I believe in one God, Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages; Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten, not created, of one essence with the Father through Whom all things were made. Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became man. He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered and was buried; And He rose on the third day, according to the Scriptures. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father; And He will come again with glory to judge the living and the dead. His kingdom shall have no end.
And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Creator of life, Who proceeds from the Father, Who together with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified, Who spoke through the prophets.
In one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.
I confess one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the age to come.
Amen.
Few texts in Christian history have carried as much weight as the Nicene Creed. It is recited week after week in churches across the world, sometimes so familiarly that its extraordinary character can be overlooked. It is not simply a prayer, nor merely a theological statement produced by ancient bishops. It is a concise confession of what the historic Church understood the apostolic faith to teach about God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Church, baptism, resurrection, and the life to come.
For the Ekklesia Catholica Vera, the Creed has particular importance. We are not attempting to invent another form of Christianity or construct a new doctrinal system from the ground up. Our purpose is restoration: Scripture first, interpreted in conversation with the witness of the ancient and undivided Church. Our own Founding Manifesto therefore places the Nicene-Constantinopolitan confession at the heart of our statement of faith, and our Liturgy of the Word and Table gives the congregation the opportunity to stand together and recite the historic Symbol of Faith.
The Creed matters because it provides something increasingly rare in fragmented Christianity: a confession that belongs not to one modern denomination, theological school, nationality, or personality, but to the common inheritance of the ancient Church.
Christianity Before Nicaea
The Nicene Creed was not the beginning of Christian doctrine. The bishops who gathered at Nicaea in AD 325 did not suddenly decide, three centuries after Jesus, what Christians ought to believe. Nor did the emperor Constantine invent Christianity, establish the doctrine of the Trinity, or dictate that Jesus should henceforth be regarded as divine. These popular claims do not survive serious examination of the writings that existed long before Constantine.
Christian confession began with the Apostles themselves. The New Testament contains numerous short statements that appear to preserve early confessional or liturgical formulas: Jesus is Lord; Jesus is the Christ; Christ died for our sins, was buried, and rose on the third day; there is one God and Father and one Lord Jesus Christ; Christ existed in the form of God and humbled Himself by becoming human; baptism is administered in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Long before there was a formal Nicene Creed, Christians were already confessing its essential beliefs.
This pattern continues immediately after the apostolic age. Around the beginning of the second century, Ignatius of Antioch insisted that Jesus Christ was truly descended according to the flesh, truly born, truly crucified under Pontius Pilate, truly suffered, and truly rose from the dead. His language already sounds strikingly like portions of what would later appear in the Creed. (New Advent)
Justin Martyr, writing around the middle of the second century, described Christian baptism as being given in the name of God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. He spoke openly of Christian worship directed toward the Father, the Son, and the prophetic Spirit. Whatever theological vocabulary would later develop, the basic Trinitarian shape of Christian faith was already plainly present. (New Advent)
Perhaps the most striking witness comes from Irenaeus of Lyons around AD 180. Describing the faith received throughout the churches, he wrote of one God, the Father Almighty and Maker of all things; one Jesus Christ, the Son of God, incarnate for our salvation; the Holy Spirit who spoke through the prophets; Christ’s birth, passion, resurrection and ascension; His future coming in glory; the resurrection of humanity; judgment; and everlasting life. The resemblance to the later Nicene Creed is unmistakable. (New Advent)
Tertullian did something similar around the beginning of the third century. His “rule of faith” confessed one Creator God, His Word and Son, Christ’s incarnation through the Virgin, His crucifixion, resurrection on the third day, ascension to the Father, the sending of the Holy Spirit, Christ’s future return, and the resurrection of the dead. (New Advent)
These witnesses are crucial. Nicaea did not create a new religion. It gave precise language to a faith Christians had already been confessing for generations.
Why a Creed Became Necessary
If Christians already believed these things, why was a council necessary?
Because words can be used in different ways.
During the early fourth century, a major controversy arose surrounding Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria. Arius wanted to defend the uniqueness and transcendence of God the Father, but in doing so he taught that the Son did not share the Father’s eternal divine being in the fullest sense. The Son was extraordinarily exalted and existed before the rest of creation, but He was nevertheless understood as having received His existence from the Father in a manner that ultimately placed Him on the created side of the Creator-creature distinction.
That raised an enormous problem. Christians were already worshiping Christ. They were baptizing in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Gospel of John proclaimed that the Word was with God, was God, and that all things came into existence through Him. Christians confessed Christ as Savior and Lord. If the Son were merely the greatest creature God ever made, the entire shape of Christian worship and salvation became difficult to explain.
The controversy spread rapidly.
Emperor Constantine did convene the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, partly because religious conflict threatened the unity of the Empire. But convening a council is not the same thing as creating its theology. The bishops themselves argued from Scripture, Christian worship, inherited teaching, and the faith they believed they had received from the churches before them.
The resulting creed confessed Jesus Christ as:
“God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father.”
The decisive Greek word was homoousios: “of one essence” or “consubstantial” with the Father. (New Advent)
That word was not intended to explain the mystery of God exhaustively. It established a boundary. Whatever distinction exists between Father and Son, the Son cannot be placed among created things. He is “begotten, not made.” Everything that was made came into being through Him. The Son therefore belongs eternally to the divine reality of God.
The Creed was protecting something more ancient than itself.
From Nicaea to Constantinople
The Creed commonly called the “Nicene Creed” today is more precisely the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. The statement issued at Nicaea in 325 was shorter than the form now used in Christian worship. It concluded simply with belief in the Holy Spirit.
The theological disputes did not end at Nicaea. Arguments concerning the Son continued, and questions concerning the Holy Spirit became increasingly important. Some who were willing to recognize the divinity of the Son were unwilling to confess the full divinity of the Spirit.
In AD 381, bishops gathered at Constantinople under Emperor Theodosius. The council reaffirmed the Nicene faith and rejected various forms of continuing Arianism and teaching that diminished the Holy Spirit. The confession concerning the Spirit consequently received the fuller form familiar to us:
“The Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets.”
The council also confessed one holy catholic and apostolic Church, one baptism for the remission of sins, the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the age to come. (New Advent)
There is an interesting historical qualification here. Scholars have debated the precise literary history of the creed associated with Constantinople and whether every line of the present text was actually composed during the council itself. What is certain is that the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451 publicly received this confession as the creed of the 150 fathers of Constantinople, and the assembled bishops acclaimed it as their common faith. (New Advent)
Thus, by the fifth century, the form essentially familiar to Christians today had become the great ecumenical Symbol of Faith.
The Creed Is Deeply Biblical
The Creed does not replace Scripture. It depends upon Scripture.
“We believe in one God” reflects Israel’s ancient confession that the Lord is one and the apostolic declaration of “one God, the Father.” The Father as Maker of heaven and earth reflects Genesis and the biblical doctrine of creation.
Jesus Christ as the only-begotten Son reflects the Johannine writings. “Through whom all things were made” echoes John 1:3 and the great New Testament passages concerning creation through Christ. “Begotten, not made” protects the distinction already implied there: the Word through whom created things came into existence cannot simply be another member of creation.
“He came down from heaven…and became man” summarizes the Incarnation proclaimed in John 1:14 and throughout the New Testament.
“He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate” deliberately anchors Christianity in history. The Christian faith is not merely a collection of timeless spiritual principles. Christians claim that something happened in the world, in a particular place, during the administration of a particular Roman governor.
“He suffered and was buried. And the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures” closely resembles Paul’s ancient summary in 1 Corinthians 15:3–4, a tradition Paul himself says he had received.
“He ascended into heaven” recalls Acts 1. “He shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead” summarizes the apostolic expectation of Christ’s return and judgment. “Whose kingdom shall have no end” echoes the Gospel proclamation of the Kingdom and the language surrounding Christ throughout the New Testament.
The confession of the Holy Spirit is equally biblical. Most importantly for the later controversy surrounding the Creed, Jesus Himself says in John 15:26 that the Spirit of truth “proceeds from the Father.” The Creed uses precisely this language.
“One baptism for the remission of sins” reflects both the apostolic preaching of Acts and Paul’s declaration of “one Lord, one faith, one baptism.” The resurrection of the dead lies at the heart of 1 Corinthians 15. And “the life of the age to come” expresses the great biblical hope not merely of disembodied souls escaping the earth, but of resurrection, restoration, and life in God’s renewed creation.
The Creed is therefore not a philosophical substitute for Scripture. At its best, it functions as a map showing how the ancient Church understood Scripture’s central proclamation.
The “Catholic” Church of the Creed
One phrase deserves explanation because modern ears often misunderstand it: “one holy catholic and apostolic Church.”
The fourth-century bishops were not saying, “We believe in the modern Roman Catholic denomination.” The Greek word katholikē was already ancient Christian terminology and meant something like universal, whole, or according to the whole.
For this reason, in the Ekklesia Catholica Vera we may render the phrase as “one Holy, Universal, and Apostolic Church.” That is the language used in our liturgy.
The Church is one because Christ has one Body. It is holy because it belongs to God and is sanctified by His Spirit. It is universal because the Gospel gathers God’s people from every nation. It is apostolic because its faith is grounded in the teaching entrusted to the Apostles.
This is also why Ekklesia Catholica Vera should not be understood as a claim to be another Roman Catholic institution. Catholica points toward the wholeness and universality of the Church—the undivided assembly of Christ.
Why We Recite the Pre-Schismatic Creed
One small Latin word eventually became one of the most famous controversies in Christian history:
Filioque.
It means “and the Son.”
The original ecumenical Creed says of the Holy Spirit:
“who proceeds from the Father.”
In portions of the Western Church, the phrase was eventually altered to:
“who proceeds from the Father and the Son.”
The addition arose in the Latin West, especially in Spain, where it appears in connection with the Council of Toledo in 589. Its original purpose was largely anti-Arian: emphasizing the relationship between Son and Spirit helped Western Christians defend the full divinity of Christ against lingering Arianism among the Visigoths. (Orthodox Church in America)
Whatever the intention, the alteration created two serious questions.
The first was theological. The original Creed says that the Spirit “proceeds from the Father,” language drawn directly from John 15:26. Eastern Christianity strongly emphasized the Father as the single fountain or source within the Trinity. Western theologians developed ways of speaking about the Spirit’s relation to both Father and Son. There are subtleties here, including differences between Greek and Latin theological vocabulary, and the disagreement should not be caricatured. Modern Orthodox and Catholic theologians have themselves acknowledged that some of the historic conflict resulted from differences of terminology and theological emphasis. (Orthodox Church in America)
But there was also an ecclesiological problem that is, for us, even more straightforward: Who has the authority to change the common Creed of the universal Church?
The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed belonged to the whole Church. No ecumenical council had inserted filioque. A regional portion of Christianity gradually altered a confession that had been received by East and West together.
Even Rome resisted incorporating the addition into its own liturgical recitation for centuries. The Roman Church finally used the filioque in the Creed publicly in Rome in 1014, only about forty years before the conventional date of the Great Schism in 1054. (Orthodox Church in America)
This is why saying that we use the pre-schismatic Creed requires a slight historical qualification. The filioque existed in parts of the West long before 1054. What we mean is that we recite the original ecumenically received form of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, the form belonging to the undivided Church rather than the subsequently modified Western form.
We therefore say simply:
“And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father.”
That is the wording contained in both our Founding Manifesto and our Liturgy of the Word and Table.
We do this not because everything Western is wrong, nor because everything Eastern is automatically correct. We do it because when an ancient confession was received by the whole Church, restoration should begin with the text held in common before later division. We have no need to add to it.
A Creed of the Undivided Church
This principle reaches beyond the filioque.
Christian history after the early councils became increasingly complicated. Eastern and Western Christianity gradually developed different theological languages, different canonical structures, different assumptions about ecclesiastical authority, and eventually different institutional identities. The rupture between Rome and Constantinople hardened over centuries. Still later, the Protestant Reformation fractured Western Christianity into further confessions and denominations.
We cannot simply pretend that fifteen centuries of Christian history never happened. Nor should everything that developed later automatically be rejected simply because it was later. But if the goal is to identify a foundational confession around which Christians can recognize the apostolic faith before those later divisions, it is difficult to find anything more appropriate than the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed in its original ecumenical form.
It belongs to no Protestant denomination.
It was not created by medieval Roman Catholicism.
It was not created by the later Orthodox churches as a response to Rome.
It predates the Great Schism by centuries.
Its foundations predate even Nicaea.
It represents a point in Christian history at which believers from across the ancient Church could still stand together and confess one God, one Lord Jesus Christ, one Holy Spirit, one Church, one baptism, one resurrection, and one coming Kingdom.
That is precisely why it is valuable to a church seeking restoration rather than sectarian innovation.
The Creed Is a Boundary, Not the Whole Faith
We should also resist turning the Creed into something it was never intended to be. Christianity cannot be reduced to a paragraph of doctrinal propositions.
The Creed says almost nothing about Christian ethics. It does not tell us how to care for the poor. It does not contain the Sermon on the Mount. It does not explain prayer, fasting, forgiveness, marriage, community, discipleship, or the breaking of bread. It assumes a much larger Christian life grounded in Scripture and lived within the Ekklesia.
The Creed instead answers a narrower but indispensable question:
Who is the God whom Christians worship, and what has He done?
The Father is God.
The Son is truly God and truly became man.
The Spirit is Lord and Giver of Life.
The Son came for our salvation.
He suffered.
He died.
He rose.
He ascended.
He reigns.
He will return.
His Kingdom will never end.
There is one Church.
There is one baptism.
The dead will rise.
The age to come awaits us.
Those statements establish the boundaries within which the Christian story can be faithfully proclaimed.
This corresponds closely with our larger approach in the Ekklesia Catholica Vera. Scripture remains the supreme standard. The early Church serves as a privileged witness to how the apostolic deposit was received. Creeds and councils are valuable precisely insofar as they preserve and articulate that faith rather than replacing it. Our Doctrinal Charter accordingly describes the Church as “one, holy, universal, and apostolic” while insisting that Christ alone is her Head and that all human authority remains accountable to His Word.
Why We Say It Together
There is also something profoundly important about reciting the Creed rather than merely printing it in a doctrinal statement.
Christianity is not only something an individual believes privately. It is a faith confessed by a people.
When the congregation stands and says, “We believe,” it is doing something larger than repeating theological information. An old Christian and a new convert, a scholar and someone who has never read a theology book, the minister and the people stand on equal ground and confess the same faith.
No one is asked to invent Christianity for himself.
No charismatic preacher gets to redefine the faith each Sunday.
No congregation is dependent upon whatever theological fashion happens to be popular this decade.
For a few moments, Christians living in the twenty-first century speak words recognizable to Christians living in the fourth, and behind those words stand confessions recognizable in Irenaeus, Justin, Ignatius, Paul, John, and the apostolic proclamation itself.
This placement is especially fitting within our Liturgy of the Word and Table. Scripture is read, the Gospel is proclaimed, teaching is given, and then the congregation stands to confess the Symbol of Faith before continuing toward prayer, reconciliation, thanksgiving, and the Eucharistic Table.
The movement is deliberate:
We hear the faith. We confess the faith. We pray the faith. We gather at the Table in the faith. And then we go forth to live the faith.
Not a New Creed, but an Ancient Confession
The Church does not need another fashionable statement of belief every generation. It needs memory.
The Nicene Creed reminds us that Christianity did not begin with our denomination, our pastor, our theological movement, the Reformation, the Great Schism, medieval Rome, or imperial Constantinople. It reaches backward through them toward the faith confessed by Christians when the Church was still struggling to find precise language for what she had already received from the Apostles.
The Creed is not perfect because a council makes human words magical. Its authority does not surpass Holy Scripture. Rather, its enduring value lies in how faithfully it gathers together the great biblical affirmations about Father, Son, Spirit, creation, Incarnation, cross, resurrection, Church, baptism, judgment, resurrection, and the Kingdom to come.
And this is why we recite the ancient form without the later filioque. We are seeking the common inheritance rather than the vocabulary of one side of a later division. We receive what the undivided Church received. Where later Christians added, we return to the common text. Where later centuries divided, we seek the older foundation.
When we therefore stand together and confess:
One God.
One Lord Jesus Christ.
One Holy Spirit.
One Holy, Universal, and Apostolic Ekklesia.
One baptism.
One resurrection.
One life of the age to come.
we are doing far more than reciting an ancient document.
We are declaring where we intend to stand: with Holy Scripture, with the apostolic witness, and with the faith of the ancient and undivided Church.
One Faith. One Table. One Christ. Undivided.