1700 years of Nicene Creed

According to tradition, the Nicene Creed turns 1,700 years old tomorrow.

I was born into a Unitarian family, and as old-school New England Unitarians, we didn’t think much about the Nicene Creed. I mean that literally, and not in a snide sense: obviously the Nicene Creed was never recited in our Unitarian church, but beyond that no one even talked about it; it just wasn’t something we ever thought about.

If we ever thought of the Nicene Creed, we thought about it in negative terms, much the same way Professor Francis Christie of Meadville Theological School wrote about it in 1910:

“The symbol of Nicaea inaugurated a mania for fixed and irreformable definitions, a consequent scholasticism, a cessation of thought, a weakening of the moral force of the church, a period of superstitious ritualism.” (Francis A. Christie, “The Significance of the Nicene Creed,” The American Journal of Theology, vol. 14 no. 2, April, 1910, p. 271.)

Today, I’d be less doctrinaire about the Nicene Creed. Even though the Nicene Creed’s trinitarian theology has never made much sense to me personally, I have friends for whom it remains a profoundly moving statement of theology (including some good Universalist friends). Part of being staunchly non-creedal is remaining open to the possibility of truth in creeds you don’t feel much emotional sympathy with. Yet Transcendentalist that I am, I continue to feel that Thoreau got it right when he wrote:

“…in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident. The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed.…”

To use Theodore Parker’s terms, when it comes to religiou, there is that which is transient, and that which is permanent. Using these terms, Thoreau is talking about that which is permanent: “no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed.” A creed, on the other hand, is a fallible human invention, and while it is useful for a time, it is nonetheless transient. The Nicene Creed has been useful to many Christians for 1,700 years, which is a very long time indeed; but it only points toward the divine, it is not itself divine. — At least, so sayeth my Unitarian forebears, with whom I entirely agree.

With those caveats, happy birthday to the Nicene Creed.