How the Nicene Creed Was Written

The early Church already had short confessions of faith, recited by those being baptized. But when the priest Arius began teaching that the Son of God was a creature — exalted, but made, not eternal — the old baptismal words proved too loose to keep him out. Both sides could say "the Son of God." The Church needed language that heresy could not slip through.

So in 325 the emperor Constantine gathered the bishops — by tradition some 318 of them — to Nicaea. There they confessed the Son as *homoousios*, "of one essence" with the Father: "Light of light; true God of true God; begotten, not made". It was a deliberately un-Arian word, and Arius could not sign it. The Council of Nicaea gave the Creed its spine.

The creed of 325 was strong on the Son but ended almost abruptly: "And in the Holy Spirit." Within a generation a new party, the Pneumatomachi ("Spirit-fighters"), was denying that the Holy Spirit is fully God. The Church answered as it had before. The Second Ecumenical Council, called by Theodosius to Constantinople in 381 with about 150 bishops, took up the Creed again and filled out its final articles — the Spirit, the Church, baptism, and the age to come.

The result is the Creed we know: the Nicene core of 325, completed at Constantinople in 381. Because both councils shaped it, its proper name is the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, though everyone calls it simply the Nicene Creed. Its article on the Holy Spirit — the Council of 381's great addition — still reads: "And 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."

The Church received this Creed as its common confession — the rule of faith recited at baptism and, from the sixth century onward, sung by the whole assembly at every Divine Liturgy. It is not a private opinion or a theologian's summary but the voice of the Church saying together what it believes.

Its very stability became a point of division. Centuries later the Western Church inserted a phrase into the article on the Spirit — the *Filioque, "and the Son" — so that the Creed there reads that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son*. The Orthodox held then, and hold now, that no local church may alter by itself a Creed that the whole Church confessed in council. In the East the text of 381 is still sung exactly as the Fathers left it.