The ‘Macedonians’ or ‘Pneumatomachians’,  thought to have been founded by Bishop Macedonias I of Constantinople accepted the divinity of Christ but thought the Spirit to be the creation of the Father and the Son, denying the Spirit any divinity.  Their view was that  the Spirit was instead a servant of the Father and the Son.    The Council of Nicaea wanted to affirm the Spirit’s place in the Trinity, and also to affirm that the Spirit was at work before Christ, indeed from the foundation of the world.    To do this they reminded people of the words spoken by the prophets.

The English word prophets comes from the Greek ‘to say beforehand’.  The Old Testament is packed with people who speak God’s word to call people to repentance and to turn to the Lord.  But where do we find the Spirit?

Jesus reads from Isaiah in the Synagogue ins Luke 4.18

“‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me

to bring good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

and recovery of sight to the blind,

to let the oppressed go free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’

Peter in his speech on the day of Penteccost in the Acts of the Apostles reminds his hearers of the Prophet Joel  in Acts 2:16-18;

“No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:

“In the last days it will be, God declares,

that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,

and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,

and your young men shall see visions,

and your old men shall dream dreams.

Even upon my slaves, both men and women,

in those days I will pour out my Spirit;

and they shall prophesy.”

The eternal role of the Trinity as three persons is affirmed and the life breathed into us through the Spirit is that which was given to the prophets, the apostles and people across the world and down the centuries.

‘God is Spirit’ (John 4.24), but it may not be clear what is meant by that.  The single Hebrew word ‘Ruach’ is translated in English by at least three different words: wind, breath and spirit, although none of them accurately translate its depth of meaning, although they may give us an inkling about the Christian meaning of the Holy Spirit.

Augustine was key in the development of the theology of the Holy Spirit, developing the idea of the Holy Spirit as the bond between the Father and the Son.  Augustine insists on the distinctiveness of the Spirit, but describes it as the commonality between the Father and the Son.

He writes: ‘For this reason, the Spirit is able to teach us that love which is common both to the Father and to the Son and through which they love each other’.

‘And there appeared tongues as of fire, distributed on each of them and resting upon them.  And they were all filled with the Holy spirit, and began to speak with other tongues as the Holy Spirit gave them utterance.’

O how rapid is the discourse of wisdom, and where God is the teacher, how soon is the lesson taught! It was not necessary for the apostles to receive some sort of interpretation in order that they might hear better; they were not given time to familiarise themselves with a vocabulary in order to be more eloquent; they had no time for study; but the Spirit of truth ‘blowing where he willed’ the various languages of various nations were made common speech in the mouth of the Church.

It was on this day of Pentecost that the trumpet of the preaching of the gospel sounded forth.  It was on this day that showers of spiritual gifts fell from heaven, streams of blessings which watered every desert place and all dry ground, for ‘the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters’ in order to ‘renew the face of the earth’.  New flashes of light were beaming forth to drive out the old darkness, seeing that by the splendour of the radiant tongues was being received the lustrous Word of the Lord, a fiery utterance in which is present an energy which illuminates, a burning force which stimulates intelligence and consumes sin.

From a sermon of Leo the Great

Christ’s Second Coming at the end of the world is sometimes called the Parousia, and the New Testament writers identify it as the final triumph of Jesus in the establishment of His kingdom.  Jesus is expected to return, bringing history to its close, and ushering in the ‘last day’ and bringing the world to judgment.

Some New Testament writings appeared to expect this return of Christ to take place in their lifetime (for instance 1 and 2 Thessalonians), but others treat it as something future, with present implications.

On that last day, all human beings from the dawn of history until the end of time will be judged by Christ. He will not just be passing negative judgment on sinners, but here will be shown the universal manifestation of God’s mercy and of humanity’s cooperation with divine grace. Thus Christ will glorify the virtues of the saints no less than testify to the sinful conduct of the wicked. In both cases, however, the last judgement will glorify God, His infinite justice no less than His infinite mercy.

The advent of the Kingdom of God will be transformative and renewing, breaking into human history in order to redeem it from its present inadequacies.

By saying that Jesus is seated at the right hand of the Father, we acknowledge the beginning of the Messiah’s kingdom, the fulfilment of the vision of the prophet Daniel about the Son of man: “To him was given dominion and glory and kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.” (Daniel 7.14)

The Ascension of Jesus is recorded in Luke’s and Mark’s gospels, with a more detailed account in the Acts of the Apostles.  It is the moment of departure when Jesus’ risen, glorious body is transferred into heaven.  The apostles are witnesses of the “kingdom that will have no end”, but they are also confronted with their responsibility to continue the task started by Jesus, and the promise of his return.

The Ascension implies that Jesus’ humanity has been taken into heaven. Jesus glorifies our fallen and sinful humanity when He returns to the Father. Through Christ, humanity becomes a “partaker of the divine nature”.

This wording is borrowed from the First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians (1 Cor 15.4), and at this point the Creed moves from the earthly life of Jesus to His glorified state.

Jesus dies on Friday afternoon and is laid in the tomb before dark. According to Jewish time, a day was calculated from nightfall to nightfall. Since Jesus was buried on Friday afternoon and rose from the dead on Sunday, He was in the tomb some part of three days.

The mystery of Jesus’ resurrection is the core of our Christian faith.  The Scriptures describe the astonishment of the disciples as they find the empty tomb, and how the Risen Christ visits His disciples on a number of occasions.  He speaks with them, eats with them, and shows them his wounds.  In short, he is fully human again.

The wonder of this event changed everything. It becomes the centre of the Apostles preaching. Because of Jesus’ resurrection, death is not what it seems to be. It is not the end, but the beginning of a new life for those who follow in His footsteps. In St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, he reminds us that, “If we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him.” (Rm. 6:8)

From a Platonic perspective this affirmation is breathtaking in its incoherence. The concept of the Son of God suffering death was in such terms unimaginable. The Nicene Creed affirms it as the irreducible content of Christian belief. It gives a reason for the sequence of events- ‘for our sake’ Jesus was crucified- and it gives a secular historical locator for them- ‘under Pontius Pilate’.

It affirms that Jesus actually died and was actually buried- a tradition had from the earliest times grown up suggesting that Jesus survived the crucifixion without in fact dying. The Creed affirms that it is part of the Christian faith that the Son of God died and was buried and that everything was done ‘for our sake’.

The Christian teaching of the Incarnation of the Son is here affirmed. Again, in Platonic terms this was a deeply difficult concept because it involved the divinity in the profoundly transcient realm of the material. Could God really assume human flesh with the change and decay, and fundamentally, the limitation that this implied? Enough thinking Christians in the early period had become uncomfortable with what could easily be seen as a diminishing of the divine in the flesh and as logically incoherent. Members of an early movement called the ‘Docetists’ for example argued that Jesus only appeared to be human. The Nicene Creed takes a stand against such opinion and identifies as heretical the docetic when it affirms the radical solidarity of the God the Son with humankind. It also and importantly identifies the purpose of Incarnation as salvific. The characters of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary are here introduced for the first time.

This part of the Creed announces belief in Jesus Christ, the ‘Lord’ (kurios) and the ‘Son’ (huios). Here the concern is to include Jesus within the essential definition of God. This requires a nuanced and complex response to a problem inherent in the metaphor of filiality, or sonship. Sonship is a relational metaphor, it implies derivation from another and -in Platonic terms- derivation most naturally entails the inferiority of the thing derived.

The writers of the Nicene Creed were then completely concerned to assert the oneness of the Father and the Son, not the Son’s inferiority through derivation. Thus the concepts of ‘monogenesis’ (affirming the Son’s uniqueness) and of ‘eternal begetting’ (there was no moment -in time or out of time- when the Father preceded the Son or sustained being apart from the Son) and that cascading sequence of identity assertions- ‘God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God’. The Son was not ‘made’ –a quality of inferiority in Platonic terms- but ‘begotten’, and begotten ‘eternally’ and involved intimately in the work of the Father’s making because all things were made ‘through him’.

The Nicene Creed then affirmed that the Father and the Son shared the same ‘substance’. Crucially, it is here that the Creed deploys a very precise language that is also a non-Biblical language. Terms like ‘Lord’ and ‘Son’ and ‘Father’ are Biblical terms, but here the word ‘of the same substance’/homo-ousios is non-Biblical- and its deployment was judged necessary to give explicit and precise definition to the concept intended.

The word homo-ousios was very much current in the background context of the Council of Nicaea- and it played its full part in the Arian Controversy which gave rise to the writing of the Creed in the first place.

The opening of the creed affirms the unity and sovereignty of God.  The context of its development is important. Early Christians faced the charge that they were not true monotheists, that is that they believed in the existence of more than one God. The Christian commitment to language of a ‘Father’, a ‘Son’ and a ‘Holy Spirit’ understandably gave rise to some confusion. Given the Jewish background of the faith, this was a very serious charge and the Nicene Creed is constructed in part to refute it. The text affirms that God is ‘one’. But the Jewish background is only half the truth for the Creed’s concept of divine ‘oneness’ is consonant not only with the Jewish theological tradition but also with the Platonic philosophical tradition. A Platonist milieu thoroughly characterised the intellectual context of the Creed’s formation. For the Platonists, the perfection of God was to be found in ‘unity’ and ‘simplicity’. In Plato’s understanding of the One and the Many, authenticity was to be found at the level of the One.

Importantly, however, the Creed affirms the involvement of God in the creating of heaven and earth. Platonists resisted such a mode of attribution because they felt that the involvement of God in the material world compromised the simplicity basic to his definition. For example, the dialogue Timaeus allocates the work of the creation to a ‘Demiurge’, a lesser fabricator deity, not the one God. The Nicene Creed parts company with the Platonic context, then, when it affirms that the One God is the Creator, and the Maker not only of this earth, but of ‘all things seen and unseen’. God is the unitary author of all that is.