Dr. Phillip Cary Explains Creeds
A creed is a confession of the faith. It’s not like the Westminster Confession, which is 20 pages long. You can fit it on one page. You can recite it in about 60 seconds, often set to music. It is the most widely used confession of faith in the Christian world.
The Nicene Creed is designed to give a fundamental summary of the Gospel about who God is. It’s always organized threefold: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There’s also the Apostles Creed, which is different but is organized in this Father, Son, and Holy Spirit fashion. The Apostles Creed is a bit earlier. The Nicene Creed is a bit longer later and deals with a more fundamental metaphysical issue about the being of God. But, most fundamentally, it is the confession of faith that more than a billion Christians share. So if you are not saying the Nicene Creed every Sunday, you are in the minority in the Christian world.
The Nicene Creed
I believe in one God, the Father almighty. Maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible. I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; through Him, all things were made. For us men and for our salvation, He came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man. For our sake, He was crucified under Pontius Pilate, He suffered death and was buried, and rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. He ascended into heaven and was seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and His kingdom will have no end.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of life, Who proceeds from the Father and the Son, Who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who Has spoken through the prophets. I believe in one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins, and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.
The Origins of The Nicene Creed
The Creed of Nicaea in 325 was shorter than what we have today. What we have today came in 381 from the Council of Constantinople. The original Creed of Nicaea in 325 was likely a baptismal creed from a local church.
Each local Church, especially in big cities like Rome, Antioch, and Jerusalem, would have its own Creed. Each Creed would be in three parts: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These creeds weren’t written down; they were handed down verbally. They did this because of the church practice of not passing out creeds to Pagans because they could make fun of it.
We don’t have a precursor to the Nicene Creed. It was probably from a local church; Somebody at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD grabbed one of these local creeds, wrote it down, and then added a few pieces to get rid of heresy.
Dr. Phillip Cary Explains The Heresy of Arias
Somewhere early in the fourth century, around 325, there was a priest, or elder, named Arias in Alexandria. He taught that because the eternal Son of God came from the Father, He must have been created by the Father.
So, therefore, there was once when He was not. That phrase was explicitly cursed by the Council of Nicaea in 325. Anyone who taught that ‘there was once when He was not,’ was cursed.
In Galatians 1:8, Paul says, ‘But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed!’ The Nicene fathers were saying that Arias’ teaching was false regarding who Jesus is. So it wasn’t about cursing Arias; it was about cursing teaching that leads us away from the true being of Christ.
The Debate Surrounding Translations
The Holy Spirit seems to be really into translation. You can declare the good news of God in any language in the world. However, you want a learned ministry, or at least some ministers who know their languages and can give you some pointers about what’s going on in Greek. So what we have in Christianity is a long tradition of commentary about Scripture, including learned commentary by people who know the languages.
By the grace of the Holy Spirit, a translation can be good enough to save someone’s soul from sin. But in the Church, we want people who can explain what’s happening in the Greek. So there’s a place for scholars. It’s secondary, but it’s something you need. Any decent translation of the Nicene Creed will be good enough to teach you who God is: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The Theological Misstep of Arias
Arias said, ‘If the logos came from or originated from God the Father, then the logos is subsequent. There was once when the logos did not exist because biblically speaking, only God is there at the beginning. God created all things and therefore the logos must be one of the things God created. Therefore, the Son of God is one of the things God created and there was once when He was not.’
Arias was trying to bring the notion of creation back into this. The problem was he brought the notion of creation into the begetting of God. So this phrase, ‘begotten, not made,’ could also be translated as begotten, not created, because the eternal Son of God is not created.
He’s not a creature. He is begotten, which is to say the relationship between the Son and the Father is like a relationship of a father begetting a son on earth. The strange thing is that He’s begotten before all ages. So the Father originated the Son in eternity.
The Pre-Existence of God The Father and Christ The Son
He preexisted the whole creation. You can think of time as a sequence of before and after. It’s a succession like King Charles is in succession to Queen Elizabeth; One replaces the other. The eternal Son of God is there before any succession. So we have to picture something beyond picturing as we’re speaking of something beyond words. When the church fathers talked about the incomprehensibility of God, this was exactly what they pointed to. Human language is not very good at depicting eternity.
How Does The Nicene Creed Depict Christ?
There’s the eternal birth and the birth in time, aka the temporal birth. Eternal birth is when He’s eternally begotten from the Father. Then the birth in time, which we’re more familiar with. Luke 2 tells us that He was born of the Virgin Mary. The ‘second birth’ is when He took on human flesh like you and me. Whereas eternal birth is unique to the eternal Son of God. Those two births make up the second article of the Nicene Creed.
What Dr. Phillip Cary Believes About Jesus’ Presence in The Garden
He was born of the Virgin Mary, which happened quite a bit after the garden. In His humanity, there was a time before he was born, just like all of us. In his divinity, He’s always been there. However, there are appearances of God before Jesus’ human birth.
Abraham had a conversation with God on the road to Sodom, where they talked about the future of Sodom. There is a long tradition in Christian exegesis of ScriptureScripture. It suggests that when the Lord appears visibly to Abraham, especially in this strange figure called ‘the angel of the Lord,’ it may be the pre-incarnate human form of the eternal Son of God. That’s a common Christian reading of those verses. We will have some puzzles when we talk about how the eternal God manifests Himself in time.
Dr. Phillip Cary Shares His View on The Importance of Mary
We are talking about someone (Jesus) Who’s just as human as you and I are. It is a virgin birth, which is to say, God brought it about. The will of the flesh didn’t bring it about. Her virginity means that she is an active partner in this, in a very deep way.
She has to consent to this redemption through her body. So, in her case, it’s no longer a simple biological process. It is God Himself choosing to become one of us. So He needs Mary to say, ‘Behold, the Lord’s bondservant; may it be done to me according to your word.’
The Latin word, fiat, is also used in creation when God said, ‘Let there be light.’ Her ‘fiat’ is the first word of redemption. In the same way, God’s fiat in Genesis 1 is the first word of creation.
So in the incarnation, God had a human partner. So her will is important to the establishment of our salvation. And that’s extraordinarily beautiful, and this is one of the reasons why Catholics and Eastern Orthodox go crazy over the Virgin Mary.
The Eternal Nature of God’s Covenants
God knows who His covenant partners are and chooses them wisely and well. Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. So, the Lord knew that Noah would be a good covenant partner. The Lord knew that this nobody, as Mary calls herself, would be a good covenant partner. She says, ‘He has had regard for the humble state of his bondservant.’ Why does she go to her cousin Elizabeth?
She was confused, upset, and didn’t know what was happening. John the Baptist was leaping for joy; He was a prophet already in Elizabeth’s womb. She reassures Mary, and it’s after her calling Mary ‘the mother of my Lord’ that Mary says, ‘My soul exalts the Lord.’ She wasn’t ready to say that right away. When she gets this human reassurance from Elizabeth, she bursts out in song and prayer.
How The Nicene Creed Describes the Trinity
The Nicene Creed is the great statement of the early Church about the doctrine of the Trinity. It’s rooted in the baptismal name, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And then it says that the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God.
Then it says that there’s only one God. That’s going to give you lots of puzzles to work on. But one thing to be aware of is that the Nicene Creed is resolutely Monotheistic. It doesn’t even use the word three. So you don’t need the word three to state the doctrine of the Trinity.
You just need the Creed and the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Then, each time you name one of these three, you describe the divinity of that Person.
This goes back to 1 Corinthians 8:6, which says, ‘Yet for us there is only one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we exist for Him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through Him.’ So to call Him Lord is to say the name of the Lord God of Israel belongs to Him. So we have a deeply layered Biblical theology of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, announced in the Creed.
Why Should Believers Study The Nicene Creed?
It’s a summary of what the ScriptureScripture has to teach us about who God is and why this is good news, especially when it says, ‘For us men and for our salvation He came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man.’
That is good news, and it’s nice to learn that by heart. One of the reasons you sing a favorite song repeatedly is to get it in your heart. This is good news to keep in your heart. Why does the eternally begotten Son of God take on flesh? For us and for our salvation. Why was He crucified? For us and for our salvation. Why is He sitting at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty? For us and for our salvation.
It’s set to music thousands of times by some of the best musicians. You learn to sing it, to say it, and to get it in your heart. Then you’ll know who God is and why that’s good news.
About Dr. Phillip Cary
Dr. Cary is a philosopher married to a midwife (he thinks about the mysteries of life; she puts her hands on them). He and his wife have three sons and two grandchildren. His favorite theologian is Martin Luther, which means he feels quite comfortable in a high-church Anglican congregation where they love both Word and Sacrament.
Dr. Cary loves Luther because he thinks we know people by hearing their words, and that’s how Luther taught us to know God. He was writing a dissertation on this theme at Yale while working on a double degree in philosophy and religious studies back in the early 90s. He was planning to write a little chapter on the Augustinian background to Luther’s theology, but this grew into a whole large dissertation, which then grew over the years into three books on Augustine, which is endlessly fascinating and different from what he had expected.
Dr. Cary loves learning things by reading old books, and that is essentially what he teaches. As far as he is concerned, the best old book is the Bible because it contains the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It always cheers him up to teach anything that has to do with the Gospel. Consequently, he has written a theological commentary on the presence of the Gospel in the book of Jonah, as well as a little book based largely on conversations with his students where he hopes to lure them into trusting the Gospel rather than applying a whole slew of “practical” ideas to their lives—unbiblical ideas that do little more than make them anxious. It turns out the Gospel of Christ tends to cheer them up, too.
Links Mentioned:
The Nicene Creed: An Introduction by Dr. Phillip Cary
Good News For Anxious Christians by Dr. Phillip Cary
The Meaning of Protestant Theology by Dr. Phillip Cary
Previous interview with Phillip Cary
List of Books by Dr. Phillip Cary
For more inContext interviews, click here.