This is the weekly bulletin insert from Sermons That Work.
The Nicene Creed, Week 1
To commemorate the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, the Rt. Rev. Matthew Gunter, bishop of Wisconsin, has written a series of reflections on the Nicene Creed and its relevance for contemporary Episcopalians. Over the coming weeks, we’ll share his teachings, written mostly in a question-and-answer format.
Definition of doctrine in the Episcopal Church
“The Nicene Creed [is] the sufficient statement of the Christian faith.”
— ‘Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral’ (1979 Book of Common Prayer, p. 877)
“In our canons, the formal definition of “doctrine” is “the church’s teaching as set forth in the Creeds and in An Outline of the Faith, commonly called the Catechism.”
— The Episcopal Church Canon III.10.4.c.2
“Doctrine shall mean the basic and essential teachings of the Church and is to be found in the Canon of Holy Scripture as understood in the Apostles and Nicene Creeds and in the sacramental rites, the Ordinal and Catechism of the Book of Common Prayer.”
— The Episcopal Church Canon IV.2
2025 is the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, which established the Nicene Creed as the symbol and measure of the Church’s faith.
Why the Nicene Creed was written
The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus had left his followers struggling to understand and articulate what had happened and its meaning. Paul and the other authors of what became the New Testament pointed the way. Those writings contained creed-like statements, e.g., 1 Corinthians 15:1-8. But even that needed interpretation. How could they make sense of the things Jesus had done and the things Jesus had said about humanity, God – and himself?
The Gospels and the other writings accepted as scripture, inspired by the Holy Spirit, include language that identifies Jesus with the God of Israel, including things He said Himself. His followers were convinced that his death and resurrection had reconfigured everything, bringing salvation from sin, death, and decay with the promise of a hitherto unimagined transformation of human persons and the world. Finding language to express that in ways that enabled people to experience that salvation and transformation was important. Was Jesus some sort of divine being sent by God at the mysterious heart of all reality? Was he something more?
They had the scriptures, they had the church’s language of prayer and worship, and they had the baptismal formulae that were already the seeds of a creed and which believers were expected to affirm. With all of that, theologians of the church struggled for decades – centuries – to make sense of and find a satisfactory way to articulate who he was and why he mattered. Some ways of articulating that were deemed unsatisfactory, misguided, or even dangerous. This struggle and the debates it provoked became more public and more intense once Christianity was declared legal by the Edict of Milan in 313.
Arius and Alexander
Things came to a head with a priest in the city of Alexandria named Arius, who taught that, while Jesus was in some sense divine, he was still a divine creature of God. The God behind it all could not be apprehended and would surely not deign to be identified with the messy, chaotic material world by taking on mortal flesh. But his bishop, Alexander, preached otherwise – that Jesus was indeed the incarnation of that very God. Arius condemned his bishop’s teaching. In response, the bishop disciplined and exiled Arius. But this set up an intense controversy. The Council of Nicaea was called by the Roman Emperor Constantine to address disputes about how to understand the person of Jesus and, thus, God, creation, humanity, and salvation.
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Church of the Redeemer
Church of the Redeemer: Worshiping God, living in community, and reaching out to the world around us. We are an Episcopal Church serving north King County and south Snohomish County, Washington. As you travel your road, go with friends walking the way of Jesus at Redeemer.
Church of the Redeemer is at 6220 Northeast 181st Street in Kenmore, Washington. The campus is a short distance north of Bothell Way, near the Burke-Gilman Trail. The entrance looks like a gravel driveway. The campus is larger on the inside than it is on the outside. And we managed to hide a large building on the side of a hill that is not easily seen from the street.
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