The year 2025 is the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed, and many conferences, seminars, and papers are commemorating its history and significance. Before I knew much about the creed, I would continuously hear two reasons why we do not need to take it seriously.
First, it was said that we need only the Bible as our creed, that we do not need a man-made theology written by 4th century bishops and a pope to tell us what to believe. We should read the Bible for ourselves, and the Holy Spirit will rightly guide us. Second, the creed is too philosophical and abstract in its formula, written in ancient words and thoughts no one understands today. We just need to love others and follow the spirit of Christ in our daily and practical affairs.
Indeed, we should defer to the primacy of scripture in our thoughts about God and we should work hard to live authentic and godly lives. However, the two criticisms miss a very important aspect of the Nicene Creed--that is, it expresses an essentially biblical faith and a conscientious godliness, so says the Scottish theologian Thomas Forsyth Torrance.
In 1988, nine years after he retired as Professor of Christian Dogmatics from New College of Edinburgh University, T. F. Torrance wrote an erudite and focused book on the patristic theology behind the Nicene Creed, The Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Faith (published by T & T Clark in 1991). Instead of viewing the creed as a dispassionate text written under the imperial pressure and dictate of the indifferent emperor Constantine (hoping to bring peace and unity to his empire), Torrance sees the final product of a long debate from May to July about the proper wording of the basic beliefs of the universal church as a testament to the earnestness of the 318 leaders who sought to be faithful to the apostolic witness, to resist the threats of obviously contrary religious movements attached to the churches, and to undergird the faithful worshippers in these churches to endure persecutions. The careful wording of the creed is meant to guide people to understand rightly the central claims of the biblical canon, and thus to live rightly as people professing the faith of the apostles.
The creed was not formulated in a historical vacuum. A theological range war was occurring over the teachings of Arius (a presbyter of Alexandria who died in 336). Arius argued that though Christ is the greatest and highest reality within creation, nonetheless, there was a time when Christ did not exist. Arius selected biblical passages to support this claim and subsequently to argue that God the Father is in reality supreme over the Son. However, Arius' real motivation for subordinating Christ to God the Father was philosophical--that is, an eternal being cannot ontologically mingle with a contingent being. Only God is God, Arius said, and since Christ is human, Christ cannot be equal with God the Father. Christ may be similar to God, but not essentially divine.
Arius expressed a fundamental outlook of the Hellenized world. Plato (died in 430 BC) had argued that at the most fundamental state of existence there are two ontologically incompatible realities--the world of being and the world of becoming. Even though Plato worked hard to conceive of ways in which, for example, the virtues can almost be eternal and unchanging, they still are only representations of eternity, not permanent realities themselves. This dualism features an unbridgeable gulf between the realm of eternity and time, permanence and change, deity and creatures.
The early church struggled with this kind of dualism from the beginning. In fact, perhaps the first list of (supposedly) authoritative books for the church was shaped by a dualistic outlook. Around 140 Marcion of Asia Minor went to Rome and presented a list of books that included only a truncated version of the Gospel of Luke and Paul's writings. His reason for this selective list was that if God is pure Spirit and not in any way mixed with the darkness and evil of creation, then the church cannot have any doctrine of the goodness of creation. Creation is a mistake, and thus, we must reject the Hebrew scriptures, for they are based on the claim that God creates the cosmos and works to redeem it. Consequently, because Jewish writers are prejudiced by the Old Testament teachings of God as the Creator of the cosmos, Marcion rejected all Jewish influence on Christianity. He kept Paul, because, as the Apostle to the Gentiles, Paul worked with a proper dualism (in Marcion's view) between the spirit and flesh, between purity and the defilement of the world.
Marcion's appeal is mainly philosophical. God and the world cannot be mixed in any way. Consequently, he preached a gnostic doctrine of the soul's escape from the world's depravity. Salvation is an escape, not a redemption, restoration, or a new creation. If ontological dualism is true, then the apostle's claims of the "Logos became flesh and dwelt among us," of Christ being the "fullness of the Godhead bodily," of "The Father and I are one" are symbolic at best and false at worst. The true difference between Arius' dualism and the Nicene Creed is not over mere wording (that is, "same substance" versus "similar substance") but between two incompatible accounts of reality.
The Patristics sought to refute philosophical dualism, but they also wanted to reject a particular ramification of dualism--if the cosmos and our bodily existence are antithetical to the divine in all ways, then the cosmos and our creaturely existence are transitorily futile or, worse, delusional. The cosmos and our physical lives cannot be redeemed because they are irredeemable. Thus, in our creaturely state, we are locked into our sins, doomed to darkness, and destined towards nothingness.
However, the Apostles and the early church knew such a view was wrong. They had witnessed the triune God at work in the person of Christ and in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit; they personally experienced the gift of the Spirit regenerating their lives and bestowing holiness upon them. Consequently, they accepted and affirmed the Jewish claims of a good creation, of God revealing actual divine reality, for example, to Moses at Mt. Sinai, in the Shekinah glory in the Holy of Holies, and in the words of the prophets. God can be truly real within creation. However, philosophical-theological dualism separates us from God, therefore intellectually and existentially weakens the Christian kerygma (that is, the proclamation of the Good News). Gregory Nazianzen (died 390) expressed clearly the reason why Christianity must reject dualism--"What is not assumed is not healed. That which is united with God, that will be saved." Because the Son of God is fully human and fully divine, the healing and redemption of the world and sinful humanity are real, not only of the soul and spirit but also of the body and the heavens and earth. Hence, it is possible to live a godly life, even in a world filled with sin, death, and evil.
The arduous debates at Nicaea and the final Nicene Creed itself were products of the Patristic theologians and the early church's efforts to be faithful to the scriptures and to explain accurately the source of their own Christian lives.
Perhaps, the two skeptical groups (mentioned at the beginning) would most object to the ninth line of the Creed--ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρί ("same substance with the Father"). Arius though used the word ὁμοιούσιος ("similar substance"). Although there is only an iota of a difference between the two words, they point to entirely different realities. Since Arius maintained that only God can be God, the human-Jesus can be only similar to God but not really divine. Contrary to Arius, Athanasius (the Patriarch of Alexandria who died in 373) started with the assumption that Jesus really is the incarnation of the Logos, that Jesus in his humanity is the fullness of the Godhead bodily. ὁμοούσιον is the best word Athanasius could use to express these claims, for it connotes that two things are one substance in some way.
Athanasius did not invent the word. The Roman Neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus (died 270) used it to describe how all reality flows from the One, the indescribable ultimate reality. Even the Roman Gnostic Valentinus (died 180) chose it to describe how all truths emanate from the ultimate spiritual Mind. Origen of Alexandria (died 253) possibly (though there are some textual difficulties) used it to explain the bond between the Son of God and God the Father. Paul of Samosata in 268 used it, as well as the Libyan Sabellians a hundred years earlier (though they were not trinitarians). Thus, the word carried linguistic weight in the 4th century Mediterranean Greek speaking world, and Athanasius selected it to describe a fundamental feature of the biblical testimony of how God reveals divine reality in creation, especially in Christ as the Son of God.
With it, Athanasius found a way to express the profound reality of Christ as the incarnate person who manifests the actual divine reality. Just as light is also radiance but still the same reality (which is Athanasius' analogy), so is Christ the same substance with God the Father. With this notion it becomes possible to envision how the Creator can unite with creation, of how an eternal being can experience creaturely existence, of how we can accurately relate to God. Thus, for Athanasius, the word ὁμοούσιον becomes the linguistic tool to refute dualism and to secure the church's theology and consequently her piety.
Torrance says this about the place of ὁμοούσιον in the Creed.
The evangelical significance of the homoousion is very apparent in its direct bearing upon the saving acts of Jesus Christ, in healing, forgiving, reconciling and redeeming lost humanity, for it asserted in the strongest way that they are all done out of a relation of unbroken oneness and communion between Jesus Christ and God the Father. (p. 141)
Even though the word has relevance in philosophically describing the ontology of the godhead, according to Torrance its lasting impact upon the generations of Christians since the council of Nicaea is on the faith and godliness of the church. The word helps communicate a metaphysical truth about Christianity--God really does reveal the substance of deity in the person of Jesus Christ, and thereby intellectually fortifies the church's claims about Christ; hence, the word emboldens and enriches the church's preaching and the Christian life.
We could say that a 4th century Greek word, laden with metaphysical implications, is not helpful for the 21st century church. That may be true, but the reason for its use is very relevant for today. The church (no matter what century) still must be faithful in its theology, beliefs, and practices to the scripture's witness of God and creation, of Christ as the Word made flesh. We may find better English words (or German, or Hausa, or Mandarin, etc.) than the word ὁμοούσιον to describe this reality, but we still must find the proper way to reject the dualism of Arius and affirm the motives and aims of the Nicene Creed.