John Squires provides an excellent resource in tracing the scriptural antecedents of phrases in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (hereinafter referred to as the “Nicene Creed”). However, from my perspective, he somewhat downplays the significance of that creed in the life of the Christian church globally, and of The Uniting Church in Australia in particular.
The Uniting Church’s Basis of Union Para. 9 on the Creeds reads:
The Uniting Church enters into unity with the Church throughout the ages by its use of the confessions known as the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed. The Uniting Church receives these as authoritative statements of the Catholic Faith, framed in the language of their day and used by Christians in many days, to declare and to guard the right understanding of that faith. The Uniting Church commits its ministers and instructors to careful study of these creeds and to the discipline of interpreting their teaching in a later age. It commends to ministers and congregations their use for instruction in the faith, and their use in worship as acts of allegiance to the Holy Trinity.
In his final assessment of the role of the Nicene Creed in the Uniting Church, Squires neglects the all important first sentence of this paragraph: “The UC enters into unity with the Church throughout the ages by its use of the confessions…” For centuries, the Nicene Creed, in particular, has functioned as a significant symbolon of the shared faith of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church (both eastern and western traditions). Rev. Dr George L. Parsenios of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America describes the role of this creed as symbolon in the following way:
In the ancient world, the term symbolon referred to various kinds of tokens that people would use to identify one another. When two people entered into a treaty or a contract, for example, they would break a piece of pottery or an animal bone and each person would keep half the broken item as a symbolon of their contract. The word symballô means to "join together," and it was by "joining together" the two broken pieces that the members of the contract would identify their connection. In Greek literature, this was even the way that two relatives might show their kinship. They would each display their symbolon. Even more interesting for our purposes, when the great citizen Assembly would meet in ancient Athens, each citizen would be given a small token called a symbolon that showed that he was a legitimate citizen. In order to be paid for sitting on a public jury or to be paid for service in the Assembly, one returned this symbolon to the proper authorities at the end of deliberations. The symbolon proved that a person was a legitimate citizen who earned a legitimate salary. Something like this is what a figure named Rufinus had in mind in the 4th century AD when he explained why the label symbolon was applied to the Creed. A way was needed, he claimed, to distinguish true teachers from false, in order to keep the faithful from being confused. Just like soldiers in battle, therefore, who wear certain insignia to let their fellow soldiers know if they are friend or foe, so too, Christian teachers had to show their symbolon, the Creed, in order to let people know whether or not they were on the side of the true faith.
So there is a real sense that the “confessional” use of the creed is a marker of identity. We can see that role in negative terms as John Squires describes it:
That’s certainly how the Creed has been seen, and used, over the centuries. It’s almost like it shuts down debate; simply “believe these words” and you are “in”, but “question these ideas” and you are at risk of being declared “outside”. So the Creed, in this view of things functions as a gate; and priests and ministers are the gatekeepers, ensuring the purity of orthodoxy.
Or we can understand the importance of having an identity: not a rigid, impermeable identity, but a self-conscious, relational identity that is aware of its interactions with others, and self-reflective.
In this respect, we are a bit at the mercy of the paucity of some of our modernist vocabulary. “Belief” becomes either commitment to historical scientific fact or tentative understanding. “Orthodoxy” becomes getting things in the right words and thinking correctly.
Pre-modernity and postmodernity offer us more expansive understandings of such terms. Simply, “orthodoxy” is not about right thinking; it is about right honouring (doxa) of the God who comes in Jesus. “Belief” is not about historical and scientific claims but allegiance to something of such depth that its historical and scientific reality is mysterion: sacramental - it comes to us through Word (embodied language/action). Interestingly, Para. 9 of the Basis of Union uses the word “allegiance” in describing the use of the creeds in worship “as acts of allegiance to the Holy Trinity”. Symbols carry deep meanings and connections. They are not simply words, items or images. They re-present the world with which they are associated. Theologically, our faith (more expansive than modern “belief”) and our worship (honouring, not just modern “praise”) are gifts of God, and we enter into them not simply as individuals but as a people called together by God.
I suspect that very few Uniting Churches would regularly use the Nicence Creed in worship. However, when it is used, it is used as symbolon and is not simply “regular rote reciting”. It is an entering into the living history of a Christian faith that really had and still has to wrestle with the nature of who God is and how Jesus is related to God. That symbolon does continue to set the parameters of our theological thinking now; and it commits us to relationship with an enduring tradition of faith embodied not just in “our church”, but in the Church, the ekklesia, the body of Christ, the people of God, the communion of the Spirit.
Of course, the Nicene Creed is not the only symbolon. Its confessional use does not negate the significance of living out the shared faith it re-presents. Parsenios is careful to point that out too:
When we speak of the "legitimate" members of the Church, and of the "criterion" of Orthodoxy, we must not confine such things to the words we utter in the Creed. Those words are absolutely essential, but they are weak if they do not issue forth into a particular way of living. We cannot claim to have true knowledge of God if we do not express this knowledge in the true way of life. We do not only recite the Creed. We need to live the Creed.
None of us live out the faith fully. None of us understand it fully. We may all have our personal “beliefs” or understandings of faith, but we also stand in a tradition that is not simply defined by individuals, but by a corpus through which the living Word re-presents itself again and again. As Para. 4 of the Basis of Union declares:
Through human witness in word and action, and in the power of the Holy Spirit, Christ reaches out to command people’s attention and awaken faith; he calls people into the fellowship of his sufferings, to be the disciples of a crucified Lord; in his own strange way Christ constitutes, rules and renews them as his Church
In Confessing the One Faith: An Ecumenical Explication of the Apostolic faith as it is Confessed in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (381) (World Council of Churches [WCC] Faith & Order Paper No. 153, 1991), the WCC reminds us of its primary function “to call the churches to the goal of visible unity in one faith and in one eucharistic fellowship" with three essential conditions:
“common confession of the apostolic faith”;
“mutual recognition of baptism, eucharist and ministry”; and
“common structures for witness and service as well as for decision-making and teaching authoritatively” (p. 1)
It affirms that the “apostolic faith must always be confessed anew and interpreted in the context of changing times and places” as does the Basis of Union as Squires points out. But, that faith must also “be in continuity with the original witness of the apostolic community and with the faithful explication of that witness throughout the ages” (p. 2). The Basis of Union affirms this also, as Squires also indicates.
I agree with Squires that we “need to dig down into and beyond the words themselves” but these words are not simply of “historical significance”. They are symbolon of and for the Christian faith now.
And allegiance to co-sovereignty, even a certain queerness!
So helpful. There are surprising elements to re-discover, too. “For our sake” rather than “for our sins” for example.