Tag: Creeds of the Kehillah ~ Part 27

The Nicene Creed~ Part 13

In our last post, we continued to explore the Nicene Creed. This post digs a little deeper into the actual articles of faith in the Nicene Creed. As you can see below,  I have skipped several clauses that we previously examined in the Apostle’s Creed.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father,

God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father.
Through Him, all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
He came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
He became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.
For our sake, He was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
He suffered death and was buried.
On the third day, He rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
He ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and His kingdom will have no end.

HIS KINGDOM WILL HAVE NO END

Of the clauses from the Creed of 381 encompassed by the present volume, this is the most substantial addition to the Nicene Creed of 325. A heresy based on 1 Corinthians 15:28 had declared that in the last days Yeshua and all that belonged to Him would be taken into the Father, so that God, in being, all in all, would cease to be a Trinity. Now when everything has been subjected to the Son, then He will subject Himself to God, who subjected everything to Him; so that God may be everything in everyone. (The heretic who was alleged to have maintained this was Marcellus of Ancyra, a friend of Athanasnius, though he incurred no ecumenical condemnation in his lifetime and would probably have considered the charge unjust.) The purpose of this clause, then, is to make it clear that just as the second person of the Trinity has existed from eternity, so He will continue to exist for all eternity after the end of the created order – in willing submission to God the Father but without surrendering either His own identity or the individuality of the saints.^[1]

The ESV Study Bible explains the apparent heresy this way: Yeshua is one with God the Father and equal to the Father in deity (8:6; John 10:30; 14:9; Heb. 1:8) yet functionally subordinate to Him (Mark 14:36; John 5:19, 26–27, 30; 17:4), and this verse shows that His subjection to the Father will continue for all eternity. God will be all in all, not in the sense that God will be everything and everything will be God, as some Eastern religions imagine, but in the sense that God’s supreme authority over everything will be eternally established, never to be threatened again.^[2]

In my next post, we begin to dig into the third article of the Nicene Creed: We Believe in The Holy Spirt.

Click here for the PDF version.

^[1] Edwards, M. J., & Oden, T. C. (Eds.). (2009). We Believe in the Crucified and Risen Lord(Vol. 3, p. 171).

^[2] Crossway Bibles. (2008). The ESV Study Bible (p. 2214).