The Creed - Constantinople and Nicaea

In many languages the word for believing shares a common origin with the word for glue. It comes through in English in the words adhesive and adherent. Belief is not knowledge, it is the model to which we adhere: we choose what to believe, and we cling to it. This is the nature of our creed: it sets out the life-changing choices we have made. Once we have chosen to work with a Trinitarian model – with Yahweh Elohim as infinite compassion and Jesus of Nazareth as its incarnation – the rest of the creed follows on.

The creed recognised by all mainstream Christian denominations as the definition of Christian orthodoxy is the creed adopted at Nicaea in AD325 and revised at Constantinople in AD381.¹⁵⁷ In the original Greek this revised Nicene Creed runs to 174 words; in English translation it runs to about 220. Its two key terms are homoousion and enanthropesanta. Homoousion describes the relationship of Jesus and the Father as ‘being of the same substance’, making Jesus fully divine. Enanthropesanta clarifies sarkothenta: sarkothenta is merely made physical or bodily; enanthropesanta is made human (anthropos).

Much of the rest is already familiar: there is one God (theos) who is both pater and pantokrator (all powerful, or the sum of all powers), as well as maker or fashioner (poieten) of the earth and the sky. Jesus is kurios and christos as well as only (monogene) Son of God, begotten (gennethenta) not made (poiethenta), and homoousion (of one substance) with the Father. The relationship is described poetically as light from light (phos ek photos), the phrase used when one candle is lit from another: once they are both alight, it is impossible to tell which came first, as they now have the same nature (homoousion). The metaphor is clarified in a poetic repetition: light from light, true God from true God (theon alethinon ek theou alethinou). This process took place when the Son was begotten of the Father before the beginning of time (gennethenta pro panton ton aionon), allowing the twin metaphor whereby Christ is eternally both fully God and Son of God. Finally Holy Spirit (pneuma hagion) is also kurios, and giver of life, who spoke by the prophets, and is co-worshipped and co-glorified with the Father and the Son.

157 The full title of the creed presently in universal use is therefore the Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan Creed of AD381, although it is everywhere called simply the Nicene Creed. The full text is analysed in more detail in the Appendix.