What Is a Creed? A Statement Written to Exclude Something
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
A creed reads like a summary of what a community believes, and it is more usefully read as a list of things somebody was arguing about. Nearly every clause in the historic Christian creeds was inserted to rule out a specific position held by identifiable people, which is why the documents dwell at length on questions that seem technical and pass over matters that are obviously central but were not in dispute.
What they are for
The functions are several and the defining one is boundary-setting:
- •Defining membership, so that a community can say what assent it requires, which is why creeds are recited at baptism and at initiation
- •Excluding specific errors, which is the historical driver, with each phrase answering a particular proposal
- •Teaching, since a short memorable text conveys a structure of belief to people who cannot read theology
- •Worship, as a communal recitation performed together in the first person, which is itself an act rather than a summary
- •Unity across distance, since a shared text is what makes scattered communities recognisably the same body
- •Testing clergy and teachers, which is the use that has generated the most institutional conflict
Reading the Nicene creed as an argument
The creed produced at the Council of Nicaea in 325 and expanded at Constantinople in 381 is unintelligible as a summary and perfectly clear as a rebuttal. The insistence that the Son is begotten not made, and of one substance with the Father, exists to exclude the position associated with Arius, a priest of Alexandria who taught that the Son was the highest of created beings and therefore not eternal. The phrase stating that there was no time when he was not addresses the same point. The declaration that he came down and was made man and suffered rules out the view that he only appeared to have a body. The section on the Holy Spirit was expanded in 381 because the status of the Spirit had become the live question by then. The clauses about the church, baptism and resurrection are brief because nobody was disputing them. The technical word for one substance was itself contested for decades because it is not biblical, and the councils that followed spent centuries refining exactly how divine and human natures relate in one person, producing further definitions and further schisms.
The clause that split the church
The most consequential single word in Christian history is an addition to this creed. The original text states that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. Western churches began adding that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, rendered in Latin as filioque, first in Spain in the sixth century as an anti-Arian measure and eventually accepted in Rome. The Eastern churches objected on two grounds: that the theology was wrong, since it appeared to subordinate the Spirit or to introduce two sources within the Godhead, and more fundamentally that no single part of the church had authority to amend a text agreed by an ecumenical council. The dispute accumulated alongside disagreements about papal authority and culminated in mutual excommunications in 1054, conventionally dated as the schism between the Catholic and Orthodox churches, which has never been healed. Modern ecumenical discussion has produced agreed statements acknowledging that the two formulations may be compatible and the word remains in Western recitation and absent from Eastern.
Elsewhere and against
Other traditions handle the function differently. Islam's shahada is a single sentence of testimony, and its brevity is theologically deliberate, since assent to it is what makes a person Muslim; the longer articles of faith are a teaching structure rather than a recited formula. Judaism has no creed in the Christian sense, and Maimonides' thirteen principles from the twelfth century are influential without being binding, in a tradition that prioritises practice and interpretation over required assent to propositions. Within Christianity several movements have explicitly rejected creeds, with Quakers, Anabaptists and various restorationist groups holding that fixed formulas substitute words for faith, produce division, and confer authority on the councils that wrote them; the phrase no creed but Christ expresses the position. The counterargument is that every community has boundaries and that refusing to state them does not remove them but makes them informal and unaccountable, which is a general observation about institutions rather than a theological one.
The takeaway
A creed defines membership, teaches, unites scattered communities and, above all, excludes specific positions, which is why its clauses cluster around whatever was being argued about. The Nicene creed's insistence that the Son is begotten not made and of one substance with the Father exists to answer Arius, and its brief treatment of baptism reflects that nobody disputed it. A single Western addition about the procession of the Spirit, made without an ecumenical council, contributed directly to the schism of 1054, and several Christian movements reject creeds entirely.