"and the Son."

 Ninth Thursday after Pentecost

Lectionary Texts:

Thursday:

2 Samuel 9

John 5:25-47

Friday:

2 Samuel 10

John 6:1-15

Today in our continuing study of things that are in the Nicene Creed that are not in the Apostles' Creed, we come to the Nicene Creed section on the Holy Spirit. This is the part of the Nicene Creed that was not in the 325 A.D. original, which reads like the Apostles' Creed simply, "We believe in the Holy Spirit." The additional material on the Holy Spirit was written in 381 A.D. at the Council of Constantinople. It reads.

 

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, 
    who proceeds from the Father.
    With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified.
    He has spoken through the Prophets.

 

If you know the Nicene Creed and have just read the part I have above,  you may sense that I have left something out. I have--and that something caused the biggest problem between the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church that eventually led to their split in 1054 A.D. That problem is a single world in Latin that was added in the Western/Catholic churches-- filioque, which means, "and the son," so that the creed now read:

 

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, 
    who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
    With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified.
    He has spoken through the Prophets.

 

The history of this additional word and its consequences is unimaginably complex, especially for a Protestant, who rarely if ever says the creed. The word first began to appear in the liturgies of some Western Churches in the sixth century. It was pronounced as doctrine by Pope Leo III a little after 800 A.D. The Patriarch and the bishops of the Eastern, i.e. Greek speaking, churches immediately rejected it. 

 

I'll go into this problem a little more deeply in next Wednesday's blog, but here's the short of it. The Eastern Orthodox thought that it reduced that position of the Holy Spirit, making the Holy Spirit something like the grandson of God rather than a co-equal person of the Trinity. Moreover, the Eastern Church believed that the original Nicene--Constantinopolitan Creed was sacrosanct and unchangeable, and that all Christian doctrine was completed by the seven ecumenical councils, the last of which was the Second Council of Nicea in 787 AD. Any subsequent theological development was theologoumenon--human theological understanding but not divinely revealed doctrine. The Catholics thought differently.

 

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,

The complexity of your relationship is unfathomable to us but fills us at a deeper level of our understanding than that which is simple in our brains. Increase all our levels of understanding. In your three names. Amen.

 

Faithfully,

Christian