It would be very easy for us to consider the First Ecumenical Council, that of Nicaea in 325 ad, and its legacy as merely a historic event, something that the scholars among us have debated and will debate for many years to come. With all the conferences this year marking the 1700th anniversary of the council, one would think that we’ve exhausted the topic. As such, this could make Nicaea just a bit of Christian archaeology. But I’d like us to consider Nicaea as a living reality. It is, I submit to you, part of our DNA, one of the building blocks of Christianity, with influences far greater than a history lesson or even this anniversary can imagine.
In the Orthodox Church calendar, we remember annually the first council on the Sixth Sunday of Easter, observed this year on June 1. We remembered the 1699th anniversary last year, and we will remember the 1701st next year. We remember the 318 attendees of the council. I won’t name them all, but let me identify three. They are all saints.
First, Nicholas of Myra – better known to you as Santa Claus, who famously slapped Arius and wound up in jail because he did this in front of the emperor. Tradition holds that Constantine had a dream in which he imprisoned the wrong person, and he released Nicholas a day or so later.
Second, Spyridon, whose body can be seen on the island of Corfu in Greece. He famously answered the question of how the Trinity can be one God by squeezing a brick, releasing fire, water, and earth, and saying, “See, three yet one.”
Then, there is the Great Athanasius, who gave us the term homoousios, the one term in the Creed that is not found in scripture.
At every Divine Liturgy in the Orthodox Church, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed is recited by the congregation. It is the introduction to the Eucharistic offering, and originally, only those who were baptized and chrismated members of the community were allowed to be present for this recitation. One had to know and proclaim the faith of the Church to be received into the Eucharist. While this is not the case today — we don’t ask people to leave if they are not members of the Orthodox Church — the connection between knowing and affirming the faith of the Church and participation in the Eucharist was and is clear.
Many years ago, as a graduate student, I traveled to the Soviet Union. On the trip, our group attended a Sunday liturgy. The Russian Orthodox Church, while not openly persecuted by the Soviet regime, was restricted in many aspects of its life. Participation in the Church was frowned upon, certainly by anyone needing endorsement from the Communist Party. There was no religious education in parishes or in schools. Church life was limited to liturgical life. People did attend services, but the attendees were mainly older people.
At the time for the singing of the Creed — it’s sung in the Russian tradition — the deacon faced the people and led the congregation in the singing, directing the hundreds of people in the traditional melody. In that moment, singing Creed seemed to me far more than the liturgical act of a text written more than one thousand years ago in a melody that was centuries old. It was an anthem, a congregation proclaiming and affirming their Christian faith for all to hear. The deliberate cadence of the traditional melody had the feeling of protest, an act of resistance and defiance — an expression of faith and devotion to Jesus Christ when the society officially proclaimed otherwise.
When so much had been taken away, their faith, as sung in the Creed, was still in their DNA and could not be removed. It was a moment of religious education, a moment when a congregation was enmeshed in the sacred, creating a moment for handing forward a living tradition through the music and text of the Creed. At a time when we often say that doctrine divides, this was an act of profound unity through doctrine. I can’t imagine a more powerful moment of formation, assuring the continuity of the faith and its handing forward to another generation.
Growing up in the Greek Orthodox tradition, we did not sing the Creed; it had to be memorized and recited. Much like the generations of Roman Catholic children who had to “know the catechism,” my Sunday school teachers made it their project when we were about ten years old to drill the Creed into us, one clause at a time in English. My parish afternoon Greek language teachers did the same, but with the original Greek text. There was very little concern that we would understand the theological or historical significance of any of it, no matter the language we used. After all, words like “consubstantial,” homoousios, and ekporevomenon were hard enough to pronounce, let alone understand. But it had to be known. The Creed had to be in the DNA of our identity as Orthodox Christians.
Learning the intricacies of the history and the text itself would have to wait until seminary. But this personal formation would prove very beneficial to me about one year ago.
In the Byzantine rite of ordination to the office of bishop, the candidate must first recite the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed before the ordaining hierarchs and the congregation. He does this all by himself, facing those who will later ordain him. The candidate will also recite additional statements, affirmations of faith, about other councils, canons, and more, but it opens with the Creed. To ease the jitters of the moment, he is given the text in his hands.
Having gone through this process, I am grateful that those teachers from many years ago insisted on precision. During my ordination, I had to recite the text perfectly in the original Greek. This was not a time for pronunciation errors, misplaced accents, slips of the tongue, or omissions. And the recitation needed to be authoritative. There could be no doubt within myself or those listening to me about what “I believe…,” as they were about to ordain me into the apostolic ministry of the Church.
In both instances, the Creed is far more than a historic document for theologians to discuss. It is a living text, part of our DNA, animating a congregation and certifying the faith of one individual about to become a link in the chain of the apostles of Jesus Christ.
While these examples are from my tradition and my experience, we should be able to recognize the significance of a living tradition that includes a doctrinal statement of faith. Christianity, without this, is a Christianity only of our own, quite possibly self-aggrandizing and triumphalist, era. Nicaea obligates us to face our history and ask what we hope to hand forward. What if we could not teach our faith openly? What if our only expression of faith was liturgical? What do we want our children and grandchildren to believe? Without Nicaea and its Creed, Christianity might have been unmoored from history and from its own history. Without Nicaea, there would be no historic or universal reference point for subsequent generations.
As Jaroslav Pelikan wrote:
“the doctrine of the Trinity (enshrined in the Nicene Creed) has been the unquestioned—and unquestionable–touchstone of truly orthodox faith and teaching. It has given its outline to systematic theologies like the Institutes of John Calvin, to catechisms, and to sermons.”
Without Nicaea, theology and doctrine might not matter, and all Christianity would be local. Christians debating Trinitarian issues, Christology, and so forth, might seem like unimportant “professional hair splitting” to some, but Christians discerning who they are, what they believe, about God and God’s relationship to humanity is critical to living as the Body of Christ. How might we recognize one another and know that we are Christians without this symbol of faith? Symbol, meaning to bring together and to unify. Without Nicaea, there would not be much need for an ecumenical movement because the movement begins from the premise that Christians do not live in the unity of the past.
Even at Nicaea, according to Georges Florovsky [former Dean of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary], Emperor Constantine the Great, who attended the council was concerned about disunity.
According to Eusebius, the great historian of the day, Constantine said, “Discord in the Church I consider more fearful and painful than any other war…. My desire shall be fulfilled when I see all the minds united in peaceful harmony.”
It would be easy for us to consider great councils as a given reality in the life of Christianity rather than something that had to emerge. It would be just as easy to dismiss councils because history has shown that they were and could be manipulated. The living reality of Nicaea that we have inherited is our commitment that the council, the synod, is the way of the Church created by the apostles themselves. And it has endured — albeit with changes and challenges — for 1700 years.
In his Easter Encyclical this year, His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew wrote, “The Council of Nicaea inaugurates a new age in the conciliar history of the Church, the transition from the local to the ecumenical synodal level….. In this sense, the celebrations of this great anniversary are not a return to the past, inasmuch as the ‘spirit of Nicaea’ exists unspoiled in the life of the Church, whose unity is associated with the correct understanding and development of its conciliar identity.”
Or as John Behr wrote, Nicaea gave Christianity a process for resolving debatesii on a grand scale. To one degree or another, all our communions rely on councils and synods of leaders to debate and to discern how to address the issues of the day, relying on the words of the Acts of the Apostles, “For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.”
Councils are in our DNA. They range in frequency, in size, and in scope, but they all trace their origins to scripture and to Nicaea.
Did your communion celebrate Easter on April 20 this year? If you did, then Nicaea is in your DNA. It would be easy for us to consider the dating of Easter as an arcane question rather than one that leads to a living celebration of the core of our faith — the Resurrection, even if there are legitimate questions about its exact date. (We like precision, don’t we?)
As Americans, we don’t debate the date of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In Boston, where I live, on July 4, the Declaration is read on National Public Radio and is the Boston Globe’s editorial on that day. The date and the text matter. As individuals, we don’t debate a birthday, a wedding anniversary, or even the day when a loved one died. These are foundational; these days matter. Celebrating the resurrection of Christ is the day that matters most in our year, so having a stable formula for determining the day of celebration for all these centuries matters. Yes, East and West observe different Sundays for this celebration, although this year we converged, but we use the same formula — that of Nicaea, making it a living reality in all our communions.
It would be easy to forget that without Nicaea and its universal formula for determining the date for celebrating the Resurrection, Christians would have remained divided as to the celebration of their central element of faith, weakening Christian witness. That the late 20th century and current debates about returning to a common Easter date have always pointed to the Nicene formula; there is no need to “reinvent the wheel,” or re-litigate the issue. There is a seventeen-century-old formula that worked then and now. Why? Nicaea is part of our DNA.
What we are celebrating these days about Nicaea is our tradition as Christians. Tradition, as Pelikan also liked to say, is “the living faith of the dead.” Nicaea may have happened seventeen centuries ago, but it is not a relic of the past only to be debated and dissected. It has made us who we are as Christians and will continue to do so because Nicaea is alive in each of us.
This meditation was presented by Bishop Anthony during the NCC Spring Governing Board Meeting in Arlington, Virginia, on May 14, 2025.
About Bishop Anthony
Anton “Tony” Vrame was elected Bishop of Synada on March 22, 2024, by the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, making him an auxiliary bishop for the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. He was ordained on April 20 of that year at the Archdiocese Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in New York City. Bishop Anthony, as he is now called, represented the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese to the Faith and Order Commission (now Convening Table) of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States (2005–2019), including five years as Chair of the commission (2008–2013), which placed him on the Executive Committee of the Governing Board. He currently represents the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese at the NCC’s Convening Table on Christian Education and Faith Formation and Leadership Development. He also serves on the Board of Trustees of Friendship Press, the publishing arm of the NCC, after having served a three-year term on its Bible Translation and Utilization Committee. Bishop Anthony is also director of Holy Cross Orthodox Press and adjunct associate professor of Religious Education at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, Brookline, Massachusetts.