The Nicene Creed

The creed moves in three parts, following the names used at baptism since the earliest church: the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. A fourth movement closes it out, covering the church, baptism, and what Christians expect after death. Read it that way and the shape stops looking arbitrary.

Most of its length sits in the second part, on Jesus Christ, because that was the part under dispute. "Begotten, not made" is doing precise work. A carpenter makes a chair, and the chair is not a carpenter. A parent begets a child, and the child is the same kind of thing as the parent. The council was saying that whatever the Father is, the Son is.

"Being of one substance with the Father" translates the Greek word homoousios. Newer Catholic books render it "consubstantial." Older English books say "of one substance." The claim behind every phrasing is identical: whatever the Father's being is, the Son has that same being, and a very close copy would not be enough.

The last four lines are easy to skim and worth slowing down for. One church. One baptism. Resurrection of the dead. Life of the world to come. The creed ends on the future, and it ends on the body.

Early in the fourth century a presbyter in Alexandria named Arius began teaching that the Son of God was the first and greatest of God's creatures. Highest of everything made, and still made. His slogan traveled fast because it was easy to remember: there was a time when the Son was not.

The argument grew loud enough that the emperor Constantine summoned bishops from across the empire to Nicaea, a town in what is now Iznik in Turkey, in the year 325. Constantine called the council and pushed it toward a decision. He did not write the text, and no individual bishop did either.

The council found that scripture quotations alone would not settle it. Arius was willing to sign almost any biblical phrase and then read it his own way. So the bishops reached for a word from outside the Bible, homoousios, of one substance, precisely because it was the one word Arius could not sign. People have argued about that decision ever since, and it is why the creed contains a term you will not find in any translation of scripture.

The creed of 325 also did not end where modern printings end. It closed with a set of condemnations aimed straight at the Arian slogans. In the standard 1900 English translation of the council's acts, with the translator's bracketed glosses left out, the ending runs:

"And whosoever shall say that there was a time when the Son of God was not, or that before he was begotten he was not, or that he was made of things that were not, or that he is of a different substance or essence, or that he is a creature, or subject to change or conversion, all that so say, the Catholic and Apostolic Church anathematizes them."

Almost every version you will see today drops that ending, which is a shame, because it shows what the creed was for. Those lines were a boundary drawn in public around a specific argument by people who had watched it split their congregations.

The 325 creed had almost nothing to say about the Holy Spirit. In the 1900 English translation the whole clause reads "And in the Holy Ghost." The translator supplies the words "we believe" in brackets, because the Greek carries the verb over from earlier in the sentence. Five words on the page, then it stopped.

By the 370s a second argument had opened over whether the Spirit was fully God. Bishops met again, at Constantinople in 381, and filled the gap. In the same translation, with the brackets kept this time, the expanded clause reads: "And [we believe] in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver-of-Life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets."

The same council added the lines about the church, the one baptism, the resurrection of the dead, the life of the world to come, and "whose kingdom shall have no end." Its clause about the church reads "one, holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church." The Prayer Book form printed at the top of this page leaves out "holy," which is one reason two printings of the creed can look different at a glance.

So what almost everyone calls the Nicene Creed is really the text of 381. Scholars call it the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, which is accurate and nearly impossible to say aloud in a service.

One more difference is worth knowing before you start comparing texts online. The conciliar Greek says "We believe." The Latin translation says Credo, I believe, and the English liturgies followed the Latin. A council speaks as a body. A congregation answers one voice at a time. Both forms are in ordinary use today and neither one is a mistake.

There is one clause where the churches genuinely part company. The Greek of 381 says the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. The Latin West came to say that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. The Latin for "and the Son" is filioque, and that single word carries almost all of the weight.

Neither side disputes the history. The phrase turns up in Spain at the Third Council of Toledo in 589. It spread through Frankish churches during the 700s. Pope Leo III agreed with the doctrine the phrase expressed and opposed putting it into the creed. Rome's own liturgy took it up in 1014, under Pope Benedict VIII. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states the same sequence: the affirmation is absent from the creed confessed at Constantinople in 381, and its use in the creed was "gradually admitted into the Latin liturgy (between the eighth and eleventh centuries)."

The Orthodox objection runs on two tracks. The theological one is that within the Trinity the Father alone is the source, and that giving the Spirit two origins blurs what the three persons are. The procedural one may matter more in practice. The Council of Ephesus in 431 ruled that it was unlawful for anyone to bring forward, write, or compose a different faith as a rival to the one set out at Nicaea. On that reading, a word added to a conciliar creed without a council is the offense, whatever the word happens to mean.

The Catholic answer is that the Latin phrase describes an eternal relation between the Son and the Spirit and does not set up a second source alongside the Father. The Catechism describes the Greek and Latin approaches as a "legitimate complementarity, provided it does not become rigid," while stating openly that the addition remains a point of disagreement with the Orthodox churches.

This page does not settle that, and neither does any software. The disagreement is roughly a thousand years old, it sits underneath the split between Rome and the Orthodox churches, and serious people on both sides have given their working lives to it. If you are deciding which form to say, say the one your own church says, and ask your priest or pastor why it says that.

The Apostles' Creed is the short one. It grew out of the questions put to candidates at baptism in the church at Rome, and its earliest ancestor is older than Nicaea, though the familiar wording took several more centuries to settle.

It is brief because it was answering a different need. Nothing in it tries to define how the Son relates to the Father, since that argument had not started when its core took shape. It says that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, and rose. It never says "of one substance," and it does not need to.

Two clauses in the Apostles' Creed have no equivalent in the Nicene: the descent to the dead, and the communion of saints. Going the other way, everything the Nicene Creed says about the Son being begotten of the Father before all worlds has no counterpart in the Apostles' Creed at all.

In practice the two divide by occasion. The Nicene Creed belongs to Sunday worship and to the Eucharist. The Apostles' Creed belongs to baptism, confirmation, daily prayer, teaching children, and the opening of the rosary. Many Christians say one of them every week and the other only at a font. The Church of England publishes the full Apostles' Creed with a short introduction, linked below.

The creed is said at Sunday Mass and on solemnities in the Catholic Church, at the Divine Liturgy in the Orthodox churches, and in Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Reformed services. Orthodox practice also uses it at baptism.

Plenty of Christians never say it. Many Baptist congregations, Churches of Christ, Quaker meetings, and independent and Pentecostal churches recite no creed at all, holding that scripture alone binds a believer. In most of those churches the objection is to reciting a human document as a membership test, and members would affirm the content line by line if you asked them.

A smaller number of groups reject the content itself. Jehovah's Witnesses and Latter-day Saints teach a different account of how the Father and the Son are related, and Oneness Pentecostals reject the Trinitarian structure the creed assumes. Each of those groups states its own position openly.

If you have compared two printings of the creed and found them different, nothing has gone wrong. The creed was written in Greek and every English version is a translation choice. Catholics who have been to Mass since 2011 remember the change well: "one in Being with the Father" became "consubstantial with the Father." Same Greek word underneath, a more literal English rendering on top, and about a year of grumbling in the pews.

There is a second reason, and it is less obvious. Several of the most widely used modern English versions of the creed are under copyright, held by liturgical commissions and publishers. That is why this page prints the traditional English form, whose wording goes back to the Book of Common Prayer and belongs to nobody. Your parish may use a newer version. The difference is in the English, and the belief underneath is the same.

One phrase confuses more readers than the rest. Most modern versions print "one holy catholic and apostolic Church" with a small c, and the word there means universal, from the Greek katholikos. The older Prayer Book form above capitalizes it and drops "holy," which does nothing to help. Catholic readers understand the line as pointing to their own communion. Orthodox and Protestant readers take it as the whole church in every place and century. Both readings are old, and neither one turns on the size of a letter.

Standing in a room saying "I believe" when you feel nothing at all is a common experience and it does not make you a liar. Creeds are corporate by design. The church holds the line while individual people wobble, and it has been doing that with roughly these words since the fourth century.

A useful practice is to say it slowly on your own, one clause at a time, and notice where you stop. Most people have one line that snags. For some it is the virgin birth. For others it is the resurrection of the dead, or the word "one" in front of "Church," or the whole idea that a room full of fourth century bishops could settle anything. Find your line. Then take it to somebody.

Reciting the creed is not a password and not a test you pass. It is a summary of what the church has held, offered so that you know what you are being asked to consider. Nothing on this site has authority to tell you it is true. This is software. The AI here can help you find words, look up a passage, or think out loud at an hour when nobody is awake. A priest, a pastor, or a mature believer you trust is the person to bring the hard line to.