Explainer

Creed

3 January 2025

5 min read

Creator or creature – a centuries old question of identity

Why does a 1,700-year-old creed still matter?

Frances Young

Frances Young is Emeritus Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham.

An abstract depiction of The Creation shows an aperture in a cloud like formation over water.

The Creation, James Tissot.

James Tissot, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

2025 will be the 1,700th anniversary of the Nicaea Creed. In October 2024, Prof. Frances Young gave the inaugural lecture of the McDonald Agape Nicaea Project at St Mellitus College.

In the year 325CE the first ever “ecumenical” (= “worldwide”) council of bishops assembled at Nicaea near Constantinople (now Istanbul). It was summoned by Constantine, the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity and patronize the Church. Why does this seventeenth centenary of an obscure discussion around complex words matter to us today?

The outcome of the Council was agreement to the text of a creed, and banishment of a pesky priest named Arius, whose bishop disapproved of his teaching. Unfortunately, some other bishops remained sympathetic to something like Arius’ viewpoint, and for political reasons Constantine was desperate for Church unity. Argument over the issues went on for half a century, until another Council in 381CE reaffirmed the position established in 325CE and agreed the version labelled “the Nicene Creed” and still used in Church liturgies across the world today.

The controversy was basically about the identity of the pre-existent Word or Son of God incarnate in Jesus Christ. Nicaea established that the Son was “of one substance” (homoousios) with the Father – in other words, he was fully God in every sense of the word. But for many traditional believers at the time this was difficult to accept.

The common sense of the culture thought in terms of a “chain of being.” Most people in the Roman Empire were polytheists – there were loads of gods: Mars, god of war, Nepture, god of the sea, and so on. Each city, each ethnic group, had its own god, as did every family, every interest group, every burial society – you name it. But generally there was a sense that above all these was the Supreme God, who was worshipped indirectly through worship of these lower gods, and below them were all sorts of nature spirits, daemons, benign and malign, then souls incarnate in human persons, then animals, even vegetables as living entities, and finally inert matter like earth and stones, at the bottom of the hierarchy or chain of being.

Jews identified their God with the Supreme God and insisted the one God alone should be worshipped. But they also imagined a heavenly court of archangels and angels, then below that the souls of the righteous, and so on in a somewhat parallel hierarchy. No surprise then that Christians assumed a similar picture: God, then the Son of God, then the Holy Spirit, then archangels and angels, then souls, and so on in a hierarchical ladder.

But in the second century Christians had argued their way to the idea of “creation out of nothing.” Many non-Jewish thinkers, including some early Christians, followed Plato, conceiving creation as the outcome of Mind (the Demiurge or Craftsman) shaping Matter into whatever Forms or Ideas were in mind. But other Christian thinkers argued that God was not a mere Craftsman who needed stone or wood to work on like a sculptor – God produced the Matter in the first place. This then triggered a full-blown critique: God did not create out of pre-existent Matter or there would be two first principles; God did not create from God’s own self or everything would be divine; so God must have created out of nothing.

Now try to fit that to the chain of being: where do you draw the line between God the Creator and everything else made out of nothing? This was the issue which surfaced in the so-called Arian controversy. What we might call the “mainstream” remained wedded to the hierarchy, not least because of earlier controversies about God’s monarchia. The word did mean “monarchy” – single sovereignty; but arche could mean “rule” or “beginning,” so monarchia also referred to the single first principle of all that is. It was natural to attribute monarchia to God the Father, a view that worked OK with the hierarchy. But some had suggested that the one God 'changed mode', as it were, appearing now as Father, now as Son, now as Holy Spirit, taking different roles in the overarching scriptural story. This suggestion was mocked as all too similar to the pagan god, Proteus, who in mythology kept changing shape. It is even possible that that key word homoousios had been condemned along with this “Modalist” view.

Traditionalists were suspicious. The first historian of the Church, Eusebius of Caesarea, was present at Nicaea, and wrote a somewhat embarrassed letter to his congregation explaining how he had come to agree to this formula. Even Athanasius - the one who would come to be regarded as the staunch defender of Nicaea - largely avoided the term for a quarter of a century, though that does not mean he did not identify the principal issue. He campaigned hard and ended up in exile five times over. The fundamental issue was whether Christ was God incarnate or some kind of divinised superman, or a semi-divine mediating figure, a created Creator. Arius is supposed to have said, “there was a when he was not,” even though he was “the first and greatest of the creatures” through whom God created everything else.

So why does it still matter? Four simple reasons:

Because it was basically about identity, and the question of Christ’s identity still matters.

Because we still find people treating Jesus Christ as superhuman – not really one of us, or semi-divine – not God in the same sense as the God the Father. If we are to be ecumenical, across different denominations today but also across time, we need to affirm that God’s Son and Spirit are truly of the one God. As early as the second century the first great Christian theologian, Irenaeus, characterized the Word and the Spirit as God’s two hands – we can imagine the Trinity reaching out first to create and then to embrace us with God’s redeeming love.

Because it means we can look to Jesus and there catch a glimpse of God’s very own loving face - not just a dim image but the reality itself.

And because only God could recreate us in God’s own image and raise us to new life.

To find out more about the McDonald Agape Nicaea Project being held by St. Mellitus College in London, come and join the public lectures, or look out for other Nicene celebrations in 2025.

For more information or to register for these events, you can visit the Nicaea Project website

The Nicaea Project

Watch the lecture

Column

Belief

Creed

Education

6 November 2025

4 min read

Theology isn’t just for believers – and that’s the problem

As spiritual curiosity among the young rises, let’s change how they explore it

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Quizzical-looking students look across a tutorial to others.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

The Cambridge don told us calmly but firmly in answer to a question, probably mine, that: “You don’t need to have a commitment to study theology here, but it helps.” It was 1972 and I looked around me. I was surrounded by young blokes, dare I say it, of a certain type – tall, pale-though-uninteresting, spotty and a bit chinless. Very much like me in fact in those respects but unlike me, I thought, in one key respect: Blimey, they’re all going to be vicars!

I ran a mile – well, about 100 – to study something more fun at a redbrick, something that was also being studied by young women, which was important for me at that moment.

Little did I know that I’d take a theology degree some 30 years later, when I trained for priesthood. And, as it happens, very much alongside women, though this column really isn’t about that.

What it is about is the lingering academic assumption that theology is for the committed, the faithful; that it’s vocational and for people who are called to make a career of it. I wanted to study it as an adolescent only because I was academically interested (yes, how we laugh now).

I’m with C.S. Lewis when he says faith is either a fraudulent trick or an absolute truth but can’t be anything in between (“He has not left that open to us”). Either way, I thought, that’s a great story, a curiosity for stories that led me to journalism, since the latter choice – absolute truth – seemed to be the matriculation requirement for theology at university. And the idea that theology is for committed Christians still prevails.

It’s been on the news agenda again lately that religious studies at A-level and theology in further education have been collapsing as course choices, even as Gen Z (18-28) has shown an increasing propensity for a return to faith and church-going – the “quiet revival”.

That apparent paradox may be explained in a number of ways. The current college generation may not equate religious interest with academic study (as I didn’t, in a way). It may be that young men, in particular, are drawn to church by a resurgent conservative Christian nationalism. Or it may simply be that a spiritual consciousness is seen as a self-improvement technique that gets dropped by their thirties.

But there’s another possibility. Maybe we’re just not teaching theology very well. Maybe, perish the thought, we’re making it boring. Perhaps it’s like wanting to make music as a child and being sat down in front of a blackboard to be taught theory, bars and crotchets and whatnot.

Maybe the young are interested in the subject but not in the Church Fathers, scriptural hermeneutics and ancient Greek. They may be intensely interested in whence our western ethics, morality and culture derive, but then they have history and philosophy for that. Theology is dying on its feet even as the young are wishing to make it live again.

I have a proposed solution and it’s this: Contextual Theology. This is a school that examines the meaning of religious faith in its contemporary cultural and social contexts. It values human experience – otherwise revelation – as a valid theological source and recognises that scripture emerges from its own cultural circumstances and must be viewed with reference to our own.

What Contextual Theology emphatically isn’t is an attempt to make theology “fit” post-modern mores and fads. The fount of divinity is unchangeable – impassable, as theologians say – but we’re invited to interpret it through the prism of the world in which we live. It’s not so much about how theology works in the world as how theology makes the world work.

Contextual Theology is as demanding as it is illuminating. It’s the degree I took, as it happens, when I trained for priesthood in the early Noughties and it never did me any harm (Discuss).

This isn’t a replacement theory for classical theology. We need to understand it in its ancient context to re-interpret it in our technocratic political climate. The curiosity of our young generation seems to suggest that’s an appealing prospect.

Yet search for a Contextual Theology degree course and you search in vain. They’re only available on courses for ministerial training (like mine), validated by a university rather than taught by it. That means you can only really study Contextual Theology if you’re training for ministry. Which takes me back to that summer of 1972.

As Graham Tomlin, of this parish, asserts, we need theologians as well as ministers if the quiet revival among the young is to be properly supported. But we need theologians of all sorts, classical and contextual.

I like to think of the theologian who, struck by lightning, arrives at the Pearly Gates. “But I taught that God sends famine and floods on all those who sin,” complains the theologian. “Ah,” replies St Peter, “but I think you took him out of context.”

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