Theopedia

Nicene Creed

Definition

The Nicene Creed is the church’s ecumenical statement of Trinitarian faith, adopted by the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 and revised by the Council of Constantinople in AD 381, from which it is sometimes called the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. It was framed to answer Arius, who denied that the Son was eternal; against this the creed confesses him “begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father,” of “the being of the Father” rather than a creature brought into existence.1

Historical Origin

The controversy that produced the creed began around 318, when Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, discoursing to his clergy on the Trinity and insisting on the unity of the three persons in God, was fiercely challenged by the presbyter Arius over how the Son could be “begotten” of the Father without that begetting having a beginning in time.2 To settle the dispute, the emperor Constantine summoned a council of bishops, some 250 to 300 of whom attended, meeting from late May to July of 325 at Nicaea in Asia Minor, with Ossius of Cordoba probably presiding.2 The council’s decision against Arius took the form of a short statement of faith, the Creed of Nicaea.2

Carter gives the full text the council produced:

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things, seen and unseen; and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten as only begotten of the Father, that is, of the being of the Father [ek tēs ousias tou patros], God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not made, consubstantial [homoousion] with the Father through whom all things came into existence, both things in heaven and things on earth; who for us men and for our salvation came down and was incarnate and became man, suffered and rose again the third day, ascended into the heavens, and is coming to judge the living and the dead. And in the Holy Spirit. But those who say “there was a time when he did not exist,” and “before being begotten he did not exist,” and that he came into being from non-existence, or who allege that the Son of God is from another hypostasis or ousia [ex heteras hypostaseōs ē ousias] or is alterable or changeable, these the Catholic and Apostolic Church condemns.1

Carter notes that the Greek word ousia (“being” or “essence”) does three distinct pieces of work in this text: it identifies the Son as “of the being” of the Father, it supplies the root of homoousion (“consubstantial,” of one ousia with the Father), and it names what the condemned view denies, that the Son shares the Father’s own ousia at all.1 By this point in the century, more than one set of Trinitarian vocabulary could express an orthodox position; the achievement of Nicaea was securing the church’s agreement around this particular formula for guarding the Son’s full deity against Arius’s denial of it.1

The 381 Creed of Constantinople

The 325 creed’s statement on the Holy Spirit was a single clause, “And in the Holy Spirit,” with no further elaboration; Arius himself had said nothing about the Spirit, and the fourth century’s controversies over the Spirit’s own deity had not yet fully emerged.2 The Council of Constantinople in 381 answered that later controversy by expanding the creed’s third article: “in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Life-giver, who proceeds from the Father, who is worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son, who spoke by the prophets.”3

Scholars have catalogued many small wording differences between the 325 and 381 texts, but Cheng, following Lewis Ayres, narrows these to three substantive changes: the extended statement on the Spirit quoted above, the omission of the phrase “from the ousia of the Father” in the Son’s own description, and the omission of Nicaea’s closing anathemas against Arius’s specific formulas.3 The first of these, securing the Spirit’s own place within the church’s confessed worship of Father, Son, and Spirit alike, is what completed the doctrine of the Trinity that the 325 creed had begun to state.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Craig A. Carter, “The Biblical Character of Pro-Nicene Theology,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 7. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. Samantha Ming Sum Cheng, “The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit’s Eternal Procession in Church History,” in “Retrieving Eternal Procession: A Dogmatic Western Account of the Holy Spirit’s Relation to the Father and the Son in the Triune God’s Divine Life” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2025), 26-27. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. Cheng, “The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit’s Eternal Procession in Church History,” 42-43. ↩ ↩2