Jane Williams on the Nicene Creed as a Creative and Exciting Description of Who God Is

And so you can see that the Creed fits beautifully into that. It's a moment in the Church's history where the majority of Christian leaders were able to come together and really hammer out this quite extraordinarily creative and exciting description of who God is and therefore what we trust in as Christians. When we say, I believe in one God, we're saying I trust in this God, and therefore I will live in the world as though it's God's world.

From the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, you are listening to Public Worship and the Christian Life, a podcast that amplifies people and stories that share wisdom and wonder about Christian public worship. This season's guests, hosted by my colleague, Dr. Noel Snyder, reflect on the affirmation of faith in the Nicene Creed in commemoration of its 1,700th anniversary. The first ecumenical council in 325 was a gathering of Christian bishops in Nicaea, located in present-day Turkey, as the first attempt to reach consensus in the Church through an assembly representing all of Christendom and to affirm the Christian faith in the triune God. Much has changed in the life of the Church these past 1,700 years, but the creed the Council agreed upon is still recited and continues to shape us as a church. Welcome to the podcast.

Hello, and welcome. My name is Noel Snyder, and I'll be your host for this brief season of the podcast in which we will focus on the Nicene Creed with this year being the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. My guest for today is Dr. Jane Williams. Dr. Williams is the McDonald Professor in Christian Theology at St. Mellitus College in London. And connected to that role, she is involved in a four-year project called the McDonald Agape Nicaea Project. This project aims to explore the historical and theological significance of the Council of Nicaea. Jane's work also involves promoting theological education throughout the Anglican Communion. Dr. Williams, welcome.

Jane Williams 00:02:27

Thank you so much. Wonderful to be with you.

Noel Snyder 00:02:29

I wonder if we could begin with you just telling us a little bit about the work that you do at St. Mellitus College, the McDonald Agape Foundation, and the plans that you have through those institutions to celebrate the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. What are those celebrations about, and what are your hopes for them?

St. Mellitus College is a college that trains primarily Anglican people for ordained ministry in the Church of England, but also people from other denominations just studying to get a degree. And one of the things that's been at the heart of our sense of calling as a college is to be orthodox, so to hold tightly to the tradition that we have received as the saving tradition of Christianity, but also to be generous in the way that we hold that, to enable people from different ways of practicing being Christian to come together and see the Spirit at work in each other's lives and try to learn from each other. And so you can see that the creed fits beautifully into that. It's a moment in the church's history where the majority of Christian leaders were able to come together and really hammer out this quite extraordinarily creative and exciting description of who God is and therefore what we trust in as Christians. When we say I believe in one God, we're saying I trust in this God and therefore I will live in the world as though it's God's world. And so the 1,700th anniversary just gave us a chance to really rediscover our own roots as a college, but also to re-equip our students to really concentrate on who is this God that we believe in, and how do we know about God, and what implications does that have for our life. So it's a combination of— we have got some of the most amazing scholars coming to give lectures, and we work them really hard when they come, Noel. They give an evening lecture to an audience that can comprise people with thirteen doctorates in theology, and people who just go to church and want to know what this is all about, and everything in between. Then in the morning they spend the morning with us as an academic staff team across all the different disciplines that we teach in a theological college, and we get to engage with them. So this is, we hope, a gift to the wider thinking Christian public in and around London, but also a gift to us as academics who are resourcing the future church leaders and church theologians.

Noel Snyder 00:05:06

Oh, how wonderful.

Jane Williams 00:05:07

It's so exciting.

Noel Snyder 00:05:09

And that's coming up this year at some point.

Jane Williams 00:05:12

So we've had a couple of lectures already, and we have another few over the course of this year, and then we have a major conference at the end of April, beginning of May, again with that range of very top scholars and papers from across the whole set of theological disciplines, focusing around the Creed and what that enables us to think about God.

Noel Snyder 00:05:38

And what's that been like for your students, even, to experience this range of guests that are coming in and giving these presentations and teaching?

Jane Williams 00:05:49

We've very specifically chosen our speakers to be, as I say, outstanding academics, but also people with a real commitment to the life of theology at the heart of the church, so people who think it is a discipleship issue as well as a theological issue. And so our students are finding that really inspiring to hear people, you know, taking apart every Greek syllable in the Creed as though it matters to how we preach, teach, pray, and live. And I think our students have been really incredibly touched that these scholars are prepared to come and give their time and their expertise to us as a college and the wider communities that we serve.

Noel Snyder 00:06:35

Yes. That can be so hard for some of us to connect, that idea of discipleship and paying close attention to a theological statement like the Nicene Creed. And it sounds like you're seeing some really great fruit for what that means for ministry for people who are in training for ministry.

Jane Williams 00:06:53

Because of course, that's the context of the Creed, isn't it? It isn't just a piece of interesting speculation. The church leaders who came together were trying to work out how to be faithful to scripture, the good news that they had to share with the world. It mattered. And at that period in the fourth century where the first Creed comes into being, quite a lot of those people who were helping to put it together had been through considerable persecution. So it's not idle for them. It's a matter of either this is worth living in, or it's not. And I think that should be a mark of good theology, shouldn't it? Is it worth living in the world in the way it's described by this theology or not? Because if not, let's not waste our time.

Noel Snyder 00:07:40

Yes, absolutely. Now you wrote an article about the Nicene Creed. It was a relatively brief article, and it appeared on the website Seen and Unseen, and that article was you giving some reasons for why the Council of Nicaea is worth celebrating today. You've already, I think, started to allude to some of those reasons but could you share with us more about that article and those reasons.

Jane Williams 00:08:08

I mean, obviously the most important reason, I think, is the description of God that the Creed gives, that the God we believe in is one, but that oneness is this dynamic relationality of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And because we can be so used to that, we can forget what an extraordinarily creative theological description this is of God. And if God isn't like this, then nothing else makes any kind of sense. So that's the most important thing, that really hammering out and ruling out some other ways of describing God. In particular, ruling out any ways that suggest there isn't identity of being between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, that there are any kind of gaps, as it were, between the persons of the Trinity. So absolutely holding together that oneness and that threeness. So that's the most important thing. But as I've already mentioned, Noel, I mean, it clearly was a really significant period in the church's history. The first Roman emperor to declare himself to be a Christian, the emperor Constantine, convened this council. And, you know, there has been quite a lot of debate, as you know, about how deeply his Christianity went, but nonetheless, he considered himself to be convening the church and enabling the church to offer something to the wider public. So that role of Constantine at a point where the church for the first time is not subject to sometimes specific, sometimes lengthy persecution, sometimes just sporadic persecution, but for the first time gets to be a public body that begins to be able to shape the society around it from the top as well as from the bottom. Now, again, people have ideas about whether that's a good thing or not for us as Christians, but for the church at the time. you can imagine the relief, thinking at last we are not going to have our property taken away at a whim, we're not going have our lives taken away as a whim, we have a chance to really help people see why this is good news. I suppose the third thing I mentioned in that little article is that it's an interesting way of making decisions. It was an attempt to bring together representatives from all the different Christian churches across the Roman Empire at that time, speaking different languages, having different experiences of being a Christian. And that's an interesting model of how we come to a common mind that you actually need to allow diverse voices and experiences to speak into what it is to be a Christian. And they weren't—you know, they were all men. So when I say diverse, only in some ways, but nonetheless . . .

Noel Snyder 00:10:58

Diverse within certain bounds.

Exactly, but that was definitely the intention to have an ecumenical council, a worldwide council.

Noel Snyder 00:11:18

And I love that part as well, because what you're highlighting there is the importance of the Creed—not only the text of the Creed and what it teaches us about God, but also the context and the idea of making decisions in such a way that it's an ecumenical council that brings in the whole sort of household of God from different corners of what was the Christian church at that point in time. And I'm wondering if you could even reflect a little bit more on your own celebrations that are coming up of the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, and how holding together both of those—the text of the creed, but also the context of the council of Nicaea—why that's important to hold both of them together.

Jane Williams 00:12:10

The text of the Creed is so beautifully succinct, and if you come from the kind of church background that I do, where you say it week in, week out, it can just skate over the top of your head, and you don't really hear what is being said. And having the opportunity, by listening to all of these amazing scholars, to really pay attention to how God is being described in the Creed just makes God more and more exciting. I've actually, as part of the project, written a little book specifically concentrating on the Holy Spirit, which is a cheat because the main paragraphs about the Holy Spirit were not added till 381, but I hope that I may be forgiven for that. And again, really trying to draw out the unified theology of God who is in all Gods interacting with us, Father, Son and Holy Spirit and yet one God. So that's been just a really exciting thing to do. And for us, both in our context as a college and trying to hold together with generosity in a very fractured church world at the moment in England, and I think probably not just in England, what does it mean to hold both of those words with equal weight: generous and orthodox? And people are always suspicious when we say that's what we're trying to do, because they think one must qualify the other. We either really mean to be generous or we really mean to be orthodox, and you can't be both. And you know, it's not easy, but we do feel that is part of our calling. So again, that's partly why we wanted to really concentrate on what was going on at Nicaea and its context, its attempt to draw people together from lots and lots of different backgrounds. So both for us as a college and then more widely for us as a Christian church at the moment facing issues that really divide us not just because we're horrible, though we can be, but because they're real theological differences. How do we do that without automatically writing other people off as not real Christians? And, you know, if I knew the answer to that, Noel, I would tell you, but this project is at least giving us a way of exploring that in our own context as well as in the context of the fourth century.

Noel Snyder 00:14:32

I think that's so important to make that connection, because in our own time, there can be this tendency to really think that the fractiousness that we experience, and all of the divisions, and what we see as infighting, and all those things that are affecting the church nowadays that that maybe was different in the past times. But if you look very carefully at the Council of Nicaea, you can see similar dynamics happening in lots of ways. And yet, this experience of this testimony that's been handed down to us and this way of coming together amidst all these different forces and theological leanings and coming together and producing eventually a unified statement.

Jane Williams 00:15:30

It has continued to be life-giving. It continues to enable us to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. That makes you believe in God in itself, doesn't it, that we still are able to proclaim the good news despite the fact that we're the ones doing the proclaiming.

Noel Snyder 00:15:48

That's right. Now, as a professor at St. Mellitus, your job is to teach theology. And one of the things that you've already alluded to is that there's a difference between theological reflection and looking at a creed in ways that are maybe overly philosophical, but then maybe living out what it means to be a disciple who is shaped by this vision given to us by the Nicene Creed. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that connection, maybe even in your own personal experience. How does the Creed shape your teaching, for one, but also your living and how you understand your own discipleship?

Jane Williams 00:16:37

One of the courses that I teach that is actually one of my favorite courses is an introduction to Christian doctrine, which we shape around the Creed. And all of the students are already Christians, many of them with extraordinary testimonies of what God has done in their lives and what God is doing through them in terms of their mission and so on. Yet every single time I teach this class, you can see people thinking “Oh, so that's what I mean when I say this or that about God.” The opportunity to join it together and just see the breadth and depth and gloriousness of God—not that we can ever fully describe God, because any God I could describe would be much too small—but the sheer excitement of what it is that God is actually like. One of my great heroines, the writer on mysticism Evelyn Underhill has a phrase that I use over and over and over and again which is: God is the interesting thing about religion. We know that in theory, but the way we manage a lot of our churches, it's as though we think actually the sermon is the interesting thing, or the worship band is the interesting thing, or the socials are the interesting thing, but actually . . . all of that is a complete waste of time if it isn't about God. God is the interesting thing about religion. So I love watching the students fall in love with God all over again as they pay attention to how God is described in the Creed. And because they do, that makes me . . . their response to it year after year after year renews my own faith. It's wonderful. I mean, you must find the same: teaching people theology teaches you theology, doesn't it, it teaches you?

Noel Snyder 00:18:26

Totally, yeah, especially the questions that people ask that I maybe wouldn't think to ask and also don't necessarily have a ready answer, and that sends me searching again.

Jane Williams 00:18:38

And because so many of our students are working as pastors and priests and ministers of various kinds—I'm not an ordained person. I would be terrified to do the things they do. I find it incredibly humbling that they're willing to attend to my teaching and then take it out and make it real for people. And that again is just really renewing, I find, for me.

Yes, absolutely. I wonder if you've also had experience, [does] anybody come to mind. of you sat under their teaching and learned more about God and entered more deeply into the spiritual realities that are given to us in the Nicene Creed?

Jane Williams 00:19:22

I mean, I've had so many wonderful teachers, both academic and lived, not that those two have to be different. I had the great opportunity as an undergraduate to be taught by C. F. D. Moule, the great New Testament scholar, who was incredibly learned and so gentle and humble and always started his lecture with a prayer, which in the academic university world was unusual at that time. And I saw there something of how you can be rigorous without being ungenerous. So an idea that he also taught my father, one of the ideas that my father put forward to him, he wrote back so beautifully in saying, “Ingenious, but unlikely.” And I thought, well, that's just lovely that you can see somebody's, you can see this real thinking behind that, but it's just not quite going to work. So that was one inspiration. There was a woman I have a huge admiration for who had a calling to be a hermit, to be a solitary living in the most incredibly challenging circumstances up on a hill in Wales, with no electricity, no running water. And again, that sense of this being a world-changing faith, that she was prepared to change the whole shape of her life because she got so close to God and God got so close to her. And again, she was very firm. She didn't let you get away with sort of woolly spiritual practices. But always with the expectation that we were both going to grow as a result of that. So, such a range of influences, and I think we're very lucky to grow up in a church that expects that we will interact with each other and learn from each other.

Noel Snyder 00:21:44

As you said, quite a range of experiences, but so amazing to be able to experience that and be shaped by it. And it sounds like some of the work that you're doing there and in your teaching there that you are trying to carry forward—not only what you've learned intellectually, theologically, if you can say it that way, but also the spirit of it and being captured by a vision—that this really matters for the whole of how we see reality and really live our lives.

Jane Williams 00:22:14

I'd be so grateful, Noel, if you would continue to pray for us as a college that we may and be faithful to that calling, and any listeners who are willing to do that, we'd be just so grateful.

Noel Snyder 00:22:23

I sure will. As you look forward to continuing these celebrations this year and then even, if I'm understanding correctly, four years total of these celebrations of the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, what do you think is the call to the worldwide church other than to pray for all of you there and to pray each other as we continue to be appreciative of the witness of each other in all these different places around the world? What do you see as the call at this moment in Christian history?

Jane Williams 00:23:00

Do I get to ask you that question back when I've had a go? Because I would love to hear your answer too. Thank you. I really do think it is to keep saying to ourselves, God is the interesting thing about religion. We can go down so many rabbit holes of things that, it's not that they're not important, but it's just that they are not God. And unless we can keep coming back to what is God actually like? In God's absolute generosity, how has God enabled us to discover God and interact with God, and how does that live out? So I think that's where I would want to start, is God is the interesting thing about religion. As I said, I find it fascinating that so many wonderful Christian students are . . . it's not that they don't know God, they really know God much better than I do, but they are often surprised by the way in which the Creed describes who God is, and excited and refreshed and renewed by that description. So that's where I would go. Where would you go, Noel?

Noel Snyder 00:24:08

Sure. Thanks for asking me. When I think about that, I think about this idea of listening to Scripture closely with each other, and to recognize that receiving these gifts from the past is something that we should not gloss over, that there have been people who have been willing to stake their lives on these things, and they have handed us these great treasures. And I even think that nowadays, when we're seeing this global connectivity, this global growth of the church in areas that are not Anglo, not connected to Europe and North America, for us to continue to listen across the world and to listen to scripture together, I think is such a huge call. And I think even again, to engage our history more deeply and to recognize the gift that was given to us in the gospel, how it comes to us from God's people in the Jewish people, and how that even shapes our understanding nowadays of this gift that we've been given. I think those are a lot of the things that I think about when I think of our call.

Jane Williams 00:25:29

That's wonderful. And then that great gift that centuries have passed on to us that we need to pass on to the future to come.

Noel Snyder 00:25:36

Absolutely, yes. Well, it's been a pleasure to talk with you, Jane, and I thank you for giving us this time. Anything else that you would like to say as you look forward to the continuing celebrations of the Council of Nicaea?

Jane Williams 00:25:53

A lot of these lectures will be on the St. Mellitus College YouTube channel, so if people want to join in these celebrations from a distance, that's quite a good way to do that, and then look out for my little book on the Holy Spirit.

Noel Snyder 00:26:09

Wonderful. I know a lot of our listeners will be very glad to know about those resources and will be on the lookout for that book. Thank you for your work, and we'll continue to support each other in our prayers.

Jane Williams 00:26:25

Thank you. Thanks for this invitation as well, Noel.

Kristen Verhulst 00:26:29

Find resources related to the Nicene Creed and more at our website, worship.calvin.edu.