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The Nicene Creed: A Turning Point

Canon J. N. D. Kelly
Scottish Journal of Theology / Volume 36 / Issue 01 / February 1983, pp 29 - 39
DOI: 10.1017/S0036930600016240, Published online: 02 February 2009

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How to cite this article:
Canon J. N. D. Kelly (1983). The Nicene Creed: A Turning Point.
Scottish Journal of Theology, 36, pp 29-39 doi:10.1017/
S0036930600016240
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Scot. Journ. of Theol. Vol. 36, pp. 29-39.

THE NICENE CREED:

ATURNING POINT1
by T H E R E V . CANON J . N. D. K E L L Y

I
other lectures at this Conference have explored the
Wdeeperthetheological
issues raised by the Nicene Creed, the aims of
HILE

this lecture are primarily historical. I should like to tell you something
of the origins of the creed, and how it came to be adopted or at least
used at the First Council of Constantinople in October 381.
Theology will of course make its appearance, for it was in the context of
the acrimonious theological debates of the fourth century that the
creed emerged; and there is a profound sense in which, as I shall very
briefly suggest, its adoption marked a significant turning-point. But
my treatment of the theological background, and of the theological
revolution of which it was the token, will remain historical.
There is one misunderstanding, not I imagine shared by professional
scholars or experts in Christian institutions who may be present but
certainly widespread among educated people, which I must clear out
of the way at the outset. The creed we are considering is not only
widely known in a general way, being used by all the major branches of
the Christian Church, but is probably as familiar to people without
theological training as to trained scholars through its liturgical use at
the eucharist. And the title we all give it, and by which the originators
of this Conference have chosen to describe it, is the Nicene Creed. In
fact, however, while it can fairly be described as a Nicene creed, as a
creed embodying the Nicene theology, it is not in strictness of language
the Nicene Creed. The council of Nicaea, the first of the so-called
ecumenical councils, was held at Nicaea in Bithynia in June 325,
almost sixty years before the council of Constantinople. Its purpose, in
the mind of the emperor Constantine and his advisers, was to establish
a common Christian faith against the divisive allegations of Arius and
his talented coterie of friends that the Word or Son was not God in the
1
A lecture delivered at the Colloquium in Commemoration of the Nicene Creed, at
New College, University of Edinburgh, 2nd May 1981. Much ofihis lecture reproduces,
in a form adapted to a non-specialist audience, the argument developed in chap, x of my
Early Christian Creeds (3rd edition).

29

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S C O T T I S H J O U R N A L OF T H E O L O G Y

full sense but a kind of demigod, far superior to ordinary human beings
but inferior to the ineffable God. This aim the council achieved by
publishing a creed which all the bishops present were required, on pain
of excommunication, to sign. This is of course the authentic Nicene
Creed, and for convenience scholars distinguish it from other creeds
(including the one we are considering) by the initial letter N. While it
bears (especially in translation, in which subtle details are lost) a
superficial resemblance to our creed, it is a much shorter statement, as
is illustrated most strikingly by its closing section. While the closing
section of our creed has a full-dress exposition concerning the Holy
Spirit and then goes on to affirm belief in the one baptism, the
resurrection of the dead, etc., the third or closing article of the original
Nicene creed consists of a single terse clause, 'and in the Holy Spirit'.
The reason for its reticence is that the bishops attending the council
were not concerned to elaborate a full doctrine of the Spirit or to go
into the other items later to be dwelt on by our creed. They were
interested in one thing only, the refutation of Arius and his friends; and
this they accomplished or, rather, a small, determined group of
them accomplished by thrusting awkwardly into a sample creed
they had in front of them affirmations which they knew would be
totally unacceptable to the 'heretics', notably the affirmations that the
Son was derived from the essence or being of the Father, and was one in
being (homoousion) with him. They rammed this message home by
appending a string of anathemas which were an integral part of the
creed: whereas our creed has no anathemas and ends triumphantly
with the proclamation of life in the world to come.

II
Let us direct our attention now specifically to our creed, which the
liturgies name the Nicene creed but for which scholars prefer, for
reasons which will become clear, the cumbrous but revealing
designation of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan creed. For convenience
we shall label it C. The question which concerns us is its history, and
more particularly its connexion with the council held at
Constantinople in October 381. This council, may I remind you, was
convened by the emperor Theodosius I to restore unity in the Eastern
Church and to restore it on the basis of the Nicene faith that the Son
was one in being with the Father. Although neither Western bishops
nor representatives of the pope (Damasus I) were present, its

THE NICENE CREED

31

achievement was sufficiently significant for it to come eventually to be

regarded as the second ecumenical council.
The ancient answer to our question, an answer going back (as I shall
explain in a moment) to the middle of the fifth century at any rate, was
that our creed C was the definition of faith formulated and published
by the council of Constantinople. Until recently most modern scholars
have felt unable to accept this answer, although there have been three
or four eminent ones this century who have thrust their necks out and
done so. Nevertheless the traditional description of C, from the fifth
century until the birth of scientific investigation of credal origins, was
'the faith (pistis) of the 150 fathers' (one hundred and fifty being the
accepted figure for the participating members of the council). This
explanation of the creed's origins goes back at least to the council of
Chalcedon, which as you recall met in 451 and formulated what has
ever since been the orthodox definition of the union of divine and
human in Christ the God-man. At that council, the minutes of which
survive and can be studied in Schwartz's magisterial edition, the
original Nicene creed (N) was publicly read out and acclaimed at the
second session (10th October), and then the imperial commissioners
ordered 'the faith of the 150 fathers' to be read out too. The
archdeacon of Constantinople, Aetius, immediately got up and
recited our creed (C) from a written text. It again played a prominent
part at the fifth and sixth sessions (22nd and 25th October), when it
was incorporated along with N in the definition adopted by the
council.
11 is important to emphasise that, when C was read out as the symbol
of the council of Constantinople, no one at Chalcedon raised the
slightest objection or protest. Admittedly, the applause with which it
was greeted (as the minutes betray) was cooler, less enthusiastic than
the cheers with which N was received; but that is entirely comprehensible in view of N's extraordinary and universal prestige.
Nevertheless the majority of critics, in both the last century and the
present one, have rejected the view that C is a creed promulgated at
Constantinople in 381. The reasons for their scepticism can be briefly
summarised. First, as these scholars read it, the surviving evidence for
the council's work does not seem to suggest that it published any creed
or formal definition of its own. Secondly, all the reports of
contemporary or near-contemporary historians and other writers
agree that the object of the council was 'to ratify the Nicene faith' (so
Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret, etc.), and this has been taken, not

32

SCOTTISH J O U R N A L OF T H E O L O G Y

unnaturally, to mean the reaffirmation of the original Nicene creed

(N). Thirdly, these scholars point out that there is a seemingly absolute
silence regarding a Constantinopolitan creed between 381 and 451, in
spite of the fact that a number of synods and councils were held at
which a reference to it, if it in fact existed, would have been natural.
Thus Harnack argued long ago that there was not the slightest trace in
the period 381 -451, whether in the official records of synods eastern or
western or in the writings of theologians orthodox or heterodox, of the
existence of C, much less any hint of its being the ekthesis sponsored by
the fathers of Constantinople. T h e coup de grace seemed to have been
decisively, and humiliatingly, administered when it was pointed out
that our creed C featured as a recommended baptismal confession in
the Ancoratus, published by Epiphanius of Salamis almost a decade
before the council of Constantinople.
Such considerations might seem fatal to the traditional hypothesis,
but they themselves suffer from serious weaknesses. Perhaps the most
important is that, if the traditional account is abandoned, we still have
the problem of explaining the attitude of the Chalcedonian fathers.
Although C was much less warmly received by the majority than the
ancient Nicene creed, no one ventured to question its claim to be the
publication of the council of Constantinople. Their acceptance of it is
incredible unless they were satisfied that it was, and since it was
rehearsed by the archdeacon of Constantinople they could in case of
doubt consult the archives from which he drew his text. T h e critics
admit that C must have had some connexion with Constantinople, but
until comparatively recent times their attempts to show what this was
have tended to suggest an artificial or largely fortuitous linkage. Again,
the argument which I called the humiliating coup de grace has itself been
exposed as an insubstantial bogy, for it has been established beyond
any shadow of doubt that the creed which stood in the original text of
Epiphanius's Ancoratus, published several years before our council, was
not in fact C but N. Finally, the claim that there is not a particle of
fourth- or fifth-century evidence (apart of course from the Chalcedonian minutes) indicating that the council of Constantinople had
shown any interest in creed-making has been called in question. Both
Ed. Schwartz and others have drawn attention to a number of patristic
passages dating from the period 381 -451 which state or imply that the
150 fathers of Constantinople were understood to have made additions
to the sacrosanct text of N with the object of dealing with theological
issues which had not been raised at the time of Nicaea.

THE NICENE CREED

33

III

At this point scholarly debate about the creed and its provenance
seemed to have reached an impasse. Although important difficulties
had been disposed of, there still remained, as an apparently
unsurmountable obstacle to accepting the tradition that C was the
creed of the council of 381, the fact that the weight of contemporary
evidence, as well as the reports of historians, clearly suggested that the
work of the council was confined to endorsing or confirming the Nicene
faith. The first and necessary step to finding a way out of this impasse
was taken in this country in the first edition of my Early Christian Creeds
(1950) in which, working on suggestions put forward by the
distinguished Belgian scholar, Pere J. Lebon, I drew attention to an
important fact which had hitherto passed unnoticed. It is a
circumstance of immense significance that, from the time of the council
of Constantinople and probably well before that, and also for
generations after Chalcedon, the description 'the faith of Nicaea', or
'the faith, symbol, or ekthesis of the 318 fathers' (the number
traditionally held to have been present at Nicaea), was not in ordinary
patristic usage applied solely to N in its pure, authentic form. It could
equally well be used of a creed, local or otherwise, which was patently
Nicene in its general character and import, even although it might
differ from N in much of its phraseology. It is of course impossible, in a
lecture like this, to set out the evidence for this in full; I must content
myself with selecting for you one single, rather striking item of it. We
possess the catechetical lectures which Theodore, bishop of Mopsuestia in Cilicia, delivered around 400 to candidates preparing for
baptism. In these he expounds the creed, and it is possible to
reconstruct the formula he was using with a high degree of accuracy.
Now the study of this formula reveals two interesting and relevant
facts. First, while it includes prominently the Nicene key-phrases
'begotten from the Father', 'not made', and 'of one substance with his
Father', it is in language, content and general style a very different
creed from N; indeed, it is much closer in wording and manner to our
creed C, and like it not only lays stress on the Lord's birth from the
Virgin and crucifixion under Pontius Pilate, but has a third article
dwelling on the procession of the Holy Spirit the life-giver, the one
baptism, the one holy catholic church, remission of sins, and
resurrection to eternal life. Secondly, in spite of its great and manifest

34

S C O T T I S H J O U R N A L OF T H E O L O G Y

divergence from the original Nicene creed, this elaborate confession

was designated the Nicene creed by Theodore in his lectures. The
inescapable inference is that any orthodox credal formula which
embodied the full-blooded Nicene theology in the characteristic
terminology of N qualified, in the accepted usage of fourth- and fifthcentury writers, for the title of Nicene creed.
A revealing illustration, from a rather different point of view, of the
readiness of fifth-century churchmen to apply expressions like 'the
faith of Nicaea' much more loosely than scholars previously allowed or
appreciated is provided by the minutes of the third session of
Chalcedon. When the Nicene creed in its original wording had been
recited, the assembled fathers hailed it with excited shouts: 'In this we
were baptized, in this we baptize.' Now it is pretty certain that N was
hardly ever, if indeed ever normally, employed for baptism; no one in
any case could possibly believe that it was at any stage the exclusive
baptismal formula of the church. The clear implication of the bishops'
acclamation is that they were prepared to treat any baptismal creed
which contained the Nicene theology and the characteristic Nicene
slogans as identical with the Nicene creed proper.
With this important discovery as our guide we can descry, in a
general way at any rate, a way out of the impasse. The explanation
which fits the apparently contradictory facts is that the council of
Constantinople did in fact, at some stage in its proceedings, endorse
and use our creed C, but in doing so it did not conceive of itself as
promulgating a new creed. Its sincere intention, perfectly understood
by contemporary churchmen, was simply to confirm and ratify the
Nicene faith. That it should do this by adopting what was really a
different formula from that of Nicaea may appear paradoxical to us,
until we recall that at this stage importance attached to the Nicene
teaching and the Nicene controversial key-words rather than to the literal
text of N. It is improbable that the council actually composed C. The
whole style of the creed, its graceful balance and smooth flow, convey
the impression of a liturgical piece which had emerged naturally in the
life and worship of the Church, rather than of a conciliar artefact. C
was probably already in existence when the council took it up,
although it is likely that the fathers touched it up here and there to suit
their purposes. In settling on C as a suitable formulary the council
assumed without question that it was reaffirming the Nicene faith, but
it was no doubt guided in its choice by the conviction that this
particular formulation of the Nicene teaching, as modified by

THE NICENE CREED

35

whatever additions it had thought fit to make, was peculiarly well

adapted to meet the special situation with which it was dealing.

IV
Can we take a further, final step and identify both the special
situation in which the council came to adopt C and the form of
endorsement it gave it? Hitherto scholars had to be content with
vague, general suppositions, but in 1965 an attractive and satisfying
solution was propounded by a brilliant German researcher, A. M.
Ritter, in his masterly study of the council and its creed. 2 Briefly, his
proposal was that the creed was put forward officially at the council
during discussions with a delegation of Macedonian or Pneumatomachian bishops led by Eleusius of Cyzicus. The object of these
discussions, as we learn from Socrates and Sozomen, was to bring
about an accommodation between the orthodox majority, who
accepted the divinity and consubstantiality of the Spirit, and the
Macedonians, who contested this doctrine; and Ritter gave good
reasons for our believing (a) that they should be placed, not at the
commencement of the council (as had been generally supposed), but
after the death of bishop Meletius, the first president, when Gregory of
Nazianzus was acting as president; and (b) that the initiative both for
getting them going and for indicating the line to be followed must have
lain with emperor Theodosius himself. Flying in the face of all
reasonable probability, he must have hoped, in his keenness to
establish church unity on as wide a basis as possible, that at least the
less intransigent Macedonians could be won over; and to this end he
must have induced the reluctant majority to hold out an olive branch
to them.
That this is not guess-work but fact, and that in all probability the
olive branch took the form of C, Ritter effectively argued by drawing
attention to a striking passage in the long autobiographical poem
which Gregory of Nazianzus composed in his retirement and which
(although its importance has been generally neglected) constitutes in
the relevant sections an eye-witness, if heavily prejudiced, account of
events at the council. In this passage 3 Gregory bitterly complains that
at the council he had been compelled to witness 'the sweet and
1

Das Konzil von Konstantinopel undsein Symbol (Gottingen).

' Carm. hist, x i , 1 7 0 3 - 1 4 ( P G 3 7 , 1 1 4 8 f ) .

36

SCOTTISH J O U R N A L OF THEOLOGY

beauteous spring of our ancient faith, which gathered in unity the

adorable nature of the Trinity, being wretchedly befouled with briny
infusions poured into it by double-minded men sharing the beliefs
favoured by august Majesty who claim to be mediators how
admirable if they really were mediators and not blatantly adherents of
the contrary cause!' Stripped of diplomatic and poetic obscurities, the
obvious implication of these lines is that the Nicene creed, the
palladium of Nicene orthodoxy, had been tampered with and, in the
supposed interests of unity and to satisfy the imperial will, had had
additions intruded into it which, in Gregory's opinion, were
unsatisfactory to the point of blasphemy. T h a t these mediating
concessions were designed to placate Macedonians is clearly indicated
by Gregory's later statement that, as a result, the church had now
opened its doors to 'Moabites and Ammonites', for this was the
uncomplimentary description he liked to apply to the contentious
people who questioned the divinity of the Holy Spirit. As is well
known, he himself not only believed in the divinity and consubstantiality of the Spirit (as did the other Cappadocians), but was
content with nothing less than their full and frank proclamation and
had no use for their diplomatic watering down.
We may conclude, then, that in the course of the discussions with the
Macedonians the council put forward, as a statement of belief which
might be acceptable to all parties, a version of 'the Nicene creed'
modified by additional matter concerning the Holy Spirit which fell
short of what Gregory (who was fully aware that N needed
supplementing at this point) deemed adequate. From this it is an easy
step to identify the formula proposed with C, which by studiously
refraining from calling the Spirit 'God' and 'consubstantial' might
seem to be stretching out an irenical hand to Christians, like the
Macedonian group, who rejected his fully divine status. To be sure,
Gregory did less than justice to its sponsors by condemning it so
sharply as a betrayal of the true faith. A careful analysis of the section
on the Holy Spirit reveals that, for all its tactful avoidance of language
that would arouse Macedonian prejudices, it in fact contained a
pneumatology that was in substance all that Gregory could have
desired. For example, the all-important clause WHO WITH THE FATHER
AND THE SON IS TOGETHER WORSHIPPED AND TOGETHER GLORIFIED precisely reflects Basil the Great's view that the Spirit should be glorified
along with the Father and the Son because of the conviction that he is
not alien to them but shares the divine nature. As is well known, the

THE NICENE CREED

37

council was determined to assert the full consubstantiality of the Spirit,

but many in the orthodox camp were still uneasy about the frank
description of him as God and consubstantial with the Father and the
Son which was becoming de rigueur and preferred, as Basil had done,
more cautious modes of expression. Bearing this in mind, and also
recalling that the aim ofTheodosius at this phase of the council was the
conciliatory one of uniting as many as possible on the basis of the
Nicene faith, we can appreciate that C's firm but temperately worded
theology of the Spirit corresponded, so far as its substance was
concerned, with the real convictions of the orthodox majority, and in
its expression went so far as they deemed prudent to meet the
susceptibilities of the Macedonian delegation.
Not surprisingly, the delegation soon decided that no worthwhile
compromise was being offered them, for the supposed concessions were
(pace Gregory) largely verbal. The negotiations broke down, the
dissatisfied Macedonians packed their bags and departed, and the
creed lost its original raison d'etre. But since the council had adopted
and used it in the abortive discussions, it was the council's creed. This
account of its origins also explains the curious silence about it as an
independent confession. If the council really had framed a new creed
and published it as such under its own name, it is inconceivable that
every trace of such a momentous happening should have disappeared.
On the other hand, if what the council did was to reaffirm the Nicene
faith in the form of C in the context of its unsuccessful negotiations with
the Macedonian group, everything becomes clear. We should not
expect to come across separate references to C until the original text of
N began to be disentangled from the ambiguous formula 'the faith of
the Nicene fathers'. Nevertheless, since the council had adopted C at a
critical juncture in its proceedings and had used it as a negotiating
instrument, C can with justification claim to be the creed of the 150
fathers of the council, and all the more so as they had promulgated no
other.
V
This is all I propose to say about the history of the creed which is
awkwardly but, I think, accurately described as NicehoConstantinopolitan. In the few minutes still at my disposal I must try
to say something about the claim advanced in the title that it marks a
turning point.

38

S C O T T I S H J O U R N A L OF T H E O L O G Y

Throughout the fourth century a fateful intellectual debate

continued, with Nicaea and Constantinople as the focal points and
their two creeds, N and C, as the public tokens of the great shift in
theological emphasis that was taking place. The subject of the debate
was the understanding of God and the conceptual devices by which the
cardinal features of the Christian revelation were to be accommodated
in it. From the external point of view the debate appeared to be a
struggle between the orthodox tradition of the full divinity of Christ on
the one hand and the manifold forms of Arianism on the other; and so
it tends to be represented in histories both of the development of
doctrine and of the Church. But deeper issues were also at stake. At
Nicaea a small, determined minority succeeded in getting the
homoousion inserted in the creed, and for generations this was the bone
of contention between the fiercely warring theological parties. At
Constantinople the doctrine of the consubstantiality of the Son was
finally vindicated, and the homoousion was extended, in guarded
language in the creed but openly in the council's public teaching, 4 to
the Holy Spirit. Arianism was therefore finally crushed in the great
church, although it continued, usually in moderate forms, to retain the
allegiance of millions among the barbarians outside or in the frontier
provinces of the empire. All this is a familiar story. What is not always
noticed, however, is the profound intellectual revolution which the
triumph of the new orthodoxy at the two great councils implied. To
make my point as clearly and as simply as I can, prior to Nicaea the
accepted Christian doctrine of God was an Origenistic one of a holy
Triad, of an ineffable Godhead with two subordinate and, in the last
resort, disparate hypostases; but after Nicaea the pressure group which
pushed through the introduction of the homoousion dragged, if you will
forgive the crude metaphor, these two inferior hypostases within
the divine essence. During the four or five decades following Nicaea
the predominant view in the church continued to be Origenistic,
pluralistic; that applies as much to an orthodox leader such as Cyril
of Jerusalem as to Eusebius of Caesarea and Arians of right and left
wing. But once the creed of Constantinople both reaffirmed and
supplemented the Nicene creed proper, there could be no future
for such pluralism. The Son and the Spirit were 'one in being' (as
we now translate homoousion) with the Father, and the Godhead
was an indivisible unity expressing itself in three eternal modes differ4

cf. the tomos of the council of 382: Theodoret, hist. ecct. 5, 9, iof. (GCS 44, 292).

THE NICENE CREED

39

ing only in their relations. The Nicene creed, in its original form N
and its more mature development C, symbolised this far-reaching
revolution.
J. N. D. KELLY

St. Edmund Hall

Oxford