What Are the Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed?
Walk into a church almost anywhere in the world and you may hear a congregation recite the same paragraph that Christians were reciting in the fourth century. The apostles creed and nicene creed are the two most widely used summaries of Christian belief, and they remain in daily use across Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist, Reformed, and many other communities.
What a Creed Is and Why They Exist
The word creed comes from the Latin credo, meaning I believe, which is how these statements begin. A creed is a short, memorable summary of essential belief, written to be spoken aloud together.
Creeds served several practical purposes. They gave converts something to learn before baptism, in a world where most people could not read and books were rare. They marked out what the church understood the apostolic teaching to be when rival versions circulated. And they gave scattered congregations a common language, so that Christians in different regions could recognize each other. Philip Schaff’s classic history of the creeds of Christendom introduces this material by discussing the origin, value, authority, and classification of creeds, beginning with the ecumenical ones that contain the basic doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.
The Apostles’ Creed
Despite its name, the Apostles’ Creed was not written by the twelve apostles. A later legend held that each apostle contributed a line, but historians trace the text instead to an early Roman baptismal confession, sometimes called the Old Roman Symbol, which took shape in the second and third centuries and reached its familiar wording gradually over several more.
It is short, concrete, and structured in three parts around Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It affirms God as Father and creator; Jesus as God’s only Son, conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate, buried, risen, ascended, and returning as judge; and the Holy Spirit, the church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. It is still the creed most commonly used at baptisms in the West. Schaff’s second volume, which reproduces the ante-Nicene and Nicene rules of faith and baptismal creeds, prints these texts alongside the Eastern confessions for comparison.
The Nicene Creed and the Councils
The Nicene Creed emerged from a specific controversy. In the early fourth century a presbyter named Arius argued that the Son was the highest of created beings and therefore not eternal in the way the Father is. The dispute spread quickly, and the emperor Constantine convened a council at Nicaea in 325 to settle it.
The historian Ramsay MacMullen, writing for Yale University Press on the Council of Nicaea, notes that roughly two hundred bishops assembled, that the exact number is uncertain, and that the traditional figure of 318 was fixed within a generation and became shorthand for the council and its creed. The bishops affirmed that the Son is of one substance with the Father, using the Greek term homoousios.
The version most churches recite today is slightly later, expanded at the Council of Constantinople in 381 to say more about the Holy Spirit. One clause, the Latin addition known as the filioque, stating that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, was added in the West and never accepted in the East. It remains a point of division between Eastern Orthodox and Western churches.
What They Affirm
Both creeds affirm one God who created everything; Jesus Christ as truly God and truly human, crucified, risen, and returning; the Holy Spirit as God; one church; forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the body; and everlasting life. The Nicene Creed is longer and more precise where precision was contested.
Not every Christian group recites creeds. Some Baptist, Anabaptist, and Restorationist churches prefer to say they have no creed but the Bible, though most still hold the doctrines the creeds express. The Church of England’s Articles of Religion take the opposite tack, stating that the three creeds ought thoroughly to be received and believed because they can be proved by warrants of holy Scripture.
