Nicea’s Cultural Offense
The emergence of creeds and confessions presents a grand narrative of intra-Church conversation (sometimes collegial, sometimes not so much). The councils wrangled over momentous points of doctrine, which turned on such words as Homoousios, Filioque, and Theotokos. Along the way, such heretics as Marcionites, Sabellians, and Apollinarians were pushed to the side. These are the matters that “trigger” theologians and drive them to purify the Church and its worship. Chalcedon settled the major Christological question of the incarnation; centuries later, the Belgic Confession (among others) limited the biblical canon to 39 books, excluding the Apocrypha; and Nicea dismissed the Arians.
Of course, all items in the Nicene creed, our conference focus, have social implications, countless points of impact entailed by sound Christianity alive and at work in the world. But some impinge more immediately upon the world’s conceits and agendas and so are more apt to “trigger” the outsiders, the secularists who’ve fashioned and championed the “received wisdom” of “civilization” in its current state.
This paper will look at the offenses and stumbling blocks the Nicene Creed sets before today’s cultural elites in the West. For instance, talk of Christ’s return “to judge the living and the dead” insults the antinomians, ethical relativists, and nihilists—those who maintain, with political clout, that personal preference sets the moral standard and that those who would say otherwise are anathema. Also, the declaration that Jesus is “the Only Begotten Son of God,” flies in the face pervasive religious pluralism (making us de facto Bahá’is), rendering criticism of false faiths deplorable (as “hate speech”) as well as actionable in courts of law. And, of course, the claim that God is “maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible” sets the confessor against the materialists and doctrinaire Darwinians who reign in our major universities and other institutions of public indoctrination, e.g., the Field Museum in Chicago, the Smithsonian Institute, and National Geographic.
So, the Nicene Creed is not only ecclesiastically hygienic; it is a social firebrand.