Please note that due to software, not everything recorded in this transcript will be accurate

Nicene Creed                                                                                                            

Media – Michael Jr. clip

John Dickson (Studio)

That’s US comic Michael Junior — with his trademark clever … and clean — which sort of stands out in comedy today. And he raises an interesting theological question: we know Jesus had a half-brother James.  So, what would it have been like for James?

Media – Michael Jr. clip

John Dickson (Studio)

Poor, all-too-human, James! The jokes work because we have more than a sneaking suspicion that Jesus wasn’t really like the rest of us — he wasn’t quite human. I’ve had many sceptical friends over the years, people who don’t believe in God, but reckon Jesus must have been on a higher plane somehow than the rest of us. How high a plane!? It’s probably the most significant of all church history’s debates: Was Jesus fully human or fully divine or a hybrid of some sort? For ancient Greeks, the idea of the divine taking on flesh was illogical … absurd — gods don’t get mixed up with bodies. The infinite can’t be finite. The eternal can’t step into time. For Jewish thinkers, the concept of a human sharing in the divine nature sounds like blasphemy. Indeed, the closest thing to a full-on Jewish ‘creed’ is the 13 Principles of Maimonides, which appear in the Siddur, the Orthodox Jewish Prayer Book. The first and third principles were likely written to rule out Christian views of Jesus: 

Reading

Principle 1. I believe with complete faith that the Creator, Blessed is His Name, creates and guides all creatures, and that He alone made, makes, and will make everything. Principle 3. I believe with complete faith that the Creator, Blessed is His Name, is not physical and is not affected by physical phenomena, and that there is no comparison whatsoever to Him.

John Dickson (Studio)

Well, Christians from the beginning said otherwise. It was John writing in the first century who declared, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God … And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” John chapter 1. But how on earth does that work? God and flesh are not two words that anyone normally put together—not Greeks, not Romans, not the Jewish people …It was such a puzzling idea that there were arguments amongst the early Christians—in the first, second, third, and into the fourth centuries. The very word “heresy”—which basically means a mere ‘choice’, rather than a solidly supported perspective—developed in this context. The most serious early “choices, heresies,” were about the nature of Jesus. Some wanted him so elevated he couldn’t possibly have been really human (he just appeared so). Others couldn’t bring themselves to believe he was fully divine, so he must’ve been a special kind of creature. Enter the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, where bishops from across the Christian world gathered to settle — among other things — who Jesus was, and who he wasn’t. This year marks the 1700th anniversary of Nicaea. Its outcome was the Nicene Creed — the word ‘creed’ just comes from the opening Latin word of the famous statement: credo, “I believe” (although the original was the plural – sorry, Anglicans – credimus, “We believe.”). The “we” is poignant because these 175 or so words in the Nicene Creed are embraced by Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants. It is the ultimate statement of agreement between the great brands of the faith. They disagree on stuff—a lot of stuff—but these three paragraphs represented the shared core of Christianity, what C.S. Lewis called Mere Christianity. And at the heart of the agreement is Jesus Christ. Jesus – fully human and fully divine – is the star of the Nicene Creed, and the best thing Christians still have going for them! Some think of the Council of Nicaea as the invention of Jesus’ divinity and the related idea of the Trinity. Others see it as the end of the organic, flexible, open-minded church that Jesus founded and the beginning of the crusty dogmatism of Mother Church! But I see it as the ultimate statement of the Christian Faith. In the Venn Diagram of ‘Catholic’, ‘Orthodox’, and ‘Protestant’, the Nicene Creed is the shaded overlapping bit. It’s what all the teams see as central. And at the centre of the centre is — you guessed it — the humanity and divinity of Jesus. I’m John Dickson, and this is Undeceptions.

Undeceptions theme

John Dickson (Studio)

My guest today has run more church councils than most people alive. The Most Reverend and Right Honourable the Lord Williams of Oystermouth, former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams. For a decade, he was the figurehead of the world’s 80 million or so Anglicans (that is, the Church of England or Episcopalians). If you Google him, you might compare him to Gandalf or Dumbledore — and he certainly has the mind to match. Rowan has held distinguished posts at Oxford and Cambridge, served as Master of Magdalene College, and is a fellow of the British Academy. He’s written so many books and articles, it’s hard to even begin. For our purposes, he is one of the world’s great authorities on the history and theology leading up to the Nicene Creed. The most consequential heretic of all of Christian history was a Greek-speaking Egyptian named Arius around AD 300. That was the real cause of the Council of Nicaea—to combat Arius’ ideas. Well, Rowan literally wrote the standard academic book on Arius. Details in the shownotes! 

 John Dickson:
For people who have never heard of the Nicene Creed, could you give us the 30-second elevator pitch as they say over here in the US.

Rowan Williams:
Very briefly, um, the Nicene creed comes from the very first general counsel of the church. The occasion when the Emperor Constantine recently reconciled Christianity gathered together bishops from all over the empire to settle a dispute about Christian teaching that had arisen. First draft of the creed, finished in 325, final draft, 381, slightly revised and expanded.

John Dickson:
What do we actually know about the council, uh, in 325? I mean, who turned up? How’d they get there? What did they do?

Rowan Williams:
We know remarkably little about the proceedings. There must have been some sort of record, but it seems to have vanished. We’ve got a few account from a couple participants, but um, it lasted quite a while. It was a few weeks. And in addition to settling matters of Christian teaching, it settled a few matters of discipline like the date of Easter, for example, which was much controverted at the time. One interesting fact is that the emperor having convened, the council, promised to arrange transport for all the bishops. He allowed them to use the, the public postal service of the empire, so they probably travelled on oxcarts, which sounds very inconvenient and uncomfortable, but wasn’t quite as bad in those days. It was doubt as better living or coming on mule back all the way. Now, it was supposed to be a council for all the bishops in the empire, but in fact, nearly all of them came from the Eastern Mediterranean. Very few from Western Europe. Quite a few from Egypt. From Syria, Palestine. What’s now Turkey and interestingly, a couple from right outside the borders of the Roman Empire, possibly from Iraq or Iran that tells us something about the reach of the Christian Church in those days.

 John Dickson:
Any Englishmen?

Rowan Williams:
Nope. Um, there were a few bishops in Britain by that time, but like most of the bishops in France and Spain, it was a bit far for them. It was all the way across Europe. Even on an imperial subsidised oxcart, that could have been quite a challenge.

John Dickson (Studio)

Those ox-carts were heading to the city of Nicaea in Bithynia — today’s İznik in Turkey. Constantine chose it because it was safe, away from the mobs of Rome and Alexandria, yet only 30 kilometres from his residence in the royal city of Nicomedia. To follow the drama about to unfold, you need the main characters. First, Constantine himself; he was convinced that unity in the church meant unity in the empire. That was his key motivation. Then Hosius of Corduba, the emperor’s trusted religious advisor — a steady figure between the two opposing sides. On one side stood Arius of Alexandria, the spark of the controversy. As a mere presbyter or priest (they’re the same word), he couldn’t address the council, but his views were championed by other characters, including a guy called Eusebius of Nicomedia, not to be confused with Eusebius of Caesarea. He was a major theological force who would later baptise Constantine. On the other side was Alexander, the Bishop of Alexandria, the first to condemn Arius. With him came his young deacon Athanasius. He was silent at Nicaea but destined to become the era’s defining voice. Let’s begin with the emperor…

 John Dickson:
What was Constantine’s role in all of this? I mean, there are some pretty good conspiracy theories about, uh, how he managed the outcome.

Rowan Williams:
Constantine had decided that the Christian Church was going to be useful to him. He’d just managed to defeat his last rivals in the early 320s, gaining total personal control of the whole Roman empire, having previously just been in charge of the Western bit. So he’d arrived in Eastern Europe, he’d, uh, settled in Nicomedia, which is very near the border in near the coast of Turkey, and he thought. What we need is a good sort of solid story to pull the empire together. So Christianity seemed to be a kind of transcultural, unifying force. So he was a bit disappointed when he discovered that the Christian Church that he’d begun to patronise was divided very deeply, divided over doctrine. It was a matter of urgency to him then to get that division sorted. Otherwise, the church was not going to do the job he wanted it to do. Now it’s very difficult to gauge just how much real personal influence he had. He turned up at the council, he presided at the opening session. He was very visible in some sessions. We’re told he sat on a little stool for some of the sessions just to show he was a humble lay layperson, not not taking over. But I, I have a shrewd suspicion that people noticed he was there. And in terms of the final solution, the final text of the Creed, it’s clear enough that he and his closest advisors put a pretty heavy thumb in the scales. He had a, an advisor who was a bishop from Spain, Hosious of Cordova, and he seems to have trusted him quite a lot. He’d given him a few important commissions to do. Hosious had a very clear preference for what sort of formula ought to win out, and that was, sure enough, the one that succeeded. But, uh, the odd thing is that it’s possibly not quite what Constantine in the cold light of day would’ve thought was in his own best interests. And that’s one of the strangest features of the council. He clearly wanted the Christian churches to be swinging in behind him in the name of Imperial Unity and harmony and all the rest of it. And therefore swinging in behind his own view of his own divinely appointed status, which was quite a high view, unsurprisingly, and he believed he’d be chosen by whatever supreme God there was to sort out the Roman Empire. So a theology that said, well, God delegates power downwards and it lands on the monarch on the earth … that was suited to Constantine quite nicely. The odd thing is that that’s not quite what the council settled for. And the main defender of that sort of theory, who did write his own account of events, um, lost out at the council and was frozen out a few years afterwards. So yes, there are sort of textbook versions of this, which say, oh, Constantine took over the council, bent it to his will and made it come up with a theology that was favorable to him. A bit more complicated than that.

John Dickson (Studio)

Only bishops were really allowed to speak at Nicaea … not lower clergy like priests or deacons. That sounds elitist. It wasn’t socially elitist. Astonishingly, slaves could become bishops in early Christianity. No, it was intellectually elitist. The very role of the bishop – the overseer – was to preserve and protect Christian teaching in the region they were responsible for. Bishops were modelled on two New Testament leaders: Timothy, who was the apostle Paul’s protege and the protector of the teaching for all of Ephesus and its surroundings, and Titus, the protector for the Island of Crete. Anyway, that’s why only bishops get to talk at the council. Enter Arius.

John Dickson:
You’ve hinted at the man who lost out, or the ideas that lost out at the council. I happen to be holding your very well-loved, uh, book, Ariaus Heresy and Tradition. It’s not gonna hit the New York Times bestseller, but it’s, uh, in very nerdy circles it’s, uh, widely regarded. But can you tell us about Arius, uh, people have never heard of Arius, but tell us about him and especially his idea, which was a pretty cool idea, uh, viewed from one perspective that, um, Jesus is like a ladder bteween the infinite God and the finite human.

Rowan Williams:
Yes. Well, Arius, as far as we can tell, and we’ve mostly got rather hostile accounts of him, I’m afraid, from his enemies. Arius was a very senior cleric in Alexandra. Alexandria at this time is a, is a great kind of buzzing center of intellectual and religious and political controversy. Um, it’s the great intellectual centre of the Christian world, far more than, say, Rome at the time. And it’s also a city where historically powerful senior priests have been just as important as the bishop. So the bishop in Alexandria doesn’t have quite the authority over other senior clerics that he might have in, in other cities like Antioch or Indeed in Rome. Um, so Arius is in charge of a district of Alexandria. Possibly, this is my theory and not everybody agrees with it. Possibly it was the, the ancient church where some of the earliest martyrs were buried. We’re told he had, um, a good philosophical education that he’d studied logic and dialectic and we’re told also that he was the much revered spiritual director of quite a lot of communities of nuns in the city, a new development in the Christian Church at this time. And so Arius think we have to imagine as quite a charismatic figure. He’s a guru to a lot of people. He’s got a good academic training. He is well connected. He has friendly relations with senior bishops elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean, so he’s not just a sort of marginal figure. He’s quite a significant presence in the Church of Alexandria.

John Dickson (Studio)

We don’t know much about Arius’s actual words, only what was reported by his opposition. But we know he wrote a cool song with a pretty tune. There’s no better way to spread bad ideas than a cool song!! His song was called The Banquet, in part, the lyrics were:

Reading

God was not always a Father.
Once God was alone,
And not yet a Father.
But afterwards, He became a Father.
The Son was not always.
Once He was not.
He was not before his origination.
Then, wishing to form us,
Thereupon He made a certain one,
And named him Word and Wisdom and Son,
That he might form us through him. 

John Dickson (Studio)

All together now … 

Arius’s concern was to protect the Father’s glory. Calling Jesus fully divine seemed, to him, to blur the distinction between Creator and creature. Our Muslim friends have a similar disagreement. After all, Jesus got hungry, tired, and emotionally distressed. How could someone so changeable share the same nature as the unchanging God? So Arius concluded: Jesus must be a created being. In his famous line, “Once he was not.” And that, Rowan says, is exactly where Arius runs into trouble with the Bible; specifically, the apostle John.

Rowan Williams:
We are told in the Bible that God’s word, God’s logos in Greek, is eternal and that God creates with and in and through this everlasting word or mind, the sort of eternal intelligence of God, and that eternal intelligence of God creates a universe which is coherent, which is intelligible universe that we can understand. And that relates to the Jewish idea of divine wisdom: God creating through it in his wisdom (Sophia). That’s, that’s fine as far as it goes. And then of course you have the difficult bit, which is the word became flesh as it says in St. John’s Gospel. So this everlasting mind of God is somehow embodied in the life of a first century Galilean migrant worker. Which, you know, it’s a big claim that it was then it’s now. Well, this migrant worker from the North Country experiences, it seems inner emotional turmoil at times. Temptation, uncertainty, anger. He suffers, he feels tired, he feels hungry, and above all, he is subjected to torture and humiliation and execution. So how do you square that with the fact that he embodies everlasting divine wisdom? One solution to this basic problem was the idea that you have the eternal God, the source of everything, unchanging, absolutely transcendent, and he creates, he deliberately brings into being, a sort of second in command, a kind of second-level reality, like an immensely enhanced archangel who is the recipient and the transmitter of divine power to the universe, that isn’t God. So through this second in command, God creates the world and also engages with the world, reveals himself to the world and redeems the world. But because that second in command figure isn’t absolutely strictly God, he’s capable of change. He’s capable of suffering. And so in principle, it’s okay for him to be embodied in Jesus of Nazareth and to undergo those experiences. Now that, that’s a theory which has a certain kind of, um, elegance to it, it’s um, it’s fairly straightforward. Um, it clarifies ideas that a number of quite respectable theologians in the earliest centuries had toyed with and for Arius, with his strong commitment to dialectical clarity and logical precision areas think, “Well, you know, that’s the solution. That’s it.”

John Dickson (Studio)

Rowan Williams notes that Arius’ view might have been a bit more palatable to the Greek philosophers of his time (especially the Neo-Platonists, who saw reality on a continuum from the earthly to the heavenly in a great chain of being). Jesus was sort of like a ladder between humans down the bottom and God at the top. But Arius’s Bishop – Alexander, the bishop of Alexandria – was not impressed. He wasn’t interested in being cool among the Greek philosophers. The more important question for him was: What is true to the teaching of the apostles, regardless of the headaches it might cause philosophically?

Rowan Williams:
So quite a sharp division, as you can imagine, a very, very senior respected cleric standing up to the bishop and basically saying to the bishop, I’m sorry, sorry, your grace, but you are a heretic … which didn’t land terribly well with the bishop, and after a bit Arius has to leave the city and he makes a round of his old friends who were in influential positions in churches around the Mediterranean. And the controversy escalates quite rapidly within, I’d say about 18 months from that point until Constantine arrives and thinks, well, there’s a problem to be sort.

John Dickson:
So what was the second solution to this problem of infinity touching finitude. Uh, I interrupted you before you were gonna say the second solution be

Rowan Williams:
Well the second solution up until this time had been very much emphasized like golf between Jesus of Nazareth and the eternal word of God. For this solution. There really is an eternal word of God that lives with God, is intrinsic to God, is part of God, and this eternal word inspires controls, directs the human life that we call Jesus of Nazareth, but doesn’t exactly inhabit it.

John Dickson (Studio)

Rowan is describing what is dubbed Logos-Anthropos Christology.  Some early Christians thought the divine Word didn’t truly become Jesus but simply guided him from the outside—like a divine mind steering a human being. Rowan says that misses John’s point: the Word didn’t just inspire Jesus; the Word became Jesus. The Greek of John 1:14 is stark and clear: ho logos sarx egoneto. Literally “the Word flesh became!”

Rowan Williams:
Now that that isn’t something that many people really want to believe because they want to say something a bit more radical, a bit more direct about the involvement of God in the life of Jesus. So a lot of people are trying to avoid that. So when Bishop Alexander gets up to sort of stake his position in Alexandria, he ends up saying something which Arius and a good many others, think is dangerously close to that second solution. That is, um, making the logos the eternal word of God, a kind of factor inside God rather than an independent divine agent and weakening the bond between that eternal word and the humanity of Jesus. So Alexander can be accused, I think unfairly, of leaning a bit in that direction. And Arius certainly can say, ‘I’ve got a lot of people on my side’ when you look at the language they use. So really you’ve got two, um, two extreme positions between which somehow Constantine and his advisors and the bishops of the council have to steer a course. And that’s the challenge. And it’s not, of course, resolved at the council itself. It takes another 50 years or more to get a formula that really captures it for people.

John Dickson (Studio)

And the formula that sorted it all out is up next.

Break

Media – Dr. Who – The Council of Nicaea

John Dickson (Studio)

That was Peter Davison – the fifth Doctor – in the understandably forgotten Doctor Who episode, ‘The Council of Nicaea’ (no kidding!), where our famous Time Lord has a hand in making sure Christian history turns out alright. ‘Did Dickson find that cultural reference himself?’ I hear you ask … No. I think it’s clear who found that gem. Tensions in Nicaea were real. Arius’s view was championed by Eusebius of Nicomedia and Theognis of Nicaea. They argued Jesus wasn’t fully God, just a kind of ladder between humanity and divinity. The overwhelming majority of bishops (a couple of hundred of them) pushed back hard on that, also rejecting the idea that Jesus was a mere vehicle being driven around by divinity. That would deny his full humanity. So the creed had to navigate a careful path. The bishops were less interested in appealing to the hip fashions of Greek philosophy and more committed to stating things in ways that echoed the phraseology and the thinking of the Bible itself. The final vote at the Council of Nicaea (yes, they voted) was something like 250 to 20 against Arius’ cool ideas. 

Reading

We believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.
And in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the only-begotten Son of God,
begotten of the Father before all ages;
Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made;
of one being with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven …

John Dickson (Studio)

The Creed opens by echoing Genesis 1:1 — “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” It’s grounding Christianity right there: God is the source of everything, not part of the furniture of the universe. “Heaven and earth” means the whole show. We’d say “the universe.” When Christians say ‘god’, they don’t mean “a super-powerful being inside the universe” like the Greco-Roman deities. God isn’t in the house; God is the architect of the house. You don’t expect to find your home’s architect lurking in the kitchen — that would be creepy — but everything in the house points to the mind of the Architect. All of that is packed into the Creed’s first 15 words. But here’s the salient thing. Jesus gets 110 words (in the original language) — the Creed is overwhelmingly centred on him. Christianity isn’t moral theism: “God + good life.” It’s a laser focus on Jesus — and how he discloses the reality of the eternal God himself.

John Dickson:
So what was the final, uh, you know, answer to this question that, that the Nicene creed captures?

Rowan Williams:
The final answer is not so much a theory in itself as a set of almost a warning signs, um, a set of, a list of things. It won’t help to say. So it’s the creed is designed to rule things out rather than to give a theory and it goes something like this. Okay, so the eternal God eternally has a word, a mind, an intelligence, but the language the Bible uses suggests that that eternal word is not just an impersonal quality. That in some sense or another, it’s a second. Agency, not quite subjectivity, but a certainly a second presence. In other words, that the divine life is not just an individual like you or me or me sitting in heaven and deciding whether or not that there should be another individual. The divine life is something we can’t quite imagine, but which is in itself. Both plural and totally harmonized like a perfect chord of music. There are different elements in it. They can’t be understood without each other. So when we’re told that God gives forth an everlasting word, it means eternally there is in God a sort of outpouring and a responding; a baseline and a treble line or whatever. You know, there, there are two elements in, in the chord, and eventually of course you add the Holy Spirit, in three. I like the musical analogy because it. It reminds us that there are certain kinds of unity that are not just, um, a kind of atomic, indivisible lumpiness that this, this is in itself a fluid, reciprocal, diverse, but completely convergent life. So, um, that’s what I think the Creed is getting at. And it, it does it like this. It begins by saying, yes, we believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty. We’re not gonna have another God in heaven. Let’s get that out of the way. This is God, the creator of all things visible and invisible. There are no bits of creation that belong to somebody else or have been created by accident and then we believe in one Lord. Jesus Christ, the early begotten son of God. This is the eternal son of God made flesh.

John Dickson (Studio)

As I’ve said, explaining Jesus to Greeks and Romans in the ancient world was tough. They struggled to see how infinity could become finite, how spirit could take on flesh. Arius offered a pretty good solution: Jesus wasn’t infinity at all—just a link between us and the infinite. I reckon it’s to the credit of the bishops at Nicaea that when it came down to it, they weren’t willing to bend Christian beliefs just to make them palatable or easier. They stuck with the older, harder idea: God himself actually entered the world.

Reading

Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not made, 

Rowan Williams:
And here’s the interesting set of images. God from God, light from light. Now the light from light imagery is used by a number of early Christian theologians to say, when you kindle one fire, one flame from another, you are not creating a different thing. We don’t know where one stops and the other starts. You are not dividing, but something with its own life, its own integrity has come into being alongside the original. So light from light, or indeed the analogy of the light coming from the sun. Where does the sun stop and the light start? You can’t say. So it’s all a way of trying to get your mind around this idea that God is eternally not just an individual, but a process, an act with irreducible complementary elements within it.

Reading

Of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made;
who for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven,
and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary
and became man. 

Rowan Williams:
And the great climax is where the creed says ‘of one substance with the father’ in Greek, and that word of one substance. that’s the really controversial one because that says that the stuff of which you might say the logos of the word consists is the stuff of God. There’s nothing in the Word that isn’t God, no extra elements. The only differentiation between the word and the Father Almighty is their relationship, and that’s the word that became increasingly controversial in the decades that followed.

John Dickson (Studio)

That controversy literally turned on one letter in the Greek alphabet. Supporters of Arius wanted a homoiousios – ‘similar substance/being’. The bishops said: Nup. Homoousios – the Son was “same substance/being” as the Father. The Arians weren’t happy.

Rowan Williams:
It was fiercely resisted by Arius’s supporters of the council, but finally settled on is the one thing you had to say to make quite clear that you weren’t talking about a divine word that was not quite divine and separate from the father, and you weren’t talking about something that was just part of the father either. You were talking about a complete identity of the stuff, the constituent energy that made God the Father, God and God the word God.

Reading

And He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate,
and suffered, and was buried.
And the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures;
and ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father;
and He shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead;
whose Kingdom shall have no end.
And [we believe] in the Holy Spirit.
the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father,
who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified,
who spoke through the prophets.

John Dickson (Studio)

The mention of the Holy Spirit in the third stanza of the Nicene Creed raises the awkward topic of the Trinity!! The Creed makes it clear the Spirit isn’t an impersonal force or a doctrinal extra. He’s called “the Lord,” God’s own title. He “proceeds from the Father and the Son,” sharing their life. He’s “worshipped and glorified” right alongside them. So the point is unmistakable: the Spirit is God, no less than the Father and the Son. That’s the Trinity: one God in three persons. You ask a Christian is God three or one, and she says: YES. Our Muslim neighbours call it blasphemy (literally in chapter 5 of the Quran); atheists think it’s bad maths. But the Trinity solves a deeper puzzle: Have you ever thought how God could be considered eternally loving, if in eternity, there was no beloved before creation? Was God only potentially loving, waiting for humans to appear so he’d have someone to love and be loved by!!? The Christian answer is ‘no’. God is intrinsically and eternally a loving community of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That’s why we call him the Tri-unity—the Trinity. And it’s out of this idea of divine community that Christianity gets its huge emphasis on human community. This is the first aspect of the new life the Spirit breathes into us: community. The heart of the Spirit’s work here and now is to take ordinary people and fashion them into a new kind of community — what the Creed calls “the one holy catholic and apostolic Church.” The Spirit’s role is to take ordinary people, of every kind, from everywhere, and shape them into a community that reflects the love of the Trinity itself. But here’s the thing: this bit of the Creed wasn’t fixed in 325 at the Council of Nicaea. It came a little later.

John Dickson:
Am I right that the Holy Spirit line or lines were added later, not in the actual Nicene Creed?

Rowan Williams:
That’s right. The text of the creed of itself in 325 doesn’t have very much about the Holy Spirit. It simply adds ‘aAnd in the Holy Spirit, and we believe in the Holy Spirit’, and it’s not until 381 at the second so-called General Council that a longer section is added. It’s, it’s a bit puzzling really, because in 325 there were already some other Creeds around being used in the Eastern Mediterranean world, which had longer sections on belief in the Holy Spirit, belief that, um, the spirit inspired the prophets of the Old Testament, belief in the church, baptism, and so on, and eternal life. And so why exactly the bishops didn’t add this I’m not sure except that the long experience of Bishop’s meetings suggests that after a, a long and exhausting day, sorting out the rest of the, the articles of the creed, somebody said Right now, let’s get onto the, the third section on the Holy Spirit. And there was a large groan and somebody said, can we just say we believe in the Holy Spirit and go and have some coffee? And they decided to leave it at that.

John Dickson:
Because you would know this more than most!

Rowan Williams:
I have the bruises to show for it, but I think as the, the decades followed it became clear that teaching about the Holy Spirit needed a bit more clarification and it needed to be made clear that, oh, the Holy Spirit shared the same life as the Father and the Son and and so on. So in 381, we have this extra section added, which incorporates some of those phrases that you find in other creeds that are around in the period.

Reading

And [we believe] in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life,
Who proceeds from the Father; who with the Father and the Son
together is worshipped and glorified; who spoke by the prophets.
In one Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.
I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins.
I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life
of the world to come.
Amen.

John Dickson (Studio)

Now there is a lot more to be said about the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit as they’re presented in the Nicene Creed – a LOT. If you want to hear three lectures (sermon-lectures) on the Creed, head to the shownotes for a link to series I did when I was in Sydney recently. The talks were a kind of introduction to the Faith all brands agree on, for doubters and believers alike. For now, there’s one little item to sort out. There are two controversial words in the third stanza of the Creed—actually, in Latin, it’s just one compound word (Filoque). A couple of centuries after the Council of Nicaea (and Constantinople), a form of Arianism had a revival over in Spain. It’s a long story how (basically the Visigoths took over and they were Arians!!). To combat this, the Spanish bishops who held the old faith of Nicaea added a clarification about how Jesus relates to the Holy Spirit. The original Nicene Creed said the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father” full stop. In other words, the Spirit is an extension of the Father’s own inner life. But the Spanish bishops were worried that this might imply – to anyone influenced by the Arians – that the Spirit doesn’t also come from Jesus, the Son of God, and that therefore Jesus is less than the Father. So, they added one Latin word, filoque, “and the Son”, so that the Creed now stated that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son …” In the West—from Rome to England—that word (or those words) became part of the official Nicene Creed, by order of Pope Benedict VIII in 1014. But what about the East, the Orthodox Church—in Turkey, Greece, Syria, Jerusalem, Egypt, and so on? Well, they weren’t super impressed that the Latin ‘westies’ went and changed the agreed upon Creed—even if it was just one word (well, three in Greek), that’s just not on!!!! So, even these universally agreed upon statement of Christian Faith has one disputed word. Does the Spirit proceed from the Father alone or from the Son as well? The irony is: the Orthodox Church knows full well that Jesus (as well as the Father) sent the Spirit into the world. But that’s not the point (they would say). There should have been consultation. A universal creed demands universal discussion. I’ve got sympathies with that.

 Rowan Williams:
The Pope is not the head of everything, the senior bishop, but not in control of everything. So for the Pope to approve a change in the Creed without asking any of the other church leaders is, procedurally, a bit of a problem. The second thing is that the Easterners say, well, this gives you the impression that the Holy Spirit is a bit less personal than the Father and the Son. The Father and the Son are sort of up there together, and then they together, collaborate on producing the Holy Spirit and that slightly diminishes the role of the Holy Spirit because scripture says the Holy Spirit precedes from the Father, directly from the Father. Just like the Son, the Spirit is an immediate expression of the divine, the source of divine life. The source of divine life as it was springs up in two interrelated, but separate ways: the Word, (the Son) who eventually gets involved in the life of the universe through Jesus and the Holy Spirit, who is always connected with the Son, but nonetheless is not just dependent on the Son as a kind of, um, second level derived reality. And that’s the argument that persists, I think to the present day between Eastern and Western Christians with a lot of Eastern Christians saying, especially in the 20th century … and half the problems, or more than half the problems of Western Christianity, rest on an inadequate idea of the Holy Spirit, an idea that the Holy Spirit is just a kind of, um, functionary for the son. Whereas we want a more robust picture of the Holy Spirit, a more global and genuinely creative and divine model of that Spirit’s work.

John Dickson (Studio)

Now, with so much quarrelling over mere words in this Nicene Creed, I know my sceptical friends will probably be rolling their eyes. What’s all the fuss about?

John Dickson:
What’s at stake here? I mean, what someone might be listening saying, this is esoteric squabble.

Rowan Williams:
Yep. People were saying it in the fourth century, too. What’s at stake is drawn out very clearly by Arius’s greatest opponent, Athanasius, who is a junior cleric in Alexandria, close to Bishop Alexander.

John Dickson (Studio)

Athanasius was a theological powerhouse. He went on to become the bishop of Alexandria and spent decades defending the agreement at the Nicene council against emperors and Arians. He was especially concerned with Jesus’ identity as fully God and fully human.

Rowan Williams:
Athanasius devotes a huge amount of time and energy to long discussions of why it all matters and its something like this. Our human nature has encountered a kind of fundamental disaster, a fundamental kind of poisoning, almost so that we’ve stopped being capable of being human in the way we ought to be. And our human nature, therefore, needs to be reconstructed from the ground up. But what or who has the power to do that? No other bit of creation can do that for us. We’ve got an appeal to the creator, so the same power, the same energy that made the world must be the one that remakes it. And so the word, the son, that divine reality that is embodied in Jesus of Nazareth, must be endowed with the same power as the creator. Otherwise, we’re still in the same mess as before. We are not recreated. And the language in the New Testament used by St. Paul about the new creation that happens when people come to faith, that’s that’s in the background there.

Reading

“He took pity on our race, and had mercy on our infirmity [weakness], and condescended to our corruption, and, unable to bear that death should have the mastery — lest the creature should perish, and His Father’s handiwork in men be spent for nought — He takes unto Himself a body, and that of no different sort from ours.”

Athanasius, On The Incarnation, Chapter 2 

John Dickson (Studio)

So much for what’s in the Nicene Creed. How about what’s not? Stay with us…

Break

John Dickson (Studio)

Lots of people have doubts about Christianity, but there’s a doubt that comes before any particular doctrine: Which Christianity?  Anglican, Baptist, Presbyterian, Catholic, Pentecostal, Orthodox… take your pick. On social media you sometimes hear that there are 30,000 Christian denominations. As the so called Blunt Skeptic put it on X: “How can Christians all use the same text to defend their own beliefs and show everyone else is wrong? Same text! Why is that?” This critique actually began as a Roman Catholic jab at Protestants a century ago. We’re true Church; you’re the divided splinter groups! Recently — bless ’em — the National Catholic Register fact-checked their own claim …. and said it’s probably closer to 3,000. Not sure that helps! And of course sceptics now throw the whole thing back at all the Christian brands: “If you Christians can’t even agree among yourselves, why should we bother?” I asked Rowan Williams about this particular criticism and whether the Nicene Creed provides an answer. But you have to be a Plus subscriber to get that part of the conversation. Plussers, listen on. The rest of us … please don’t blame me … this was Director Mark’s decision … Or was it Producer Kaley … 

Let’s press pause. I’ve got a 5-minute Jesus for you.  Part of the reason we have a 5-minute Jesus in these episodes is that Jesus has been central to Christianity from the beginning. That sounds obvious but the Creed really brings that out. As I said, out of the 175 words in the entire Nicene Creed 110 are about Jesus. We’ve spent much of the time in this episode talking about the first great claim about Jesus in the Creed—that he is fully divine. The Architect of the Universe, the Creed says, stepped out of eternity and into history. But there’s the second theme: the history of Jesus. “He was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became truly human. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate.” Christianity’s universal summary of faith gets everyone repeating the name of one very specific Roman official: Pontius Pilate, governor of Judea, one we date precisely. He ruled AD 26–36. So what’s a figure from secular history doing in Christianity’s central creed? It’s a reminder that Christianity is anchored in events, not in a mystical insight or private revelation. Jesus’ life isn’t a tale from Middle-earth; it’s part of the history of the Middle East. And at the centre of that history is the third theme about Jesus struck by the Creed: Jesus died and rose for our salvation. Echoing Jesus’ own teaching, the Creed affirms that there is a future Judgment we need saving from. “He/Jesus will come again,” the Creed says, “to judge the living and the dead.”All forms of Christianity insist there is a final reckoning, an actual judgment. But equally, all forms proclaim that God offers amnesty—escape from judgment—through Jesus’ death and resurrection. That’s why Creed has a laser focus not only on Jesus generally, but on just ‘3 days’ of his 30-year biography: It says “For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven … For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day, he rose again, in accordance with the Scriptures …” Think about this: The creation of the universe gets 15 words … Now, Jesus’ final weekend gets 19 words!! That simply reflects the emphasis of the New Testament. The apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:

“For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve.”

The centre of the centre of Christianity—across all traditions—is that Jesus is God in the flesh, Eternity in history, and that his chief mission was to die and rise to save us from the coming judgment. If that sounds a little cliched, it’s because it’s the indisputable core of Christianity from the beginning, through every age, and still is today. You can press ‘play’ now.

 John Dickson:
The first word of the creed is faith or belief, which is a damaged word. Ever since our new atheist friends came out swinging and telling us all that faith is really believing things contrary to evidence, um, you know, some people would find it hard to say. I. Believe or I have faith. Can you help us through that little hurdle?

Rowan Williams:
Years ago, I, I wrote a little book called Tokens of Trust, which is about the creed. And I was trying in that, in the introduction to that to say, park the words faith and belief for a moment. And remember that in, in the original Greek, these are words for trust. I put my confidence in this and it’s a bit like what Buddhists say, in fact: I take refuge. I, you know, I’m settling here. I, I trust this is a good place to be, a good place to live. Now I think that that’s something rather different from, as it were, winding yourself up to say, I believe this to be true, but I’ve no very good reasons for it. Or, I believe this to be true because my life depends upon it. If I get it, if I get it wrong, um, it’s, and this is where. I think we have to step back and look at the whole of our mental life. It it’s that aspect of our mental and imaginative life where we bit by bit, we learn what we can rely on and who we can rely on gradually, not by any single process of abstract argument. We come from a point where we can say, you know, ‘I think I can, I think I can sit with that. I think I can put my weight on that. I think that’s dependable’. And how that happens is a long, complicated job, and it’s not something which boils down as I say, to a a formula very easily. But in fact, that’s the way we run a very great deal of our human lives.

 John Dickson:
We interviewed Tom Simpson, uh, from Oxford, who’s, uh, a specialist in the philosophy of trust, and he talked us through just how important it is to economies, to the healthcare system, relationships, and so on. Yeah,

Rowan Williams:
Exactly. We, we sometimes let ourselves be, be trapped by a completely impossible ideal of certainty, as if in an ideal world, we would have absolute cast iron clarity. About every important conclusion we make. And, um, that leaves out in the cold pretty well. Every important decision we make, who we, who we go to bed with, who we vote for, who we rely on for advice, all sorts of things, which really do not shrink down to that. And no reason why our religious commitment should be somehow more blindingly clear and cast-iron certain than that.

John Dickson (Studio)

I asked Rowan — The Most Reverend and Right Honourable the Lord Williams of Oystermouth, former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams — what any of this has to do with those who don’t believe in Christianity.

John Dickson:
My final question is for the doubters in my audience, of which there are many who listen to interceptions but aren’t sure what to make of the Christian faithI would love to point them to the ENE creed, the, which is what this episode is about, and I want to ask you, Rowan, give my doubting listeners the doubters guide. To the nice creed, if they’re gonna go away. If I’m gonna challenge them at the end of this to get the nice creed, have a little read and reflect, nice and slow.  Can you give them the doubters guide?

Rowan Williams:
Yes. I, I, I think want to say, these are the things to look out for in the creed that you might take away and  ponder. First of all, um, it’s a creed which assumes. That the world hangs together in some way. I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. The the way the universe we live in is the universe that hangs together. That makes sense. It’s not an accidental bundle of processes, and it’s not an eternal battle between good and evil. It’s a huge kind of tapestry in which things hold  together and not only make sense, but make sense of each other because it’s all flowing out from one unimaginable limitless intelligence, which is also a loving intelligence. So I’d say think about that. Think about not another layer of scientific explanation, but a kind of imaginative sense of how the whole thing hangs together. And second, think in that context what it might be to believe in a God who to put it rather crudely can’t help himself creating relationship eternally. God is not a solitary individual sitting twiddling his thumbs in the clouds eternally. God is more like, like take a very ancient image, the water bubbling over from a spring. God is life giving and in being a giving God is a loving God. So that on the one side we have this promise or challenge for our intelligence.The world all hangs together. On the other side, we have this as a challenge to our feeling and our imagination. It hangs together because behind it is a cohesive love. A faithful love, and behind all the, the ivory, taring, ities that people see in the creed, those I believe, are the things that the creed most wants us to bear in mind to run our lives together.

John Dickson:
Rowan Williams, thank you so much for your time and for your guidance through this, uh, difficult topic of the Nicene Creed. 

Undeceptions theme

John Dickson (Studio) 

Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dickson, produced by Kaley Payne and directed by Mark Hadley. 

Alasdair Belling is a writer and researcher. 

Siobhan McGuiness is our online librarian. 

Lyndie Leviston remains my wonderful assistant. 

Santino Dimarco is Chief Finance and Operations Consultant. 

Editing by Richard Hamwi.

Our voice actors today were Yannick Lawry and Dakotah Love.

Special thanks to our series sponsor Zondervan for making this Undeception possible. 

Undeceptions is the flagship podcast of Undeceptions.com – letting the truth out.