Nicene Creed
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What is the Nicene Creed?
The creed reads:
We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, who makes all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, before all worlds, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance of the Father, by whom all things were made; who for us men and our salvation came down and was incarnate and was made manโฆ
Who created the Nicene Creed?
The original Nicene Creed was first adopted at the First Council of Nicaea in 325. In 381, it was amended at the First Council of Constantinople.
What we call the Nicene Creed is actually the product of two ecumenical councilsโone in Nicaea (present-day Iznik, Turkey) in AD 325, and one in Constantinople (now Istanbul) in AD 381โand a century of debate over the nature of the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
In AD 324, Constantine reunited the Roman Empire under a single throne. Constantine was himself a recent convert to Christianity, having (temporarily) ended all persecution by decree in AD 313 after he claimed that he won a battle by calling out to the Christian God. It was Constantine who convened the first ecumenical, fully representative, universally recognized council of the Christian church.
Why is the Nicene Creed false?
1 ) To know that G-d is One, a complete Unity (Deut. 6:4)
The idea of God as the father is not only upsetting; it is incorrect. God as the father and Jesus as his only son make zero sense if everyone is a child of God. That would make God, the mother of all life as only motherโs give birth to children. The true teaching is that there is the masculine, the male, and the feminine, the female.
Shekhinah: the Divine Feminine
Torah teaches the concept of the divine feminine (Shekhinah). The term shekhinah most commonly refers to the divine feminine, or to the feminine aspect of God โ God as mother, nurturer, protector and compassionate one.
The pre-Christian culture of the Greeks revered the divine feminine, which they termed the goddess energy. It had three principal forms: the young virgin (Persphone), the adult mother (Demeter), and the grandmother (the old crone).
For example, in the early church, women held leadership positions. Women were embraced for their gifts, such as their natural talent for healing the wounded. We see this in the scientific data, where 86.0% of all nurses in the United States are women.
Jesus and the Heavenly Father Can't be the Same thing
The Church of Latter-Day Saints does not recognize the Creed
When the emperor Constantine was converted to Christianity, he became aware of the divisiveness among the clergy concerning the nature of Deity. In an attempt to overcome this he gathered the eminent divines of the day to Nicaea in the year 325. Each participant was given opportunity to state his views. The argument only grew more heated. When a definition could not be reached, a compromise was made. It came to be known as the Nicene Creed, and its basic elements are recited by most of the Christian faithful.Personally I cannot understand it. To me the creed is confusing.How deeply grateful I am that we of this Church, [The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints], do not rely on any man-made statement concerning the nature of Deity - President Gordon B. Hinckley
The collision between the speculative world of Greek philosophy and the simple, literal faith and practice of the earliest Christians produced sharp contentions that threatened to widen political divisions in the fragmenting Roman empire. This led Emperor Constantine to convene the first churchwide council in A.D. 325. The action of this council of Nicaea remains the most important single event after the death of the Apostles in formulating the modern Christian concept of deity. The Nicene Creed erased the idea of the separate being of Father and Son by defining God the Son as being of โone substance with the Father.โ Other councils followed, and from their decisions and the writings of churchmen and philosophers there came a synthesis of Greek philosophy and Christian doctrine in which the orthodox Christians of that day lost the fulness of truth about the nature of God and the Godhead. The consequences persist in the various creeds of Christianity, which declare a Godhead of only one being and which describe that single being or God as โincomprehensibleโ and โwithout body, parts, or passions.โ One of the distinguishing features of the doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is its rejection of all of these postbiblical creeds - Dallin H. Oaks, of the Quorm of the Twelve Apostles
The message of Christ and His gospel became subject, soon after His resurrection, to various, extremely controversial interpretations; and the question, What is truth? has continued to be controversial up to this day.
When we investigate another aspect of the history of Christian churches, it is obvious that modern historians have come to the astonishing observation and conclusion that what we understand today as Christianity reflects the outcome of interpretations of respective powers in charge strong enough to suppress differing opinions. The struggle that occurred in the first centuries after Christโs resurrection as to which of the various opinions were right and what were the true ingredients of salvation began to come to a forceful end when the Roman Emperor Constantine called, in the year A.D. 325, selected bishops from various Christian positions to come to the so-called Concilium of Nicaea about which the Catholic historian, Karl Kupisch, writes: From the 4,000 bishops that existed, only 250 came. From all of western Europe only four bishops were present. The bishop from Rome was not present. Constantine himself did not subject himself to be questioned as to who was the master of the conference. His ideas and his concepts were accepted." "...the Nicene Creed became the law of the Roman empire, and orthodox Christianity became the essential ingredient of good Roman citizenship. The need for the Roman emperor to have unity among his various appendages made Christianity the tool to establish this unity through the power of force; and the Christians, who had just escaped persecution over the first centuries after the resurrection of Christ, became now themselves the oppressors, paired with the power of the Roman Empire."
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