Those Cryptic Creeds: A History

The 451 Council of Chalcedon defined orthodox Christianity by denying a series of heresies. Non-Chalcedon Christianity persisted, but Chalcedon is enshrined in creeds recited by Greek, Roman, and Protestant congregations today. These creeds hedged against a variety of interpretations of Christ and the Trinity in the early church. Beginning with vague first-century catechisms, the creeds evolved into long, explicit definitions in terms of Greek philosophy. These terms and the doctrinal disputes they address are so obscure that worshippers may innocently hold heretical views while reciting the words.

The earliest surviving guide to Christian converts is the Didache, written about the same time as the later gospels. Like them, it doesn't fuss over theology. The emphasis isn't on belief, but on morality, which is detailed in the first six sections with references to Matthew's Sermon on the Mount, but no explicit mention of Jesus. In the seventh section, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are named as part of the rite of baptism, and "Jesus thy child" is referenced later in eucharistic prayers, which say that "life and knowledge" are made "known through Jesus thy child." The eucharist is addressed to the Father to the exclusion of the son. Instructions for exposing false teachers never mention false beliefs, focusing on misbehaviors--greed, hypocrisy, and immorality. Theological definitions of heresy appear nowhere in the document. Instead, paragraphs detail sins to avoid ("cursing, murders, adulteries, lusts, fornications, thefts, idolatries, witchcrafts, charms") and character traits to cultivate, such as receiving "accidents that befall" as the will of God.

Doctrines of the Trinity and Christ's nature are left implicit--as they are in the synoptic gospels before the pre-theology of John and Paul. The Didache seems to imply vague common-sense understanding like the one I had as a teenager from years of listening to Baptist sermons. "God" usually meant the Father, Jesus was his son sent into the world to save us, and the Holy Spirit was something sent after Jesus left the earth. Praying to all three wasn't polytheism--they were all one God--but nobody tried to explain the bad arithmetic. Completely absent from the Didache, however, is a keystone of my Baptist education, that Christ died for our sins. The catechism describes Jesus as a channel through which the Father lives with no mention his death. Because it is silent about the nature of the Trinity or the economy of its persons, the Didache is vague enough to permit all heresies. Its concern is moral conversion, not orthodox belief.

True belief emerges as a concern in the Second Century. For most of the time before Constantine's First Council of Nicaea in 325, Christianity was outlawed, so documentation is spotty. Earlier writings survive typically as quotations in later documents with only implicit evidence for their dates. The earliest surviving creed seems to be the Old Roman Symbol, an older draft of the Apostles' Creed:

I believe in God the Father almighty;

and in Christ Jesus His only Son, our Lord,

Who was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary,

Who under Pontius Pilate was crucified and buried,

on the third day rose again from the dead,

ascended into heaven,

sits at the right hand of the Father,

whence He will come to judge the living and the dead;

and in the Holy Spirit,

the holy Church

the remission of sins,

the resurrection of the flesh.

At first glance, this might seem to be sufficient, but it leaves unspecified many distinctions that fueled later excommunications. Gnostic Christians believed, for instance, that God the Father was distinct from Yahweh, the fallen angel who created the sinful earth. This heresy was soon blocked by creator of heaven and earth in the Apostles' Creed, a revision that is still used today. And the modest addition of the word suffered in The Apostles' Creed plugs another gap in the Symbol, blocking the heresy that Jesus died without really suffering. Called Docetism, this is also associated with the Gnostics , who reasoned that, as God, Jesus couldn't have suffered bodily, so he must have been immaterial, a ghost. Also the Apostles Creed emphasized the universal church as opposed to disconnected congregations by adding the communion of saints and the holy catholic church, instead of just the holy church.

But the Apostles' Creed remains vague about the nature of the Trinity, if any, and relations between its members. Jesus is called "only son" and "Lord," and the Holy Spirit is said to have "power.' After 313, when Christianity was embedded in the Roman government, doctrinal conflicts became political. By the time the Emperor Constantine called the Council of Nicaea in 325, there were many flavors of Christology. Adoptionism, which Bart Ehrman and others see as the original "low" Christology out of which Trinitarianism evolved, says that Jesus was fully human until he was adopted as God's son, perhaps at his baptism or his resurrection, much as David is God's "firstborn" son in Psalm 89:27. According to adoptionism, Jesus is Lord, at God's right hand, but by election, not by nature. This has the advantage of avoiding polytheism. Christ is merely the head angel. God created him and the Holy Spirit as mediators, much as, in the rigorous monotheism of Islam, the angel Gabriel mediates between Muhammed and God.

A number of heresies accept the Trinity, but deviate from orthodoxy over how human and divine natures can coexist in one being. I've already mentioned Docetism, which dismisses any human nature as an illusion. Nestorianism held that the two persons of Jesus were shared a common will but remained two persons. The Monophysite heresy held that Christ's divinity consumed his humanity, producing a single divine person. Apollinarism held that Jesus had a human body/soul but a divine mind. Monarchism stressed the absolute unity of God to the detriment of the Son and Spirit. Sabellianism, akin to Monarchism,  held that the three persons of  the Trinity were not really separate, but were functions a unitary God, much as I myself can be a father, husband, and writer, so the Trinity thus is about our relations to God, not how God is. Opposing this, Tritheism (possibly more a hostile label than a viable sect) emphasized three separate persons. If some of these heresies seem to make distinctions without differences--at least, differences that humans can discern reliably--the hair-splitting intensifies when we come to the main heresy that the Council of Nicaea addressed, Arianism.

Arianism is the non-Trinitarian view that Christ was created by the Father. This is not to be confused with Adoptionism, but agrees with orthodoxy that Christ is the divine logos that created the world (John 1:1-4) and was incarnate in the virgin birth for our salvation, possessing both natural and a supernatural being. However--like the early church fathers Irenaeus, Origen, and Ignatius of Antioch--Arianism subordinates the Son to the Father, a position that does seem consistent with the Gospel narratives, especially Mark 14:36, Matthew 26:39, Luke 22:42, and John 6:38, where he explicitly bows to the will of the Father. According to Arianism, at some time before the creation of the world, there existed only the Father, who begat the Son and created the Holy Spirit--a distinction that may be unknowable and none of our damn business because it was all before the world began but was felt to be of great moment in the Fourth Century.

         The logic behind Arianism seems ironclad: "If the Father begat the Son, there was when the Son was not." The term begotten seems an unfortunate metaphor because it normally means ejaculating into a mother-to-be, but, on the positive side, a son is consubstantial with his father, made of the same stuff, and the authority of the scriptures stuck theologians with the term. Spiritual ejaculation may work for Mary's virgin motherhood, but the creation of the cosmic Christ, the preexisting Logos, allows no such mechanism. The begetting metaphor self-destructs, in any case, if the Father is not somehow prior to his Son; that's what father means. 

             The ultimate form of the Nicene Creed gets around this with brute force, smashing logic and arithmetic like the Incredible Hulk. The Son is said to "eternally begotten" or "born of the Father before all ages," depending on the translation. Thus, the Son's birth is not after the Father's, not derivative but simultaneous and continuous because his coming-into-being is outside of time--in eternity where there is no before, after, or during, but only, in the words of Boetheus, "the complete, simultaneous and perfect possession of everlasting life, . . . everlasting life in one simultaneous present" (Consolation of Philosophy, 5.6). (See https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2020/06/three-kinds-of-eternity.html).

Ultimately, even the expanded wording of the Nicene Creed fully affirmed at Chalcedon failed to block off all the heresies, and there is yet one more document, an incredibly thorough one called the Athanasian Creed, so long that it is recited only on special occasions. The Eastern branch of Christianity lost patience with logical hair-splitting and left the Trinity as a mystery of the faith, something like a Zen koan, while Western theologians kept kept trying to define the undefinable, ending up with a nonsense as explanation (forgive my pro-Eastern bias). The Athanasian Creed is a three-page document of which this sample gives the flavor: "The Father eternal; the Son eternal; and the Holy Ghost eternal. And yet they are not three eternals; but one eternal. As also there are not three uncreated; nor three infinites, but one uncreated; and one infinite." The document affirms redundantly the mystery of orthodox Trinitarianism: The Father is God. The Father is not the Son. The Son is God. The Son is not the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God. The Holy Spirit is not the Father. God is one. Whoever would be saved, this creed says, must keep the whole Catholic faith, which includes this three-page riddle.

       I understand the historical position of the document in a struggle not to worship a human being or three different gods despite New Testament evidence in those directions, but I wonder if it is possible to understand the resulting word-salad, and does believe even mean anything absent understanding? Is it possible to believe self-contradictions like square circles or 1+1+1=1.

Few practicing Christians today are familiar with the old heresies, even ones they inadvertently believe or shrug off as distinctions without differences. How does it affect our personal worship if Jesus was two-souled, one-souled, or whatever nuanced combination, so long as he did what he did? It seems sufficient to experience a relationship with a supreme being somehow mediated by the First Century mendicant we call Jesus. Beyond the Bible story they signify, a narrative of salvation, the creeds seem to be little more than baroque passages of word-music.