Thinking About the Nicene Creed

This is a paper I wrote when I was just beginning my theological studies, titled “A Few Thoughts for Mormons on Approaching the Nicene Creed.” It was for a class on the Mystery of God. I thought it would be a fun follow-up to my most recent post. I’d probably come up at the subject a bit differently now, but it’s interesting to see how I was thinking about it when I was first grappling with the notion of the Trinity.

I do not know how many Mormons are familiar with the Nicene Creed, but those who are, I suspect, are likely to be more than a little wary of it. From an LDS point of view, it is perhaps easy to dismiss it as coming from an apostate Christianity, as reflecting too much theological formulating instead of plain and simple gospel truths. It is clearly outside the bounds of our tradition, reflecting a theology alien to us, and I am certainly not out to dispute that fact. Yet I wonder if we can nonetheless learn to better understand what it means to those who do accept it as basic doctrine, if we can engage the challenge of not merely viewing it as something faintly ridiculous but of attempting to appreciate the meaning it has for traditional Christianity.

I think that part of the problem in discussing this topic with Mormons is that we have a bit of a suspicion of anything that sounds too theologically complicated as merely being a ruse to disguise the fact that the person does not in fact have a clue what she is talking about. We follow the time-honored tradition of claiming the pure and simple original truths of Christianity, easy to understand, before they were corrupted by the philosophers who made a such a dreadful mish-mash of things. We like things that make sense. Needless to say, we are not fond of the traditional Christian conception of the Trinity. In discussing the Creed, then, I think a basic challenge is to deal with what I might call the gobbledygook problem. For a Mormon, all of this is in danger of being so much gobbledygook. Make up your minds. God is either three characters, or God is one, but God can’t be both, and don’t use any crazy theological formulations to get out of this.

Yet at the risk of only adding to the chaos, I would like to throw out a few thoughts. I think much of the problem stems from the fact that we, that is to say, LDS Christians and traditional Christians, tend to use the same language without always realizing that we actually don’t mean the same things with the same words. The result is that we often talk past each other without knowing it. Looking at the Creed, there is much language that at least sounds familiar to a Mormon. At the most basic level, we have a Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That’s all well and good; doesn’t sound too different from the First Article of Faith, does it?¹ Some of the other language is a bit strange, of course, and begins to suggest some theological differences. But I think the key to understanding, or at least attempting to understand, what’s going on here actually comes in the first line, one which on the surface sounds fairly straightforward and hardly a matter for dispute: “We believe in one God.”

The question is, what are we talking about when we say God? As Latter-day Saints, we believe in God as a being, a being who is in some sense ultimately like us. The human and the divine are not in the end a different kind of thing. This means that we have the ability to understand God; Joseph Smith in fact tells us that we cannot understand ourselves unless we understand God.² And it is thus no surprise that we talk about God in human categories. When we say that we are related to God and use human terms of relationship, we are not speaking metaphorically. God is our Father, and we are his children, and we mean that very literally. When we discuss members of the Godhead, we are talking about beings, divine beings who are infinitely more advanced than we are, but ones who are nonetheless in some fundamental way the same kind of beings that we are.

And I suspect this is why it is so difficult for us to grasp what traditional Christians are talking about with the Trinity. I’ve encountered a lot of debates between Mormons and other Christians over this question of whether the Trinity is composed of separate beings, with each side whipping out their favorite proof texts. What does it mean when Jesus says, “My Father and I are one,”³ brings out one side. Well, who was Jesus praying to in the Garden of Gethsemane, counters the other. And I wonder whether both sides are missing the point because they fail to appreciate the other’s basic conception of God. From a Mormon point of view, because we are thinking in terms of God as a being like us, Trinitarian notions necessarily become absurd. To put it as bluntly as I can, we as humans do not have three persons in one essence, and since we understand God as in some basic sense like us, we cannot conceive of God like that, either.

This is the problem, or at least one of them; here lies the gulf we must cross to honestly engage the Nicene Creed and not simply caricature it as silly theology for people who like to think in contradictions. But now things become more difficult, because I do not know if I can cross this gulf, either— I am after all a Mormon, and I think like a Mormon. But I will try. Let us attempt to make a genuine effort to suspend our notions about God for a bit, and imagine other ways of thinking. What if God is radically different from us? What if God is not even a being? What if we think about God as the Creator and ourselves as the created, if we suggest a basic difference, if we remove God from the realm of human understanding? What if we do not see God as anything that we are going to clearly grasp? What if we were to think about mystery, as one Catholic theologian puts it, not as something that we have not discovered yet but as something that we will never truly master, in fact, as something that in the end masters us?⁴ I know I am probably skirting close to the gobbledygook problem here, and yet this is the challenge for us, to not hear these ideas and think that it is merely so much nonsense, but to consider the notion of a God who is utterly beyond us, and the fact that we cannot explain God as simply part of the situation when God is God and infinite and we are humans and finite.

But having placed ourselves in such a world, consider that even though God is ultimately beyond our comprehension, we want to talk about God, we need to talk about God. Obviously we are limited and what we say will always be inadequate, and yet we still are going to attempt to say something. So we use the language we have, even though it is human language, and in some ways not always appropriate to the task. We use words to describe God because they offer us a glimpse of the divine, even though they may not mean exactly what they do when we are using them about other humans. This is probably an important point for us to remember, we who in our tradition use human terms about God without really thinking too much about what we are doing, that when we see terms in places such as the Nicene Creed that also have meanings in the human realm that we shouldn’t be too quick to jump to conclusions about exactly what those words mean when applied to God.

When we look at the Creed, it might be tempting to fall into the trap of counting, to start turning our minds over this knotty problem of three and one that just doesn’t seem to jive. Which is why we would maybe to do better to not read it as an equation, but to read it more like a narrative or even as poetry. That might seem a bit odd, but I know it helps my own Mormon brain get away from the desire to neatly parse God and to get rather irritated when things don’t seem to fit into a clearly comprehensible structure. If I read it as poetry, I can consider that things aren’t so logically neat, that not everything is literal, that words are alluding to broader realities. So perhaps this is at least a beginning in approaching the Creed, to look at the story it tells about God. It is a story about how God relates to us, how these characters named Father, Son, and Spirit are all involved in our lives, and which in the process hints at who these characters might be and how they relate to each other. It is a story that is important for us to know, and yet one that we can never truly grasp, no matter how often or in how many ways we tell it. For it is a story about a reality which is, in the end, not our own, although it intersects our own.

All of this is really only a starting point, but I hope it is helpful in thinking about a traditional reading of the Nicene Creed. One last question I would like to pose is whether we as Mormons have anything to learn from the Creed, and more broadly from a traditional understanding of the Trinity (aside from the obvious value of attempting to better understand the beliefs of other Christians— and I do not mean to lightly gloss over the value of that particular endeavor). As a Latter-day Saint, I cannot accept the traditional doctrine of the Trinity. And yet I can also appreciate the value of grappling with the questions it raises, with a God beyond human comprehension. We may ultimately have placed God in the sphere of the human, but perhaps we have something to learn from such challenges; they are a compelling reminder that even for us God is not as neatly packaged and intelligible as we perhaps at times make him out to be. For we too struggle with coming to grips with the divine. As the prophet Isaiah reminds us, “my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.”⁵ And we, along with other Christians, can continue to marvel at the astounding fact that God, however we understand him, is not simply a remote or indifferent presence, but is intimately involved with the salvation of humanity.

1. “We believe in God, the Eternal Father, in His Son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost.” Article of Faith 1. [↩]
2. “If men do not comprehend the character of God, they do not comprehend themselves.” Joseph Smith, “The King Follet Discourse” (Joseph Lyon and Associates, 1963), 2. [↩]
3. John 10:30 [↩]
4. Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith (New York: Crossroad, 1978), 217 [↩]
5. Isaiah 55:8 [↩]