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CHRISTIAN HISTORY & BIOGRAPHY: Why should we care about the early councils today—or even recite a creed? Aren't the gospel accounts in the New Testament enough for today's church?

ROBERT LOUIS WILKEN: One begins with the simple and inescapable fact that the Scriptures need to be interpreted. The Bible is not a doctrinal treatise. It's not a catechism. It's not a set of well-defined teachings. It's basically a narrative, a story about what God has done in the coming of Christ. So from the beginning, how to understand the various parts of the Scripture in relation one to another was an enormous challenge for Christians.

Take, side by side, two portions of Scripture: First, the great passage in Colossians 1 about Christ being the image of the invisible God in whom all things consist. Second, the narrative in Mark of Christ as a preacher, prophet, and healer. In one passage, all things come into being through Christ. In the other, you've got someone who looks very much like a preacher in the style of John the Baptist. The conviction of the early church was that the Bible was one book. It had one story. So one had to try to find a way to bring what was read in Paul into relation to what was read in Mark. And this was not a simple matter of quoting biblical verses; there were honest differences of opinion as to how they were to be understood.

The basic problem was that Christians began, as Jews, with the belief that God is one. On the basis of his teachings and miracles, the kind of person Jesus was, and because he rose from the dead, Christians said, "This man is not like any other man"—he is in some sense divine, or God. But how do you say that God is one when you've got two identifiable realities God the Father and God the Son—and claim they're God? That's the problem. And it's not an easy problem to solve.

Before the Council of Nicaea, there were plenty of local baptismal "creeds" that agreed in essentials while varying in details. Why coerce the whole church into accepting a single, rigidly defined creed promulgated by a single council? Was this really necessary?

Christians are reflective people. They think about what they believe. In my recent book The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, I quote a passage from Augustine. He says, "No one believes anything unless one first thought it believable.… Not everyone who thinks believes, since many think in order not to believe; but everyone who believes thinks, thinks in believing and believes in thinking."

The church very early on attracted well-educated people, and they began to think about what they confessed, what they believed, and to say, "Well, what does this mean?" or "How can this be, in light of what is said elsewhere in Scripture?" And eventually the problem emerged that I just outlined, namely, "How can we believe in one God and claim that Jesus, a human being, is also God?" That led to the controversy.

The Nicene Creed is different from the Apostle's Creed. The Nicene Creed is a creed that tries to define, to use more precise language for the church's faith, to set boundaries. It even introduces a word that is not in the Bible, homoousios, of one substance or being, because the bishops felt that it helped explain how God could be one yet twofold (the debate about the Holy Spirit will follow two generations later). With that term the council fathers wished to say that in whatever way God is God, Christ also is God. The term "begotten" (which is biblical) means that he comes into being eternally from the Father—he is not made like human beings.

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