Confessional Standards



Historical Context

Sometimes called the “Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan Creed,” this expression of the Christian faith is the product of a century of heated debate around the person and nature of Christ and consequently, the nature of God. At the end of three hundred years of oppression and widespread persecution, a great turn came when the Roman Emperor Constantine declared the Christian faith legal for the first time by the Edict of Milan in 313 AD. As Roman Emperors had done in the past with conquered peoples, he convened a council of representatives from every major city in the empire to settle internecine disputes. In 325 AD, the council was convened in Nicaea, just outside of Constantinople. The Emperor himself presided, deferring to bishops and theologians from across the known world to deliberate the questions at hand.

At issue was the teaching of Arius, a presbyter from Alexandria. In an effort to defend Christianity as a monotheistic religion, Arius presented the Trinity as a chain of divine beings with the Father alone at the very top, and the Son and Spirit following along behind—lesser divinities, but still divine. His bishop, Alexander, a deacon named Athanasius, and many others immediately perceived the diminished place of the Son and Spirit. In an effort to be defensibly rational, Arius had abandoned the confession that Jesus is the eternal God, no less than the Father. The council declared there was no time or ontological category in which the Father’s existence preceded the Son’s, they are of one substance.

The close of the Council of Nicaea opened a generation of heated debate. By the time a second council was gathered in Constantinople in 381, the church was ready not only to defend the equality of divine Being in the Son, but in the Spirit as well. The creed we now share is the product of these two councils, and represents the core Christian belief in the doctrine of the Trinity, revealed and beyond human rationality.

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