We believe

Welcome back!

Now it's time for us to start working our way through the Nicene Creed. Recall that a creed is a statement of accepted beliefs and we see this in the structure of the Nicene Creed. Notice that over and over we make a statement about something we believe:

We believe in one God...

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ...

We believe in the Holy Spirit...

We believe in one holy catholic and  apostolic Church...

 Let's take a moment and think about the first two words of the creed, "We believe".

We

If you read various sources you will find some presentations of the Nicene Creed with "I believe" in place of the "We believe" in our reading. Why is this? Well, there actually is a technical reason for the two different presentations. The original statement of the Nicene Creed was written in Greek and actually used the Greek phrase for "We believe" ("pisteuomen" or "πιστεύομεν" if you want to get fancy). When it was translated into Latin for use in liturgy, this phrase was translated into "credo", literally "I believe". 

But does this make any difference? I have read several articles where the authors state they prefer the use of "I believe" because it makes the creed a personal statement of belief and in that they are correct. However, I prefer the "We believe" version. Why? Glad you asked. I prefer the "We" form because I see the Nicene Creed as a statement of unity in faith. Time to learn another vocabulary word, ecumenical. I bring this word up because the Council of Nicaea is often called an "ecumenical council" and the Nicene Creed is considered one of the few "ecumenical creeds". So what does this mean? Fairbairn and Reeves tell us the following:

In sharp contrast, the other great creed - the Nicene - emerged as the result of two major meetings of Christian leaders in the fourth century. The first meeting was held at Nicaea... and the second at the imperial capital of Constantinople... Because the results of these meetings were so widely approved in the churches, today they are referred to as the First and Second Ecumenical Councils. (11)

The Council of Nicaea and the Nicene Creed are "ecumenical" because they involved people from across the known world and what they produced was widely accepted among the churches of their time. In fact, the Nicene Creed is still widely considered authoritative across contemporary Christianity (Britannica has a nice statement about this you can find here).

So back to why I prefer the "We" form. I prefer the "We believe" because it gives me a sense of unity with the Body of Christ across both space and time. When I say "We believe" during worship service I am saying that I include myself with those who also believe the statements being said. It provides me a sense of belonging. Now is that better in any objective way than the "I believe" form? No. I'm speaking personally here. I think it is better for you to choose a form that fits you best and stick with it.  

Believe 

 First, a bit of a disclaimer. What follows is not a defense of things Christians believe. I'm not wading into apologetics at this point in the blog. Instead, let's take the word believe in context. The Council of Nicaea was a meeting of Christians and the Nicene Creed is a Christian statement, so in context we start with the assumption that those most affected by it will be Christians. What I am getting at is this is not the time to defend why you should believe in God, but rather we're taking some type of belief in some type of God as a given. That may be a little broad, we're actually going to be talking about the Christian God but hopefully you get the point. If we were to meet and I ask you the question "Do you believe in God?", your first response should be "Yes". At that point we can go into the type of God we are each talking about.

Great, but what does it mean to believe? After all, the Nicene Creed makes several statements about what we say we believe so what are we actually saying? When we say we "believe" something it means we accept it as being true. We may or may not have hard evidence for what it is we believe, but we accept it as true. This is often contrasted with what means when we say "I know". Believe it or not there is a whole branch of philosophy called epistemology dedicated to understanding differences between things like knowledge, belief, and opinion. I hope to get into this in a future series, it really is more interesting than it sounds. So when Christians come together to recite the Nicene Creed, we are saying that we as Christians accept the follow statements as true. That's all. Saying "We believe in one God" we are saying "We, those of us who consider ourselves as Christians, accept as true there is one God". We're not trying to prove there is a God, or prove there is one and only one God, but we are saying that we believe there is one God. 

Next time we will start to tackle what it is we say we believe. Hope to see you there! 

In Christ,

Michael 

Reference: 

Fairbairn, Donald, and Ryan M. Reeves. The Story of Creeds and Confessions: Tracing the Development of the Christian Faith. Baker Academic, a Division of Baker Publishing Group, 2019. (Amazon, B&N) 

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