. Nevertheless, in 2016, the MWC Courier review of the Statement of Shared Convictions included an article by Zimbabwean Bekitembe Dube. In “Songs of the Trinity and Shalom,” Dube declared: “Our hymns in [the church in Zimbabwe] affirm belief in the Trinitarian God. These are sung with a fervency of affirmation.”Footnote ²⁶ Could it be that this form of remembering, during the 1700^th anniversary year of the Council of Nicaea, and going forward, offers the gifts that are needed, for our churches now, as well as for the church in all times and places?

When I was growing up in midcentury Michigan in the United Methodist churches led by my dad, we would regularly recite from the 1964 Hymnal the “historic confessions” of the Apostle’s Creed and the Nicene Creed as well as a “modern” affirmation and a missionary statement called the “Korean Creed.” In a worship filled with changing responsive readings as well as extemporaneous prayers, these collective “Affirmations of Faith” by clergy and people together stood out in form and consistency. We stood in a broad stream of faithfulness. In the church and parsonage we focused on a moral and spiritual perfection through a living Christ, and social justice undergirded by God’s great mercy for all. Doctrine was everywhere assumed, but rarely expounded. When as a teenager I discovered my father’s fine Neo-Orthodox library and devotion to the Trinity, I was astonished. I am beginning this essay with my own “lived religion,” that is, the reception of religious language and practice among ordinary people in specific contexts, because I think this best reveals the persisting force of John and Charles Wesley’s movement from a revival of the Church of England to numerous populist denominations in the United States.

As an Anglican priest John Wesley inherited and continued a non-dogmatic stream of scripture and tradition focused on Christian life and practice as well as his own attachment to the first three centuries as “primitive Christianity.” The “primitive Fathers” preserved for him evidence of intense faith and disciplines which inspired his own work in the Church of England.Footnote ²⁸ Yet, references to ancient creeds are few and scattered in his prolific writings. Instead, Wesley focused on soteriological and therapeutic themes against Calvinism and quietism to confirm a transforming personal and palpable religious experience of divine grace and love available to all, whose veracity was confirmed by the observable behavior and emotions of the Christian.Footnote ²⁹ Creeds occur in his arguments against mere conformity or the uselessness of speculative theology:

This “internal evidence” of Christianity was so compelling, plain, and intimate that “a peasant, a woman, a child may feel all its force.”Footnote ³¹ This force he saw in the “primitive Fathers,” who in spite of their often weak arguments, “I reverence their writings because they describe true, genuine Christianity and direct us to the strongest evidence of the Christian doctrine.”Footnote ³² Echoing Paul to the Corinthians on the priority of love of God, he wrote provocatively, “…that orthodoxy, or right opinions, is at best but a very slender part of religion, if it can be allowed to be any part of it at all.” Footnote ³³ Not surprisingly, the era of the councils with their technical debates and bitter divisions seemed to him to evince mainly ecclesial power and imperial favor. He also defended the spirituality of Pelagius, Donatists, and the Montanists. Thus, Wesley declared that his “Collection of Hymns” contained “all the important truths of our most holy religion, whether speculative or practical….a little body of experimental and practical divinity” (73–74).Footnote ³⁴

These prolific and eloquent encouragements through hymnody, letters, and sermons for an experiential love of God were rooted in the currents of early eighteenth-century Christianity and contemporary lived religion. The moral intensity of “Holy Living” by Jeremy Taylor, the rebuttal of Calvinism by the Caroline divines, and contemporary debates about the reality of miracles were electrified into a life changing conversion of Wesley through Pietism with its demand for individual assurance through an experience of the Spirit and the empirical spirit of the English Enlightenment which lent observation and verification to the supernatural movements and transformation of the soul.Footnote ³⁵ For Wesley as an Anglican revivalist this reality of direct interior spiritual experience answered both active skeptics and the indifference of mere conformity which were more destructive to the interior realities of true religion than diversity of practice or opinion. As he urged in “Catholic Spirit,” “Though we can’t think alike, may we not love alike? May we not be of one heart, though we are not of one opinion?”Footnote ³⁶ His focus on a “religion of the heart” resulted in a theology as “…a moving vortex, fueled by scripture and divine love, shaped by experience, reason, and tradition, and moving dynamically toward the holiness of Christian perfection. Any model that lacks dynamic movement toward holiness and its growth within individuals and its dissemination throughout the world is clearly inadequate.”Footnote ³⁷ While Wesley certainly assumed and affirmed traditional doctrine, he was alert to the variety and limits of human opinion and the lack of love in Christian divisions and debates.Footnote ³⁸ When he abridged the 39 articles for the American Methodists, he left out Article 6 which included the Nicene Creed. Creeds were necessary, but not sufficient for the realization and practice of divine love in Christian living.

As Methodism grew into a separate church in North America, the issues of lived religion shifted from a revitalization of traditional forms toward individual conversion which embraced lay participation and ecstatic speech in the controversial and successful camp meetings.Footnote ³⁹ Democratization of culture and religion changed Methodist theology toward more individualism, free will, social activism, and a relentless optimism.Footnote ⁴⁰ Methodism divided several times over slavery or practices of holiness but not over biblical criticism or modernism as in other mainline denominations.

In the later twentieth century growing political divides in the United States between liberals and conservatives spurred religious conflicts on biblical authority with regard to race, feminism, sexuality, and liberation theology, including among United Methodists. Like the issue of slavery a century before, this crisis of justice and faithfulness challenged conventional doctrine and practices in deeper ways beyond proof texting scripture or the writings of Wesley. The Nicene Creed featured in the internecine conflict as part of a conservative retrieval of ancient doctrine to restore and enforce standards. Not surprisingly, Wesley in his extensive occasional writings, could be quoted on all sides with regard to doctrine, even as his focus remained on scripture and vital religion.Footnote ⁴¹ A petition to the General Conference of 2016 to include the Nicene Creed in The Book of Discipline was soundly defeated since both conservatives and liberals were hesitant to change Wesley’s original exclusion. When the eventual break came in 2022, the new conservative Global Methodist Church included the Nicene Creed in The Transitional Book of Doctrines and Disciplines. This addition of the Nicene Creed recalls its inclusion into the liturgy for the first time in the sixth century as a means of proving superior orthodoxy.

Ecumenism in the twentieth century has fostered a prominent acceptance of the Nicene creed, even in evangelical circles, yet a critical history of ancient Christianity echoes some of the instincts of Wesley. The original Nicene Creed was a compromise document to end a theological debate among fourth-century bishops. The creative shifts in theological thinking which finally led to its broader acceptance are not evident in the text itself nor can it rule on contemporary questions such as inclusive language or human sexuality. Wesley preferred the first three centuries precisely because he saw them as focused on Christian living rather than elite theological debate. Reading or singing the Wesleys is more akin to Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses: doctrines of divine power and incarnation are the beginning of a transformative journey into mystery. Dogmatic apologetics tends to assure us that lex orandi, lex credendi (the law of prayer is the law of belief) covers all sins of abstraction or competition. Ironically, Wesley fostered this principle so fiercely in his trust of dynamic divine action that he was led into radical positions such as the criticism of orthodoxy, the acceptance of lay and women preachers, and the ordination of sacramental leaders for mission in America. Wesleyan lived religion has always been potentially disruptive. As Henry Chadwick said about Origen, we begin by evaluating his orthodoxy and we end by having to interrogate the definition of orthodoxy itself.

Latter-day Saints have repeatedly and emphatically rejected the Creed of Nicaea. In their General Conferences, Latter-day Saint leaders have dismissed it as “man-made”Footnote ⁴² at best and “aided” by “Lucifer”Footnote ⁴³ at worst. While direct mention of Nicaea in this setting is infrequent – 14 times since 1850 – a uniformly shallow interaction accompanies its uniformly negative reception. This includes mistakes in facts of history and inaccuracies in representations of Trinitarian dogma. Always it is embedded into a narrative that sets it in opposition to the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with these teachings presented as an authoritative correction. Central to this correction is the Latter-day Saint assertion that God the Father has “a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Missing from this correction, however, is any hint that Latter-day Saint conceptions of God have developed. Despite its tracing today to the First Vision of founding prophet Joseph Smith in 1820, he did not articulate a notion of the Father’s physical body until 1841, when he declared, “That which is without body or parts is nothing. There is no other God in heaven but that God who has flesh and bones.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Smith’s most recent and best biographer, Richard Bushman, suggests that 1841 completes a shift from Smith’s “traditional Christian belief in God as pure spirit to a belief in his corporeality.”Footnote ⁴⁶ That it is a shift is underlined in an 1840 tract by Apostle Parley Pratt: “Whoever reads our books, or hears us preach, knows that we believe in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, as one God,” that “the Son has flesh and bones” and “the Father is a spirit.” Whoever suggests otherwise, Pratt was clear, “has entirely misrepresented us.” While it was the case, according to Pratt, that Latter-day Saints at that time understood the Father to be “a personage of spirit” in “organized formation” with “its eyes, mouth, ears, &C.,”Footnote ⁴⁷ he was also clear that (1) this does not divide the one God, (2) the Son is “the express image” of the Father, with humanity “created in their image,”Footnote ⁴⁸ and (3) the Holy Ghost “proceeds from the Father and the Son.”Footnote ⁴⁹ For many Christians then and now, it remains a mistake to attribute even a spirit body to the Father. Such an assertion, however, need not take one beyond Nicaea’s minimal orthodoxy. Neither, albeit more controversially, need later Latter-day Saint attribution of a physical body to the Father.Footnote ⁵⁰

Allied to this, Latter-day Saints profess belief in God the Eternal Father, his Son, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost. They baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. They pray to the Father through the Son in the Spirit. They invoke Father, Son, and Spirit in administering the Eucharist, which they call the Sacrament. Their keystone scripture, the Book of Mormon, declares as its central purpose, “the convincing of the Jew and Gentile that Jesus is the Christ, the Eternal God,”Footnote ⁵¹ and, in its pages, the “one God” is explicitly defined as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost in doxological contexts.Footnote ⁵² Furthermore, as demonstrated in the table below, the first published statement of Latter-day Saint belief overlaps significantly with Nicaea’s final Constantinopolitan form.

Written in conjunction with the organisation of the Church in 1830, the Articles and Covenants of the Church of the Christ – what is now Doctrine and Covenants 20 – was read and accepted at the Church’s first conference on June 9, 1830.Footnote ⁵³ Sandwiched between brief accounts of the Church’s founding and the appearance of the Book of Mormon on one side and various statements of Church procedural matters on the other is a 307-word statement of nascent Latter-day Saint belief. Following the order of the Latter-day Saint document the relevant excerpt from the Nicene-Constantinopolitan symbol is set comparatively side-by-side below.

While space prohibits a detailed exposition, one comment is necessary. Smith’s Articles and Covenants do not contain Nicaea’s language of consubstantiality. For some, this may be enough to indicate the Latter-day Saints’ anti-Nicene position. However, this overlooks the structure of Smith’s statement. There an introductory word on God is followed successively by statements on the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost before concluding by returning to the introductory word to make clear that the one infinite and eternal, everlastingly unchangeable God is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Distinct, yet undivided. It appears difficult to make adequate sense of this formula without some notion of consubstantiality.

If this is the case, the source of Latter-day Saint antipathy to Nicaea is not immediately obvious, nor does it appear necessary. While the reasons for its development are various and complex, one is suggested by the only reference to “creeds” in the Doctrine and Covenants, in what is now section 123 from what was originally a letter written by Smith from the jail at Liberty, Missouri, in March 1839. While Smith was in prison, the Latter-day Saints were being forcibly expelled from the state of Missouri, suffering all the indignities and indecencies that entailed. As well as asking God for redress, Smith’s letter suggested they should gather up and “publish to all the world…the whole concatenation of diabolical rascality and nefarious and murderous impositions that have been practised upon this people.” Insisting this was their “imperative duty,” Smith described the same spirit that “supported and urged on and upheld” the “hand of murder, tyranny, and oppression” as “strongly rivet[ing] the creeds of the fathers.”Footnote ⁵⁴

Amid persecution, Smith’s opposition to creeds solidified, and he found language to describe them that buttressed the development of his increasingly speculative and materialistic later theology. In writing that “creeds set up stakes and say hitherto shalt thou come and no further,” Smith was clear: this “I cannot subscribe to.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Smith, it seems, came to understand creeds as the end of divine conversation – a human full-stop on the possibility of God’s continued communication. His commitment to the reality of its continuance meant this was theologically unacceptable, and his associating creeds with the experience of brutal maltreatment rendered them morally bankrupt.Footnote ⁵⁶ Regardless of the accuracy of Smith’s assessment, it remains the case that Latter-day Saint scripture, worship practices, and fundamental beliefs about God can sit within the bounds of Nicene orthodoxy.

May the God who communicates bless the continued conversation constructively on all sides.

The Augsburg Confession of 1530, which is the common confession of faith which still unites all Lutheran churches around the globe, begins in its first article with the declaration that “The churches among us teach with complete unanimity that the decree of the Council of Nicaea concerning the unity of the divine essence and concerning the three persons is true and to be believed without any doubt.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The Book of Concord of 1584 includes the Nicene Creed alongside the Apostles’ and Athanasian Creeds as one of the “three [ancient] Creeds” to which the churches and schools of the Augsburg Confession are committed.Footnote ⁵⁸

Lutherans have known and appealed to the text of the Nicene Creed in its standard Niceano-Constantinopolitan form of 381 (or 451), with the Western addition of the filioque – not merely by historical accident, but with deliberate reflection, as when Jacob Andreae and other Tübingen theologians in the late sixteenth century engaged in an extended Scriptural and patristic defense of the theological and soteriological significance of the double procession of the Spirit in dialogue with Patriarch Jeremias II of Constantinople.Footnote ⁵⁹ (In 2024, however, the Lutheran World Federation issued a joint statement with the Eastern Orthodox Church “suggest[ing]” use of the Creed without the filioque in translation from the Greek original.)

But Lutherans have appealed not only to the theological text and substance of Nicaea but also to the history of the Council of Nicaea itself, as known through the church historians – for sixteenth-century Lutherans, chiefly the Latin Tripartite History compiled from the Greek works of Socrates Scholasticus, Sozomen, and Theodoret.

Luther pointed out in his 1520 Address to the Christian Nobility that “even the Council of Nicaea, the most famous of all councils, was neither called nor confirmed by the bishop of Rome, but by the emperor Constantine.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Constantine’s intervention in the Arian controversy at Nicaea in order to maintain peace in the Empire became a paradigm for Lutheran princes reforming the church in their own territories. Melanchthon wrote to the Elector John in the Instruction for the Visitors: “While His Electoral grace is not obligated to teach and to rule in spiritual affairs, he is obligated as temporal sovereign to so order things that strife, rioting, and rebellion do not arise among his subjects; even as the Emperor Constantine summoned the bishops to Nicaea since he did not want to tolerate the dissension which Arius had stirred up among the Christians in the empire, and constrained them to preserve unity in teaching and faith.”Footnote ⁶¹

The corollary to this emphasis on the role of the emperor at Nicaea was the absence of the pope. Luther pointed out in his thirteenth thesis for the 1519 Leipzig Disputation that the Council of Nicaea stood against more recent papal claims to supremacy.Footnote ⁶² Positively, the Council of Nicaea stood as an example that matters of faith must be decided on the basis of Scripture alone. As Luther said in his extensive discussion of Nicaea in his 1539 treatise On the Councils and the Church: “The Historia Tripartita also says in Book V, chapter 29, ‘At Nicaea the faith was grounded on the writings of the apostles’.”Footnote ⁶³

Nicaea also served Lutherans in their defense of clerical marriage. Some of the church historians recounted the story of the bishop Paphnutius, a confessor tortured during the Great Persecution, who stood up against all the other bishops at the council when they sought to introduce celibacy as a rule for the clergy, and argued that faithful married life was equal to monastic celibacy. Paphnutius’s example was irresistible to Lutherans not only as a refutation of Pope Gregory VII’s imposition of celibacy on all Western clergy but also as a proof that one bishop (or theologian) might be in the right against all others, even at the “most sacred of councils.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Indeed, Lutherans could be critical of the disciplinary canons of Nicaea; certainly, the canons were not founded on Scripture in the same way that the decree about the divinity of Christ was.Footnote ⁶⁵ It was “permissible to convoke a council to regulate fasting and prayer, vestments,” and the like. But such matters were not binding. The decision of Nicaea about Jesus’s divinity was authoritative not because the council had made it but because it was founded on Scripture.Footnote ⁶⁶

One decision made at Nicaea that still retained practical significance was its decree setting the date of Easter. Luther was aware that, in his day, the astronomical observations no longer matched the calendar assumed by the council, but he called on the “exalted majesties, emperors and kings” to issue an order, in parallel with Constantine, to resolve the discrepancy, or else the church should keep “wobbling along” with things as the fathers had established them.Footnote ⁶⁷ When in 1582 Pope Gregory XIII introduced his new calendar to make such a change, Lutheran states (along with most Protestant and Orthodox Christians) refused to follow, maintaining “Old Style” Julian dating for centuries (or down to the present day for liturgical purposes in many Orthodox churches).

In addition to being affirmed in the Lutheran Confessions, the creed of Nicaea, with its confession of the Son as consubstantial with the Father, was maintained by Luther and his followers in the weekly liturgy of the Lord’s Supper, often sung in a hymn setting composed by Luther himself.Footnote ⁶⁸ Early in his campaign against Scholastic theology and its jargon, Luther could, to be sure, express reservations about the “new, non-Scriptural word” homoousios: “Even if my soul hated this word, homoousion, and I refused to use it, still I would not be a heretic. For who compels me to use the word, providing I hold to the fact defined by the council on the basis of Scripture?”Footnote ⁶⁹ But for most of the rest of his career, Luther vigorously defended both the word and the doctrine:

Indeed, in the Christian theological tradition, there have been few theologians who have emphasized the theology of the homoousios – understood in the doubled form of the Chalcedonian Definition or, for Lutherans, the Athansian Creed, the context in which the Nicene Creed was always understood: “consubstantial with the Father according to His divinity, consubstantial with us according to His humanity” – more strongly than did Luther. In particular, Luther insisted that the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father was in no way diminished by the Incarnation: that Jesus Christ is God without qualification or remainder. As the hymn A Mighty Fortress puts it: “Ask ye, who is this? Jesus Christ it is,/Of Sabaoth Lord/And there’s none other God.”

Luther’s 1540 Disputation on the Divinity and Humanity of Christ is an extended and penetrating reflection on this double consubstantiality, centered on the conclusion that it is possible, indeed necessary, to assert that “this God suffered, died, was buried.”Footnote ⁷¹ As Luther strikingly put it in On the Councils and the Church: “If it cannot be said that God died for us, but only a man, then we are lost; but if God’s death and a dead God lie in the balance, his side goes down and ours goes up like a light and empty scale…But he could not sit on the scale unless he had become a man like us, so that it could be called God’s dying, God’s martyrdom, God’s blood, and God’s death. For God in his own nature cannot die; but now that God and man are united in one person, it is called God’s death when the man dies who is one substance or one person with God.”Footnote ⁷²

For Luther, as for Athanasius (and for Cyril of Alexandria after him) this was the central significance of the Nicene confession, founded in Scripture and repeated at subsequent councils and in the Church of every age and place: that the One who had become incarnate of the Virgin, suffered, and rose again, “for us human beings and our salvation,” was none other than true God.

The term “Coptic” can mean many things: a people, an ethnicity, a language, a period of time, and/or a Christian confession. In the latter sense, “Coptic” refers specifically to the Christians of Egypt of the Miaphysite faith, who adhere to the one-nature Christological formulations and expressions of God’s suffering (Theopaschite formulae) preferred by Pope Cyril of Alexandria. In the fifth century, they challenged the two-nature Christological formulations promulgated by Pope Leo of Rome and the Council of Chalcedon. They criticized the latter council’s failure to adopt a Theopaschite formula. Miaphysite Christians of Egypt, whether living in Egypt or in the diaspora, together constitute what is known today as the “Coptic Orthodox Church.”

The significance of the Nicene Creed to the Coptic Orthodox Church cannot be underestimated. However, the church rarely refers to the creed as “Nicene.” Instead, the church usually refers to the creed simply as, “The Faith,” “The Orthodox Faith,” or “The Canon/Rule of Faith.” The church considers herself the rightful guardian and heir of this faith from the time of the dispute between Pope Alexander of Alexandria and the presbyter Arius, through Pope Athanasius of Alexandria’s defense of Nicene faith to the present. The Nicene Creed has been the succinct expression of the faith for the church. Two moments of poignant reception have to do with the church’s ecumenical relations: schism in the fifth century and theological agreement in dialogues of the 1990s.

During the Christological controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries, what would become known as the “Coptic Orthodox Church” insisted on keeping the faith of St. Athanasius the Apostolic. For example, the sixth-century head of the Pachomian federation of monasteries in Egypt, St. Abraham of Farshut, is remembered for resisting Emperor Justinian’s pressures to adopt the faith of Chalcedon by underscoring his adherence to the faith of St. Athanasius.Footnote ⁷³ Athanasius became such a prominent saint in the church that he is regularly depicted iconographically on the walls of churches. A sixth-century church in the Fayyum oasis of Egypt associates him with the foundation of Christianity by situating him and St. Mark, the evangelist to Alexandria, flanking the Virgin Mother and the Christ Child.Footnote ⁷⁴ In fact, in every celebration of the Eucharist, the Coptic Orthodox Church twice names St. Athanasius alongside St. Mark for his evangelism to Egypt, as well as Miaphysite teachers of the faith, St. Dioscorus of Alexandria (the Alexandrian pope deposed at the Council of Chalcedon in 451) and St. Severus of Antioch (the bishop of Antioch exiled to Egypt in the sixth century), plus “the 318 assembled at Nicaea, the 150 at Constantinople, and the 200 at Ephesus.” First, this set of saints is invoked in a prayer requesting the absolution of the ministers and all participants of the Eucharistic liturgy, and then they are named a second time in a prayer commemorating the saints.

The Coptic Orthodox Church makes extensive liturgical use of the creed, which is prescribed for recitation at every communal gathering of the faithful and even in personal daily prayers. It is the creed of the baptismal liturgy, the first hour of the daily office, the evening raising of incense, the morning raising of incense, all Eucharistic liturgies, the marriage liturgy, the funeral liturgy, and many more. A nineteenth-century manuscript presenting the daily office as practiced by the Monastery of St. Antony at the Red Sea introduces the creed with the following words: “This is the exposition of the faith arranged by the three councils, which is said at every divine liturgy [i.e., celebration of the Eucharist] and at the end of every prayer.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The “three councils” refers to the same three named in the Eucharistic prayers (Nicaea, Constantinople, and Ephesus). The faithful repeat the creed so many times that it is likely rare to find a Coptic Orthodox church-goer who does not know the creed by heart. It begins in the first-person plural, “We believe,” and is typically chanted, with only the final line sung, “We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.”

The reception of the creed in the liturgical services occurred in the period that led to the church’s alienation from Christians adhering to the Council of Chalcedon’s Definition of Faith in 451. Already in earlier decades of the fifth century, Pope Cyril had accused Bishop Nestorius of Constantinople of failing to understand the Nicene creed, a dispute which became the touchstone of all future Christological debate.Footnote ⁷⁶ The Nicene creed begins its article on the Son with a unitary subject, “one Lord Jesus Christ,” to whom are ascribed actions of both the pre-existent Logos (“begotten, not made,” “by whom all things were made”) and the human Jesus (“was incarnate,” “crucified for our sake”). Nestorius, St. Cyril argued, divided this unitary subject, professing instead “two Sons.” This accusation of failure to uphold the faith of Nicaea echoed throughout the Christological controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries and left an indelible imprint on the faith and liturgies of the Coptic Orthodox Church.

A late fifth-century bishop of Antioch in Roman Syria known as Peter the Fuller was one of the major Miaphysite figures who consolidated opposition to the Council of Chalcedon. He is credited with introducing two liturgical changes that remain hallmarks of Coptic Orthodox communal prayer life. First, to mark Miaphysite communities as the true upholders of Nicene faith, he introduced the chanting of the Nicene creed as part of the divine liturgy.Footnote ⁷⁷ Second, to mark the importance of the Theopaschite formula, he introduced a developed trisagion that not only interpreted the hymn, “Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us,” Christologically, but also elaborated it to include an explicitly Theopaschite formula: “Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, who was crucified for our sake, have mercy on us.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Like the creed, the developed trisagion holds an equally ubiquitous presence in the prayer life of Coptic Orthodox Christians.

While the centuries before and after the Council of Chalcedon in 451 may have seen the most intensive engagement with Nicene theology, the creed remained of great significance to the Coptic Orthodox Church. Once Arabic became the living language of the tradition, many original compositions would convey the Nicene faith in Arabic, both to ensure its transmission and to continue apologetics defending Miaphysites as guardians and heirs of Nicene faith.

In the 1990s, dialogues were held between the Oriental Orthodox Churches (of which the Coptic Orthodox Church is a member) and the Eastern Orthodox Churches. These dialogues resulted in theological agreement among the churches on the reception of the Nicene faith, which have in turn paved the way for many pastoral agreements. For example, in 2001, Pope Shenouda III (of the Coptic Orthodox Church) and Patriarch Petros VII (of the “Greek Orthodox,” that is, Chalcedonian, Church in Egypt) agreed to allow marriage between members of their respective communions.Footnote ⁷⁹

At the turn of the third millennium, the same Pope Shenouda III, who served as the Coptic Orthodox pope from 1971 to 2012, published a book called The Creed, which offers a phrase-by-phrase detailed exposition of the Nicene creed.Footnote ⁸⁰ The introduction names a wide-ranging intended readership among seminary students in Egypt and the diaspora, in Sunday School meetings, and in youth gatherings. I can attest to the dissemination of the book in the latter context, as I received a copy as a participant in the East Coast Coptic Youth Convention, a spiritual retreat convened for Coptic Orthodox high school youth residing in the northeast United States.

While the Nicene creed is the only creed of the Coptic Orthodox Church, the first hour of the daily office contains another Trinitarian confession of faith. It does not begin with the credal formula, “We believe.” Instead, a reading of Ephesians 4:1–15 segues directly into a Trinitarian confession:

Over time, the Nicene Creed supplanted many other creeds that had previously existed, but here may be a short creed that, perhaps like the Apostles’ Creed in the West, somehow avoided oblivion or entered into the prayer-life of the church despite the stature of the Nicene Creed.

The Coptic Orthodox Church breathes the Nicene Creed daily, weekly – in every sacred rhythm of the spiritual life. Received through Saints Athanasius, Cyril, Dioscorus, Severus, and other luminaries, the church continues to transmit the Nicene Creed through regular recitation as well as doctrinal instruction of the faithful.

What can we learn from Nicaea today from a Catholic perspective? Of course, many of the lessons of Nicaea are common to all Christian traditions. For this forum, however, I have chosen a few lessons – among many others – that are related to the Roman Catholic tradition.

1. The outbreak of the so-called Arian crisis is linked to the relationship between episcopal teaching and theological discourse, that is, the relationship between the Magisterium and theology. The evidence indicates that Alexander taught some topics of Trinitarian theology in public (Arius, Letter to Eusebius of Nicomedia [FNS 6.2]).Footnote ⁸⁶ Arius, in turn, reacted and publicly accused the bishop (Alexander of Alexandria, Letter to Alexander [FNS 8.9]). According to Constantine, the conflict broke out because some “philosophical questions” were asked “in public meetings” (Constantine, Letter to Alexander and Arius [FNS 24.6–8]). How should we interpret this evidence?

After reaching its zenith in the time of Origen, the didaskaleion (the theological school of Alexandria), gradually lost its autonomy from the episcopate, and its cultural influence diminished. Conversely, the episcopate grew stronger and gained greater control over the school. Naturally, this process was not without conflict. According to Origen, the apostles stated that “the Son was begotten of the Father before all ages” (De principiis 1 praef. 3); however, they did not explain how this occurred. The ministry of the bishop was to teach the apostolic preaching, whereas the task of the theologian was to offer a theological explanation of it. Yet, it seems that Bishop Alexander, at some point, struggled to explain in church how the Son was begotten – a topic that belonged to the scholastic setting. In Arius’s view, Alexander failed to respect the distinction between the bishop’s preaching in church and the exploratory discourse of the teacher in the school. Did the bishop present his own theological views to the church as part of the apostolic preaching, or was he simply making explicit the content of the apostolic kerygma? For present purposes, it is not necessary to answer this question.

Two issues were at stake: the distinction between the episcopal Magisterium and theological discourse, on the one hand, and the extent of the minimum content of the faith, on the other. These two aspects are interconnected. A healthy distinction between the episcopal Magisterium and theological discourse guarantees both the doctrinal unity of the Church and the appropriate space for theological pluralism. A theologian should not present his or her personal theological view as Magisterium, and the Magisterium must allow room for theological diversity. However, the problem is complex, because it is not always clear what belongs to the apostolic faith and what pertains to exploratory theological discourse. For the Nicene assembly, for example, the creed presented by Eusebius of Caesarea was not sufficient; the bishops requested specific additions: the homoousios and “from the ousia of the Father.” Catholic theology values both the doctrinal unity of the Church and the free exercise of theological reason. But holding these two elements together requires maintaining the distinction between the episcopal Magisterium and theological discourse and clarifying the minimal content of the Christian faith. The sufficiency of the Nicene Creed, or any other creed, was a matter of debate in the decades after the great Council. These issues, of course, have significant ecumenical implications.

2. The second lesson reminds us that even the most solemn magisterial texts were written in a historical setting and, therefore, require historical interpretation. The historical-critical method was not welcomed in Catholic biblical studies until the mid-twentieth century. Only after a long and arduous process did Catholic theology come to acknowledge that biblical texts must be interpreted using historical and philological methods. However, this awareness is less integrated into the study of the Magisterium of the Catholic Church.

According to Athanasius, the bishops at Nicaea proposed several biblical expressions to declare that the Son is like the Father in all things. The “Arians,” however, interpreted all these biblical verses to mean that “like” was common to both us and the Son. The Hellenistic cultural setting required a new language to faithfully express the meaning of Scripture. In other words, the Nicene faith had to express in Greek terms the relationship of the Son to the Father – the same relationship narrated in the Gospels. Faced with this challenge, the bishops could not find a biblical expression capable of excluding the “Arian” interpretation of the relationship between the Son and the Father. In these circumstances, the bishops were compelled to συναγαγεῖν – that is, to gather, harvest, identify, summarize, and compile the thought of the Scriptures – through the term homoousios (Athanasius, De decretis 20.1–3). This non-biblical term was intended to serve as a formula to express the Son’s divine identity univocally.

However, according to Eusebius of Caesarea, precisely when the homoousios was introduced into the Creed, it was necessary to explain its meaning: “The homoousios should not be said according to bodily passion, nor in reference to division, nor to any cutting of the Father’s subsistence. For it is not possible for the immaterial, intellectual, and incorporeal nature to be subject to any bodily passion; instead, it is appropriate to understand such things with divine and ineffable thoughts” (Eusebius of Caesarea, Letter to His Church [FNS 37.7]). In other words, from the very moment the homoousios was introduced into the Nicene Creed, it required interpretation.

The use of the expression ὁμοούσιος τῷ πατρί (“consubstatial to the Father”) in the Creed and the discussions about its interpretation, as attested by Eusebius, demonstrate that both Nicene and anti-Nicene authors employed philosophical elements to articulate and express their doctrine of the Christian God. Human thinking can be anti-philosophical, but never a-philosophical. Consequently, the proceedings of Nicaea remind us that not only Scripture but also the Magisterium must be interpreted using appropriate scholarly methods. The documents of Nicaea, Trent, and Vatican II were written within specific cultural contexts and, accordingly, with specific cultural languages. Therefore, they must be read and analyzed using critical and historical methods. In short, although the bishops struggled to produce a univocal formula, the key expression of the Nicene Creed – possibly the most solemn statement of ecclesiastical doctrine – is, like all human language, not exempt from the risk of interpretation.

3. A third lesson drawn from contemporary sources – one related to Catholic theology, but not exclusively – is the relational character of the expression “the Son is homoousios to the Father.” From the very beginning of Nicaea’s reception, the term homoousios has often been isolated from its grammatical context. It is essential to focus on the expression rather than the isolated term. The phrase “the Son is homoousios to the Father” (ὁμοούσιος τῷ πατρί) is constructed with the dative case – specifically, the dativus sociativus or associative dative – which implies two entities, one in relation to the other. Thus, the expression itself denotes a relationship between two distinct realities. This remark contradicts a Sabellian understanding of the formula, as it affirms the natural and, therefore, eternal correlativity of the Father and the Son. In addition, this understanding of “the Son is homoousios to the Father” sheds light on the intense twentieth-century debate concerning the relationship between the economic and the immanent Trinity – a debate in which Schoonenberg, Rahner, and Lafont, among others, took part. The eternal, natural relational character of the Father and the Son implies that Fatherhood and Sonship do not depend on the divine economy but on divine being.

In summary, after 1,700 years, the Council of Nicaea (325) still sheds light on the life and theology of the churches. I have tried to show that not only the doctrinal outcomes of Nicaea but also its procedures offer lessons for today. The process of cultural translation carried out by the Council – from biblical to philosophical language – was a major achievement for the fourth century and remains a lasting paradigm and stimulus for discovering the new languages required by every new cultural context.

Is Nicaea a shining star, or a muddy puddle? The fiery Reformer Richard Cox, later to become Bishop of Ely, notoriously contrasted the “lively fountains of the word of God” with the dreary “puddle of the fathers and councils.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Yet, only a few years later, Bishop John Jewel could enthusiastically invoke Nicaea and the fathers as guiding lights, sure authorities: “I am only a finger: these are clear and bright stars.”Footnote ⁸⁸ These divergent evaluations reflect abiding ambiguities within Anglicanism’s own self-identity, as a Church both Catholic and Reformed. This short piece will examine how Nicaea has acted as a catalyst for these tensions in the past and suggest how it might aid their (at least partial) resolution in the present.

The English Reformers’ decisive reassertion of the unique authority of Scripture was often expressed by a sharply negative attitude toward anything that savoured of ecclesial tradition, including Nicaea. Article VIII of the Church of England’s XXXIX Articles (its official statement of doctrine) retained a place for the Nicene Creed as one of three Creeds that were to be “received and believed” – but only insofar as its content could “be proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture.” This was partly a response to a Roman polemic that argued for the acceptance of contentious doctrines based on their conciliar promulgation. But it was also rooted in a deep conviction regarding the corruption of man’s nature by the Fall. Thus Article XXI states bluntly that councils “may err, and sometimes have erred, even in things pertaining unto God; wherefore things ordained by them as necessary to salvation have neither strength nor authority, unless it be declared that they be taken out of holy Scripture.” In this way, the Anglican affirmation of Scripture as the norma normans non normata injected a note of intrinsic provisionality and contingency into any merely ecclesial statement, even the Nicene Creed. We might characterise this as a “confessional” rather than “conciliar” reception of the Nicene faith, in which the doctrines of Nicaea were affirmed as compatible with Scripture, but Nicaea possessed no intrinsic authority of its own.

Centuries later, it was precisely this robust Protestant perspective on Nicaea that threatened to derail the first Lambeth Conference of 1867. As Anglicanism itself was redefined as a family of diverse churches spread across the world (rather than being an expression of Christianity uniquely tailored to the English people and their history), it encouraged the articulation of a more “conciliar” form of governance and ecclesial self-expression – and what better model could there be for such a renewed identity than the great ecumenical councils? However, in the tempestuous opening session of the Conference, sustained pushback from evangelical bishops succeeded in having a more “catholic” statement of the authority of patristic councils entirely removed and replaced by a reassertion of the traditional theology of the Articles. This victory was, arguably, short-lived, for the 1888 Lambeth Conference would come to adopt the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, a new summary of Anglican doctrine which singled out the Nicene Creed as the all-sufficient statement of the Christian faith. This was something of a double-edged sword: from this point onwards, the Nicene Creed had a new and abiding centrality in Anglican self-identity (and ecumenical outreach), but the particular Protestant context within which the Creed had been received was lost.

A further distinctively Anglican reception of the Nicene Creed was through its liturgy, as the Creed was retained by Thomas Cranmer in his new Prayer Book. It had been virtually unknown to English congregations before the Reformation: not only was the whole service in Latin, but the common practice had been for the laity to say the Apostles’ Creed in English, while the priest recited the Latin text of the Nicene Creed.Footnote ⁸⁹ In this sense, the Church of England’s liturgy radically democratized the Creed. Tellingly, Cranmer placed it immediately after the readings from Scripture, and immediately before the sermon, as a kind of “measuring rod” to help the congregation determine whether the preacher’s message was orthodox. The Creed was also rendered in the first person singular rather than plural, partly to harmonize with the Apostles’ Creed but also to emphasize the importance of genuine personal assent over merely corporate acknowledgement. The English Reformers also undertook a significant amount of patristic research to recover the authentic text of the Nicene Creed, in case its transmission had been affected by Roman corruption. Ironically, this resulted in a major textual error, which remains in the Prayer Book to this day: the removal of “holy” from the “one holy catholic and apostolic church.” It is a salutary reminder that the latest “scholarly” discovery should not always be adopted as superior!

Nicaea, then, was doctrinally demoted but liturgically embraced; it also proved very convenient as a badge of Anglican ecclesial respectability, a sign of commitment to the great historic verities of orthodoxy. A posture of Nicene fidelity increasingly became part of the Church of England’s claim to represent the recovery of the old learning of the primitive church, before the dastardly influence of Rome had obscured and corrupted the true faith. Similarly, the Roman charge of heresy could be answered by the Anglican divines’ hearty re-condemnation of all the heretics anathematized by the early councils. In this way, Nicaea was also useful as a means to exclude anabaptists and other radical religious opinions, who could thus be portrayed as dangerous anarchists, disruptive trouble-makers who fell outside the boundaries of venerable orthodox dogma.

Indeed, it is notable that despite the provocative adoption of sola scriptura, the actual understanding of the role of Nicaea that the Church of England promoted was still the basic patristic and medieval model of the unchanging faith being reaffirmed against new heresies. George Bull’s massive Defensio Fidei Nicaenae (1685) could acknowledge that the ante-Nicene fathers had used different words and modes of expression than the bishops of 325, but it still labored to demonstrate a fundamental continuity of belief that stretched from the New Testament to Athanasius. Nicaea, on this account, had not really said anything new, and Justin Martyr or Irenaeus or Tertullian would surely have affirmed the homoousion if they had just stopped to think about it. It was precisely this kind of perspective that stimulated John Henry Newman to write a fresh account of Nicaea that was, as he put it, no longer the work of mere “antiquarians and doctrinists,” but of the true “ecclesiastical historian.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Newman’s Arians of the Fourth Century (1833) destabilized the received Anglican assumption of a static patristic past, by demonstrating that the Arian crisis had forced a genuine development of doctrine at Nicaea. In this way, Newman encouraged a renewed attentiveness to the complexity and untidiness of the history of the early church and helpfully recovered something of Nicaea’s provocative strangeness. However, Newman’s attempt to establish objective criteria for doctrinal development led him (as his critics had feared) to argue for the necessity of the teaching office of Rome to arbitrate orthodoxy, which ultimately led him away from Anglicanism altogether.

As the Protestant openness to questioning received traditions had in some sense legitimized Newman’s reinterpretation of Nicaea, it also opened up a trajectory of reception of the Creed that departed not only from Anglicanism but from the Christian faith altogether. It was painstaking scholarship into the ante-Nicene fathers and into the texts of the earliest creeds that led men like William Whiston, Newton’s successor as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, to argue for the antiquity and validity of Arianism as the authentic biblical faith cruelly snuffed out by the unbiblical innovations of Nicaea. Whiston was subsequently expelled from his professorship precisely for his failure to subscribe to the creeds. It is an irony of history that those individuals most eager to assert that they hold to “No Creed but the Bible” have often been the quickest to fall away into sub-biblical error. In the twentieth century, it was this same radical reinterpretation of the patristic past that led Anglicans like John Robinson, Don Cupitt, and Maurice Wiles to commend a form of Christianity free of Nicene dogmatic commitments entirely.

The varied and complex reception of Nicaea in the Anglican tradition reflects the ambiguities of Anglicanism’s own ecclesial self-identity. Nicaea is to be demoted, but not disregarded, valued, but not venerated. For the Anglican Reformers, an undue emphasis on Nicene traditionalism might have threatened to obscure and occlude the gospel; today, the most potent threats to that same gospel might best be guarded by a Creed that so robustly enshrines biblical truths. The Anglican reception of Nicaea encourages us to take history seriously – not as an impediment to doctrinal clarity or ecclesial stability but rather as the arena of God’s purposes. The purpose of remembering Nicaea is not so much to reassure us of old certainties or the errors of familiar foes, but to draw us deeper into the good news of Jesus Christ. So, on this 1700th anniversary, we rightly behold the Creed but only so that we might better behold the Man.