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The Importance of the Nicene Creed Today

The Church formulated the Nicene Creed before it selected certain apostolic writings, called them the New Testament, and declared them to be Holy Scripture. Another way of looking at it is that God chose the people who were bound by the Nicene Creed to affirm the contents of the New Testament, thereby endorsing the theology of the creed. The Nicene Creed is therefore a reliable test of our interpretation of the New Testament. If we are at variance with the Nicene Creed, we are in error. So whoever denies the Trinity must also deny the New Testament, and whoever upholds the New Testament as Holy Scripture must also affirm the Trinity.

In the beginning, the Church did not have a formal creed, nor did it have a formal list of the books in the New Testament. Then it formulated the Nicene Creed to express its doctrines and to serve as a test of orthodox teaching. So for a while there was a Church with the Nicene Creed but, even though it used the books of the New Testament as Holy Scripture, it had no official statement saying that they were. After the Church was bound by the Nicene Creed, it made a formal list of the books in the New Testament. Therefore, whoever attempts to reconstruct the ancient Church with an official list of New Testament books but without the Nicene Creed is reconstructing an imaginary church that never existed. This doesn’t mean their church is invalid, it just means that it isn’t a historic reconstruction, because in any part of Church history in which there was an official list of New Testament books, the Nicene Creed was the official expression of faith and the final test of orthodoxy.

Metropolitan Maximos said the change was made in part to counter heretical European movements, led by Arians and Visigoths, challenging the divinity of Christ. By saying that the Holy Spirit proceeds "from the Father and the Son," it clarified that Jesus was God, he said.

If the Eastern and Western churches can agree on a common creed, it would be an important step toward ending the 1,000-year-old split, the metropolitan said. >/i>

Has anyone explored the writings of St. Augustine to see just how this became an issue? Very interesting!

It is always interesting to see developments such as this but I am not going to get my hopes up on this one. Yes, the filioque was inserted to fight a heresy that the Orthodox will agree needed to be answered but clearly disagreed with the method used to do that.

In this thread, I already see that some questions are being raised about how the Creed will be interpreted in the West without the filioque. Will an old schism close just to open a new one?

The other important item is that the disagreement over the insertion of the additional language into the Creed comes back to the question of who would have the autority to make such a change, a single Patriarch or a Council.

That question will require a lot more work than the one they've addressed in this article.