A new series from leading theologian, Garry Williams, encouraging us to engage systematically with theology via the Nicene Creed
‘We believe in one God’
You may have read or said the Nicene Creed* beginning either ‘I believe’ or ‘We believe’. The Church of England, for example, has ‘I believe’ in the Book of Common Prayer, but both ‘I’ and ‘We’ appear in the recent Common Worship liturgies. The original Greek text had ‘We believe’ and seems to have been changed so that the Creed could serve as an individual profession of faith.
Saying ‘I believe’ makes sense if only one person is saying the Creed, but when it is said by many then the ‘We’ becomes important. The first person plural reminds us that the Creed originated as an agreed statement of the catholic (i.e. universal) church that served to exclude from the body heretical denials of the divinity of God the Son. This was what all orthodox Christians professed. The element of universality is even stronger for us today when we say the Creed, because we join with our brothers and sisters from 1,600 years of church history and all corners of the earth.
This universality is an extraordinary thing to be conscious of as we take these words upon our lips (and a weighty reason to consider doing so together if we never do). To say the Creed is to connect ourselves outwardly and audibly to the church across space and time. And if we say the Creed in the context of corporate worship then we do so in the particular presence of the omnipresent God, before the eyes of the watching angels who learn from the church (Eph. 3:10), and in the teeth of Satan and the demons. When ‘We’ declare the catholic faith, it is an act of loyalty, love, and defiance. It becomes a bold and bracing moment of worship.
It’s not about me
Do not infer from the fact that the Creed begins with a first person pronoun that it will be preoccupied with Me, Myself, and I, or Us, Ourselves, and We. This is no statement of modern self-centred philosophy like the ‘I think, therefore I am’ of Descartes, which, even though he was trying to be helpful in refuting radical scepticism about existence, nonetheless starts off all human knowing on the wrong foot. Nor is it going to be a moment in which a post-modern Self expresses its sovereign self-definition, choosing its faith much as it feels it can now choose its (his? her? hir?) gender.
By contrast with systems founded on and gripped by the Self, the I or We of the Creed immediately fades from view. The focus will shift with the third word of the Creed (even sooner in the Greek and Latin where it is the second): ‘in’. Immediately upon speaking the self is taken outside of itself. This is not a Creed about you or about me, it is a Creed about the triune God and His works.
As such, it is a Creed that accords with and expresses the very fabric of reality, all of which is by, from, through, to, and for the triune God. This is not a Creed about me and my own faith. ‘Do you have a faith?’ we may ask, but really that is irrelevant, even misleading. The question we all face and which we answer in the Creed is rather: ‘Do you have this faith, the Faith?’. In declaring that we do, in decentring ourselves and expressing the centrality of the triune God, we take our proper place in the creation.
The Creed takes us out of ourselves because it is spoken by us as part of the body of Christ. And it lifts the body’s gaze from itself, turning our attention to the triune God who is the Alpha and Omega of all things.
*The ‘Nicene Creed’ as we commonly call it is in fact not the creed of the Council of Nicaea in 325 but the revised text formulated at the Council of Constantinople in 381.
