Everything for a Reason: Why We Say What We Say

A Series on the Nicene Creed (Part 3)

The first thing that strikes many people when they recite the Nicene Creed is that it seems at times repetitive, or at least, unnecessarily verbose. It seems to say things that do not really need saying, or clarify things that do not need clarifying. Yet to the Fathers’ working within the great Council of Nicaea, not a single word they composed was unneeded. Rather, every jot and tittle they believed absolutely needed to be there. 

Last month, we discussed the words ‘maker of heaven and earth,’ and how this was a rebuke of the heretical beliefs of the Gnostics. Yet right after these words appear the following,

‘and of all things visible and invisible.’

I have personally had several people ask me why we say these words at all. If the Father is the maker of everything, including heaven and earth, why do we need to also say that He made all things visible and invisible? Isn’t that clearly implied already? Are we not just adding superfluous chatter for nothing? 

Well, as it turns out, it is not merely confessing that the Father created everything, just in a different way. It is in fact confessing something new. 

You see, perhaps the greatest heresy of the Early Church, the heresy against which the Nicene Creed was most directly written against, and the heresy which is most heavily addressed in the Second Article of the Creed concerning the Son, was the Arian Heresy: the doctrine that Jesus is not God, but merely the highest created being. 

The Arians did not believe this because they wanted to attack Jesus and lower Him down. Rather, they believed this because they wanted to keep the Father higher up. They believed that the central doctrine of the Bible was the complete transcendence and incomprehensibility of God the Father, that God is so above and beyond our intellect and imagination that nothing can really be known about Him. They confessed this because, to say that God can be understood by us in any way, means that He is somehow like us; and if He is in any way like us, then He is not as great as He could be (because, after all, we are not all that great). 

But, one might ask the Arian: if God is so far above us, how can we have any relationship to Him at all? Why does God even try to communicate to us through the Bible or through Jesus if we can’t understand Him anyway? 

What some Arians tried to say in response is this: as creatures, we can know nothing about God… but, you see, our soul is not a creature! Rather, our soul is a part of God that is ‘on loan’ to us. The part of us that we borrow from God, that part (our soul), can understand God; and therefore it is only to that part that the revelation of God through the Bible and through Christ is addressed. 

This was perhaps the earliest recorded version of what we now call ‘mysticism,’ that God can only be grasped by an irrational movement of the soul, and not by our intellect, or will, or bodies. 

What the Fathers of Nicaea argue instead from the Bible is that all of us is made to grasp God. In fact, that is what God created us for in the beginning, to be the image and likeness of God, to be a vessel for God to fill—and not just our soul, but even our minds, and perhaps most importantly, our bodies! 

In this way, the soul is not superior to all the rest of us, our minds, bodies, emotions, and will. It is just one more part of our complete person; and it is our complete person—as a whole!—that God created to be destined for Himself. The only thing that is really special about our soul is that it is, well, invisible. 

In order to confess that the total human person was made for God, the Fathers of Nicaea had to confess that the soul is not “some better, higher aspect of us that is not really our own, but actually a ‘piece of God.’” Rather, they confessed that God created everything, including our visible bodies, our brains (the seat of our intellect), our hearts (the seat of our will), our guts (for them, the seat of our emotions), as well as what is invisible in us, our soul. They are all equally parts of who we are, all created by God, and all created by God for a purpose, to have communion with Him.