Methodist Connexional Ecumenical Officer Rev Steven Cooper writes…
“God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father…”
Words of the Nicene Creed, as it appears in the Methodist Worship Book – the standard book of liturgy used by the Methodist Church in Britain. While their use is in no way compulsory, the presence of the Creed in our ‘authorised liturgies’ underlines that the essence of what the Nicene Creed articulates is fundamental to our understanding of the faith we have received and the faith we proclaim.
The foundational constitutional document of the modern Methodist Church, the Deed of Union (1932), sets forth our ‘Doctrinal Standards’, which begin: “The Methodist Church claims and cherishes its place in the Holy Catholic Church which is the Body of Christ. It rejoices in the inheritance of the apostolic faith and loyally accepts the fundamental principles of the historic creeds and of the Protestant Reformation.”
While the Nicene Creed articulates some of the fundamentals of our understanding of our triune God, it also underpins the call to unity which we share with our siblings across the whole of God’s church. It does this in two respects: first, by the simple fact of our sharing of the Creed with several of our most historic ecumenical partners; and moreover, secondly, because the actual text of the Creed—and what it says about God’s nature—informs our understanding of the proper unity of the church.
The first concern of the Council members at Nicaea, 1700 years ago, was to make clear the nature of the relationship between God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ within the Godhead. At the heart of its articulation of this relationship emerged the words, referring to Jesus Christ, with which this article begins: “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God…”
The image that the Council members likely had in mind when they formulated this expression “Light from Light” is captured by Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch, in his A History of Christianity, where he writes, “The Logos was seen finally and completely in Jesus Christ, a being other than the Father, but derived from him with the fullness and intimacy of a flame which lights one torch from another: torchlight from torchlight.”
This image of a flaming torch passing on its flame—the same and undimmed as it is passed on—was a marvellously elegant way of capturing Christ’s nature as “of one Being with the Father”. The very God who created the universe is the same God who comes alongside each one of us, most especially the poor, and shares our life.
And this same image of burning torchlight can rightly be applied to the church. The Jesus who declares, in John 8:12, “I am the light of the world” is the same Jesus who, in Matthew 5:14, proclaims to his followers, “You are the light of the world.”
In John 17:21, Jesus prayed, “that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.” As CTE’s Chair of Trustees, the Rev Callan Slipper often emphasises, Jesus’ prayer here reminds us that the church is called not only to be One, but in its oneness to reflect the very oneness of Jesus with God the Father. This is where I find the image of “torchlight” from Nicaea especially helpful. As Christ’s body in the world, the light that the church is called to be is reflective of the light of Christ himself: light like that of a flaming torch that, in all its difference and diversity, is nonetheless one fire, of one being, one substance—or in the words of the Creed itself, in its later form of 381, “one holy catholic and apostolic”.
The Methodist Church indeed rejoices in the inheritance of the faith we have received, within which the Council of Nicaea has played such a pivotal role. Nicaea continues to underpin our understanding, and to encourage us in our journey towards unity, “that the world may believe”.
Rev Steven Cooper took up the role of Connexional Ecumenical Officer for The Methodist Church in April 2024. While at university he founded what became known as Christians in Unity in Cambridge. He has served as a minister in two different Local Ecumenical Partnerships (LEPs), as Chair of Churches Together in Stevenage, and as the Methodist Denominational Ecumenical Officer for Hertfordshire. Latterly he was the minister of Wesley’s Chapel & Leysian Mission (the ‘mother church’ of worldwide Methodism) – itself in a lively informal partnership with its ecumenical neighbours.