Seventeen hundred years ago, from sometime in May till about the end of July, a gathering of about 300 community leaders from across the Christian world took place in the Asia Minor city of Nicaea. The meeting had been called by the Roman Emperor Constantine, who chaired the meeting in person and who, in the year 313, had issued, in the Edict of Milan, the Roman Empire’s first declaration of the freedom of religion. Now 12 years later, understandably bewildered by the large variety of Christian practices and even beliefs in various parts of his domain, and concerned no doubt for his own eternal salvation, Constantine had called together this meeting in Nicaea. The purpose was to reach an agreement on Christian belief that would be acceptable to all Christian communities. Constantine was not a Christian himself at this stage, choosing to be baptised quite a few years later, only as he was dying.
The statement that the bishops came up with was extraordinarily concise, carefully structured, and poetic. It did not achieve the full consensus hoped for, and it needed to be finalised, after another five decades of further debate, at the Council of Constantinople in 381. In its completed form, at it can be recited in just over 90 seconds and focusses attention on the distinctive threefold naming of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Its poetry shines through in the rhythmic flow of words: ‘light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made,’ and so on. Every word and phrase is loaded with significance, thick with meaning. Even in our modern English translations we can sense the painstaking and not always agreeable struggle to find exactly the right word and concept. The result is an encapsulation of the essence of Christian belief in a few short sentences, not a word too many or too few.
Was it necessary, all this mental effort? Christians were talking about something totally new and unprecedented that had taken place in their experience – it was overwhelming and it was confusing. That’s why there was such diversity in how people were trying to articulate this experience. How were Christian leaders going to work together? How was a government that had now legalised a diversity of religious practice going to relate to such enthusiasm? Rowan Williams has put it well: ‘You can’t just say, “That was amazing!” and leave it at that. You’re a human being, so you’ve got a mind. You need to think about it, you need to talk about it.’ What took place at Nicaea in 325 CE was not the beginning nor the end of this thinking and talking about what was so totally unprecedented in this life of Jesus, and what had happened that was so overwhelmingly life-changing on the day of Pentecost. But it was a high point in this thinking and talking; it was a moment of ‘thick description’ in the story of Christianity, a moment when concentrated thought was brought to bear on the matter of faith. The Nicene Creed, even when not explicitly affirmed in worship, continues to govern the basic presuppositions of Christians of all varieties throughout the world. We are all beneficiaries of the work of those gathered at Nicaea all those centuries ago.
