A Process-Relational Look
at the Nicene Creed
by Paul S. Nancarrow *
One of the things I have always found helpful about process theology is the way it has allowed me to look at traditional doctrines of the Church and interpret them in fresh and dynamic ways. Process thinking will always call old dogmatisms into question and demand new understandings. But it can also serve to clear away accretions of misplaced concreteness and rigidities of interpretation, and make possible contemporary engagements with ancient insights.
One such traditional text that I have been encouraged to read differently through a process lens is the Nicene Creed.
For many progressive Christians today, the inclusion of the Nicene Creed in liturgies and worship services can feel like a jarring intrusion. It is, after all, a conciliar document, a form drawn up by a committee, setting forth a list of faith-propositions that must be adhered to and accepted to be considered “properly” Christian. When it is plunked down in the middle of a series of more emotive and devotional texts and gestures – prayers, readings from Scripture, Psalm recitations, personal and communal intercessions – the Creed can seem out of place. It can feel as though it is interrupting the flow of prayer and community with a dogmatic litmus-test designed for exclusion and gate-keeping.
But looking at the Creed with processual eyes can see something else.
In process thought, a proposition is not a bare statement that must be true or false, agreed or not agreed. Instead, a proposition is a “lure for feeling,” an invitation to hold ideas or images together in a way you hadn’t put them together before – and by holding them together to be opened to new possibilities for experience and achievement in your actual life. When I was in graduate school, a professor illustrated this by saying “You with a PhD” was a proposition that held together two things in such a way as to motivate considerable action! In this sense, entertaining a proposition is not just a litmus-test but is an invitation into new possibilities.
The propositions of the Nicene Creed, therefore, can be seen not just as statements to which one must adhere, but more importantly as invitations to experience God and Christ and Spirit in dynamic and interrelating ways.
A second way in which a process reading of the Nicene Creed can be helpful is in recovering some of the original vitality of the Greek philosophy that was at work in its creation. One of the historic challenges of the Council of Nicea was that some of the bishops spoke and thought in Latin and some in Greek, and the different words and concepts they used didn’t always quite match up. The Western half of the Church did not always appreciate the nuance and flow of the Eastern half’s approach to God.
A case in point is the word “substance.” The Latin bishops used substantia for the divinity shared between the Persons of the Trinity, where the Greek bishops used ousia. The Latin word carries a connotation of firmness, of persisting self-identity, of what-ness. Over time, the word acquired extra connotations along these lines, such that Descartes would later say that a substance is “that which needs only itself to exist,” and popular speech today uses “substance” to mean “material” or “stuff” (as in the phrase “controlled substances”).
Therefore, in the basic Western understanding of the Creed today, to say that the First and Second Persons of the Trinity are “of one substance” seems to imply that they are “made of the same stuff.” It encourages, even if unintentionally, a kind of materialistic or mechanistic, rigid and reified understanding of the Persons.
The Greek word ousia, however, derives from a participle of the verb “to be.” It means “being,” the state of actuality; but it also means “be-ing,” the activity of actualizing. It emphasizes not what-ness so much as is-ness. The word connotes a kind of flow, a movement – not a static self-identity but a continuing self-expression. Process thought, with its assertion that actuality happens when “the many become one and are increased by one,” sees “be-ing” in a similar way, and helps to recover this more dynamic aspect of the Greek thought that underlies the formalisms of the Creed.
To say that the First and Second Persons of the Trinity are “of one being,” then, would imply not that they are made of the same stuff, but that they relate to each other in a shared activity of mutual influence and actualization. Mutual influence and actualization – more than “stuff” – feels more in keeping with the faith-statement that “God is Love.”
This is an example of what a process reading can do to recover some of the dynamism of the original thought behind the Creed. A process reading can also help us to respond to this thought as more than just an assertion, but as a lure for feeling, an invitation to experience.
What does it feel like to hold together thoughts and images of God and Jesus as “of one be-ing,” as “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God”? On the one hand it seems like a simple identity, the same words repeated in pairs – but those pairs are interrupted by the preposition “from,” indicating some kind of distinction, some differentiation, perhaps even some sort of movement. What does it suggest to be a light that comes from another light, and yet is also the same light? Remember, this is a lure for feeling, not a riddle to be solved: the point of the proposition is not to generate a definition, but to experience a relationship. If light comes from light yet is still the same light, then can that suggest a feeling of such light flowing from God to Jesus then also to me? How does this proposition about the be-ing of the Trinity help me realize something about my own be-ing with and in Them?
Reading the Creed as a series of lures for feeling lifts it up from being a conciliar document, a litmus-test for orthodoxy, and opens it as a spiritual exercise, a prayer, an invitation to divine encounter.
In this connection it is worth remembering that the Nicene Creed was a baptismal pledge before it was a conciliar document. When the Council was bogged down in debate, one of the bishops suggested they take a look at the formula people recited in his churches when they were being baptized. In baptism, “I believe” means much more than just “I accept as true.” It also means “I take into my heart.” It also means “I recognize myself as belonging to all of you who have also said these words.” It also means “I promise to live in the light of these beliefs.” The baptismal statement is as much a devotional act as it is a doctrinal assertion. When the Council took this baptismal statement and added to it specific language to refute the Arians and declare the full divinity of the Persons of the Trinity, they did nothing to remove the devotional aspect of the original baptismal creed. A process-relational reading of the full Nicene Creed today helps to reengage this devotional dimension.
In this brief essay I have looked at one word – homoousios – and one phrase – “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God” – and I have tried to show how a process-relational reading can both recover some of the original intent and also open a new sense of personal and devotional connection. There is a great deal more to the Creed, of course, than this one word and this one phrase. And this one essay only begins to scratch the surface.
But I hope it does suggest how the Nicene Creed can be read as a set of lures for feeling, invitations to imagine divine and human interrelationship that give rise to new possibilities for work and devotion, action and experience, in the life of faith. Such a reading, pursued as a study and reflection and prayer exercise for personal devotion or in a small group setting, could also help to revitalize the use of the Creed in worship.
While the Creed is recited as part of a liturgy, there isn’t much time for deeper reflection on the propositional feelings and imaginative openings of the text. But if the text has been studied and meditated beforehand, if the worshiper brings deeper understandings with them to the liturgy, then the experience of reciting the Creed in the liturgical assembly can be much richer and more worshipful. And it can open from the Creed more lures to be personally active in the co-creative work of God’s Love in the world.
* The Rev. Dr. Paul Nancarrow is an Episcopal priest retired from full-time parish ministry. His theological work has focused on process-relational interpretations of liturgy, particularly the co-acting of divine and human action in sacramental life and worship. He has taught theology for deacons’ ordination training programs in Michigan, Minnesota, and Virginia. Dr. Nancarrow is co-author, with Bruce Epperly and John B. Cobb Jr., of The Call of the Spirit: Process Spirituality in a Relational World (Faith in Process, 2022).