The Creed of Nicaea (IV)
Vol. 57 No. 6 The Second Sunday after Christmas January 4, 2026
The fourth century was dominated by controversy over the deity and humanity of Christ. Was it God himself who came to save the world in Christ, or merely someone like God? And if Christ was truly God, was he also truly man—or only something like a man?
The answer first articulated at the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D., and reaffirmed at Constantinople in 381 A.D., was that Christ is both true God—“of one substance with the Father”—and true man, “who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven … and was made man.” At the same time, it became clear that the full deity of the Holy Spirit must also be confessed: the Spirit is the one “who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified.” What was at stake was not only fidelity to Scripture and the Church’s worship, but the Gospel itself. For only God can save; and what is not assumed of our humanity is not saved.
Great as this achievement was, it immediately raised further questions. What, precisely, is the relationship between deity and humanity in Christ? Are they united merely by a moral association of will or purpose between two persons, one divine and one human? This proposal, advanced by the followers of Nestorius, was rejected at the Third Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D. There is but one person in Christ—one “self” or identity—in whom deity and humanity are united.
But this, in turn, prompted another question. If Christ is one person, what becomes of the divine and human natures united in him? Are they blended into some third thing? This view, associated with the followers of Eutyches, was rejected at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 A.D. A mixture of divine and human natures would be neither truly divine nor truly human, but something else altogether. Instead, the Church confessed one Christ in two natures, united “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the properties of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person.” In this unconfused distinction the ancient boundary between Creator and creature is preserved; in their inseparable unity the saving mediation of Christ is secured.
There would be further councils, but by this point the essential parameters of the Nicene faith concerning the Trinity and the person of Christ had been established. The affirmations, negations, and careful distinctions of the creeds and councils may appear arcane or overly technical, and they certainly belong to the disciplined language of theology. Yet theology is simply the Church’s effort to think as clearly, coherently, and comprehensively as possible about what Scripture teaches us to believe—so that its meaning is neither distorted nor obscured. Especially given the fluid and sometimes unstable character of human language, these definitions serve as anchors, guarding the faith against the gradual erosion of meaning.
Moreover, the Definition of Chalcedon did more than settle a fourth- and fifth-century controversy. It provided a theological template that shaped later explorations of Christian faith and practice: in Anselm’s account of the atonement, for example, and in Thomas Aquinas’s reflection on the relation of nature and grace. “Grace does not abolish nature, but perfects it.” This distinction allows nature to be truly nature and grace to be truly grace, without collapsing one into the other or setting them in opposition.
Most notably, the logic of the Incarnation shaped the thinking of the Protestant Reformers—including the English divines—about saving grace, the sacraments, and the Church. The Reformers drew clear distinctions between justifying faith and sanctifying works; between the outward and visible sign and the inward and spiritual grace; between the invisible Church of the elect and the visible Church of sinners. Yet they insisted just as strongly on the inseparable unity of these realities. These were not, as is often alleged, departures from the Catholic tradition, but clarifications of it: the ancient catholic doctrines of grace, the sacraments, and the Church rethought through the governing pattern of the ancient catholic doctrine of Christ.
What emerged from this clarification of the catholic tradition in the Reformation was the culture of the early modern world, in which the Christian secular was distinct from, yet coterminous with, the Christian sacred. This vision took political form in the recognition of distinct but cooperating authorities of the Christian Church and the Christian State, jointly responsible for the good ordering of a single Christian society—an idea implicit in the Prayer Book’s prayer for the Church. In what we now call the late modern era, however, this inheritance is not merely fading but being deliberately dismantled. The grammar that once ordered the relation of nature and grace, faith and works, Church and world, is treated as dispensable or unintelligible. What is being abandoned is not an antiquated settlement but a hard-won theological wisdom, forged in the Church’s confession of Christ—for only where the divine and the human are confessed, without confusion and without separation, in the one Lord Jesus Christ, can God be truly God, humanity be truly human, and the world itself be held together rather than torn apart.