The Nicene Creed

I was raised Lutheran. Amoung the various things we had to recite every week in church was the Nicene Creed, which apparently is important for a good bit of Christianity today. I don't know about newer sects, but the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, Lutherans, as well as a bunch of the other protestant sects all seem to hold this in high regard.

The text as I was familiar with is as follows:

We believe in one God,

the Father, the Almighty
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.

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.
For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man.
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;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of Life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen.

What I didn't know at the time was that there were other versions of this creed, although very similar. I also didn't really understand what it meant. I always found some of the lines to be strange, such as "in accordance with the scriptures", but I never gave it much thought. Recently, however, I happened to come across the Wikipedia page for this, and it got me thinking, especially after going on some tangents to understand what the creed is saying that adherents to it do NOT believe.

To do this subject justice would be to devote more time and space than I am willing to, but I will write about some things that I learned and found very interesting.

First of all, is the concept of Arianism.

Arianism is the body of thought developed by the priest Arius in the early days of the church. As I understand it, he basically argued that Jesus was created, and therefore not eternal in the sense that although he may have no end, he has a definate beginning. In other words, there was a time before which he existed. Church leaders at the time were very hostile to this idea, as it apparently went against the way they viewed the trinity.

Second is Nestorianism.

This is the body of thought as developed by the prienst Nestor, also in the early days of the church. He argued that while Jesus was alive on Earth, he had two distinct yet simultaneous properties. One was human, and the other divine. From my understanding, Nestor basically argued that God can not suffer, nor can he die by definition. Therefore, there had to be a distinct non-divine aspect to him which was capable of suffereing and death for the resurrection story to work. Apparently church leaders weren'T very sympathetic to his views, either.

There were other quarrels in the church, but these two were the most interesting to me. they made me realize that although I once repeated these words over and over to the point that I memorized them without ever trying to, I never really understood what they meant, and more importantly really, what they don't mean. I say this, because I think that the reason for creating the creed and later modifying it was to exclude different opinions within the church, but that's another story.

Now that I understand it a little better, I realize that all that time I used to recite this creed stating what I believed, I was in fact doing no such thing. I never really knew it, but I implicitly accepted Arius' idea that there was a time before Jesus existed. And Nestor's teachings make a lot more sense to me that anything I was ever told by my church. Does that mean I was never a Christian?

Or course not. Arius and Nestor were certainly Christians, but they just happened to be in the minority opinion. Today they would probably split with the church and form their own sects. Unfortunately for them, they lived in a time when that was simply not possible.