Does a creed create a truth?

Declaring truth is an unmodern act.

Alex Irving

Alex lectures in theology at St Mellitus College.

A typewriter holds a piece or paper reading 'truth'

Markus Winkler on Unsplash.

2025 marks the 1700th anniversary of ratification of a statement, a form of which the Church continues to say to this day. Around the world, Christian community's are responding to this landmark by thinking again about the content of that statement and also about its form: a creed.

The Church is not a source of truth. The Church might confess that which is true, but truth is not its possession to do with as it pleases. Arising from Jesus’ comments in John 14.6 the Christian tradition has thought of truth in an inflected way. If truth is primarily caught up with the person of Jesus Christ, then truth is something more fundamental than the Church. The Church has its ground in the truth rather than the truth having its ground in the Church.

A creed is an expression of belief that this is the state of affairs. More than that, it is a statement of the commitment of oneself of this state of affairs. To say a creed is an existential act, a decision, for this. It is a decision for that which we did not create and over which we have no control. Beyond even that, it is a decision which we did not even make! It was a decision made by Christians before us who determined this and not that.

It is hard to think of an act that is less compliant with a ‘modern’ human spirit. If Immanuel Kant was right that enlightenment is humanity’s ‘emergence from his [sic] self-incurred immaturity’, with this immaturity defined as ‘the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another’, then the practice of confessing a truth we have not personally determined is analogous to never quite advancing beyond a dummy and pram.

Closer to home, the creeds speak in manner that won’t always align with our experience. There is a truth that is more fundamental even than what I induce to be true based on the particular thrownness of my being. On a mode of cultural analysis that is particularly attentive to power, this could be seen as hegemonic. The creeds are tools of establishing a common apprehension across tribes and tongues. A common adherence to truth that is basic (as in non-derivative) and universal irrespective of the particularity of experience.

Beyond that, the claims that the creeds make may not be seen to be true. Experience may, in fact, trend in a different direction. The world with all its problems and pains may not appear to be the creation of an almighty and benevolent Lord. The Spirit who is Lord and giver or life may not appear to be breathing new vitality of the age to come into the present. The Church may not always appear to be one and holy.

Why then, creeds?

That what we have and know is that which we have received is baked in to the very nature of the Christian claim to know something about God rather than nothing.

At that time Jesus said,

“I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this is what you were pleased to do. “All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

To know God is not something grounded in ourselves. God the Son has become a human and known the Father as one of us and for all of us. It is on the strength of his confession of God as Father that we confess God as Father.

The continuous and repeated practice of reciting the creed reminds us that the possibility of speaking about God and the work of God is not a human possibility. It is a possibility for us based on the given event of God’s speech to us. We attend to that which is given. It is an act of faith through which we return again and again to the Word of God as the Church has received it.

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.

Participants will hear from some of the world’s leading scholars on various issues related to Nicaea, including Professor Khaled Anatolios, Dr. Beverly Roberts Gaventa, Professor Ilaria Ramelli, Professor Bruce McCormack, Dr. Willie James Jennings, and many more.

A significant part of the Nicaea conference in 2025 will be a call for papers, expanding dialogue on the topic and hearing from a wide array of voices.

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

The Nicaea Project.

Article

America

Culture

Politics

20 January 2025

3 min read

God goes public: the inauguration and the return of faith-talk

This Inauguration Day, Jack Chisnall explains why the 'Church and State' separation just can't hold.

Jack Chisnall

Jack Chisnall is a former gag teller and Oxford Theology graduate, combining the two at Holy Fooling.

The 47th President of the United States of America

Inauguration Day. Donald Trump again makes an oath to defend and uphold, as best he can, the Constitution of the United States. It has always been a fairly swift-moving bit of public pomp - swift compared to coronations at any rate, which typically take hours just to put a crown on a royal head. The Presidential inauguration can take as little as six minutes, and viewers get more bang for their buck: the President is confirmed not only as the head of the ruling government, but the representational head of state too.

It’s all a good lesson in the ‘separation of Church and State’ some will opine. Forget the medieval-sounding solemnities and pageantry, and Archbishops intoning things over altars. Here, a man in a suit enters a civic covenant with the people who have democratically elected him. Before President Jackson’s escort was swamped by 20,000 spectators in 1829 and security protocol had to cordon off spectators, the first inaugurations had a humble, almost mundane aspect: the new president would go about to shake hands with citizens who had popped along to see the ceremony, and to wish the new guy “good luck”. Sources show that Abraham Lincoln shook over 5,000 hands when he was inaugurated for a second time in 1865.

But such well-worn narratives - of humankind progressing from strange, religious druidry to sane, reasonable democracy - are looking creakier than ever, in 2025. Such views were all the rage in the 20th century. But the West is having a fundamental rethink about what exactly it would mean for humans to ‘de-anchor’ themselves from a religious way of being. We have learnt by now - the hard way - that we merely swap one form of worship for another in supposedly ‘irreligious’ societies.

In the first place, the ‘separation of church and state’ history is not as simple as all that. While it’s true that the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution did not establish a church on the national level, as in England, there were plenty established at the state level just fine. Connecticut was Congregationalist until as late as 1818 - residents paid taxes to, and were educated by, the church. There was nothing in the law to prevent it.

But it is the inauguration itself which reveals that religious instincts cannot be extracted so easily from human affairs. For George Washington, the first President to be inaugurated back in New York City in 1779, the rather last-minute idea was that he should swear on a Bible. None being found to hand, they borrowed one - from a nearby Masonic Lodge. It was fitting. The Founding Fathers certainly tweaked and trimmed the traditional religions they were raised in - but they could not dispense with them. Even the word, ‘inaugurate’, is snagged on a religious root. ‘Augury’ was the practice of discerning the will of the Gods in Ancient Roman political cult.

Christian imagery and sentiment has, over time, returned to irrigate the dry, rationalistic plains of U.S. civic ceremonial. Certainly the likes of Washington and Jefferson saw their country under the auspices of a Supreme Being, just not necessarily aligned with one of the world’s faiths. But for the George Bush inauguration of 1989, the evangelical tone was explicit. Billy Graham began things with an invocation, and the new President ordered a national day of prayer to follow, in thanksgiving for a successful transfer of power. There will be quite an obvious development of this during Trump’s 2025 inauguration, when Franklin Graham, the son of the famed evangelist, will lead the invocation prayer alongside Catholic Cardinal Timothy Dolan.

There is, perhaps, no getting around the human need to call on something larger than ourselves in our most meaningful moments - when we pledge to love someone for the rest of our lives, or swear our commitment to rule justly. The inauguration has been a good indicator of this, in the way that it has increasingly reached for an older, outright Christian language in which to express the profoundest longings and ambitions of a nation. God, it turns out, never quite leaves the frame.