The Creed of Nicea (II)
Vol. 57 No. 3 The Third Sunday in Advent December 14, 2025
The Nicene Creed begins with the confession of Israel’s faith in “one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible”. Pagan religions confused the natural with the divine, the many with the one: the scriptures of Israel made a sharp distinction between creature and Creator, the many and the one. The faith of Nicea is grounded on this distinction. The one God is utterly “other” than the manifold creature – but also intimately involved and (as the “all-ruling” Almighty) ultimately responsible for them. That is to say, despite appearances to the contrary, the world is not a chaos of warring principles. In all of reality (both visible and invisible, both matter and spirit) we meet one all-creating all-ruling principle of fatherly goodness. “This is my Father’s world”.
But if God is Father, then he has a Son. Metaphorically, God is known as Father in creation (which is other in nature); and much more in his election of a people to be his own (a creature brought near in grace): “Israel is my son, even my firstborn” (Exodus 4:22). But sonship by nature is found neither in the creature nor in the chosen people. God’s promise conferred sonship on the heir of David’s throne, and the Messiah Jesus was confessed as “the only-begotten Son” (John 1:18). But was this sonship in the fullest sense, a sharing in the divine nature? The Arians who sought to preserve the oneness of God by denying true Sonship, parsed the word “begotten” as a metaphor for “created”: in relation to the Father, Christ was merely a creature, even if he were “God” to other creatures. It is this Arian reading of “begotten” that the Creed is designed to exclude.
It begins with the biblical language: “one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God”, and then begins applying pressure. He is “begotten of the Father before all worlds” – contrary to the Arians, there was not a “time” when he was not. He is “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God”. He is as inseparable from the Father as the sun is inseparable from its radiance, for to be the sun is to give light. And thus the Son is “of the Father” in a way that all creatures are not: “begotten not made”, a direct denial of the Arian conflation of these terms. He is not a creature, made at the Father‘s will and in essence, therefore, other than God; he is a Son “of one substance with the Father“, sharing the same immaterial and indivisible divine nature with him. This is the famous ‘homoousios’, the word whose meaning the Arians could not bend. Identity in substance means there is no difference or division in nature between Father and Son. As Athanasius said, “whatever is true of the Father is true of the Son, except ‘Father’”. They are distinguished not (one might say) by what they are – the same indivisible and immaterial divine substance – but only by who they are in relation to one another, as Father and as Son. And because they are one substance, as the Creed acknowledges the Father as the “Maker of heaven and earth”, so also that the Son is the one “by whom all things were made”.
Why does his deity matter? Because if it is not God himself who comes to us in Jesus, then he is not in truth the Savior of the world – for is axiomatic that only the Creator of the world can be its Savior (Isaiah 43:11). If it was not in truth the Son of God who became in the Son of Man, then the sons of men cannot possibly become the Sons of God by the grace that is his. This logic works both ways: it also demands that Christ be true Man as well as true God; for only as God and Man can he be the Mediator of God and men.
And therefore after confessing his deity the creed turns to his humanity. It is “for us men and for our salvation” that the Son of God “came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary”. The Nicene faith corrects the error of Arius, who denied Christ’s divinity; but it also corrects the (equal but opposite) error of Apollinarius, who affirmed the divinity but denied the full humanity. (He had taught that the Word took the place of the mind and soul in the humanity of Christ.) For what is not assumed (taken on) is not redeemed, yet Christ accomplished the redemption not only of our entire humanity in body and soul. It was in the full humanity he took upon himself in the womb of Mary that the Son of God accomplished our redemption, whose primary moments of humiliation and exaltation, the Creed sketches: death, burial, resurrection, ascension, session at the Father’s right hand (in the place of co-equal authority, as the one Mediator of salvation), his final return in glory to judge the world.
One element only receives special attention: that he was “crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate”. “Crucified” means he bore the curse and condemnation of sin; “for us” (cf 1 Cor. 15:3) means that he suffered in our place and on our behalf, to win for us the blessing and righteousness that he alone deserves. “Under Pontius Pilate” secures his death as an event in history (not a myth), never to be repeated, and by implication, “once for all”.
The Gospel is not the story of the man who became God, but of the God whom became man. In the person of the Son, God himself has entered into the world he made, the Creator taking upon himself the existence of a creature. God shares in the life of men, in order that men might share in the life of God. This is the faith we celebrate at Christmas. Unless it is the true God who enters the world, unless it is true humanity that he makes his own – there is no Christmas.