Who Wrote the Nicene Creed and Why Does It Matter?

The Nicene Creed is one of the most important documents in the history of Christianity. But who wrote it? This is a question I was unable to find the answer to until I read the original sources for myself. I recommend R. P. C. Hanson’s The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God which is helpful for tracking down primary source material. The first version of the creed that was presented at the council was written by Eusebius of Caesarea and then it was changed to include language which explicitly condemned Arianism. The creed he proposed at the council can be found in the letter to his congregation on the Nicene Creed. I have created the following chart to show how indebted the language of the final form of the creed is to Eusebius:

Eusebius’ Proposed Creed

Nicene-Constantinople Creed of 381

We believe in one God, Father, Almighty, maker of all things seen and unseen; And in one Lord Jesus Christ the Word of God, God from God, Light from Light, Life from Life, only-begotten Son, first-born of all creation, begotten from the Father before all ages, through whom all things have come into being, who was incarnate for our salvation; and spent his life among men, and suffered and rose the third day and went up to the Father and will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. And we believe in the Holy Spirit. We believe each of these three exists, the Father truly Father and Son truly Son and Holy Spirit truly Holy Spirit, as our Lord said when he sent his disciples to preach, “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them into the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” We are deeply convinced that these things are so and that this is our belief and has long been so and that we hold by this faith until death, anathematizing all atheist heresy. We bear witness that we have always believed this with heart and soul, ever since we have been conscious of ourselves, and that we now believe and truly proclaim God Almighty and the Lord Jesus Christ, and are ready to demonstrate by arguments and to persuade you that we have always so believed and so preached in times past.

We believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible; And in one Lord, Jesus Christ the only begotten Son of God, begotten from the Father before all ages, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one substance (homoousion) with the Father, through Whom all things came into existence, Who because of us men and because of our salvation came down from the heavens, and was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became man, and was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered and was buried, and rose again on the third day according to the Scriptures and ascended to heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father, and will come again with glory to judge living and dead, of Whose kingdom there will be no end; And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and life-giver, Who proceeds from the Father, Who with the Father and the Son is together worshiped and together glorified, Who spoke through the prophets; in one holy Catholic and apostolic Church. We confess one baptism for the remission of sins; We look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen

After presenting his creed to the council, Eusebius said:

“When we presented this faith, there was no opportunity for resistance by anyone. But our emperor, most beloved of God, himself first of all witnessed that this was most orthodox. He agreed that even he himself thought thus, and he ordered all to assent to subscribe to the teachings and to be in harmony with them, although only one word, homoousios, was added.”

The key difference between Eusebius and the Nicene Creed is the addition of the word homoousios or that the Son is of the same nature as the Father. The Arians had no problem with the creed until homoousios was introduced. Ambrose, in his work On the Faith, reproduces a portion of a letter from the Arian Eusebius of Nicomedia (not Caesarea) that was read at the council: “If, indeed, we say that the Son of God is uncreated, then we are beginning to declare that he is homoousios with the Father” (3.15). As a result, homoousios was adopted because it was the one term the Arians could not agree to. It was also broad enough that the non-Arian parties at Nicaea could accept it, thus preserving the unity of the church which was a great concern to Constantine.

The second major difference between Eusebius’ proposed creed and the Nicene Creed of 325 is that the original Nicene Creed removed Eusebius’ phrase that the Son was “begotten from the Father before all ages.” This phrase was reintroduced into the Nicene-Constantinople Creed of 381 to combat the theology of Marcellus of Ancyra who held to a belief that was similar to modalism.

Arius, in his letter to Alexander of Alexandria, uses language that is similar to the creed when he writes that the Father “begot an only-begotten Son before eternal times. . . . Thus there are three hypostases. . . . the Son begotten timelessly before everything, alone was caused to subsist by the Father.” The subordinationist or semi-Arian Creed of Sirmium in 357 affirms that Christ was “born from him before the ages . . . the Son is born from the Father, God from God, Light from Light, whose generation as Son, as has been said, no one knows except the Father; and that the Son of God himself our Lord and God, as it is said, assumed flesh . . . the Trinity should always be preserved, as we read in the gospel.” The Arians and those who sympathized with them could call Christ “God” in a qualified sense and use terms like “Trinity” and “three hypostases” which they defined differently from the orthodox while rejecting homoousios.

The incredible irony of Eusebius of Caesarea writing the first version of the creed is that he was an original supporter of Arius rather than an orthodox trinitarian. He held to a subordinationist form of Logos Christology which taught that Christ only existed eternally in the mind of God, but not as a distinct person from him until he was begotten. Eusebius was willing to say that the Son is God, but not that he was eternal. He also denied the full deity of the Holy Spirit. Like Origen (Commentary on John, 2.6), he said that the Holy Spirit was created by the Son:

“Since the Son has been honored with the paternal divinity, he would be the maker and fashioner of all created things, both visible and invisible, and surely also of the very existence of the Counseling Spirit. For ‘all things were made through him, and without him not one thing was made,’ and ‘in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible.’ . . . But the Counseling Spirit would be neither God nor Son, since he himself has not also received his generation from the Father as the Son has, but is one of those things brought into existence through the Son, because ‘all things were made through him, and without him not one thing was made’” (On Ecclesiastical Theology, 3.6. As cited in Eusebius of Caesarea: Against Marcellus and On Ecclesiastical Theology, in The Fathers of the Church, vol. 135, ed. Kelley McCarthy Spoerl and Markus Vinzent p. 313-314).

Eusebius defined what he meant by the Son’s begetting in his work Demonstration of the Gospel and how he believed that the Father existed before the Son. Eusebius believed that this act of begetting was completed before the foundation of the world and resulted in the Son’s existence as a distinct person from the Father:

“Perhaps one might say that the Son originated like a perfume and ray of a light from the Father’s unoriginated nature and ineffable substance infinite ages ago, or rather before all ages, and that once he had come into existence he has eternal being and existence along with the Father. . . . He has his own substance and existence and has not co-existed unoriginatedly with the Father. . . . And anyone would allow that a father exists before a son” (5.1).

“But the Father precedes the Son and has preceded him in existence, inasmuch as he alone is unbegotten. The One, perfect in himself and first in order as Father and the cause of the Son’s existence. . . . Receiving from the Father both his being and the character of his being. . . . Unthinkably brought into being from all time, or rather before all times, by the Father’s transcendent and inconceivable will and power” (4.3).

“He first before all things was made by the Father, as something one in form, the instrument of every existence and nature” (4.4).

“He is the perfect creation of a perfect Creator” (4.2).

“I return to my Lord all thanks . . . For we do not say that the Son was with the Father, but that the Father was before the Son. But the Son of God himself, knowing well that he was greater than all, and knowing that he was other than the Father, and less than and subject to Him, very piously teaches this to us also when he says, ‘The Father who sent me is greater than I’ . . . Since the Son also is himself God, but not true God” (Letter to Bishop Euphration).

Eusebius had previously supported Arius and declared his teachings to be biblical. He wrote to Alexander of Alexandria and argued that he had misrepresented Arius and his teachings:

“Again, you accuse them of saying, ‘He-who-was begat he-who-was-not’? I would be astonished if someone were able to speak differently. For if there is only one who exists [eternally], it is clear that everything which exists has come into being from him, whatever indeed exists after him. If it were not he alone who exists eternally, but the son also exists eternally, how indeed could one who exists beget another who already exists? It would have to follow that there would actually be two who exist eternally” (As cited by The Second Council of Nicaea, Session 6 [Labbe, vol. 7, col. 496; Mansi vol. 13, col. 316]).

Kelley McCarthy Spoerl and Markus Vinzent write about how Eusebius tried to have Arius restored to fellowship with the church:

“Arius traveled about the eastern Mediterranean seeking support for his views in hopes of eventual rehabilitation. One of his letters mentions that Eusebius of Caesarea lent his name to the cause; another document indicates that Eusebius wrote to Euphrantion of Balaneae to explain the legitimacy of Arius’s views. Sometime in the period Eusebius of Nicomedia convened a council in Bithynia in Asia Minor to overturn Arius’s condemnation in Alexandria. Afterwards Eusebius of Caesarea wrote to bishop Alexander of Alexandria to persuade him to readmit Arius to communion in the diocese. . . . Sozomen reports that Eusebius of Caesarea reacted by convening a council of bishops in Palestine to press again for intervention in favor of Arius” (Eusebius of Caesarea: Against Marcellus and On Ecclesiastical Theology, in The Fathers of the Church, vol. 135, p. 10-11).

Eusebius of Caesarea persecuted Athanasius and tried to have him removed from the church:

“Significantly, there is evidence that Constantine ordered a council of bishops to meet in Caesarea circa 334 to investigate the charges against Athanasius, at which Eusebius would have presided. The council carried out an investigation of his behavior and condemned Athanasius, but Constantine chose not to put the decision into effect” (Eusebius of Caesarea: Against Marcellus and On Ecclesiastical Theology, in The Fathers of the Church, vol. 135, p. 16).

Eusebius was later present at the Council of Tyre in 335 which exiled Athanasius for teaching that Jesus is fully God while reinstating Arius (Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea, 59). Eusebius only begrudgingly supported the addition of homoousios in the Creed and defined the term differently than the party of Athanasius. Eusebius agreed with the Arians that the Son does not exist eternally as a distinct person from the Father. The Arians believed that because Christ was begotten by the Father (based on their understanding of Proverbs 8:22-25), this made Christ a created being. But Athanasius held with Origen that this begetting is an eternal act and therefore there was never a time when he was not.

This means that Eusebius’ statement that Christ was “begotten from the Father before all ages” is not an affirmation of eternal generation (which Eusebius did not believe in), but of Logos Christology where begetting results in Christ’s existence as a person. Eternal generation does not teach that the Son was begotten before all ages, but that this begetting is an eternal act that occurs from everlasting to everlasting in timeless eternity in the being of God. Eusebius’ terminology was later reinterpreted as teaching eternal generation because of the influence of Athanasius. This is why Eusebius’ statement that Christ was “begotten from the Father before all ages” in his proposed creed was not included in the final form of the Nicene Creed in 325. But it was reinserted in the Constantinople revision in 381 which keeps Eusebius’ original language. By that time, Origen’s concept of eternal generation had become the dominant belief instead of the Logos Christology of the second-century Christian apologists because it was better able to answer the objections of Arianism. Logos Christology was the fountain from which Arianism and eternal generation sprang when Origen rejected Logos Christology for being irreconcilable with the immutability of God. Eusebius’ beliefs represent the old guard of Logos Christology with a subordinationist bent before eternal generation became the dominant position in Christianity.

After writing this article, I discovered that the theologian B. B. Warfield agrees with me that much of the language of the Nicene Creed has its origins in the Logos Christology of the second century:

“In the second century the dominant neo-Stoic and neo-Platonic ideas deflected Christian thought into subordinationist channels, and produced what is known as the Logos-Christology, which looks upon the Son as a prolation of Deity reduced to such dimensions as comported with relations with a world of time and space. . . . . In the early years of the fourth century, the Logos-Christology, in opposition to dominant Sabellian tendencies, ran to seed in what is known as Arianism, to which the Son was a creature, though exalted above all other creatures as their Creator and Lord. . . . The language in which it is couched, even in this final declaration, still retains elements of speech which owe their origin to the modes of thought characteristic of the Logos Christology of the second century, fixed in the nomenclature of the church by the Nicene Creed of 325 A.D., though carefully guarded there against the subordinationism inherent in the Logos-Christology, and made the vehicle rather of the Nicene doctrines of the eternal generation of the Son and procession of the Spirit, with the consequent subordination of the Son and Spirit to the Father in modes of subsistence as well as of operation” (The Biblical Doctrine of the Trinity).

The irony of Eusebius’ proposed creed is that most of the language in the Nicene Creed about Christ was originally written by a non-trinitarian subordinationist who supported Arius and only signed the Nicene Creed in its final form because of political pressure and the desire to be restored to fellowship with the church after being censured at the Council of Antioch in 325 for his support of Arius. The Arian Eusebius of Nicomedia by not signing the creed had more integrity than Eusebius of Caesarea. It is homoousios (which Eusebius defined differently than the orthodox), not the begetting language (which the Arians had no problem affirming) that distinguishes trinitarianism from Arianism.

I believe the Arians, the proponents of Logos Christology, and the proponents of eternal generation all misunderstood Proverbs 8:22-25 by confusing analogical language for univocal language as well as the begetting language of Scripture about the Son. The New Testament in Acts 13:33-34, Hebrews 1:4-5, and 5:5-6 interprets the Son’s being begotten in Psalm 2:6-7 as being fulfilled in the resurrection and exaltation of Christ, not in an act of begetting before the foundation of the world.