Newsletter- Pastor's Paragraphs | Zion Lutheran Church

Nicene Creed

This year marks the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed. It was originally written in the year 325 AD. That is one thousand and seven hundred years ago! The Creed has been around for a long time. It is also the only creed accepted as authoritative by all major branches of the church, Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant. However, there was a problem that happened in the eleventh century, which split the church in half between the West and the East.

When the creed was first written in 325 AD, there was only one church centered in Constantinople (modern day Istanbul). The official language was Greek. Many questions, mostly around Jesus, were still being hotly debated. Was he fully human? Was he created? Or was he divine and eternal like the Father? If so, how are Jesus and the Father similar and how are they different? Is there really only one being, but appearing in two forms or modes? We take many of these things for granted, but they had to be worked out in the early church. The result of an Eccumenical council in Nicaea debated these issues, giving us the Nicene Creed, which was further clarified in 381 at another council, this time in Constantinople. What we say each week in worship is actually the Nicene-Constantinople Creed as agreed upon by the one church in 381 AD. Or, at least that’s what we were supposed to be saying.

Several hundred years after the church adopted the Creed, as originally written in 325 and later adapted in 381; the Western Latin part of the church faced a new controversy. To combat it, the Western half of the church, based in Rome and now speaking in Latin, added a clause to the Holy Spirit portion of the creed. This clause was never agreed upon by the whole church. Instead of the original agreed upon text, ‘We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father’, they added ‘and from the Son”. This clause is known by its Latin word Filioque (and from the Son).

They did this to show that the Son too is divine and eternal, the same substance as the Father. The Father and the Son are one. However, the Eastern half of the church, still speaking in Greek; refused to adopt this addition claiming it confuses the Son with the Father, and takes away from the Father, His unique role as the source of all things. The Son is begotten of the Father and the Spirit proceeds from the Father.

Fast forward to the 11th century when another Council is called, and the Eastern church, still using the original language insist the Western church drop the Filioque clause and return to the agreed upon version from seven centuries earlier. However, the west had been using the modified version for 4 centuries by now and was not willing to change back. It’s hard to believe, but this became church dividing and led to the Great Schism in 1054. The Western and Eastern parts of the church are still divided today.

Since the Reformers were part of the Western church, we inherited this modified version of the Creed. However, Luther and many other early reformers agreed that the creed should reflect the original form and not include the Filioque. However, given all that they were facing to reform many erroneous church doctrines at the time, worship materials were never corrected concerning the language of the creed. In recent decades, there has been a renewed effort to return to the original text that the universal church adopted 1700 years ago.

Here is a portion of a recent statement issued by the ELCA worships team.

What is the Filioque clause? It can be translated as “and (from) the Son”. It occurs in the final part of the western version of the Nicene Creed: “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified…” The Greek original, as agreed upon at the Ecumenical Council of Nicea in 381, does not contain the phrase “and (from) the Son”.

The insertion of the Filioque clause has divided eastern and western Christianity for more than a thousand years. It was introduced in the West to combat the heresy of Arianism (which denied the divinity of Christ, the Son). The addition was made official in the early 11th century and was one of the reasons leading to the Great Schism between the East and West (1054).

In the past few decades there have been several attempts at finding a solution to this church-dividing addition.

(2024. JOINT STATEMENT ON THE FILIOQUE: BACKGROUND, CONTENT, HOPES (LWF))

Most current worship materials published by the ELCA either omit the filioque or include a footnote stating that it is not part of the original text. Here at Zion, in keeping with the universal church, and in the spirit of ecumenicalism, we will use the original text (but in English, not Greek).

Pastor