Why the Nicene Creed and Why Now?

This transcript has been lightly edited from an automated transcription for clarity and readability. While we've worked to preserve each speaker's words faithfully, errors may remain.

1. 0:09

   Michael Reeves

   Who is the living God? Who exactly do we worship? What sort of God is He? What sort of salvation does He offer? All this was the matter of Nicaea. And it all started around the year AD 318 when an elder called Arius from the Church of Alexandria in North Egypt accused his bishop of failing to distinguish properly between the Father and the Son. And in his attempt to set matters straight, Arius taught that the Son Himself was created. God the Father, he said, had created the Son so as to go on Himself and make the rest of creation. And so, as Arius saw it, the Son was a highly exalted, Arius would even say divine figure, but a creature nonetheless. Now, Arius was a savvy communicator, and he soon had his ideas put into song. And before long, there were gangs marching through the streets of Alexandria chanting Arian such as, there was a time when the Son was not. Now, the Bishop of Alexandria tried to put a lid on this, and he summoned a number of other bishops to assess Arius' teaching.

2. 2:16

   Michael Reeves

   And they swiftly declared that Arius was a heretic and as such should be removed from his office as a presbyter of the church, and they also banished him from the city. But that attempt to remove the problem only spread the problem, because Arius then fled to the highly strategic city of Nicomedia. Today, that's near Istanbul, and the local bishop there was sympathetic to Arius, and he used his very considerable influence to win support for Arius and his teaching. And the confusion and the disunity that followed prompted the newly converted Roman Emperor Constantine— you may have heard that pronounced differently, resist the urge. Constantine decided to resolve the matter. And so, in the year 325, he summoned bishops from across the empire, in fact, a couple outside the empire as well, to a general council at Nicaea, also very close to Nicomedia near modern Istanbul.

3. 3:42

   Michael Reeves

   Now, this was an extraordinary moment because many of these bishops were physically scarred from years of persecution. And they walk into the palace, and they get to sit and dine with the emperor himself and discuss Christian theology and the nature of God and the gospel right in front of the emperor. They are dizzy with disbelief. And when the bishops hear for themselves what Arius was teaching, they are appalled. Some, we are told, covered their ears. Others could barely restrain their outrage. And it was at this point, later legend tells us, that Nicholas of Myra, Saint Nicholas or Santa Claus, let fly and slapped one of the Arians when he heard his teaching. But in response to Arius' teaching, here's the key point: the bishops there hammered out an agreed statement of faith, the Creed of Nicaea.

4. 4:57

   Michael Reeves

   And the Creed of Nicaea opened with these strongly anti-Arian words. Here are the opening words, we believe in one God, The Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible. And now, here the words are going to sound a little bit different to what you've just said because this is an earlier version. And the earlier version reads, And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten from the Father, only begotten, that is from the Being of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, and then possibly here are the most critical words of all, begotten, not made, one being with the Father. Now, just before considering what the Council of Nicaea was seeking to do with those words, let's just pause for a moment and try to understand Arius' rationale, his motivation. Well, for Arius, it all started with a basic presupposition about what God must be like. So, Arius held the very nature of God is to be ungenerate or uncaused. So, everything else in all of existence is caused to exist somehow.

5. 6:52

   Michael Reeves

   God instead is the cause. Now, all that might sound very logical so far, but what Arius would do with it, he would say, it follows logically then, if the Son is begotten or generated by the Father, He doesn't fit that basic definition of God. If to be God means to be ungenerate, if the Son is somehow generated, whatever that means, He doesn't fit our definition of God. Being begotten, He must be a creature. God is ungenerated. The Son being begotten must have come into being at some point. There must have been a point when the Son was not. So, in that sense, for Arius, the Son is nothing like God at all.

6. 8:01

   Michael Reeves

   He may be qualitatively different to all other creatures and exalted above us. He may, therefore, even seem Godlike to us and have this sort of courtesy title, God. But He is in the end a creature, not God, as Arius argues it. The Son must be infinitely subordinate to God. And in fact, since God made the Son so as to go on and make creation, we can say, The Son was created for us, not us for Him. He was created for us. Now, the Arians did have biblical arguments for their position, and Hebrews 1 verse 5 was a particular favorite, quoting, Psalm 2, where God declares, You are My Son. Today I have begotten You.

7. 9:20

   Michael Reeves

   The Arians looked at that and thought, Surely, if it says, Today I've begotten You, that implies there was a day before today when the Father was not yet begetting the Son. So, there's a day before which He's begotten. Now, in reality, this is just tearing a verse out of its context because in Acts 13:32-34, Paul quoted those same words from Psalm 2, and he argued that they referred to the resurrection. Now, if you are to follow Arian logic, you have to say, okay, if today I've begotten you applies to the day of resurrection, Then the day before Easter, the Father has not begotten the Son. He's not the Son yet until the resurrection, because if, today I've begotten You, applies to the resurrection, then what about the day before? And yet, Scripture could not be clearer that Jesus was the Son before the resurrection.

8. 10:20

   Michael Reeves

   The Father called Him His beloved Son at His baptism, at His transfiguration. Indeed, before Jesus was even born of Mary, we read that God sent forth His Son, Galatians 4:4, sending His Son into the world that the world might be saved through Him, John 3.

9. 10:59

   Michael Reeves

   But, you know, the real problem with the Arian argument wasn't their manhandling of biblical texts. It was that their biblicist language made them seem eager to be scriptural. In reality, that language was masking, covering over a deeper rationalism that drove their theology.

10. 11:17

    Michael Reeves

    Because remember, Arianism started with the basic presupposition, God equals ungenerate. And what they'd done was then build on that basic presupposition and use Scripture to later support that presupposition. It was cloaked rationalism.

11. 12:02

    Michael Reeves

    In contrast, the Nicene bishops wanted to start not with a philosophical presupposition about what God must be like. They wanted to start with God's own self-revelation. A young secretary at Nicaea called Athanasius, who would later give his life to championing Nicene theology, put it like this. He said, it is more pious and more accurate to signify God from the Son and call Him Father than to name Him from His works only and call Him Ungenerate or unoriginate. That's a mouthful, isn't it? Shall I just say that again, and then I'll translate? He says, it's more pious and more accurate to signify God, to know God from the Son and so call Him Father. It is better than to name God from His works only and so call Him ungenerate or unoriginate. What it's saying is the right way to think about God is to start with Jesus Christ, the Son of God, not some abstract presupposition. You signify or know God from His Son who reveals Him.

12. 13:44

    Michael Reeves

    And so, he says, you don't try to name God from His works. So, we could, for example, think, okay, who is God? Well, we see a creation all around us. Something has created that. That being we'll call the Creator. That's God's identity. He equals Creator. And Athanasius says, well, If God's very identity is to be Creator, then He depends on His creation to be who He is. So, how do we go deeper into the essential identity of who God is? We know God through the Son who reveals Him.

13. 14:32

    Michael Reeves

    And when we start with the Son, In our knowledge of God, that's when we find the first thing to say about God, as it says in the first line of the creed, is, we believe in one God, the Father. Not ungenerate, but Father. Now, of course, the reality for Arius was that we could never really know what God was like at all, because if the Son is fundamentally unlike God, then He's never going to truly reveal God to us. But if the Word that became flesh is God, then He must show us in Himself the very being of God. When we see Him, we see the Father. And that starts us being able to see that the issue at Nicaea was not just the deity of Christ, That was the presenting issue. But the ultimate issue at stake was, what sort of God do Christians worship? Nicaea proclaimed, we believe in one God, the Father.

14. 16:19

    Michael Reeves

    And when we look at the next clause of the creed, we can see how seriously the Nicene bishops meant this and what a radically different God they worshiped compared to Arius. The next clause, again, of the original Creed of Nicaea, a little bit different to the version that we have. I'll explain that in a moment. The original reads, the next clause, and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten from the Father Only begotten, that is from the being of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, and here we go, the critical words, begotten, not made, one being with the Father. Let's unpack those keywords. Let's start with that phrase, begotten, Not made. Now, something that confused many was the Greek word for originate or come into existence, genetos. Let me just try to get you to stick that in your mind, genetos.

15. 17:41

    Michael Reeves

    It has one nu, one N in it. Nu. That word, and you can hear it, genetos, sounds awfully like the other word genetos, which means begotten. The only difference is the word, second one, genetos for begotten, has 2 nu ends. So, they look, they sound identical. They look very similar. And with humans, to be begotten is the same thing as to come into existence. And so, it was very easy to think, well, if the Son is begotten, it must mean He comes into existence at some point.

16. 18:30

    Michael Reeves

    So, these 2 very similar words, to originate or come into existence and to be begotten, because they're so similar, seemed to confuse people. But Nicaea argued, just as we do not start with our human presuppositions, so we must not read our human experience of sonship up into God. That when I, as a human, beget a child, it starts to exist. I mustn't read all of that experience up into how it must be for God. With God, there is a difference between being begotten and coming into existence. There is a difference between begetting and making. What exactly is that difference? What's Nicaea getting at, begotten, not made? Well, when one begets, you beget something that is the same being as yourself. So, humans beget humans.

17. 19:50

    Michael Reeves

    The Father begets the Son. But when you create, you make a different kind of being to yourself. So, humans make or create cake. I cannot beget a cake, and I cannot make a human. Humans beget humans, and they make cake. Cake's a different kind of being. Just so, God does not beget the world. Nor does He make His Son.

18. 20:35

    Michael Reeves

    The Father begets His Son. And so, since begetting is about the same being, when we say the Son is begotten, not made, we expect to read He is, next words, one being with the Father. That's the nature of begetting.

19. 20:52

    Michael Reeves

    In Greek, that phrase, one being with the Father, is famously homoousion tou patri. Homo, one or same, ousion, ousia, being or essence, tou patri, with the Father. One being with the Father. And what does that mean? Well, it doesn't— to say that the Son is one being with the Father doesn't simply mean that the Father and the Son are made of the same divine stuff.

20. 21:37

    Michael Reeves

    Now, Nicaea is saying they are one being, but they're saying something more profound because you could imagine that there is— imagine there is in heaven there's some deep Pot of Godness. And the Father and the Son just come out of that. They're constructed out of that preexisting pot of Godness. And so, if you were to say the Father and the Son are like 2 sweets out of a tub of butterscotch, it's like they are 2 brother gods. They're similar constitution, but they're actually different gods. That's not what Nicaea is saying. Nicaea explains the Son is begotten from the Father, only begotten, that is from the being of the Father. So, the Son isn't from something called Godness that preexists the Father, The Father and the Son are not merely sharing some being together.

21. 22:55

    Michael Reeves

    No, the Son is begotten of the Father. The Son is of the Father. There is no God stuff that precedes the Father. And if you've got a slight drowning feeling right now, that's the key point. There is no God stuff that preexists the Father. Because here's the point they're wanting to make. Yes, we needed to go deep there for a moment. Don't worry, that was the deepest need for coffee moment then.

22. 23:32

    Michael Reeves

    But the point was this, Nicaea wanted to go deep to stop anyone thinking there is anything deeper in the Father than His fatherhood. No, He is Father all the way down. That's who He is. In other words, the Father did not choose to become Father at some point. If that were the case, if He decided, do you know what? I'm going to have a Son. And He becomes a Father. If that were the case, then we could ask, well, what sort of God was He before He became Father? What's He really like deep down? No, Nicaea is saying the Father has His very identity as Father. We believe in one God, the Father.

23. 24:42

    Michael Reeves

    That's a statement about who He is most really and deeply as a person. God is the Father begetting the Son. He's never without the Son. The Father never started begetting The Son. If God is Father, He didn't just become Father. If God is Father, that means He's always eternally Father. There's no deeper identity. He is Father, eternally, therefore, generating His eternal Son.

24. 25:40

    Michael Reeves

    Now, people sometimes feel uncomfortable with the creed for using these phrases that aren't found in Scripture, like one being with the Father. But in reality, what the Council of Nicaea was doing was defending the Truth of Scripture that God is as He reveals Himself to be.

25. 26:00

    Michael Reeves

    That is, the Father has not chosen to become something that He once was not. When He reveals Himself as Father, it's because That is who He really is. He really is Father, and the Son really is Son. See, the Arians had claimed to be scriptural, but by denying the eternal Son, do you see what they had done to the Father's identity? They had been forced to say He started to become Father at some point. So, they denied the eternal fatherhood of God.

26. 26:56

    Michael Reeves

    So, not coming to know God through the Son, they'd actually not come to know God as Father. Not coming to God through the Son, they'd ended up with a different God. And what a different God. See, Arius' god might have looked superficially transcendent. In reality, Arius' god was profoundly needy. Think about it. There he was in eternity, lonely. Some desire to have a creation comes up, and what does he need To have a creation, He needs to create a Son who can do the work of creation.

27. 27:49

    Michael Reeves

    So, He can't even achieve creation by Himself. He needs His created Helper. He was, said Athanasius, a God in process of completion as time went on. Inadequate, needy. More, Arius' talk of a God without a Son described an essentially, eternally barren, lonely God. But the God of Nicaea Is like an eternally overflowing fountain or an eternally radiant sun. And so, the creed speaks of the Son of God as light from light. That was the image they liked to use for— they would say the Father is the shining lamp that cannot be without the Brightness of His Son, who is the very radiance of His being.

28. 29:06

    Michael Reeves

    Eternally generating His Son, the Father shows Himself to be superabundantly, outgoingly full, not needy, life-giving, fruitful in His very nature. And that is the kind of God, not Arius's barren God. This Full God is the sort of God capable of going out in creation to give life. He is a full, sufficient God. And only such a God could have the whole fullness of deity dwell bodily In His Son, so that from His fullness we all receive grace upon grace, a full God with a full gospel. And so, we see it wasn't just the identity of God, That was at stake at Nicaea. It was also the nature of salvation, because having imagined a different sort of God, Arianism actually presented a different gospel with a different sort of salvation. Think about it.

29. 30:45

    Michael Reeves

    If the Son was a mere creature. If the Son is infinitely subordinate to God, unlike God, well then, the Son can never have known true intimate communion with God, right? Yes. The Son is utterly unlike God. He could only have ever known God from a great distance. But then, if the Son never knew true communion with God, how could He share communion with God with us? He never knew God. For Arius, there could be no true communion with God. And in any case, the lonely God of Arius wasn't interested in communion. After all, it wasn't as if the Father ever loved the Son in Arianism.

30. 31:51

    Michael Reeves

    Think about the relationship between the Father and the Son in Arianism. The Son was just God's hired workman, there to do a job, created for the task of Dealing with the universe for God. That means their relationship was entirely performance-based. And so, if the Bible ever spoke of the Father's pleasure in the Son, it can only be because the Son had done a good job of the task assigned to Him. Do you see, here is an employer God who always deals with His creatures contractually. And so, no wonder Arianism, and I include modern-day Arianism such as Jehovah's Witnesses, Entirely failed to grasp a salvation that is by grace alone.

31. 32:37

    Michael Reeves

    Arius' God was not a fatherly God of kindness and grace or love.

32. 33:12

    Michael Reeves

    And the problems go even deeper. If God is not motivated by love for His Son, what should motivate us if we are made in the image of God? God doesn't love His Son. Well, if we're made in the image of a contractual God, we must be made simply to perform rightly. Ah, well then, no need for a new birth, no need for a new heart that is turned to love God instead of sin, so what? Just do the right things. So, you could ask, well, in that case, in what sense could the Arians even talk about salvation? What sort of salvation did they even imagine? Remember, as they saw it, the Son was an infinitely Inferior being. As they saw it, the Son rose by His works to merit for Himself a place on the throne of heaven. And so, do you remember, just as God Used the Son as His hired help. Now, the Son is going to use God to get Himself a heavenly glory He had never enjoyed before.

33. 34:55

    Michael Reeves

    When the Son ascends to the throne of heaven in Arianism, He's going to a place He's never been before. He's never been entitled to before. And so, the Arian Son shows us the Arian way of salvation. We are to copy Him and ascend to God by works. A subordinate Son meant a salvation by works. The Arian Son made for an entirely different Arian way of salvation. In polar beautiful contrast, Nicaea proclaimed the Son is one being with the Father. This one had always been at the Father's side.

34. 36:01

    Michael Reeves

    Eternally begotten, eternally beloved, and therefore, He doesn't do anything that He's doing for His own advancement. No, as the creed says, for us, for our salvation He came down and was incarnate and made man. He suffered and the third day rose again, ascended into heaven. When the Son ascended into heaven, He was not rising to a glory He had never enjoyed before. He was going home.

35. 36:29

    Michael Reeves

    To the throne that was always His, now taking us

36. 36:33

    Michael Reeves

    In Him to enjoy His blessedness, His communion with His Father, His sonship. For Nicaea, the Son was not an example of how to climb up to God.

37. 37:19

    Michael Reeves

    The Son Is God Himself come down, achieving everything for our salvation, uniting Himself with us so that we can enjoy His fullness of life. Do you see it? Only with this eternal Son, One with the Father. Only with Him can we be brought into true communion with God because only He knows communion with God. Only because He is truly the Son can the Spirit of the Son come into our hearts crying not, O ungenerate, But Abba, Father. For kind Father this God truly is, and adoption by grace in His Son is His blessing. Arius' god could never offer that. But the story of the Nicene Creed doesn't quite end there. There was much for the church to digest, many implications that needed to be considered.

38. 38:53

    Michael Reeves

    And the story would only conclude, kind of— yeah, it would conclude, let's say for now, in the year 381. When a new generation of bishops assembled in what is now Istanbul for the Council of Constantinople, Constantine's city, Constantinople. And there in 381, the Creed of Nicaea from 325 was affirmed and developed into the— I'm going to try to say this right— Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, a title that is so tortuous we call it the Nicene Creed. And that's the version of the creed we know today. So, I've been looking at the Creed of Nicaea from 325. It's the Nicene Creed of 381 we know. Now, the most significant difference between the

39. 39:39

    Michael Reeves

    Nicene Creed of 381 and the Creed of Nicaea from 325 concerns what you may actually already feel has been missing from what I've been saying, the Spirit.

40. 40:16

    Michael Reeves

    And of course, it's completely understandable. In 325, at the Council of Nicaea, The pressing issue at hand is the full deity of the Son. That's what needs to be dealt with. But after 325, there were some who were saying, okay, so the Son is homoousios, one being with the Father, but is the Spirit as truly God as the Son? And once again, it was Athanasius who had been that young secretary at Nicaea. It was he who led the charge for a biblical understanding of God. And Athanasius argued, just as the Son is one being with the Father, so the Spirit Is homoousios, one being, with the Father and the Son? Athanasius put it like this. Let me try to get inside his head so you can understand what's going through his mind and the mind of the later council. Athanasius said, apart from the Spirit, we are strange and distant from God.

41. 41:40

    Michael Reeves

    But by the participation of the Spirit, we are knit into the Godhead.

42. 41:46

    Michael Reeves

    Do you see, there's that Nicene understanding of salvation again, being brought into the very life of the Father, Son, and Spirit. And what Athanasius saw Is that if the Spirit is not as truly God as the Son, we've got the same familiar problems we've already seen. If the Spirit is not Himself God, one being with the Father and the Son, how could He knit us into the Godhead? If He's got no place there? And so, the salvation described by Scripture requires a Trinitarian God. And so, the Nicene Creed of 381 therefore expanded Nicaea's passing little mention of the Spirit, we believe in the Spirit, It expanded it to affirm that Christians believe, I quote, in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified, who spoke through the prophets. Now, with this, The Nicene Creed, what it's doing is it's pressing the point of Nicaea that we've already seen. It's pressing the point salvation is not a matter of rising up to God on the basis of our works, because our problem is so deep we cannot do that.

43. 43:52

    Michael Reeves

    Our problem is Ephesians 2, we are naturally helpless and dead in our sins. And so, just as we need God to come down for our salvation and rescue us, so we who are spiritually dead need life. Given. Given to us. We therefore need the Spirit who first hovered over the waters in creation, giving life to creation. We need that One to give new life to us. And He could only give us life If He is Himself God, the author of life, the Lord and giver of life. Only He can give us life.

44. 44:57

    Michael Reeves

    Only He can unite us to God. But that full 381, later Nicene Creed, Then ends with a final addition to the original words of Nicaea. It affirms, we believe in one holy, catholic, and apostolic church. Catholic here does not mean Roman Catholic, as if it affirms the opposite of being Protestant. Catholic. Catholic here means according to the whole church. It is the opposite of being unorthodox, schismatic, or cultish. Therefore, the faith of the Nicene Creed is the faith of the whole church.

45. 46:04

    Michael Reeves

    That adheres to the apostolic gospel. Therefore, to confess this faith is not to go beyond Scripture, which is the worry of some. To confess this faith is to affirm the apostolic gospel laid out in Scripture.

46. 46:20

    Michael Reeves

    There is another worry that some people have today, that reciting the creed could replace a vital faith with just a list of doctrines, and so we get dead orthodoxy. But notice the little word in. that keeps being repeated in the creed.

47. 46:59

    Michael Reeves

    We believe in one God, the Father Almighty. We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ. We believe in the Holy Spirit. We believe in one holy catholic apostolic church. And so, when we say the creed together, we're not merely affirming our orthodoxy.

48. 47:17

    Michael Reeves

    We're not merely saying we believe that these things are true. We are declaring together we believe in this God and in His church.

49. 47:41

    Michael Reeves

    So, to recite the creed is not the same thing as to have a living faith.

50. 47:48

    Michael Reeves

    But to recite the creed without faith is to say a lie. This is the faith that binds us together as the one body of Christ. Together we worship and glorify the God who is truly Father, Son, and Spirit eternally. We believe and trust in a gracious Father who sent His eternally only begotten Son for our salvation and breathes out His Spirit on us that we might have His otherwise Unattainable life. This is the faith that makes us cry, Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and shall be forever. World without end.