Death and Life in the Nicene Creed

The Nicene Creed invites us to die. Indeed, it requires it. This probably sounds rather dramatic, especially to those of us who recite the Creed each week without much serious concern.

Readers of this website likely know the outline of how the Nicene Creed came to be. In the early 300s, a priest named Arius argued that the Son was the first and highest creation of the Father rather than one God with him. In response, the Council of Nicaea (325) expanded the second article of the creed to defend the full divinity of the Son. In the next generation, many who conceded the divinity of the Son could not accept the divinity of the Holy Spirit. In response, the Council of Constantinople (381) argued that if we worship and adore the Holy Spirit along with the Father and Son, then the Spirit must also be divine.

All good and interesting, but what does all this have to do with death?

I’d like to propose that the Creed has always been closely associated with Christian forms of dying: baptism, martyrdom, Eucharist, and asceticism. The Creed invites us to die, and those who accept this invitation will see its truths more clearly and, moreover, are promised that by losing their lives will find something even better in “the life of the world to come.”

Death and the transformation of death

Death is the most exquisite creation of the devil. It is the great enemy designed to keep us apart from God. Death is “the last enemy to be destroyed” (1 Cor 15:26).

Christ knew that death could not be avoided, but it must be overcome. Christ overcame death not by removing it, but by walking through it and transforming it from the inside out. In dying, Christ confronted the devil on his own turf. Life enters death, but death cannot extinguish it. The Light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not overcome it (John 1:5).

Christ did not avoid death, and neither did he come to help us avoid it. Rather, he quite clearly tells us that we must take up our cross and follow him (Mt 16:24). The cross leads to death, but now this death leads to true life.

The content of the Nicene Creed teaches us about this, and about the nature and power of “the Father almighty” who, because he created all things, has the power to save what he created. This Father sent his truly divine Son to become a real human being capable of dying for our salvation. The Creed teaches us about Christ’s resurrection (his overcoming of death) and our own hope for the same. It teaches about the Holy Spirit, “the Lord, the giver of life,” who, with the Father and the Son, has the power to conquer death.

Baptism, martyrdom, and Eucharist

To conquer death, we must enter into death with Christ. For most of us, this comes through the “one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.” Baptism brings about our entry into the body of Christ and makes us share in Christ’s death. “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death” (Rom 6:3)? In order to be baptized, we must profess the Christian faith, usually in the form of a creed. The Nicene Creed was based on an earlier baptismal creed, which functioned as a gateway to the saving waters of baptism.

Baptism brought about a radical identification with Christ. “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God” (Gal 2:20). From the earliest times, then, baptism was understood as a preparation for—indeed, a pledge to—live Christ’s life to the full. That is, baptism was a call to martyrdom.

The profession of faith and martyrdom went hand in hand. In the early centuries of Christianity, to profess the second article of the Creed, “I believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,” was to invite death by execution. To profess this is to declare to all worldly powers that there is only one Lord, who is the Lord over all other lords and who commands our primary allegiance. This is a truth that the martyrs (Greek for “witnesses”) have seen and were willing to testify to with their blood.

But the would-be martyrs knew what Christ knew: death is not the end. With Paul, they said, “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Phil 1:21).

In the seventh century, the Nicene Creed was inserted into the Sunday liturgy, a development which once again highlighted the Creed’s connection with life-giving death. The Eucharist is the re-presentation of Christ’s saving death, which is inseparably united with his resurrection. In the Mass, the Creed is professed at the end of the liturgy of the Word. Similar to its location in the baptismal liturgy, the Creed functions as a doorway to the sacrament. Professing our right belief gives us access to communion with Christ’s death and life in the Eucharist.

We profess the Creed publicly each week. This seems particularly important today. In a time when many people fear commitment and are more comfortable speaking about “my truth” than the truth, the public and communal profession of the Nicene Creed commits us to a truth not of our own making. Every week, we declare before and with others that there is a transcendent truth. Liturgically, our public profession of the Nicene Creed is our weekly preparation for martyrdom: “This is what I believe to be true and I am willing to give my life for it.”

Orthodoxy and asceticism

The development of the Creed was part of the great fourth-century “Golden Age” of Patristic literature, which included such luminaries as Hilary, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine in the West and Athanasius, Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, and Gregory of Nyssa in the East (to name just a few!). Interestingly, at the same time as these great theologians were carefully articulating Trinitarian doctrine at the highest levels, lay Christians on the ground were spontaneously heading to the desert to live as monks.

This monastic movement included such greats as Antony, Pachomius, and Martin of Tours, but also included the great theologians named above. Jerome, Augustine, and Basil lived as monks and even wrote monastic rules; Hilary, Ambrose, Athanasius, and the Gregories were committed ascetics who promulgated monastic ideals. Indeed, the same Athanasius who gave us the Nicene term “consubstantial (homoousios) with the Father” also gave us the Life of Antony, which, more than anything else, popularized the monastic vision of holiness.

This makes for another fascinating historical connection between Creed and death: at the same time that Christian orthodoxy is being forged, a mass number of Christians are dying to the world to live radically ascetic lives. The great councils and the ascetic movement in the fourth century were two complementary ways Christians tried to work out the meaning of God.

We might say that the councils worked out the theory of Christ and the Holy Spirit, while the monks worked out the praxis. The councils tell us what to believe; the monks show us how to believe. The councils tell us how rightly to know God; the monks show us how rightly to love God. In the Creed, the councils provide a map that tells us how not to get lost in our search for God. In the ascetic life, the monks walk the roads and explore the terrain of God.

Creed and death, doctrine and holiness, orthodoxy and asceticism all go together. Scripture teaches us that “no man can see God and live” (Ex 33:20). So, to see God, we must die. To see God in this life, we must die to the world and die to ourselves, which means that some kind of radical asceticism is necessary.

This might seem counterintuitive. Doesn’t the Creed teach us that God is the creator of all things? If so, then shouldn’t we enjoy and give thanks for God’s gifts rather than emphasizing death to the world he made? In his profound little book The Meaning of Monasticism (1950), Louis Bouyer explains why ascetic death is necessary to find God:

The reason lies in sin. Sin has vitiated our relations with things by vitiating the natural attitude of our soul, thought, will. Turned in upon ourselves by the deepest tendency of our being, instead of tending directly to God, we relate everything to ourselves instead of referring all to him. That is why in order to find him again, it is essential to strip ourselves of ourselves.

Before the Fall, everything was an icon. Everything was a window into the divine. Everything was a sign that said, “God this way.” But after the Fall, things become idols for us. Instead of things pointing us to God, we seek things as ends in themselves. Or, worse, we become the idol. We worship ourselves by referring all things back to ourselves, our own comfort, pleasure, and self-aggrandizement. We try to take the place of God as the center of the universe in a perverse self-deification. Hence, some kind of asceticism is necessary if we want to find God.

It is perhaps because so many Christians in the fourth century were committed to an ascetic ideal that so much progress was made in articulating the orthodox doctrine of God. While there is not a simple cause and effect here (not all ascetics are orthodox), true insight into God is often, perhaps necessarily, accompanied by a radical renunciation of self and the world. Only by mortifying (“making dead”) ourselves can we come to see the truth about God.

What does this mean for us today?

Not all of us are called to be martyrs or monks, but all Christians are called in our baptism to profess the Creed and die to the world. But dying is not a onetime event. If any of us would be Christ’s followers, “let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Lk 9:23). Every day, we must die to ourselves. And, “if we have died with him, we will also live with him” (2 Tim 2:11).

I help direct the Catholic campus ministry at a small Christian college. This year, we had more than 260 students participate in the Exodus 90 program. For ninety days, students increased their prayer time; took cold showers; gave up snacking, sweet drinks, movies, and frivolous internet use; fasted twice a week; exercised three times a week; and committed to daily accountability check-ins and weekly small group meetings.

Almost universally, students reported feeling more freedom from sin, experiencing richer friendships, more peace, better prayer, and renewed intimacy with God.

It is students like these who give me hope for the future of the Church. They are the ones who know what it means to be in the grip of sin and Satan’s power. And they know what it means to be liberated. They are the ones who know what it means to rely on God. They are the ones who know what it means to die to themselves and to sacrifice for Christ. They are the ones who have experienced the power of God, bringing them from death to life. They are the ones who know their limitations and who know the power of the life-giving Spirit. It is these young people who know the truths of the Creed firsthand.

The Nicene Creed is not just a list of propositional truths calling for intellectual assent. It is an invitation to enter with our whole being into the mysteries it articulates. The Creed is an invitation to die. In dying, we are given new life and new eyes to see, for it is only in dying to ourselves that we can attain the kind of heart that can see the truth about God. Jesus himself tells us this: “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God” (Mt. 5:8).

That is true in this life as well as in the life of the world to come.

• Related at CWR: “The Nicene Creed is ‘a medicine for our times'” (Sept 17, 2024): An interview with Jared Ortiz and Daniel A. Keating, co-authors of The Nicene Creed: A Scripture. Historical & Theological Commentary.