The World Council of Churches could hardly fail to mark the anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. The WCC Faith and Order Commission therefore set out to organise an international conference – the first in 30 years – around the anniversary, due to take place in Alexandria in October. The theologians making up the commission have been busy at work: what does the Creed mean for today? What is its place in fostering unity in a fragmented world?
At face value, we often assume that the creed is an instrument of unity – after all, it is something we all say we agree on. Further scrutiny however quickly raised very contemporary questions: do we all say the same creed, and mean the same thing, especially once it is translated? Does it have a very different significance in different contexts? Can, and should, it be ‘decolonised’?
I have the privileged of co-convening a working group of the Faith and Order Commission on conflict, violence, justice and peace. Decolonisation is a fundamental method for us; so is attention to context, culture and questions of power. Speaking of the creed has been enriching – and less obvious than we might think. Our group is concerned primarily with questions of justice, yet the creed does not mention justice, peace, or the reality of a violent world. Can the creed speak into the pressing matters of today? Unsurprisingly, our answer is, yes – but this needs some theological unpacking. The creed’s focus on incarnation is one of the thread that helps us think around these themes: the total embrace not just of humanity as a generic concept, but the embrace of human particularity, embeddedness in culture, and vulnerability to power and conflict.
In exploring the creed together, we also realised that it plays a very different role in our different churches. For some, its role is obvious in its liturgical inclusion, where it is said weekly. But members from other churches also said, ‘we never use it in worship – it is not relevant, it is too remote’. Unpacking this however showed that this does not mean the creed is not relevant, but that its use is primarily theological: marking out the boundaries of faith, and staking out a space for unity through a shared text. Any theological conversation on the creed as a means of unity therefore needs to take into account how differently it is used. From use, we also therefore move to how the creed is incarnated: how it is translated, not just in terms of words, but in terms of concepts relevant within the symbolic web of meaning that every language and culture inhabits.
This may be, perhaps, the aspect of the conversation that has the most power to enrich: how the truths and wisdom of the creed are reflected in different cultures, and how attention to our different understanding helps illuminate what a single, monolithic culture could never fully see. And here we come back to justice and incarnation: we always need to attend to universality and particularity together, lest we assume that one human perspective is the whole of humanity, that one overrides all others, or can remained unaffected by the perspectives of others. The creed, at its best, gives us the opportunity to reflect on how we relate to one another, how we are constituted into the body of Christ as socialised people, who come to say words together that both carry their own understanding and particularity, and choose to put this locality in relation with a greater whole.
Rev Dr Isabelle Hamley is an Anglican priest, theologian and broadcaster. She has held roles as parish priest, university chaplain and chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Rev Dr Isabelle became the Principal of Ridley Hall, Cambridge in 2024. She represents the Church of England on the World Council of Churches’ Faith and Order Commission.