A Stunning Development

 

A Stunning Development

November 28, 2025

Something of remarkable if somewhat obscure importance happened recently. This year marks the 1,700^th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, held across the Bosporus from Constantinople in the year 325 CE. The Council, the first of seven ancient Ecumenical Councils, is important mostly because it formulated the Nicene Creed. In its original form, that creed read:Top of Form

 Bottom of Form

We believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
begotten from the Father before all ages,
God from God,
Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made;
of the same essence as the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven;
he became incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary,
and was made human.
He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered and was buried.
The third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures.
He ascended to heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again with glory
to judge the living and the dead.
His kingdom will never end.

And we believe in the Holy Spirit,
the Lord, the giver of life.
He proceeds from the Father,
and with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified.
He spoke through the prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church.
We affirm one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look forward to the resurrection of the dead,
and to life in the world to come. Amen.

The Nicene Creed is important first of all because it is one of the earliest expressions of the substance, or at least what the church at the time contended to be the substance, of the Christian faith. To this day, Christians around the world recite it in worship. I belong to a Christian denomination that prides itself on being noncreedal, so we don’t recite it is worship. Still, it remains a foundational document of the Christian faith today, 1,700 years after it was written.

Now, the most important part of the Nicene Creed for my purposes here is the statement that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father.” That’s particularly important because over the centuries after 325, Christians in western Europe, but not in eastern Europe or the eastern Mediterranean, changed it. Without calling another ecumenical council to change it, they began to say that the Holy Spirit proceeds from “the Father filioque,”  that is, from the Father “and the Son.” That is not what the Creed originally said, and eastern Orthodox Christianity has never accepted it.

Now, we needn’t get into the weeds of what difference it makes theologically to say the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father” or “from the Father and the Son.” That theological distinction is, in any event, something most contemporary Christians of whatever stripe neither understand nor care about at all. What matters for our purposes is that “the filioque,” the insertion of the phrase “and the Son” into the Nicene  Creed, became one of only two theological differences between Eastern Orthodox Christianity and westernChristianity.[i]

The filioque, as the reference to “the Father and the Son” is always called, became one ot the two theological issues that led to the schism between Constantinople and Rome. In 1054 CE, the Pope excommunicated the Patriarch of Constantinople, and the Patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated the Pope. The filioque has remained a bone of contention between Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Roman Catholic Christianity ever since.

Then, very recently, something remarkable happened. Pope Leo XIV said and did a couple of things that are revolutionary in the context of the East-West split over the filioque. He referred to the Nicene Creed without the filioque as the foundational statement of the Christian faith. And he recited the Creed with the Patriarch of Constantinople without the filioque! We contemporary, Protestant Christians probably want to say: So what?

Well, in the context of the centuries old split between Eastern and Western Christianity, so a great deal. For many centuries, no Pope has recognized the Nicene Creed without the filioque as a legitimate expression of the Christian faith. Now Pope Leo XIV appears to have done so. The Roman Catholic Church essentially never makes that kind of change in its foundational theology. That Church teaches that it is infallible in its theological stances. To change that theology is to admit that the Church had made a mistake in the past, something that it contends is impossible because of the alleged relationship between the Church and God.

Now, the Roman Catholic Church has not officially changed its position on the filioque. The Church still uses the Creed with the filioque not without it. But the Pope has at least very nearly conceded that the Nicene Creed without the filioque is a legitimate expression of the Christian faith. In the context of the well over

 one thousand years long split between Eastern and Western Christianity in which the filioque played a major role, the Pope doing that is indeed revolutionary. Will it lead to anything? It’s too early to say. Still, I find it hard to underestimate the importance of what the Pope has done.

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[i] The other was the Pope’s claim of superiority over the other Patriarchs of the Church, the Patriarchs of Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Constantinople. It needn’t concern us here.