The Nicene Creed - Part 2

Here is the second in the series of magazine articles on the Nicene Creed. This one was originally published in November 2019.

In this article we begin looking at the second, and largest, section, which considers God the Son, Jesus Christ. The lines of the Creed I’m looking at are as follows:

 

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made.

 

Whenever we read or say these lines of the Creed, it is as though we are going back in time to the controversies that raged within the Church in the 300s AD. I said in the introductory article in September that a key reason for the writing of the Nicene Creed was to combat the heresy of Arius. He taught that Jesus was begotten (or created) by God in the beginning. The teaching made Jesus a created being (the most pre-eminent being, to be sure, but still a created being) and not actually one with the Father. Virtually every phrase of this section of the Creed is designed to repudiate Arius’ teachings, and so we will briefly examine them in turn.

 

Eternally begotten of the Father … This is a bit hard to grasp (at least for me!), but it’s saying that there was never a moment when the Son did not exist. He is begotten of the Father, but begotten from eternity. So long as there has been God the Father (which is for ever), there has also been God the Son. This means that the Son could never have been created by the Father at a point in time. They have always existed together.

 

God from God, Light from Light … This may shed light (excuse the pun) on the previous section. An analogy which may help us understand things is to do with the Sun. As soon as the Sun existed, it emitted light. It wasn’t the case that the Sun came first, then its light. Both came together. It is the same with God the Father and God the Son.

 

True God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father…. This sentence was designed to dot the Is and cross the Ts. We all know that with a legal text, if it’s not written carefully, people can find loopholes to get out of what it’s designed to do. The Arians would have loved to have done this with the Creed, and said “well, it doesn’t really mean this, it can be interpreted that way”. This leaves no doubt! It categorically states that the Son is “not made”, so contradicting the claim of the Arians, and that he is “of one Being with the Father”. There is no getting around this: the Son is God just as the Father is God.

 

Through him all things were made…. This is a quote from the Gospel of John, chapter 1, verse 3. This again tells us that the Son is not a created being, but the one through whom all creation came to be.

 

So what impact does this ancient controversy have on our Christian faith today? It tells us that the person we read about in the Gospels, Jesus of Nazareth, isn’t simply a good and holy person; he is actually God in human form. When we see Jesus preaching, teaching, healing, and reaching out to the lost, we have a window into God. God is not far and distant from us, but someone we can get to know, understand, and love.

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