Teaching Sermon: The Nicene Creed

By The Rev. Ted Thornton

The story of the Nicene Creed begins with what happened nearly three hundred years after Jesus’ crucifixion when secular and religious divisions brought the Roman Empire nearly to a breaking point. 
It’s a vast and contentious topic. So, I’m going to limit us to two guiding questions: What secular and theological forces were behind the formation of the Nicene Creed, and, what place should the Creed have for us in our spiritual and worship life today? 

Let’s begin by looking at something familiar: the Whiteman Windows behind the altar. Look behind the altar at the window just to the left of the cross at the top of the wooden arch. Can you see the ship and cross in the glass? And, can you see the Greek word in white glass just above the ship and cross? If you can’t see it, get a copy of the wonderful pamphlet describing those windows from our church website or the office. 

That Greek word oikoumene (Greek: οἰκουμένη) in the window is the single most important word in the New Testament for us Christians apart from the sayings of Jesus, and it’s the concept of oikoumene that guided the formulation of the Nicene Creed. Yes, by the way, oikoumene gives us our word ecumenical (also by the way our word economy: economics as an ecumenical activity? Hmm! Think about that. 

The root word is oikos, which translates literally as “household,” but in a wider, more global sense, the household that makes up the inhabited world. Forms of the word oikos appear 106 times in the Greek New Testament. Our New Testament writers were acutely aware how important the word is to the religious lives of Christians. 

The pamphlet about the Whiteman Windows will tell you that oikoumene translates as “one of many.” It’s more complicated than that. The term oikoumene is a combination of that Greek word oikos meaning “household” and another Greek word “mene” meaning “management.” Household management: this is the sense Aristotle used the word, his vision of our world as a coherent, well-managed household. 

Now, there is no escaping the fact that whenever the need to manage something arises, some degree of coercion usually isn’t far behind. Unity at the expense of diversity has always been trouble, and diversity at the expense of unity spells division, and division is never good. This means there will always be tension between the forces of unity and diversity. Attempts to resolve the tension have never worked in history: for starters think of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot The pursuit of perfection in human nature has always led to gargantuan amounts of bloodshed. 

For our purposes, the tension between unity and diversity was perhaps never so manifest as in the life of Aristotle’s most famous pupil, Alexander the Great. Alexander and his Greek and Roman successors including the Emperor Constantine used the term oikoumene to describe a vision of a global economic, communal, cultural, and political household, a universal household where unity embraced diversity and never descended into division. That was the vision. The reality was something different, as we shall see. 

We call Alexander’s brand of oikoumene “Hellenism,” because its cultural roots are in Greek culture, and “Hellas” is the ancient Greek word for Greece. Alexander dreamed of a unified world in which all people would share in the mutual pursuit of survival and happiness by cooperating fully with one another just as members of a single familial household ideally would. A glance at a map of the world after Alexander and his army rolled through shows the extent to which he made this dream come true. You’ll notice how many cities and regions were renamed with Greek names. Alexander wanted the world to be quite literally one big household, a vast melting pot of peoples and races all under the umbrella of Greek Hellenistic culture. To this end, he promoted racial mixing by encouraging his soldiers to intermarry with local women in conquered regions after which he gave them land upon which to build their homes. 

The Greek philosopher and biographer Plutarch (46-120 CE), in his treatise, "On the Fortunes of Alexander,” summed up Alexander's dream of a unified family of peoples with these words: “Brought together into one body . . . mixing all together in one loving cup.” 

The quest for a common “managed household” was further advanced through the institution of a universal coinage, universal use of the Greek language, compatible trade practices, and religion by importing the Greek gods into foreign cities everywhere, including Jerusalem, to the great dismay of some Jews, but not as many Jews as you might think. Much of Jerusalem was rebuilt in the Hellenistic style, and one of its most enthusiastic builders was the Jewish King, Herod the Great. 

Hellenistic cities were built with underground water delivery and sewage removal ducts that rendered these cities cleaner, healthier, more sanitary places to live than many others for the next two thousand years. Thanks to archaeology, today you can visit sections of these water and sewage systems that ran beneath the streets of Hellenistic Jerusalem. The famous Roman roads and postal service really did make material life better (the dark 1979 comedy movie, “Monty Python’s Life of Brian,” gets it right about this), and the inescapable fact is that most folks were willing to accept the coercion it took to maintain these standards. Followers of Jesus and other rebellious Jewish rabbis were the exception. After Jesus, there were many other exceptions to the rule, hence many more gospels than the four that made the final team, and many more writings laying claim to be Christian. 
Thanks to the influence of Alexander, what we call the “Old Testament” or “Hebrew Bible” was translated into Greek (guess where), not in Jerusalem, but in the newly constructed city of Alexandria, built on the site of the ancient Egyptian city of Rhacotis and renamed in honor of its conqueror. It was completed in the second century BCE and bears the title “Septuagint,” Greek for “Seventy,” so named because it was thought around seventy scholars were involved in the project. 

For a long time, most people living under Greco-Roman rule thanked the global dream of Alexander the Great for that. And, after Alexander died and the oikoumene began to break apart it was the Romans who put it back together again stronger than ever (yes, the Romans were Hellenists, too, through and through1). In addition to the word oikoumene, the Romans used a Latin phrase very familiar to those of us who still carry dollar bills around: e pluribus unum, “out of many one.” The great Roman statesman Cicero put it this way, “When each person loves the other as much as himself, it makes one out of many.” 

So, why spend so much time discussing this strange Greek word oikoumene in our window behind me? Because outside the New Testament, it’s that very secular Greek word that is perhaps most responsible for creating the spirit governing the creation of the Nicene Creed and for defining ourselves as Christians: people of God who strive to live in loving communion with one another under one roof in a unified “household” governed by faith. 

The chink in the armor of the oikoumene was the possibility that force would be used to maintain it. Usually, it took relatively soft power to keep order. When that didn’t work, the iron fist came down. The philosophical vision of “household management” that Aristotle passed down to his student Alexander ensured that the quest for common creeds quickly became exclusionary in Christian history. The fact is, there have always been multiple creeds in Christianity. Interestingly, the Greek word that gives us our word “heresy,” originally meant “choice,” not something to be condemned. Early Christians had many choices until “management” stepped in under Constantine. 

Okay, so Why did Constantine call the bishops to Nicea in the first place? Alexander’s dream of a singular world oikoumene didn’t last long. No sooner had he died of fever in Iraq while marching his army back home to Macedon than his generals fell to squabbling with each other and the dominion began to fall apart. The Romans, who inherited the remains of Alexander’s empire, tried hard to keep it together, but for a while fared even worse. There was indeed a period of a hundred years of genuine peace and order under Caesar Augustus, but otherwise it was chronic instability nearly everywhere. For the next 132 years after Marcus Aurelius (ruled 121-180) until the accession of Constantine, forty emperors were either assassinated or met some other violent death, a few of them through torture. One sad joke making the rounds in those times ran that a gladiator stood a better chance of surviving his contest in the Colosseum than did an emperor of escaping assassination. In addition, the imperial bureaucracy was riddled with corruption and inefficiency. 

Then there were the so-called “barbarian invasions”: mainly Germans from the north and Persians from the East. These movements of people into the empire, which was roughly the size of the continental United States, put pressure on increasingly scarce resources. Described in histories as “invasions,” for the most part they resembled the recent flood of illegal immigrants across our southern border states, people seeking a better life. 
As if all this weren’t bad enough, the empire had recently come through a pandemic. We aren’t sure what virus or bacterium caused it but that pandemic wiped out ten percent of the population of the empire, and at its height in Rome itself it was killing 5,000 people a day. 

Under such conditions of extreme social stress, it became so difficult to maintain civil order that it was decided to divide the empire into four quadrants. This tetrarchy (or rule of four emperors) was established by the Emperor Diocletian in 293. 

Constantine became emperor in the year 306 (d. 337) and thereby inherited this mess. He immediately set out to revitalize the oikoumene and restore unity. He abolished the tetrarchy in favor of his own singular rule; and in the year 313, he propagated what was known as the Edict of Milan, proclaiming our religion as officially recognized and protected. 

The problem was that our religion by that time had become riven with sectarianism. This was the immediate reason Constantine in the year 325 convened an ecclesiastical council, what came to be called the First Ecumenical Council (there’s our word oikoumene again!) in the ancient city of Nicea where the Turkish city of Iznik is located today. All that was needed was a catalyst to get the ball rolling toward the Nicene Creed, and that catalyst was a theological dispute we know as the “Arian Controversy.”
Arianism was a theological doctrine, attributed to a Christian Priest from Libya named Arius. He held that Christ, whom Christians proclaimed as the "Son of God," was not actually divine, but physically created and therefore changeable, not eternal. In short, Christ was mortal. And so, to dispel Arianism, the council drew up a "creed" that described the oneness of God the Father and the Son using the Greek word homoousion ("one substance" - GK, ὁμοούσιον). The scriptural reference taken to support this definition was John 10 verse 30, “I and the Father are one.” 

Arianism was duly rejected. The hope was that this change would lead to religious unity in the Church and and with it civil and social unity. Unhappily, that didn’t happen. Ambiguities in the homoousion ("one substance") formula sparked fresh arguments and created the need for follow up councils. A Second Ecumenical Council in 381 was held in Constantinople (modern Istanbul) and that is when most of the final wording we use was put in place. 

But, the theological tinkering and wordsmithing continued in the Third Ecumenical Council which was held in the city of Ephesus in 431. This council featured wrangling over the status of Christ’s mother Mary. Then came in 451 the Fourth Ecumenical Council, this one at Chalcedon in the modern city of Kadıköy (Kadikoy), near Istanbul. At Chalcedon, Christ was affirmed to be one person with two full and complete natures one human the other divine. However, this formula made matters even worse because Christians to the east of Rome couldn’t tolerate the dual nature creed. 

Over the following centuries, other differences arose leading to the formal break in 1054 that created the Roman Catholic Church in the West and the Orthodox churches in the East. Theological differences aside, the real problem was regionalism: what Christians living to the east really resented was a pope in Rome telling them what they should do and not do and what they should believe. Most Eastern Christians, then, with some exceptions, affirmed that Christ had one nature only and this nature was divine, not human. Hence, they came to be called Monophysites (Greek for "one nature"). Today, the chief examples of Monophysite Christianity are the Syrian, Armenian, and Coptic (Egyptian) Churches. 

So went the process we call “the Christological controversies,” which can be summed up as arguments about the nature of Jesus Christ: “How human was he, and how divine?” 

It may be hard for some of us to understand what caused people at the time to get so riled up over this question until we consider how the forces of regionalism in our country, for example, are pitting the urbanized coastal regions against the more rural “heartland,” as it’s called; and how political instability, immigration, and a vicious recent pandemic have eroded our own national sense of unity and mutual trust today. 

What’s less forgivable about all this is how the regional power struggles in Constantine’s realm corrupted perhaps the most orthodox expression of our Christian faith, a failure to accept the relationship of God, Christ, and Spirit (our holy Trinity) for what it is: a mystery, a holy mystery. It’s a failure stemming from the hubristic (prideful) sin of thinking it possible that we could ever reduce the greatest mystery of life, the nature of divine reality, to rational concepts like “substance” and “nature.” God and Christ remain a mystery, a holy mystery, in theological parlance, ineffable, that is to say, indescribable, inexpressible, undefinable. We experience this mystery symbolically and spiritually, not rationally. It can only happen when we perform what the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard called “the leap of faith.” Saying the Nicene Creed meaningfully takes a leap of faith. The Creed - any creed - functions as a holy reminder that as members of God’s creation we are part of something much bigger than ourselves, something that continues to call us into ever widening circles of loving connectedness in this “household” of ours: connectedness with God and with God’s creation. Creeds remind us that indeed there is more to life and more to reality than what meets the eye. 

Having seen how the Creed came to be and how it functions, let’s turn our attention now to that second guiding question: How should we align ourselves with the use of the Creed in our worship today? 

I don’t think there is a single right creed or any single right way to say it. I suspect I share this view with at least some of you. When it comes to the Nicene Creed or any other affirmation of faith, I don’t think a coercive common response is right. Personally, I do strive to listen carefully to every word of the Nicene Creed as I recite it because for me it’s a way I can connect with other people of faith past and present stretching back two millennia. That approach may not work for you. 

Sometimes as we recite the Creed my attention strays. When that happens, the sound of other voices - your voices surrounding me - calls me back and reminds me that we’re engaged in a communal act that draws us together and connects us with the voices of all the Christians who’ve come before us. In these moments, we’re no longer individuals but a community of believers, the body of Christ, one ecumenical “household.” We are at least for that moment a bona fide oikoumene. 

One of the obstacles preventing the Creed from occupying a more central place in our spiritual lives is our radical American individualism, which we inherited from the European Enlightenment by way of thinkers like John Locke and David Hume. The French writer Alexis de Tocqueville in his two volume Democracy in America written after his visit here in the 1830s was anxious even back then about our excessive individualism. And, in his recent (2022) book,2 Bill McKibben chides us for what he calls our “hyper individualism.” I think excessive individualism is chiefly responsible for the difficulty some of us have reciting the creed and the difficulty a larger number of Americans have belonging to organized religion in general, not to mention the political madness that is presently tearing us apart. We Americans frequently forget that we are a “household” here on what Native Americans used to call “Turtle Island.” 

For this reason, the best starting point isto remember that when we recite the Creed, we begin by saying, “We believe.” It's that sense of “we-ness,” the first person plural denoting connection and oneness with others, that permeates the whole recitation. Reciting the Creed reminds us of the promise we made or was made on our behalf at our baptisms: the promise that God is at the very heart of every breath we take and everything we do here in this “household” of ours. 

On the subject of whether the holy mysteries of our faith should be sung or recited, I’m with the late Yale Professor of Medieval History, Jaroslav Pelikan, who argued that the Creed should be sung, as we do here in this church on high holy days, not merely recited. This reminds me of the famous formula attributed to Saint Augustine, Qui cantat, bis orat: “Whoever sings prays twice.” 

In the final analysis, the Nicene Creed is one way, among many, we express our identity as a “household,” an oikoumene. We also call ourselves “the Body of Christ,” but I confess I like “household,” too, maybe even more. The “management” part of oikoumene and the implied threat of coercion I can do without. 

But, the Nicene Creed need not be the only way to affirm our faith in public worship. As I said at the outset, I don’t think we will ever resolve the tension between unity and diversity in human behavior and I despair about the presence of coercion in human relations. I do think we should celebrate the alternate creeds we recite here at Saints James and Andrew (such as the wonderful South Indian Profession of Faith we recited here in place of the Nicene Creed last week). We have many possible ways to affirm and articulate our faith. Affirming our faith in different words is good for our spiritual selves just as a varied diet of healthy food is good for our bodily selves. 

The Nicene Creed was an imperfect, over-rationalized attempt to express what means most to us and a response to civil power struggles and disorder. The tumultuous history out of which it emerged, including the many attempts to refine it, stands in stark contrast to its place in the hearts of many of us today and to the millions of Christian hearts that have adored it these past two thousand years. Is it time to set it aside? 

Constantine’s admittedly coercive attempt to impose unity has been labeled a “heresy” by his severest critics, and they don’t mean heresy in the old sense as a “choice.” Similar coercive attempts to impose unity where regionalism threatens to undo it have occurred in other religions. Unhappily, households of all kinds can slip into intolerance, authoritarianism, and repression. The dynamics of coercion and conquest remain an omnipresent threat, never far from the surface in every relationship, from family households to entire civilizations. If our guiding principle is that we love one another, as Jesus put it in his new commandment to us in John 13:34, then we must remember that Jesus took love as something we do, not something we believe: we must walk the walk, not just talk it. So, think of creeds as things that remind us what we should do in our lives, not just things that bounce around in our heads. When we say in a moment, “We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,” tell yourselves that those words translate into our commitment to act out that new commandment - to love one another - as Jesus delivered it to us in John 13:34. 

But. loving one another should never be restricted to any particular set of words. For this reason, I think it's spiritually healthy to prayerfully consider other ways of expressing what theologian Paul Tillich used to call the “ultimate concern” at the center of our lives. 

In the meantime, I hope we will continue to grant the Creed a place in our liturgical life and at the same time remain open to exploring alternatives as the Holy Spirit leads us. God has revealed Godself in many different ways beginning with how we perceive God throughout the Bible. It follows that we be drawn to a variety of ways to express how we experience divine reality. 
Amen.

1 Rome was perhaps the least original civilization in history. The Romans borrowed freely from the Greeks. Even the Greek gods had their temples in Rome: Zeus was renamed Jupiter, Aphrodite was renamed Venus, and so on.

2 The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon, 2022, 118ff.

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