We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen…

These are the opening words of the Nicene Creed, one of the three Ecumenical Creeds, and one of the two creeds we regularly recite in our worship services - creeds that put words to our confession of faith in the Triune God.

Our church especially reflects on the nature of the Triune God on ‘Trinity Sunday’ which we observe this year on June 15^th. We praise and worship a God who has revealed himself as three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and yet is one God.

Reflection on the Nicene Creed is particularly significant this year because it marks the 1700^th anniversary of the first ecumenical council of Nicaea in 325 AD, which gave rise to the Nicene Creed.  This council of church leaders was called by the Emperor Constantine to consider the being of, and the exact nature of Jesus Christ regarding his humanity and his divinity.

The Christian Church has never been a stranger to controversy, and it was a theological controversy that led to the formation of the Nicene Creed. The Creed was written in response to the teachings of Arius who claimed that God the Father alone was really God and that Jesus was essentially different from his Father. Arius claimed that Jesus did not possess any of the Father’s divine qualities; nor did he exist before he was begotten by the Father. The Father produced him as his creature. He did not share in the being of God the Father and did not know him perfectly.

Arius’s teachings were of great concern for others who claimed that to separate the Son from God the Father in this way undermined Christ’s standing both as the Revealer of God and the Redeemer of mankind.

Hoping to avoid a serious division in the church, Emperor Constantine summoned the council of Nicaea out of which came the formulation of the Nicene Creed. The creed, which was later revised and confirmed by the Council of Constantinople in AD 381, affirms the full divinity of Jesus and the unity of God as Trinity and has had a lasting impact worldwide on the understanding of, not just the Christian faith, but also of worship and liturgy.

However, the Nicene Creed itself became the source of further controversy, contributing to a schism in 1054 AD between the church of the Greek speaking East and that of the Latin West, giving rise to two strands of the Christian Church – Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. The phrase at the centre of this controversy was the inclusion in 589 AD of the words ‘and the Son’ in relation to the Holy Spirit, who is said to ‘proceed from the Father and the Son.’ That phrase, ‘and the Son,’ is often referred to as the ‘filioque’, which is the Greek translation of its words.

Despite the difference that remains to this day, both the Greek (Eastern) and the Latin (Western) Christian church hold the Nicene Creed in high honour for having played a part in shaping the faith, theology, liturgy and hymnody of the past 1700 years. It has served both as a confession of our personal faith and as the church’s confession or witness to those who do not believe.

The anniversary of the Nicene Creed provides an opportunity for each of us to examine what we believe and why we believe them, just as the Berean Jews did, who ‘received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true’ (Acts 17:11). You may like to look up the Bible verses on the following page, which show some of the Scriptural basis for the statements in the Nicene Creed.

Praise be to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen!