Nicaea and Rethinking the “Thinkability” of the Presence of God

Abstract

On the Council of Nicaea’s 1700th anniversary, can its creed still be confessed by contemporary Christians in a culture full of “buffered selves” (C. Taylor) and suspicious of long-ago metaphysical worldviews and appeals to transcendence? This essay retrieves the “thinkability” and “experienceability” of the Nicene Creed by (1) considering its place in its usual performative liturgical setting, (2) recalling its provocative historical solution and the still-remaining ontotheological problem, (3) retrieving as much as possible the experience of revelation and salvation that the creed articulates, and (4) applying a performance hermeneutic that considers the creed as analogous to a musical score that needs performance-over-time for its meaning to be thinkable, experienceable, and revelatory.