The Nicene Creed Today, Yesterday, and Tomorrow

The Nicene Creed Today, Yesterday, and Tomorrow

In an age obsessed with rewriting the past to control the future, the ancient words of the Nicene Creed stand as a stubborn, living witness to a truth that cannot be retouched. As Milan Kundera observed, "The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past." Yet the Creed, born from the fires of the first great ecumenical council in A.D. 325, refuses to be edited by the whims of any era.

Three hundred bishops gathered at Nicaea at the call of Emperor Constantine, not to innovate, but to discern. The crisis centered on Arius, a priest who taught that the Son was a created being, and his bishop Alexander, who insisted on the Son's eternal divinity. The Creed they produced was not merely a statement of belief, but a boundary marker. As theologian Karl Barth insisted, "If the Yes does not in some way contain the No, it will not be the Yes of a confession."

This is the Creed's enduring gift to the seeking soul: it tells us not only what we believe, but what we refuse to believe. "Are there some things that Christian faith refuses to believe?" asks theologian Christopher Morse, noting that such questions are "too infrequently asked." The Nicene Creed answers with clarity: we refuse to believe that the Light of the world is a creature. We refuse to believe that salvation is anything less than God's own descent into human flesh. The past is never dead, William Faulkner reminds us. It is not even past. In the Creed, the church finds not a relic, but a living compass for the journey ahead.