The Nicene Creed: a 1,700-year-old game changer

Why we should celebrate the Council of Nicaea today.

Jane Williams

Jane Williams is the McDonald Professor in Christian Theology at St Mellitus College.

A ink drawing of Constantine the Emperor on a throne listening to people showing him books.

Constantine and the council.

Wikimedia Commons.

In 2025 it will be 1,700 years since the Council of Nicaea was called by the Emperor Constantine, and came up with the first version of the Nicene Creed, which many churches still recite at least weekly in the context of worship. Conferences are planned to interrogate, reassess but, most particularly, to thank God for the Nicene Creed

But many people will be bewildered, which is a polite way of saying ‘indifferent’ or even ‘hostile’, to this outpouring of Nicaea-mania. Lots of people don’t know the Creed at all, or, if they do, they see it as dogmatic, exclusionary and couched in the arcane language of fourth century classical philosophy, which seems to have little relevance to the exploration of faith today. Is it really worth celebrating? Let me suggest some reasons why I think it is.

Suddenly, Christians had a chance to shape the world, to shape culture, from the top down as well as from the bottom up.

First of all, 325 marked a period of huge transition for the Christian faith. For the previous 300 years since the time of Jesus, Christianity had been spreading surprisingly rapidly, but generally without support from the wealthy or powerful, and suffering regular persecution. But at the beginning of the fourth century, the Emperor Constantine declared himself to be a ‘Christian’. There is a lot of debate about what he meant by that – it didn’t stop him from murdering most of his family, for example. But Constantine ascribed his victorious Imperial campaign to the protection of the Christian God, and began to offer safety and privilege to Christians and their leaders. It was Constantine who called the Council of Nicaea, wanting to assert his own authority but also wanting this nascent ‘institutional’ Church to get a grip and unite behind him. Suddenly, Christians had a chance to shape the world, to shape culture, from the top down as well as from the bottom up. Whether this is a good thing or a bad one, and what it did and does to the character of Christian faith in the 1,700 years since Nicaea is undoubtedly something that 2025 will have to examine.

Secondly, the Council of Nicaea offered a model of decision-making that has been profoundly important in Christian life ever since. Nicaea was deliberately chosen as the place to hold this council because it sat roughly on the dividing line between the Eastern part of the Roman Empire, where Greek was the lingua franca, and the Western part, where Latin was the language of public discourse. Constantine was seeking to establish himself as sole emperor over both parts, and he called together at Nicaea Christian leaders from across the Empire. We have a good idea of who was there because of the signatories to the resolutions of the Council.

Leaders came from some of the most sophisticated, wealthy and educated parts of the Roman Empire, like Alexandria, with its famous school and library. But they also came from some of the simplest parts, where peasant life was the norm for both the bishop and the congregations. St Spiridion, now the patron saint of Corfu, was one of the signatories; he maintained his hard life as shepherd while leading his human flock; St Nicholas of Myra, whom we now know as Santa Claus, was there, too; altogether there were probably 200 to 300 bishops there, highlighting the extraordinary spread of Christian faith across the Roman Empire. That is why the Council of Nicaea is called the First Ecumenical or world-wide Council. This was the first opportunity for the Church to take stock of itself and to notice and learn from its diversity.

This is a game-changing concept, both for theology and for anthropology.

This model of ‘conciliar’ discussion has remained key to the way in which Christians try to resolve conflict and make decisions, by meeting, discussing, praying and hearing from voices and experiences that represent the whole diversity of humanity. No one can pretend that the Council of Nicaea was exactly such a process – no women were part of the consultation, for one thing – but the intention was significant. In our own time of deep disagreement between Christians, a commitment to the Nicene method of consultative decision-making would be a good focus for examination of 1,700 years of trying to listen to each other, even if we often fail.

Thirdly, and most importantly of all, of course, the Council of Nicaea produced the Nicene Creed, a succinct statement of what Christians affirm about God and the world because of the paradigm-changing life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus. The short, clear statements of faith in the Creed were hard-fought for and not accepted by everyone, then or now. They became necessary as people tried out different descriptions of who Jesus is in relation to God, which brought out more and more clearly how fundamental this question is for our understanding of God, and so our understanding of our own purpose and destiny. Some suggested that Jesus was just an exceptionally gifted human being, favoured by God. But the world has been full of great prophets, most of whom receive lip-service at best, but make no actual difference. Others proposed that Jesus was God, wearing a disguise but not really, actually, human, suggesting that God can’t really commit to the created order. The most popular suggestion in the fourth century, put forward by a learned teacher called Arius, was that Jesus is something in between, not the eternal God, but not just a human being either. But that’s the worst of all worlds: we can’t trust what Jesus shows us either about God or about human beings.

All of these ‘solutions’ protected God’s transcendence and otherness – God is above and beyond created existence and divinity cannot or will not sully itself with the earthly, historical lives that human beings live.

The radical suggestion of the Nicene Creed, trying to be faithful to the witness of the Bible, is that Jesus is really God, living among us, but also really a human being, born into a particular time and place in history and dying a real, historical death. And that must mean that the Almighty God doesn’t think it compromises God’s power and majesty to come and share our lives. Imagine the dignity that gives us and our lives – God loves and honours the world and thinks that a human life is capable of showing us the nature of God. But it also means that the full life-giving power of God is not just ‘outside’ but ‘inside’ the world.

This is a game-changing concept, both for theology and for anthropology.

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 our 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

Creed

Music

Spiritual formation

3 October 2024

4 min read

Sing, pray, manifest: what’s the difference?

Song, success and the search for someone who loves.

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Associate Minister at Holy Trinity Clapham, London.

A colourful graphic overlay of praying hands over a band playing.

Coldplay.com

No one should be surprised when Coldplay release a song called 'We Pray'. Yes, the band's back catalogue is already peppered with references to the divine, but prayer in song is remarkably unremarkable.

Just do a quick search on Spotify: Coldplay are hardly alone. In recent years our purveyors of prayer have notably also included HAIM and Elda Good. Go a little further back: Leonard Cohen, even Take That and Duke Ellington. Which song do you immediately think of when I mention Bon Jovi? And who could forget Madonna, Dionne Warwick or Andrea Bocelli with Katharine McPhee. Prayer makes good music sales.

A recent poll by Skylight showed that 61 per cent of Americans pray. And, 9 in 10 of those believed they'd received an answer to prayer in the past year. If prayers and songs are both places for us to process emotion, then the genre overlap is hardly surprising.

But when you think about it, these songs at their essence sing about a spiritual practice. The spirituality is sometimes overt, and sometimes prayer is useful as a device for something else (Nick Cave's immortal line: 'I don't believe in an interventionist God / But I know, darling, that you do…'), but whichever way you slice it, we sing about prayer because prayer is one of our deepest instincts. We get meta about our metaphysics because the divide between the sacred and the secular simply isn't there. 43 per cent of respondents to this recent survey were almost as likely to pray in nature as they were in a house of worship (46 per cent). We pray for all manner of reasons, which is the premise of Coldplay's song, why 'we pray'.

This instinct seems to have also birthed the song itself. ''We Pray sort of wrote itself like some of the good songs do,' Chris Martin recently revealed. 'In Taiwan, in the middle of the night, I woke up and the song was in my head, and I don't know where it came from. So, the sound of it sort of dictated itself and that's all. I just sort of followed the road map that it said.'

The ambiguity of the song's origins also matches the huge scope within the song for the listener to interpret as they wish. Coldplay have fascinatingly added a 'blank verse' version online where people can ad lib their own prayers within the song. This is not unlike the practice of many 'charismatic' worship leaders, providing a space for deeply personal expressions of prayer within a corporate religious experience. And whether you're at Glastonbury or alone with you and your AirPods in the park, the offer is not only to connect with a higher power, but to reflect on why you're doing so at the same time.

What if the power instead resides not in the person praying, nor in the prayer itself, but in the recipient of the prayer?

We may not all have the musical genius of Martin, but many of us similarly profess an innate desire to pray, regardless of religious beliefs. Studies come and go showing that praying can also have emotional benefits.

So, the question arises: is there power in prayer? If the power is in the act itself, then it's on par with manifesting.

The act, and thoughts of manifesting may have the same motivations as prayer for many, but it can be argued that manifesting is not in the same category as prayer. Much like The Secret or The Power of Positive Thinking, manifesting the latest new age trend where your mind achieves your aspirations: you can simply manifest that new job, relationship, or Ferrari. But the practice has its limitations, and its critics. Vox's senior correspondent Rebecca Jennings reports that 'Overestimating the power of one’s thoughts, which is a symptom of OCD among many other disorders, 'could be very dangerous to people who already have anxiety disorders, but potentially, it might even be enough to start those symptoms happening in someone who originally doesn’t', according to cognitive neuroscientist Rhiannon Jones.

I recently spoke to a couple of women in their early 20s who'd just returned from a manifesting conference. Manifesting may have the same motivations as prayer for many, but it can be argued that manifesting is not in the same category as prayer, even though this hugely popular practice could be understood as a secular form of piety, potentially rivalling that of the devout. But what if the power instead resides not in the person praying, nor in the prayer itself, but in the recipient of the prayer? Martin hints that the prayer itself is not the power. He sings 'Only by his grace', and 'for someone to come and show me the way.'

Simply searching on Spotify with the keyword 'pray' is only the tip of the iceberg for prayerful songs. Many of them don't include the word, yet still meditate on prayer. For instance, U2 sang 'I waited patiently for the Lord, he inclined and heard my cry' - a reworking of King David's Psalm 40 where he is lifted out of the miry pit. The psalm's final verse begins 'But as for me, I am poor and needy; may the Lord think of me.' This is not so much a song of spiritual practice, but desperation. It can be hard even to pray when you're stuck in a rut. And in his helplessness, David finds that there is someone who fills his mind with thoughts about him.

I've recently sat with people who've in some form of prayer thanked God, the universe, even the day itself. The blank space is there. The space is for us to fill. But what if we are not praying into the void? Because far and above any personal experience or benefit of prayer, the ordinariness of prayer is really quite extraordinary: We pray. Someone is listening.