Gisle on the Nicene Creed

The title page to Gisle Johnson's translation of the Book of Concord.

With the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed, a great deal of theological literature has been published, presented on, and disseminated to celebrate what is essentially the most seminal theological document in the history of Chrsitianity outside of the Bible itself. Gisle Johnson cared deeply about Nicene theology. This is apparent not only in his sections on the Trinity in his own systematic theology, but also in his strict confessionalism. In his own translation of the Book of Concord (which contained the Nicene Creed), Gisle takes care to introduce the Creed in its historical setting in order to explain its import, which may have otherwise been lost on his fellow countrymen, who had never had a translation of the Book of Concord in their own language. Below is a translation of his thoughts on the Nicene Creed.

2. The Nicene Creed.

In the second part of the fourth century, a presbyter, Arius, appeared in Alexandria in Egypt, who denied that the Son of God was true God, teaching that he was probably before all time, but nevertheless not from eternity, and that he was created by the will of the Father from nothing. Arius’s teaching was fought and rejected by his bishop Alexander and the greater part of the Alexandrian clergy as well as by most Egyptian and Lydian bishops, and he himself was excluded from the society of the Church and deposed. He now turned to several influential Eastern Bishops outside of Egypt to seek protection from them and thereby also drew these and many other Eastern leaders into the conflict, so that it eventually spread like wildfire across the entire Eastern Church. In order to settle it and prevent the ecclesiastical schism with which the Church was threatened, the first Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine the Great, in the year 325 called together a great church assembly, which was held in the city of Nicæa in Bithynia, a province of Asia Minor. At this church assembly, which consisted—according to the usual reckoning—of 318 bishops and was the first assigned to the general church assemblies, now on the basis of a confession, which the learned deacon, bishop of Caesarea in Palestine, had written, a confession was perceived and adopted, in which the true divinity of the Son of God was most strongly confessed in opposition to Arius' heresy, and all those who shared these were rejected. This Creed, for which the Apostoles’ Creed, which it then had in Caesarea, laid the foundation,[1] and which of the city in which the church assembly was held took its namesake Nicene Creed or the Nicene Symbol, reads as follows:

"We believe in one God, the Almighty Father, Creator of all things visible and invisible.

And on one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father as the only begotten, that is of the Father's Being, God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, born, not created, of the same Being with the Father; by whom all things were created, both in Heaven and on Earth; who for us men and for our salvation descended and became flesh and became man; who suffered and rose on the third day and ascended to Heaven and will come again to judge the living and the dead.

And in the Holy Spirit.

But those who say that a time was given when the Son of God was not, and that he did not exist before he was born, and that he came into being from nothing, or who say that he is of another Being (than the Father), or that he is changeable, or that he can be changed, or that he is changeable, those are rejected by the universal Church.”

However, this Creed could not immediately be accepted into the Church, and there was fought in the history of the Church the fiercest long-lasting and intense battle concerning the Godhead of Christ. Finally, however, those who defended Christ's essence with the Father or his true Godhead, the Orthodox or, as they are also called, the Nicenes, won, and the Nicene Creed was confirmed at a new, second Church Assembly, which was held in Constantinople under Emperor Theodosius the First or Great Emperor in the year 381, and which is the second general Church Assembly, whereby it consisted of only 150 Eastern Bishops. Here, however, they were not satisfied with simply repeating what they had adopted in Nicaea. During the battle, some other Bible passages were also brought forward. A Bishop of Constantinople, Macedonius, and others had thus taught that the Holy Spirit was not of the same Being as the Father and the Son, i.e. not true God, but a creature, a creature of the Son. A Bishop of Laodicea in Asia Minor, Apollinaris, and his followers had denied that Christ had a full and true human nature. Finally, a Bishop of Ancyra in Galatia, Marcellus, warned that the Kingdom of Christ would come to an end. Even these above these bishops were believed to have to profess the true, right faith. They therefore added to the Nicene Confession some powerful additional lines, namely: "And the Holy Spirit, who is Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who is worshiped and honored together with the Father and the Son, who has spoken through the prophets"; furthermore: "who became Flesh of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary"; finally: “of his (Christ’s) kingdom there will be no end,” and curiously another clause, which in the third article follows the clause about the Holy Spirit,[2] whereas the rejection of the Arians, with which the confession drawn up at the Council of Nicaea ends, was omitted. Also this new Confession, which should really be called the Constantinopolitan, or the Niceno-Constantinopolitan, has in the Church received the name the Nicene Confession, because the oldest, proper Nicene Creed is the basis for it and is only further developed and more precisely determined in it, and because the Nicene Church Assembly far exceeded the Constantinopolitan one in significance.

However, the Nicene Creed in the form in which we and the entire Western Church have it, was not yet complete. In the Western Church, new battles had to be fought with the Arians, as the Germanic peoples, where the Western Roman Empire had gained power, had for the most part adopted the Arian faith. In order to assert the Son's perfect essence with the Father, one therefore, to the words in the section on the Holy Spirit, "which proceeds from the Father," added here the words: "and from the Son" ("which proceeds from the Father and from the Son"), an addition which arose in the sixth century in Spain and from there gradually spread over the entire Western Church. The Greek-Eastern Church, however, refused to recognize this addition, as it taught that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone, and considered it too unacceptable to add anything to the Nicene Creed; the addition: "and from the Son" even became one of the causes of the split between the Eastern and Western Churches, which began in the eleventh century and persists to this day. In addition, in the Western Church, the word "of" was also left out before the section on the Church ("And in one holy, Christian and apostolic Church"), which word is found in the original Greek Nicene Confession ("And one holy, Christian and apostolic Church"). The Westerners rejected faith in the Church.[3]

The Nicene Creed gained an extremely high reputation throughout the Christian Church. The Eastern Churches, in which its esteem was and still is greatest, even made it their baptismal confession, first from the end of the fourth century until about the middle of the fifth in the older, Nicene form, then from the second half of the fifth century, in its later, Constantinopolitan form, as they wrote the many different baptismal confessions, of which they until now had served themselves, one of this, the other of that, and as they were all different figures of the apostolic confession, what basically also applies to the Nicene. In addition, the Eastern Churches also decided that this confession should be recited at the daily service or at the “Mass,” the climax of which was the celebration of the sacrament, and they therefore included it in their liturgies or altar books. Also in the Western Church, the Nicene Creed was used both at baptism and at Mass. In the Roman congregation and in some other western congregations, it was for a long time (roughly from the end of the fifth century until the ninth) used as a baptismal confession, as the adults who came to the baptism, if it was communicated and reinforced, had to learn it by heart and give it for the baptism, and since also at the baptism of children the godparents had to give it for the child. In the Roman Church, it even has the same name as the older Apostles' Creed: “The Apostolic Symbol.” The Mass became  used throughout the Western Church, where it therefore got the name “Messe-Credo” or the Creed, which is used and sung at the Mass. It thus became in the West a kind of sacramental confession, while the Apostles’ Creed here was generally a baptismal confession. In the sixteenth century, all branches of the Western Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the English Church, the Reformed Church, and the Lutheran Church expressly professed to it as one of the Church’s fundamental confessions, the Lutheran Church notably by including it among its confessions.

The Nicene Creed, which is basically the only ecclesiastical confession that can be said to be “ordinary” in the full sense of the word, as it is recognized and used in both the Western and Eastern Churches, has its special meaning for the Church in that it firmly and sharply states the belief in the divinity of the Son and the Holy Spirit, in particular, or the belief in the Triune God and thereby explains the first part of the second and third articles of the apostolic confession and protects the correct meaning of these parts.

[1] Eusebius had in fact put the Apostles' Creed, as it sounded in his own Church, as the basis for the Confession, which he submitted to the Assembly, and which in turn formed the basis of the Nicene Symbol.

[2] Or rather, with a few insignificant changes, a form of the Apostles' Creed was adopted, in which all these attachments were already found, and which was then used at the baptism in that Cyprus. The Nicene Confession in its later Constantinopolitan form essentially already existed before the Church Assembly in Constantinople, and that as an Eastern form of the Apostles Creed and as a baptismal confession.

[3] It is a big question, however, whether the Council in Constantinople and the old Greek Church at all understood the words: "We believe in one a holy, Christian and apostolic Church" differently than if it had been written: "We believe one holy, Christian and apostolic Church." There are many indications that they had not done so.