Nicaea - Renewing the FaithSample

For us men and for our salvation, He came down from heaven; by the power of the Holy Spirit, He became incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and was made man.

A striking feature of the article is that God gave to us before we were ever able to give to Him. The Creed is God’s story for our benefit. “For us human beings and for our salvation” continues from the same grammatical subject, “…one Lord Jesus Christ,” at the beginning of the article and provides the purpose clause for each of the subsequent parts of the article. The focus is clearly on Jesus, the Son of God, coming down from the place of authority at the right end of the Father. This is an implicit denial of the Sabellian heresy of the 3rd century that refused to accept the existence of separate Persons (hypostases) in the Godhead.

It was love for humanity (John 3:16) that brought Him to us to live among us so that we could see the glory of the one and only Son (John 1:14). Light and life are the essence of His glory, replacing the ever-encroaching darkness and death in a fallen world. As the agent in creation (John 1:3; Col. 1:16), He descended in order to raise us up. This is the revelation of the mystery of Jesus Christ that St. Paul declared had been “hidden for ages in God who created all things (Eph. 1:9; Col.1:26). Grace toward human beings, entirely through faith, now produces salvation (Eph. 2:8) so that those were dead in trespasses and sins are made to sit in heavenly places (Eph. 3:5-6).

This initial mention of the Holy Spirit in the Creed is tied directly to the Incarnation. The conception of Jesus in the womb of the Virgin Mary was by the power of the Spirit who came upon her and overshadowed her womb (Luke 1:35) just as the same Spirit hovered over the face of the waters at creation (Gen. 1:2). “Incarnation” indicates directly that Jesus is both God and man in direct denial of the Arian controversy that was largely responsible for the gathering of the Council at Nicaea in AD 325. The earlier part of the section declaring Him to be “the only Son of God,… begotten, not made; of the same essence as the Father” is followed by the affirmation that He came down from heaven in the Incarnation. He is not a creation but is eternally self-existent with the Father.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) states that God became incarnate for the following four reasons 457–460): 1. to save us by reconciling us with God, 2. to share divine love with us, 3. to show us how to be holy, and 4. to enable us to share in God’s divine nature. Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria who played a key role in the Council, later wrote in his famous work, On the Incarnation of the Word, “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God,” meaning to participate in God’s divine life. Therein lies salvation in its broadest sense.

That He became incarnate from the Virgin Mary highlights the human participation planned by the Triune God. Mary magnifies the name of the Lord because she, as a humble servant, has been chosen to become “God-bearer” (Theotokos). “She bears God in that she bears and gives birth to Jesus, who is true God from true God.”

In the Incarnation, the Son of God became “fleshified” but also “in-humanized.” This somewhat rough translation suggests that He did not become something different or was made something different. The Greek church father Gregory Nazianzen wrote, “He remained what he was and took up what he was not.” He made our human nature His own so as to heal every part of that nature with its sin and suffering. To affirm based on the NT that God became incarnate in human flesh protects against any notion that God created the Son and guards against the Apollinarian heresy that the Son had two natures—a human body and soul but a divine mind. Rather, He became the God-man.

In sum, this section of the Creed enshrines for most of the global Church’s theology of the NT that it was for humanity as a whole (John 3:16) and for their salvation that the “one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God,… came down from heaven.” His mode of descent was not through normal conception but incarnation in the womb of the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit. He became humanity with all its vulnerabilities but was not created a human being. “…Being in very nature God,… he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man,…” (Phil. 2:6-8 NIV)

The church inevitably flounders when there are no reference points. St. Paul was concerned that the Ephesian believers were not “blown here and there by every wind of teaching” (Eph. 4:14 NIV). As people within the renewal tradition, we must guard against a lack of structure in worship that does not take into consideration the bedrock theology of our faith that was hammered out so long ago. While liturgical worship can sometimes risk becoming formal and impersonal, sidestepping, in particular, remembrance of the vital truth of this statement results in dangerous theological shallowness. Salvation through the incarnation by the Spirit’s power, of Christ, the Son in human flesh is foundational to worship, discipleship, and evangelism.

Revisiting this statement regularly in teaching and preaching and not just during the season of Advent is a way of ensuring that we continue to “contend earnestly for the faith, which was once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3 NKJV). While the Creed may or may not be recited regularly, neither should it be abandoned and viewed as a mere relic of history. It is unimaginable that its formulators, leaders with the Church's interest at heart, would have worked so diligently or envisioned a document without any practical use. This is a portion of the essence of our living faith that we pray we can effectively and faithfully pass on to our children and grandchildren.

Prayer

Dear heavenly Father, thank you for the salvation provided for us while we were still sinners. Thank you that you came down among us miraculously through the incarnation of Christ, your only Son. May we keep this truth always before us, and please forgive us when we have veered from its centrality. Please grant us wisdom as we teach this life-changing and life-giving truth to our families and those you have called us to lead. In the name of Christ, we pray! Amen!

Ewen Butler, Ph.D., serves as Assistant Professor of Church History at the Regent University School of Divinity.