Nicene Creed Reflection from Bishop Poulson

“We Believe”: On the 1700th Anniversary of the Nicene Creed

Dear Friends in Christ in Oklahoma,

In this 1700th anniversary year of the Nicene Creed, I am pleased that the Episcopal Diocese of Oklahoma, along with Saint Paul’s Cathedral and All Souls’ Episcopal Church in Oklahoma City are jointly offering a series of worship and lecture events focused on the Creed, spread out across the year, beginning with Evensong and the Rev. Canon Dr. Kara Slade on June 15.

Our guest speakers are distinguished theologians in our tradition, exploring with us the history of the Nicene Creed, and why it still matters to the Church today.

I want to add a few thoughts of my own, as we begin this commemoration.

I offer this not as an historian, nor a scholar, but as a bishop of the Episcopal Church, “called to be one with the apostles in proclaiming Christ’s resurrection and interpreting the Gospel” and charged with guarding “the faith, unity, and discipline of the Church” (BCP p. 517).

As I begin, I want to highlight and commend the most influential resource for me on this topic, Luke Timothy Johnson’s wonderful book “The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why It Matters” and especially chapter 9, which is my primary inspiration for this piece.

I’m old enough to remember, as a young seminarian and then priest in the early 2000’s, the jokes about crossing one’s fingers while reciting parts of the Creed, and the rationalizations that these were, after all, historical and institutional beliefs, not necessarily to be held individually or taken too seriously, even by clergy.

There was a sense, in some circles, that the Nicene and Apostles’ creeds were not only dusty relics of a distant time, but overly rigid, off putting, vaguely embarrassing obstacles to modern rationalists who might otherwise consider staying in or coming to the Church.

These days, thankfully, the seminarians, new clergy and trained lay leaders I encounter in the Diocese of Oklahoma (and elsewhere in the Episcopal Church) tend to be much more solidly creedal.

We have moved beyond the incorrect assumption that creedal orthodoxy and inclusivity cannot go together.

Rather, in this diocese and many others, we hold that we welcome all to this ancient, creedal faith, and that it is our grounding in the Holy Trinity from which we go out boldly into the world to proclaim the Gospel and promote justice and mercy. Holy faith fuels holy action, by God’s grace.

Heresies are not unique to the earlier centuries of the Church, like the Arianism countered at Nicaea. Every age has them. Like viruses, heresies are only rarely eradicated, but tend to return, again and again, in slightly different permutations.

The word “heresy” is related to the Greek word for “choice.” And so a heresy is choosing to follow one’s own ideas instead of God’s. Promoting heresy is part of the sin of selfish pride. Dante, in his “Inferno,” famously put the heretics in eternally burning tombs.

Now, “heresy” is not a term we should throw around lightly.

The term only really applies to something of major importance in the essential doctrines of the faith, not the many areas where faithful Christians can disagree.

The creeds were compiled and agreed upon so long ago not for control, or to stifle free thought in the numerous topics of theology open for discernment, but to protect people from the corrosive sin of heresy in the most critical areas of belief. And they protect us still.

Friends, I want to suggest that a strongly creedal faith is essential to the 21st century Church, as an antidote to three of the most pervasive temptations (and perhaps even heresies) of our own day: individualism, novelty, and certainty.

First, individualism. Our age is the culmination of the Enlightenment emphasis on the individual, which can be both good and bad. But our creedal faith reminds us that God made us not to be alone (Genesis 2:18), but for relationship, with God and with our neighbors.

Indeed, the very nature of the God in whom “we believe” is relationship: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three in one. Ours is a communal faith, a communion, and a common life, exemplified by the early Church in Acts, and by the Pauline image of the interrelated Body of Christ.

The Creed has, since its inception, been a source and symbol of this unity in community. And it remains so today.

The Creed is part of the four pronged “Chicago Lambeth Quadrilateral,” (BCP p. 876) (along with the Holy Scriptures, the two dominical sacraments, and the episcopate), the four Christian essentials that are the basis of our ecumenical commonality across denominations.

Second, novelty. Ours is an age obsessed with what is new: new ideas and new technologies. But the Creed reminds us that ours is an ancient faith: one, holy, catholic and apostolic.

While the Nicene Creed was first compiled in 325 A.D., it is derived from the Bible itself. It is not comprehensive: there is much that we believe that is not in the Creed. But it is our core teaching of faith, that has been handed down to us.

No concepts in it were entirely new, but had been taught since the apostolic age, and were rooted in the Old and New Testaments. This is why we can say that the Creed was not so much composed as revealed by God to God’s Church.

The placement in the Holy Eucharist of the Creed immediately after the Scripture readings and Sermon is a reminder that we are to use the Creed to interpret Holy Scripture. It is one way by which we measure the sermon’s content and teaching.

And lastly, the Creed helps guide us away from certainty. Faith and certainty are not the same. Certainty is our human temptation to believe that we know everything worth knowing, and are always right.

The Creed reminds us that so much of our faith is strange and mysterious, “seen and unseen.” The ways of God are ineffable. As the psalmist says, “such knowledge is too wonderful for me, it is so high that I cannot attain to it” (Psalm 139:5).

Although the Creed only scratches the surface of God’s mystery, we believe that it is “revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God” (I Corinthians 2:10-11).

For our Church today, then, reciting the Creed is a spiritual practice of community, tradition, and mystery, against the modern temptations of individualism, novelty, and certainty.

And it is a practice, something we pray in the sacred act of worship. It is a ritual remembering and a passing on of these core teachings of the faith.

Not a detailed map, but a compass, to point us in the right direction. Not the Bible itself, but a lens for reading it. Not Christ, but a way to understand him better. Not only a shield from error, but a light to shine on our path, so that we do not stumble.

The Creed, more than ever, is worth our prayers and our study. Its countercultural wisdom gives us courage.

May all our ministries, clergy and lay, be grounded in the Creed, this precious gift, and through it in God, the three in one and one in three.  

Bishop Poulson Reed

Trinity Sunday 2025