Why Celebrate Nicaea?

by Richard Clutterbuck.

When I invite a Methodist congregation – usually in a service of Holy Communion – to recite the Nicene Creed with me, there’s often a sense of surprise. It’s as if this is a strange and eccentric thing to do in an act of worship. So, we might not expect Methodists to be in the forefront of the celebrations for this year’s 1700^th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. What does it matter that 318 (according to legend) bishops and their assistants assembled in a corner of the Eastern Roman Empire to thrash out a formula for teaching Christian doctrine? As a student once said to me in an Early Christian Doctrine class, “Why bother, these people are all dead, aren’t they?”

I do need to acknowledge that the historic creeds (the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed) have had a mixed reception in Methodism. Its more evangelical members might think that the councils and creeds are unnecessary; after all, we have the Bible, so what more do we need? Liberals, on the other hand, may find the idea of councils too controlling and creeds too restrictive; “don’t let anyone tell me what to believe!” John Wesley, as so often, sends a mixed message. He was always a staunch defender of the basic tenets of the Nicene Creed, such as the doctrine of the Trinity, in spite of their many contemporary critics. On the other hand, Wesley omitted the Nicene Creed from the communion service in his version of the Book of Common Prayer, edited for the newly-independent Methodist Church in the USA.

So, why should we celebrate Nicaea? I could suggest a number of reasons. One would be our solidarity with other Christians, past and present, what Jurgen Moltmann called ‘the ecumenism of time’. Another might be the conciliar method of bringing together Christians with different points of view to find a common understanding – something that, at its best, Methodism has done with its conferences. But asked to give just one reason, I would say this: Nicaea gives us an answer to the question, why bother with Jesus? The creed of the Council of Nicaea is shorter than the version we commonly recite as the Nicene Creed (it’s rather light on the Holy Spirit) but it shares the same emphasis on the drama of God’s action in creation and salvation. Jesus, the person who walked the lanes of Judea, taught in synagogues,  gathered disciples, performed miracles, suffered and died at the hands of religious and imperial powers, and (so his followers believed) rose from the dead, is one with the God who created the universe and works for its salvation.

“We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things, visible and invisible;
And in one Lord. Jesus Christ, the Son of God…”

The clauses that follow make it clear that not only has everything that exists come into being through God’s creative care, that same God’s saving love for humanity finds its expression in the Father’s Son, Jesus Christ. Famously, Nicaea introduced the word homoousion (of the same substance) to talk up the unity between the Father and the Son, and to refute the claim of Arius (an influential priest in Alexandria) that Jesus was part of creation rather than one with the creator.

If that seems a strange point of view to us, it’s surely because the European Enlightenment sparked a series of attempts to get behind the councils and creeds to a ‘real Jesus’ who could be recovered from their theological formulae. So, the nineteenth-century gave us the ‘Jesus of History’ movement, with multiple attempts to write the life of Jesus, usually with an emphasis on his ethical teaching and example. More recently, the ‘Jesus Seminar’ painted a picture of Jesus as the wandering prophet, a thorn in the side of the powerful. While these movements have given us a lot that’s helpful and challenging, they don’t give us a reason for putting our faith in Jesus, making him the centre of our belief and worship as well as the inspiration for our practice. It’s this that Nicaea does, admittedly in the language of its day, but nonetheless as a genuine call to faith and affirmation of salvation.[i]

What we teach still matters. We might look for different language from that of Nicaea, but we can still share in its faith.

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[i] It wouldn’t be right to claim her as a supporter of my point of view, but I am deeply indebted to one of my fellow-contributors to Theology Everywhere, Frances Young, who is taking a leading part in some of the celebrations of Nicaea this year. Her two recent volumes on Scripture the Genesis of Doctrine (Eerdmans 2023, 2024) shed fresh light on the early church and the complex relationship between the Bible and Christian teaching. In particular, Frances emphasises the importance of teaching in early Christianity. The early church, she says, often looked more like a school for learning than a traditional religion. What you believed really mattered; it wasn’t just a matter of fulfilling the right rituals. This teaching, she tells us, both depended on a dense and creative reading of scripture and developed its own lens for interpreting the Bible. See, also her “A Song for Nicaea” in the bulletin of the Methodist Sacramental Fellowship.