What Is Nicene Christianity?

Most Christians in the world, whether Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran or Reformed, can stand in church and say the same short text: “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth.” That shared confession is what people mean by Nicene Christianity.

The name comes from Nicaea, the town in Asia Minor where bishops met in 325 to answer a dispute about whether the Son of God is truly God or the first and highest of God’s creatures. The creed most churches recite today is a fuller form of that confession, received from the Council of Constantinople in 381. For the Orthodox Church it is the Symbol of Faith, confessed at every Divine Liturgy.

The Creed marks both a center and a boundary: it shows which disagreements among Christians are family arguments and which concern who God is. This article explains what the Creed says, where it came from, how the Orthodox Church reads it, who confesses it, and which objections deserve a serious answer.

In brief

Nicene Christianity is the faith confessed in the Creed of Nicaea (325) as completed at Constantinople (381): one God, the Father Almighty; one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, “true God of true God,” who became man, was crucified under Pontius Pilate and rose bodily on the third day; and the Holy Spirit, “the Lord, the Giver of Life,” who proceeds from the Father and is worshipped and glorified with the Father and the Son. It was written to exclude the teaching that the Son, and later the Spirit, is a creature, and it states how the whole of Scripture fits together rather than replacing it. In the Orthodox reading, the Father is the one source of the Son and the Spirit, salvation is God’s healing and deifying union with humanity in Christ, and the Creed is confessed in its original form, without the later Western addition “and the Son” (the Filioque). Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, the Church of the East, Catholics and historic Protestants all confess this faith, though they disagree on much else. Latter-day Saints, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Oneness Pentecostals and Muslims do not.

Thesis: The Nicene Creed is the Church’s summary of the scriptural witness to the one God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and the historical record shows it was a reasoned response to a real dispute about the Bible, not an imperial invention.

The council at Nicaea

In 325 bishops gathered at Nicaea in Bithynia under the patronage of Emperor Constantine. Theodoret of Cyrrhus, writing more than a century later, says that some bishops had lost an eye or an arm under persecution, so that the council “looked like an assembled army of martyrs.” The number of bishops is not secure. Eusebius of Caesarea, who attended, says “the number of bishops exceeded two hundred and fifty,” while Athanasius, writing decades later, speaks of 318, the figure that became traditional.¹ {{debated: The exact number of bishops at Nicaea cannot be recovered; 318 is the traditional figure, and the one eyewitness count is over 250.}}

The dispute had begun in Alexandria. Arius, a presbyter, opposed his bishop, Alexander, over the Son’s relation to the Father. In a letter preserved by Theodoret, Arius summed up his position: “We are persecuted, because we say that the Son has a beginning, but that God is without beginning.” Arius wanted to protect the uniqueness of God, but his solution placed the Son on the created side of the line between God and everything else. Athanasius quoted the slogan of Arius’s party, “There was once when He was not.” Since most of Arius’s words survive only in quotations by opponents, historians weigh those quotations against his own letters.²

Nicaea answered with a creed. In the translation in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, it confessed “one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-begotten of his Father, of the substance of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance (homoousios) with the Father.” It then condemned anyone who said “that there was a time when the Son of God was not,” or that he was “a creature.”³ {{very-strong: The Council of Nicaea in 325 issued a creed confessing the Son as “of one substance” with the Father and condemning the claim that he is a creature.}}

Homoousios did not say that Father and Son are the same person. It said that whatever it means to be the one God, the Son is that, eternally, with the Father. The word did not settle everything at once. It had earlier associations and needed decades of argument before most of the Church agreed on what it protected. Lewis Ayres and the Orthodox scholar John Behr argue that the years after 325 were a long debate among several theological positions, not a simple contest between two parties.⁴

From Nicaea to Constantinople

The controversy continued for more than fifty years, and a new question arose. Some accepted the Son’s full divinity while treating the Holy Spirit as a creature. The Creed of 325 had ended its positive confession with the brief words “And [we believe] in the Holy Ghost.” St Basil the Great, St Gregory the Theologian (of Nazianzus) and St Gregory of Nyssa argued from Scripture, baptism and worship that the Spirit belongs on the divine side of the line between Creator and creature.

In 381 a council met at Constantinople. Its first canon declared that “the Faith of the Three Hundred and Eighteen Fathers assembled at Nice in Bithynia shall not be set aside,” and condemned, among others, the Arians, the Sabellians and the “Pneumatomachi,” those who fought against the Spirit. The council’s full acts have not survived. The fuller creed is first preserved in the acts of the Council of Chalcedon (451), where it was read aloud as the faith “which the 150 fathers set forth as consonant to the holy and great Synod of Nice.” As a joint Orthodox-Catholic consultation summarized it in 2003, “The acts of the Council of Constantinople were lost, but the text of its Creed was quoted and formally acknowledged as binding” at Chalcedon.⁵ {{strong: The fuller creed was received as the faith of the 150 fathers of Constantinople (381), though its text is first preserved in the acts of Chalcedon (451).}}

This is the text the Orthodox Church confesses today, in the translation used by the Orthodox Church in America:⁶

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth and of all things visible and invisible.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-begotten, begotten of the Father before all ages. Light of light; true God of true God; begotten, not made; of one essence with the Father; by 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. And He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried. And the third day He arose again, according to the Scriptures, and ascended into Heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead; Whose Kingdom shall have no end.

And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, Who proceeds from the Father; Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; Who spoke by the prophets.

In one Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins. I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.

A line-by-line companion is in the site’s Nicene Creed study guide.

“I believe in one God, the Father Almighty”

The Creed begins where Israel begins: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one!” (Deuteronomy 6:4).⁷ The God Christians confess is the Creator of heaven and earth, not a member of the cosmos, not a being who rose to divinity, and not the highest figure in a society of gods. All things visible and invisible owe their existence to him; he owes his existence to nothing.

“Father” here points first to God’s eternal relation to the Son. The Father is never without his Word, and he is the one source from whom the Son is eternally begotten and the Spirit eternally proceeds. Orthodox theology calls this the monarchy of the Father: the unity of the Trinity is anchored in the person of the Father, who shares the one divine nature fully with the Son and the Spirit. St Gregory the Theologian put it this way: “the three have one Nature — God. And the union is the Father from Whom and to Whom the order of Persons runs its course, not so as to be confounded, but so as to be possessed, without distinction of time, of will, or of power.”⁸

“And in one Lord Jesus Christ”

In the Septuagint as Christians received it, Kyrios (“Lord”) regularly stands where the Hebrew has the divine name. Paul restates Israel’s confession as “one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we for Him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and through whom we live” (1 Corinthians 8:6). Richard Bauckham argues that Paul here includes Jesus within the identity of the one God of Israel while distinguishing him from the Father; other scholars frame early Christology differently, but the verse plainly places Jesus on the Creator’s side of the line.⁹

“Only-begotten Son of God” marks Jesus’ sonship as unique. Christians become God’s children by adoption, “that we might receive the adoption as sons” (Galatians 4:5). The Son is Son by nature. John speaks of the Word who “was with God, and the Word was God,” through whom “all things were made,” and who “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:1–3, 14). “Begotten of the Father before all ages” rules out the idea that the Son began at Bethlehem. The man Jesus was born in time of Mary; the Son who took that humanity shares the Father’s glory “before the world was” (John 17:5).

“Begotten, not made”

This is the Creed’s sharpest answer to Arius. A maker produces something of a different nature, as a carpenter makes a table. One who begets communicates the same nature. The Father eternally shares the undivided divine being with the Son. There was no moment when God was alone and then produced a lesser deity. “True God of true God” closes the door on honorary divinity: Scripture can call angels or judges “gods” in limited senses, but the Creed confesses the Son as God in the same uncreated sense as the Father.

The debate was a debate about the Bible. Arius’s party relied heavily on Proverbs 8:22. In the Septuagint, as Brenton translates it, Wisdom says: “The Lord made me the beginning of his ways for his works.” If Christ is God’s Wisdom, they reasoned, then Christ was made. Athanasius devoted several chapters of his second Oration against the Arians to this verse, arguing that it must be read with the rest of Scripture and that it speaks of the Son’s coming in the flesh “for the works,” not of his eternal origin.¹⁰

Nicene faith does not erase the order between Father and Son that Scripture teaches. When Jesus says, “My Father is greater than I” (John 14:28), St Gregory the Theologian answered that “the Greater refers to origination, while the Equal belongs to the Nature.”¹¹ The Father is the source; the Son is from the Father; both are one God. The order is real and eternal, but it is an order of origin, not of rank or of being.

“For us men and for our salvation”

The Creed now moves from who the Son is to what he did. The Orthodox Church reads these words through the Fathers who defended the Creed. For St Athanasius, the human problem is death and corruption as well as guilt: humanity turned from God and began to slide back toward nothing. The Word took a mortal body “that thenceforth corruption might be stayed from all by the Grace of the Resurrection.” Athanasius summed up the purpose of the Incarnation in a famous line: “He was made man that we might be made God.”¹² This is theosis, or deification: by grace human beings become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4), never becoming God by nature and always remaining creatures. The site explains it more fully in What Is Theosis? Athanasius also speaks of a debt paid by Christ’s death, so healing and legal images should not be set against each other; but in Orthodox teaching the governing picture is healing and union with God, not a courtroom alone.

The same frame shapes what Orthodox Christians say we inherit from Adam. Orthodox theology usually speaks of “ancestral sin”: the human race inherits mortality and corruption, and with them an inclination to sin, rather than Adam’s personal guilt. Western Christians, following Augustine, more often speak of “original sin,” and the two traditions are closer than polemics suggest. See Original Sin vs. Ancestral Sin.

“Crucified for us under Pontius Pilate”

Pontius Pilate anchors the confession in public history. The one through whom all things were made suffered under a named Roman governor. The eternal Son truly died in the humanity he had made his own, while his divine nature remained immortal. “The third day He arose again” means bodily resurrection, and Paul ties it to the future resurrection of all who belong to Christ (1 Corinthians 15:20–23).

The Orthodox Church sings the meaning of Cross and Resurrection together throughout the Paschal season: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!”¹³ In this hymn Christ’s death is above all the defeat of death from within. Penal substitution, the model in which Christ bears the Father’s punishment in our place, belongs mainly to Reformed and wider Protestant theology. It is one Western way of reading the Cross. The Creed does not choose among such models; it says that he was crucified “for us.”

“And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life”

The Spirit is called “Lord,” a title with divine weight, and “Giver of Life” (compare Genesis 1:2; Psalm 104:30; John 3:5–8; Romans 8:11). The council of 381 was careful in its wording. The 2003 Orthodox-Catholic statement notes that the Creed “avoided directly calling the Spirit ‘God,’” although Athanasius and Gregory had done so, while clearly intending to confess his full divinity: one does not worship and glorify a creature. Gregory had answered the question bluntly: “Is the Spirit God? Most certainly. Well then, is He Consubstantial? Yes, if He is God.” St Basil described salvation in the same Trinitarian shape: “the way of the knowledge of God lies from One Spirit through the One Son to the One Father.”¹⁴

The Spirit “proceeds from the Father,” echoing Jesus’ words about “the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father” (John 15:26). This is the Creed’s original wording, and the Orthodox Church keeps it unchanged. In the West the words “and the Son” (Filioque) were later added. The earliest credal use is associated with the regional Council of Toledo in 589. Around 810 Pope Leo III, pressed by Charlemagne’s court, affirmed the theology but refused to add the word to the Creed, and according to the Liber Pontificalis he had the original text displayed on silver shields in St Peter’s. The Creed with the Filioque was first sung at a papal Mass in 1014.¹⁵ {{very-strong: The Creed as received from 381 says the Spirit “proceeds from the Father”; “and the Son” was added later in the West and first sung at a papal Mass in 1014.}}

The Orthodox objection is twofold: part of the Church changed a common creed without a common council, and the addition obscures the Father’s role as the one source in the Trinity. Catholics should be heard in their own words. The Catechism of the Catholic Church acknowledges that the Filioque “does not appear in the Creed confessed in 381 at Constantinople” and remains “a point of disagreement with the Orthodox Churches,” while holding the Western formula legitimate because the Father, “the principle without principle,” remains “the first origin of the Spirit.” In 2003 the North American consultation of Orthodox and Catholic theologians recommended that the Catholic Church use “the original Greek text alone” of the Creed in catechesis and liturgy.¹⁶ The disagreement is real, but it does not touch the shared confession that the Spirit is uncreated, personal and fully divine. The site tells the story in The Filioque: Why One Phrase Helped Divide East and West.

Church, baptism and the life of the world to come

“One Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church” confesses something visible. The Orthodox Church understands itself as that one Church in continuity with the apostles, through its bishops, its sacraments and its unbroken confession of this Creed. It does not regard 1054 as its beginning; that date is a conventional marker for a long estrangement between East and West. Other Christians draw the Church’s boundaries differently; what the Creed rules out for all of them is a purely invisible spirituality with no baptism and no continuity with the apostles.

“One baptism for the remission of sins” reflects Ephesians 4:5 and the New Testament’s link between baptism, repentance, union with Christ and forgiveness (Acts 2:38; Romans 6:3–4). In the Orthodox Church baptism is new birth: the person dies and rises with Christ, is joined to his Body, and is sealed with the gift of the Spirit in chrismation. The Creed’s last lines refuse any account of salvation as escape from the body. Christians “look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come”: everlasting communion with God in a renewed creation (Romans 8:18–25; Revelation 21–22), the fulfilment of the deification begun in baptism.

Who confesses the Nicene faith?

The Orthodox Church confesses the Creed in its original form. The Oriental Orthodox churches (among them the Coptic, Armenian, Syriac and Ethiopian churches) separated from the Orthodox after the Council of Chalcedon in 451, yet in their joint statement of 1990 both families declared: “Both families accept the first three Ecumenical Councils, which form our common heritage.” The Assyrian Church of the East, long separated from both, confessed with Pope John Paul II in 1994 “the faith received from the Apostles as formulated by our common Fathers in the Nicene Creed.”¹⁷

The Roman Catholic Church confesses the Creed, differing from the Orthodox over the Filioque and later questions of authority. The Reformers did not abandon Nicaea. The Lutheran Augsburg Confession of 1530 opens by teaching “that the decree of the Council of Nicaea concerning the Unity of the Divine Essence and concerning the Three Persons, is true and to be believed without any doubting.”¹⁸ Anglican, Reformed, Methodist and most evangelical churches likewise confess the Trinity in Nicene terms. They differ from the Orthodox on the sacraments, the Church, the saints and Tradition, and the Orthodox Church does not treat the Creed alone as full unity of faith; but those differences do not mean they worship a different God.

Which movements stand outside the Creed?

A movement stands outside Nicene Christianity when it denies the Creed’s central affirmations, however much Christian vocabulary it keeps. The fair way to show this is to let each group speak for itself.

• The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints says that its members “pray to God the Father in the name of Jesus Christ” and acknowledge “the Son as Lord and Redeemer.” It also teaches, in its own words, “that God and Jesus Christ are glorified, physical beings and that each member of the Godhead is a separate being.” Its scripture states: “The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s; the Son also” (Doctrine and Covenants 130:22).¹⁹ Three separate beings united in purpose is a different account of God from one divine essence shared by three persons. The site compares the two carefully in One God or a Council of Gods?
• Jehovah’s Witnesses teach that Jesus “was created by Jehovah God before everything else,” and is called the “only-begotten Son” because “Jesus alone was directly created by Jehovah.” Their official site says Michael the archangel “is evidently a name given to Jesus.”²⁰ This is close to the position Nicaea rejected: the Son is placed among creatures, however exalted. See Is Jesus Michael the Archangel?
• Oneness Pentecostals affirm the full deity of Christ. The United Pentecostal Church International states: “There is one God, who has revealed Himself as Father; through His Son, in redemption; and as the Holy Spirit, by emanation. Jesus Christ is God manifested in flesh.”²¹ They stand outside the Creed on the opposite side from Arius, by denying the eternal personal distinction of Father, Son and Spirit, a view close to the modalism the early Church rejected as Sabellianism.
• Unitarian forms of Christianity deny that God exists eternally as Father, Son and Holy Spirit (modern Unitarian Universalism has no common creed, so members should not be assigned one theology).
• Islam honors Jesus as Messiah and messenger. The Qur’an tells Christians, “do not say, ‘Three’; desist,” and says of God, “Exalted is He above having a son” (4:171). It also says of Jesus that “they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him” (4:157), a verse Muslims have interpreted in more than one way.²² Islam is strictly monotheistic, but its teaching about God and Jesus is not Nicene.

These judgments classify doctrines. They do not measure the sincerity or character of anyone who holds them.

Objections and responses

“Constantine invented the deity of Christ in 325.”

An emperor did call the council and take part, so the claim has a basis. But the belief the council defended was already old. Ignatius of Antioch, writing as a prisoner on his way to death in Rome (on the usual dating, early in the second century, though the date is debated), told the Ephesians that “our God, Jesus Christ, was, according to the appointment of God, conceived in the womb by Mary.” Arius himself complained that he was “persecuted” for saying the Son has a beginning, which shows that his was the view under challenge in Alexandria before Constantine was involved.²³ Nor did Constantine impose a settlement: the argument went on for more than fifty years, and the Nicene faith was confirmed only at Constantinople in 381, under a different emperor. See Did Constantine Invent Christianity or Choose the Bible?

“No creed but the Bible.”

Many Protestant Christians are wary of any text placed beside Scripture, and they are right that a creed must answer to the Bible. But the Arian controversy showed that quoting verses was not enough, because every party quoted them. Words such as homoousios do not occur in Scripture, yet the reality they protect arises from Scripture’s joint witness: there is one God; the Father is God; the Son is God and is not the Father; the Spirit is divine and distinct. In the Orthodox view, the Creed is Scripture read in the Church, where the Scriptures were first read and handed on.

“Nicaea broke with the earliest Christians.”

Latter-day Saints make the strongest version of this argument. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland said in 2007 that the Latter-day Saint view “of the Godhead breaks with post–New Testament Christian history and returns to the doctrine taught by Jesus Himself,” and asked, if those without “a fourth- or fifth-century view of the Godhead” are not Christians, “then what of those first Christian Saints”?²⁴ The first Christians did not use the vocabulary of 381, and the Church’s language did develop. But developed vocabulary is not a changed faith. The first Christians worshipped Jesus, baptized in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19), and confessed with Paul “one God, the Father … and one Lord Jesus Christ” within Israel’s strict monotheism. The New Testament nowhere describes the Father as an embodied, exalted man or God as a council of separate beings. The Creed defended that earliest worship of Christ against the claim that he is a creature.

“Homoousios is Greek philosophy, not the Bible.”

The term did come from philosophical vocabulary, which is partly why it took decades to settle. It was accepted once it was clear that it said something biblical: the Son is not a creature and shares all that the Father is, except being the Father. The real question is whether the word protects the whole biblical witness better than the alternatives. For that evidence see The Biblical Case for the Trinity.

What we can say confidently

• The Council of Nicaea met in 325 and issued a creed confessing the Son as “very God of very God” and “of one substance” with the Father.
• That creed condemned the claim that the Son came from nothing or that there was a time when he was not.
• The council of 381 reaffirmed Nicaea and confessed the Holy Spirit as Lord and Giver of Life, worshipped with the Father and the Son.
• The fuller creed is first preserved in the acts of Chalcedon (451), where it was read as the faith of the 150 fathers of Constantinople.
• The original text says the Spirit “proceeds from the Father”; the Filioque is a later Western addition, first sung at a papal Mass in 1014.
• Worship of Jesus as God is attested well before Nicaea.
• Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, the Church of the East, Catholics and the historic Protestant confessions all profess the Nicene faith.

What remains disputed

• The exact number of bishops at Nicaea: Eusebius, an eyewitness, says more than 250; 318 is the traditional figure.
• How the creed of 381 was composed and how exactly it relates to the council, since the acts are lost.
• Constantine’s theological role, the drafting behind homoousios, and the influence of individual bishops.
• Whether the Filioque can be understood in a way both East and West accept, and whether Rome will return to the original text in all its liturgies.
• Where the visible boundaries of the Church lie. Christians answer this differently, and the Creed alone does not resolve it for them.
• How to describe the link between the earliest worship of Jesus and the later Nicene vocabulary: scholars such as Bauckham see deep continuity; others stress development.

Conclusion

The Creed begins with creation and ends with resurrection. Between those horizons stands Jesus Christ: eternally from the Father, born of the Virgin Mary, crucified under Pilate, risen in the body, and reigning without end. Christianity’s center is communion with the living God, the Father, through the Son and in the Holy Spirit.

In the Divine Liturgy the Creed comes just before the Eucharistic prayer. The deacon (in some usages the priest) first calls out, “Let us love one another that with one accord we may confess,” and the people answer, “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Trinity, One in essence and Undivided.”²⁵ The Creed is not a password but a shared act of faith by people who are being healed and joined to God. Its last word is hope: “the life of the world to come.”

Notes

1. Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3.8, trans. Ernest Cushing Richardson, NPNF2 vol. 1; Athanasius, Ad Afros 2, NPNF2 vol. 4; Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History 1.6 (NPNF2 vol. 3, trans. Blomfield Jackson). Theodoret wrote in the mid-fifth century. ↩
2. Arius, Letter to Eusebius of Nicomedia, in Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History 1.4, trans. Blomfield Jackson, NPNF2 vol. 3; Athanasius, Orations against the Arians 1.5 (extracts from Arius’s Thalia) and 1.11 (the slogan), NPNF2 vol. 4. ↩
3. “The Creed of Nicaea,” in The Seven Ecumenical Councils, ed. Henry R. Percival, NPNF2 vol. 14 (New Advent edition). Greek terms given there in brackets are omitted except homoousios. ↩
4. Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy (Oxford University Press, 2004); John Behr, The Nicene Faith, 2 parts (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004). ↩
5. First Council of Constantinople, Canon 1 and Letter to Theodosius; Council of Chalcedon, Session 2 (reading of the creed of the 150 fathers) and Definition of Faith, all in NPNF2 vol. 14; North American Orthodox-Catholic Theological Consultation, The Filioque: A Church-Dividing Issue? (2003), part II. ↩
6. Orthodox Church in America, “The Creed: The Symbol of Faith,” oca.org. ↩
7. Scripture is quoted from the New King James Version (NKJV) unless another translation is named. ↩
8. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 42.15, trans. Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow, NPNF2 vol. 7. ↩
9. Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel (Eerdmans, 2008). ↩
10. Proverbs 8:22, in Lancelot C. L. Brenton, The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament (1844); Athanasius, Orations against the Arians 2, chapters 16 to 22 in the NPNF2 division (vol. 4). ↩
11. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 30.7 (the Fourth Theological Oration), NPNF2 vol. 7. ↩
12. Athanasius, On the Incarnation 9 and 54, trans. Archibald Robertson, NPNF2 vol. 4. The “debt” language is in chapter 9. ↩
13. Orthodox Church in America, “Selected Liturgical Hymns: The Paschal Troparion,” oca.org. ↩
14. The Filioque: A Church-Dividing Issue? (2003), part II; Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 31.10 (the Fifth Theological Oration), NPNF2 vol. 7; Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit 18.47, trans. Blomfield Jackson, NPNF2 vol. 8. ↩
15. The Filioque: A Church-Dividing Issue? (2003), part II, which cites the Liber Pontificalis for the shields. ↩
16. Catechism of the Catholic Church 247–248; The Filioque: A Church-Dividing Issue? (2003), part IV, recommendation 7. ↩
17. Joint Commission of the Theological Dialogue between the Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Churches, Second Agreed Statement (Chambésy, 1990), §8; Pope John Paul II and Mar Dinkha IV, Common Christological Declaration between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East (11 November 1994). ↩
18. Augsburg Confession, Article I, in the translation published at BookOfConcord.org. ↩
19. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Godhead,” Gospel Topics (Topics and Questions); Doctrine and Covenants 130:22. ↩
20. Jehovah’s Witnesses, Enjoy Life Forever! An Interactive Bible Course, lesson 15, “Who Is Jesus?”; “Who Is the Archangel Michael?”, jw.org. ↩
21. United Pentecostal Church International, “Our Beliefs,” upci.org. ↩
22. Qur’an 4:171 and 4:157, Saheeh International translation (Quran.com). ↩
23. Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Ephesians 18, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, ANF vol. 1; Arius, Letter to Eusebius of Nicomedia, in Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History 1.4. ↩
24. Jeffrey R. Holland, “The Only True God and Jesus Christ Whom He Hath Sent,” General Conference, October 2007, churchofjesuschrist.org. ↩
25. The Divine Liturgy of Our Father among the Saints John Chrysostom, English text at Ponomar.net. Whether the deacon or the priest says the call varies by usage, and translations differ slightly. ↩

Bibliography

Primary sources

• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.
• Brenton, Lancelot C. L., trans. The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament. London: Samuel Bagster, 1844.
• Percival, Henry R., ed. The Seven Ecumenical Councils. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 14. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1900. (Creed of Nicaea; Constantinople 381; Chalcedon 451.)
• Orthodox Church in America. “The Creed: The Symbol of Faith” and “Selected Liturgical Hymns” (the Paschal Troparion). oca.org.
• The Divine Liturgy of Our Father among the Saints John Chrysostom. English text. Ponomar.net.
• Eusebius of Caesarea. Life of Constantine. Translated by Ernest Cushing Richardson. NPNF2 vol. 1. 1890.
• Theodoret of Cyrrhus. Ecclesiastical History. Translated by Blomfield Jackson. NPNF2 vol. 3. 1892. (Includes Arius’s letter to Eusebius of Nicomedia.)

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Ignatius of Antioch. Letter to the Ephesians. Translated by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1. 1885.
• Athanasius of Alexandria. On the Incarnation; Orations against the Arians; Ad Afros. Translated by Archibald Robertson and others. NPNF2 vol. 4. 1892.
• Basil of Caesarea. On the Holy Spirit. Translated by Blomfield Jackson. NPNF2 vol. 8. 1895.
• Gregory of Nazianzus. Orations 30, 31 and 42. Translated by Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow. NPNF2 vol. 7. 1894.
• Behr, John. The Nicene Faith. 2 parts. The Formation of Christian Theology, vol. 2. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004.
• Joint Commission of the Theological Dialogue between the Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Churches. Second Agreed Statement. Chambésy, 1990.
• North American Orthodox-Catholic Theological Consultation. The Filioque: A Church-Dividing Issue? An Agreed Statement. 2003.

Other scholarship

• Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Bauckham, Richard. Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008.
• Catechism of the Catholic Church. English text, Holy See (vatican.va). Paragraphs 247–248.
• John Paul II and Mar Dinkha IV. Common Christological Declaration between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East. 11 November 1994. vatican.va.
• The Augsburg Confession (1530). Article I. BookOfConcord.org.

Sources from the traditions discussed

• The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “Godhead.” Gospel Topics (Topics and Questions). churchofjesuschrist.org.
• Doctrine and Covenants 130. churchofjesuschrist.org.
• Holland, Jeffrey R. “The Only True God and Jesus Christ Whom He Hath Sent.” General Conference, October 2007. churchofjesuschrist.org.
• Jehovah’s Witnesses. Enjoy Life Forever! An Interactive Bible Course, lesson 15; “Who Is the Archangel Michael?” jw.org.
• United Pentecostal Church International. “Our Beliefs.” upci.org.
• The Qur’an. Saheeh International translation. Quran.com. 4:157, 4:171.