Response to Bryan Spinks “The Nicene Creed in Worship: How It Got There and Why It Should Stay”

Abstract

Beginning with an appreciative reiteration of the main points of the paper by Bryan Spinks, both his historical survey of the introduction of the Nicene Creed into the eucharistic liturgy and his reasons for maintaining it, this response focuses on his suggestion that the liturgical use of the Nicene Creed has value for ecumenical efforts today. The historical overview shows the spread of the practice of liturgical recitation of the Nicene Creed from sixth-century Constantinople throughout eastern churches and into the west up to the Reformation. I argue that the initial liturgical use of the Creed by the Miaphysites shifted attention from the christological controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries back to the resolution of the fourth-century Trinitarian disputes. It was at once polemical (dismissing Chalcedon) and unifying (looking back to Nicea and Constantinople). The longer historical trajectory suggests diverse motives for the liturgical use of the Nicene Creed: some unifying, others polemical or exclusionary. Picking up one of these historical threads, Professor Spinks suggests a major reason for maintaining the Creed's liturgical place today is its ecumenical value. This constitutes an authentic and fruitful affirmation of unity among the Christian bodies familiar with this Creed, and a potentially meaningful step toward greater mutual recognition between Chalcedonian Churches, East and West, and the non-Chalcedonian Churches. These positive dimensions, however, are offset by the limitations of the historical Councils of Nicea and Constantinople in their effective rejection of the ante-Nicene theologians. Likewise, contemporary Christian Churches with strong roots in the pre-Constantinian Church are unlikely to find communal recitation of the Nicene Creed a meaningful ecumenical gesture. In sum, the historical survey is thought-provoking, the affirmation of communal recitation of the Creed in the present has considerable value, including as a significant ecumenical gesture in many, if not all, intra-Christian gatherings.