More Examples Of Medieval Opposition To Prayer To Saints

Concerning some of the opposition to prayer to saints around the time of the Second Council of Nicaea, Dirk Krausmuller writes:

The Departure Material In John

I've written about what I've called the departure passages in scripture and how they relate to issues like the papacy and sola scriptura. See here, for example. Acts 20, 2 Timothy, and 2 Peter have been discussed a lot, but I want to expand on John's material, which has been neglected.

The Largeness, Complexity, And Difficulty Of Extrabiblical Tradition

It's often suggested that sola scriptura is too difficult to live out. How do you know which documents are canonical and which aren't? There are so many disagreements over Biblical interpretation. Many of our questions aren't answered, or aren't answered explicitly, by scripture. A lot of people throughout church history have been illiterate. How are they supposed to follow sola scriptura? And so on.

You can approach issues like those from a lot of angles, and we've responded to such objections many times (e.g., noting that Protestants aren't the only ones who have to make judgments about what's part of their rule of faith and what isn't, that Protestants aren't the only ones who disagree about how to interpret their rule of faith, that non-Protestant rules of faith also contain written sources that illiterate people wouldn't be able to read for themselves, that a Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox layman relying on a local priest or bishop to tell him what to believe is relying on a source who's fallible by Catholic and Orthodox standards, that Catholic and Orthodox laymen are depending on translators and other fallible sources in the process of consulting their allegedly infallible authorities, etc.). One of the factors to take into account in these contexts is how large and complicated extrabiblical tradition is and how it's so often failed to bring about the sort of peace, unity, and easiness its advocates often suggest it will bring about. For example:

"The disagreements ran deep, and the disputes were often bitter and sometimes violent. From the beginning of the fourth century to the middle of the sixth century, more than 250 councils dealt with a wide range of topics." (Robert Wilken, The First Thousand Years [New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2012], 90)

And those councils often disagreed with each other.

We've provided many other examples along those lines, like here.

Thinking About The Veneration Of Images

The Other Paul and River Devereux recently produced a video on the Second Council of Nicaea and images that makes many good points. Gavin Ortlund interviewed a former Eastern Orthodox priest, Joshua Schooping, and the veneration of images is one of the topics they discussed. We have a lot of posts on the subject in our archives.

The History Of The Veneration Of Icons

Gavin Ortlund recently posted a video that provides an overview of how the veneration of icons was viewed during the first several centuries of church history.

Are church councils an ultimate criterion?

High churchmen typically reject sola Scriptura. They appeal to church councils to determine orthodoxy and heresy. But here's a problem with that: if they use church councils as their criterion for theological truth, how do they determine which church councils are authoritative? High churchman don't regard all or even most church councils as authoritative. Indeed, they think some church councils are heretical or illegitimate. 

Do church councils determine what's true, or does truth determine which church councils are true? If church councils are your starting-point, how do you decide which ones to start with? If you use church councils as your criterion, how do you decide which ones to trust? Unless you have independent access to the truth, apart from church councils, how do you winnow church councils that teach true doctrine from church councils that teach false doctrine? If you use church councils as your doctrinal criterion, what's your doctrinal criterion to assess church councils? There are competing conciliar claimants. What about Arian church councils? 

Mere Protestantism

This post is a sequel to my prior post:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2017/09/interpretive-levels.html

I'll comment on this:

http://reformingcatholicconfession.com/

I guess the best thing that can be said for it is the pertinent reminder that the Reformation isn't over. It says a lot of things I can agree with. It has some good signatories, as well as some not so good signatories. However, I won't be signing "A Reforming Catholic Confession". I'll begin with two lesser objections:

i) Jerry Walls cochaired the drafting committee. Jerry plays a Julius Kelp/Buddy Love character, wherein he can instantly transform from a militant anti-Calvinist to "the most ecumenical man in the room" and back again. The makeup is impressive, yet the actor underneath the magnanimous makeup isn't the ecumenist, but the militant anti-Calvinist. Sorry, but I can't exercise the willing suspension of disbelief to take his performance seriously. 

ii) The document is terribly redundant inasmuch as there's already plethora of "mere Protestant" creeds in circulation. Every evangelical seminary, college, denomination, and parachurch ministry has a generic evangelical statement of faith. 

However, I wouldn't say (i-ii) are deal-breakers. Moving along:

He will judge the world, consigning any who persist in unbelief to an everlasting fate apart from him, where his life and light are no more. 

Notice what that doesn't say. No mention of "eternal misery" or "everlasting conscious punishment". It's worded in such a way that an annihilationist can sign it. And that's probably intentional.

Perhaps a supporter of the "mere Protestant" confession will say it doesn't deny everlasting conscious punishment. 

Yet creeds are equally important for what they exclude as well as what they include. That's a basic function of creeds. To draw boundaries. To rule some positions out of bounds. 

And needless to say, it is equally silent on Purgatory, which is making a comeback thanks the cochairman of the drafting committee (Jerry Walls). 

What about penal substitution? That, too, is passed over in silence. How mere can you get? 

By the same token, this "mere Protestant" confession is silent on open theism. A "mere Protestant" confession that leaves the door open for open theism, annihilationism, and Purgatory is too mere for me. 

That Protestants are divided is equally obvious and, given our Lord’s prayer for unity (“that they may be one” – John 17:11), even more grievous.

i) Sigh. By that logic, the Son's prayer has gone unanswered for 2000 years. Even if, after 2000 years, the Father finally got around to granting the Son's petition, isn't that like a health insurance company authorizing treatment a week after the patient died? 

ii) Didn't Jesus say the Father always hears him (Jn 11:41-42). So shouldn't we believe that the Father already granted the Son's petition? Indeed, that the Father has been continuously granting that petition, throughout the course of church history–from the inception up to the present–until the Parousia? 

In that event, we should see in church history an answer to that prayer. If we fail to see that, it must be because we're looking for the wrong thing. 

What kind of unity is Jesus referring to? I think the best explanation is that if believers are in fellowship with the Triune God, then believers are thereby in fellowship with one another (1 Jn 1:3,6-7).

Our reforming catholic confession sets forth the catholic substance of the faith (the consensual tradition worked out over the first few centuries of church history about the triune God) according to the Protestant principles of the faith (sola scriptura, sola gratia, sola fide).

i) Freewill theists don't believe in sola gratia. They have a synergistic soteriology.

ii) What about Protestants who reject the classic Protestant (e.g. Reformed or Lutheran) view of justification in favor of something like the New Perspective on Paul? Or the more recent position of John Barclay? 

That these two ordinances, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, which some among us call “sacraments,” are bound to the Word by the Spirit as visible words proclaiming the promise of the gospel, and thus become places where recipients encounter the Word again. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper communicate life in Christ to the faithful, confirming them in their assurance that Christ, the gift of God for the people of God, is indeed “for us and our salvation” and nurturing them in their faith.

I think the sacraments are simply pictures. 

the Spirit proceeded to guide (and continues to guide) the church into a right understanding of these foundational texts (John 15:26; 16:13).

In a sense this is the right doctrine from the wrong texts. 

i) In context, Jn 15:26 & 16:13 isn't a promise to "the church". 

ii) There is a sense in which God continues to guide "the church". God gives teachers to the church. And God preserves the elect. That doesn't render them infallible, but to keep them faithful, God prevents them from straying too far. 

Yet, given the weight of orthodox judgment and catholic consensus, individuals and churches do well to follow the example of the Reformers and accept as faithful interpretations and entailments of Scripture the decisions of the councils of Nicaea (325), Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431), and Chalcedon (451) concerning the nature of the Triune God and Jesus Christ.

"the weight of orthodox judgment and catholic consensus" is not a reliable criterion. That's an intellectual shortcut, and the appeal amounts to a circular argument. By definition, "orthodox judgement" is orthodox, but that tautology is useless in ascertaining orthodoxy. You already need a preconception of orthodoxy to recognize examples of orthodoxy in church history. 

Moreover, "catholic consensus" is a very small sample. Most Christians were uneducated back then. They were in no position to exercise independent judgment. 

One set of Christians is not the doctrinal benchmark for another set of Christians.  Divine revelation is the only standard of orthodox. The onus is not on modern-day Christians to conform their beliefs to a "catholic consensus". Rather, the onus is on a "catholic consensus" to match up with divine revelation. 

Is the Son autotheos?

On Facebook, a Catholic apologist objected to the belief that each person of the Trinity is autotheos. Before addressing his objections directly, I'd like to take a few steps back:

i) I don't have a problem with church councils. There's nothing wrong with Christian representatives getting together to produce a joint declaring that not only expresses their individual beliefs, but their shared beliefs. A public statement of common faith can be very useful in various ways. But from a consistent Protestant perspective, a council doesn't make doctrine true; rather, true doctrine makes a council true. In the classic words of the Westminster Confession:

The supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture (WCF 1.10).

ii) Some Protestants pay lip-service to sola scripture, but when that's put to the test, they seem to be insecure about their ultimate commitments. Some Protestants act as though God made a temporary exception to sola Scriptura by inspiring "ecumenical councils" for the first 500 years of church history. But if you can't make allowance for the possibility, in principle, that these councils could be mistaken in some particular, then you're not operating with a consistent Protestant epistemology. Rather, you're straddling the fence.  

Objecting to my position, the Catholic apologist said:

He has constantly ascribed "aseity" to each of the persons of the Trinity in their personal capacity, rather than properly limiting it to the Trinity as a whole and/or the unbegotten, unspirated person of the Father. It seems clear that he wants to apply the concept of aseity to the Son as to the Father. So, what we are left with is separate persons who are gods or separate gods, i.e., polytheism. 

Clearly there cannot be separate infinite, perfect, omnipotent gods as a logical proposition; there can only be one infinite, perfect, omnipotent God. The existence of a second such being would mean that one or the other, or both, is not perfect, infinite or omnipotent. 

The Trinity is one God; the persons of the Trinity are identical and equal, except in origin, since the Son is begotten and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, and the Father is neither unbegotten and proceeds from nothing. Thus, they share the same nature and the same substance and are one God. There cannot be two different Gods having different origins with a different nature.

His objection is a bundle of confusions:

i) He doesn't actually present an argument. But he seems to have two intuitive arguments that he lacks the competence to articulate. So we have to begin by making his arguments for him before we can dispose of them. The first argument he's groping at seems to be this: If all three Trinitarian persons are autotheos, that means they have different origins. If they have different origins, that makes them separate Gods. 

And I agree with him that if the Father, Son, and Spirit each has different origins, that makes them separate Gods. But the problem with his argument is this: to be autotheos is to be unoriginate. Likewise, aseity means having no origin. 

Therefore, to say each Trinitarian person is autotheos, or to ascribe aseity to each person of the Godhead, is the polar opposite of saying each person has a different origin. Rather, it means none of the persons of the Godhead has a source of origin. So his argument is utterly confused. He has things exactly backwards.

ii) The second argument he's groping at is based on the alleged impossibility of two (or more) "infinite" beings. He doesn't turn that into an actual argument. He merely asserts the impossibility of two (or more) "infinite" beings. I'm guessing that in his inchoate intuition, he's getting carried away with a spatial metaphor. 

This seems to be what he has in mind: there can only be one infinitely large object. That's because it takes up all the available space. So there's no extra room for a second infinitely large object. One infinitely large object squeezes out the possibility of more than one infinitely large object. And perhaps he thinks that's analogous to monotheism. Assuming that's an accurate reconstruction of what he's gesturing at, it's beset by a host of problems:

iii) It presumes a theory of absolute space, where space is considered to be an empty container. That's the Newtonian view. And that was eclipsed by Einstein's relational view of space.

iv) What does he mean by "infinite"? If he means a potential infinite, then you could have two (or more) infinitely large objects inasmuch as a potential infinite is an actual finite.

v) Perhaps, though, he means an actual infinite. If so, why think the notion of an actually infinite physical object is even coherent, intelligible, or realistic? Try to imagine an infinitely large steel ball or an infinitely large cube. Is that even conceivable, much less physically possible? To be a physical object is to have boundaries, right? To have boundaries is to be finite rather than infinite.  

vi) A deeper problem is that God is not a physical object, so spatial infinitude is inapplicable to God. That's a category mistake. God doesn't literally fill the universe. But if the objection is that God is analogous to a physically infinite object, I have no idea where the point of comparison lies. 

vii) Perhaps he means God is "infinite" in the sense of unlimited. Yet there are things that God can't be and things that God can't do. God can't be ignorant. God can't scratch his head (since God has no head or hands). 

Likewise, for the argument to go through, God would have to be unlimited in a sense that precludes two unlimited beings. But that's just too vague. 

viii) The coexistence of abstract actual infinities is not only possible, but bedrock reality. Just combine mathematical realism with infinite sets. 

ix) Furthermore, if we choose to stick with the language of infinitude, there is a sense in which the Trinity does consist of three "infinite" individuals. For instance, if you define omnipotence as infinite (i.e. unlimited) power, and each person is omnipotent, then each person is infinite. Mind you, I don't think that's the best way to define omnipotence. 

To take a better example, if you define omniscience as knowing an actual infinitude of necessary truths, contingent truths, and counterfactual or hypothetical truths, and each person is omniscient, then each person is infinite. So either our Catholic apologist must deny that the Son is omniscient, or he must deny that his knowledge is actually infinite. Otherwise, he must be prepared to admit that, in this sense, monotheism is consistent with three "infinite" individuals.   

x) Indeed, it's always been a challenge for Christian philosophers and theologians to formulate the Trinity in a way that avoids modalism while avoiding the appearance of tritheism. But that's the hand we've been dealt. Those are the cards we must play. We can't burn a card to avoid the charge of "polytheism". We are duty-bound to work with what we've got. 

xi) Finally, to say the Son's existence is absolute and inderivative is a higher Christology than to say the Son's existence is derivative. (ditto: the Spirit.) It's ironic when, in the name of orthodoxy, Catholics accuse you of heresy for defending higher Christology than their own. 

How ecumenical are "ecumenical councils"?

Recently I had a marathon debate on Facebook with some Catholics and one Orthodox commenters. Here's part of what I said:

Historical exegesis and linguistic semantics aren't decoder rings. 

"Lately, I've been working through the Ante-Nicene fathers."

Have you been using your "personal decoder ring that you found in a Cracker Jack box" to interpret them? 

"Yes, every Protestant sect is filled with historians and linguists... Good luck with that."

You depend on the same thing to evaluate the historical claims of Rome. So your remark is self-defeating. 

"I don’t hold myself up as the final authority in reading the Church Fathers, or the Bible. You hold yourself in that position."

Which embroils you in vicious circularity. You must exercise your private judgment to determine if you think the documentary evidence supports the claims of Rome. But you can't then turn around an act as if Rome is the final authority, which supersedes your private judgment, for your token submission to the Magisterium is ultimately subservient to your independent assessment of the documentary evidence. Daniel remains the arbiter from start to finish. 

"Christ prayed for unity, and gave us a Church."

Do you think Christ's prayer has gone unanswered for 2000 years? When do you think God is going to answer Christ's prayer?

"Yes, studying history and the Church increases my confidence in it, but my submission to the authority of the Church is an act of faith, not of some rationalization."

So what's the basis for your confidence in the authority of Rome? Is it just an act of blind faith? A leap into the dark?

What's the relationship between your study and your confidence in the church of Rome? Is your faith in the Roman church independent of how you interpret the documentary evidence? If so, then what's your evidence that the church of Rome has the authority you impute to it? If you don't base your confidence in Rome on the documentary evidence, which you must interpret for yourself, then your faith is arbitrary.

Put another way, is you faith in Rome conditional or unconditional? You say your study "increases your confidence" in Rome. Does that mean you began by entrusting himself to the church of Rome apart from study? 

Do you think the authority of the Roman church provides a level of certainty lacking in your private judgment? But isn't your identification of Rome as the one true church based on you study? When you treat tour personal study as uncertain, how can you then pretend that Rome affords certainty? For you confidence in the certainties of Rome result from you study. How can the uncertainties of your personal study yield confidence in the certainties of Rome, when that's the product of you study? How can the conclusion be more certain than the source of the conclusion? 

You proceed as if Rome furnishes a level of certainty absent from your private judgment, yet your confidence in Rome can be no more or less certain than the private judgment by which you arrived at that conclusion. 

It's like saying, if the deck is stacked, it's a dead certainty that I will be dealt a full house, but I'm uncertain that the deck is stacked. The conclusion can't rise higher than the process of reasoning that underwrites the conclusion.

Anyone of sufficient intelligence can read good commentaries.

"And yet there are thousands of Protestant denominations with different views on all of this. So are all of them stupid except you?"

Roman Catholicism is one of the "thousands" of Christian denominations. So are all of them stupid except for you?

"Catholicism is not a denomination."

Catholicism is a sect.

"No, with the Orthodox Church, Catholicism forms the Apostolic Church." 

I understand your partisan position–which illustrates the fact that his statement involves a tendentious contrast. He exempts his own "church" from the "thousands". But that's a truth by definition tactic.

"Given that he's Catholic, he's simply being true to what he believes. I would also hold that the Orthodox Church is the una sancta."

Yes, he take his own denomination as the standard of comparison. That's only convincing to like-minded people.

He's responding to something I didn't say. The question at issue was "special access," not consensus.

"Of course, if Steve knows better than all of the ecumenical councils, it really isn't surprising that he would find himself to be the smartest person in the room."

Of course, Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox can't agree with each other on which councils are, in fact, "all" the ecumenical councils. Since he apparently knows the answer, he must regard himself as the smartest person in the room.

Moreover, that backfires. By his logic, if you can even call it logic, unless a Christian submits to Lateran IV or the Council of Trent, he must regard himself as the smartest man in the room. Yet that's self-incriminating on his part, because there is no consensus on which councils are ecumenical, or what makes a council ecumenical. When Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox disagree on that central issue (central for them), by his logic, that can only be adjudicated by believing you're the smartest man in the room. 

What are his criteria for distinguishing an ecumenical council from a local council or robber council? There are no unanimous criteria. There are in fact competing theories about what makes a council ecumenical. Take receptionism.

What makes a gathering of a few hundred bishops from the Eastern Roman Empire a representative sample for the global church? Indeed, there was no global church at the time of ancient church councils. What makes a particular time and place ipso facto definitive for every time and place?

Some truths are timeless, yet he isn't lodging a direct appeal to truth, but mounting an argument from authority. By his logic, a few hundred bishops were the smartest men in the room. Yet there've been billions of Christians in the intervening centuries. So, once more, what makes a few hundred bishops a representative sample group? 

If the question at issue is eternal generation, that belief need to be justified by suitable evidence. Christianity is a revealed religion. Where's the revelatory evidence for eternal generation? 

You have some traditional prooftexts, but that's only as good as the meaning of a Greek compound word, and that's now disputed even by Roman Catholic scholars. So this isn't just my position.

"It's not in contention at all -- they were declared dogmatically by the Orthodox Church in Nicea, Constantinople and Ephesus."

An illicit argument from authority. That appeal depends on a particular ecclesiology which is, in itself, a bone of contention. I'm not Eastern Orthodox, So I don't grant that standard of comparison.

When Protestants debate Catholics, or Catholics debate Orthodox, it ultimately devolves into the upstream issue of ecclesiology rather than the downstream issue of the particular doctrine. 

"No, but when you go out on a limb by yourself and fail very hard, you should have the humility to go back to the councils and creeds to see how you can better map your linguistic framework onto theirs. If you can’t, I would recommend deferring to them. If you won’t, then accept that you are a formal heretic, since you understand the difference but refuse to submit to the Church."

That's a classic example of Catholic playacting, where you get swept up in role-playing. 

I'm not answerable to Catholic bishops. That's not the divine standard of judgment. I'm answerable to God via biblical revelation.

BTW, it's hard for people to submit to "the councils" even if they wish to since theologians draw ad hoc distinctions regard which conciliar statements are fallible and which are infallible. 

By the definition of your sect, I'm "formal heretic" because I deny the Immaculate Conception and Assumption of Mary. But since I don't cede to your sect the prerogative to define reality, color me unimpressed. 

According to rabbinical Judaism, Christians are "formal heretics". I'm I supposed to lose sleep over that? 

"Perhaps you will be the one person on your own who used your own concepts to arrive at the truth."

You are using your own concepts to arrive at what he deems to be truth (i.e. Roman Catholicism).

"I don’t expect you will be impressed. I think it would be essential to all formal heretics that they are unimpressed by the fact that a Catholic would identify them as such."

When people can't win the argument through rational persuasion, they resort to intimidation tactics.

Conversely, Protestants like me consider the input of many other Christians when we read commentaries, theologians, &c.

Some Catholic commenters are guilty of an illicit argument from authority. Appealing to the opinion of dead bishops isn't a given when disputing with Protestants. You can't just reason from your Catholic assumptions. Rather, you must reason for your Catholic assumptions. An argument from authority is tendentious unless both sides grant the legitimacy of that benchmark. 

Mind you, dead bishops sometimes got it right, but that's a case of judging their conclusions by the quality of their supporting arguments, rather than deferring to them as unquestioned authority figures.

The Nicene Creed

I concluded my last blog with a number of conclusions I have drawn as I have read, studied, and taught the doctrine of the Trinity in the midst of the modern debate over “egalitatarian” views of the Trinity and the role relationships of men and women. The first of those conclusions was that significant problems have developed among evangelicals since the Enlightenment on the doctrine of the Trinity. 

I suppose that the first question someone might ask me about that assertion is, “By what standard?” My answer is by the standard of the Bible, but also by the standard of the Nicene Creed. The Nicene Creed or at least its identifying trinitarian formulas were adopted by all the mainstream confessions and creeds of the Reformation. Here is the language of the Nicene Creed in the form that it emerged after the Council of Constantinople in 381 and in which it is commonly used liturgies today.  

The key words of importance for the modern debate I have placed in bold italics. The Nicene Creed asserts, of course, that there are three persons who are God. It also asserts that there is only one God. Thus, the deity of the Son and Spirit is identical to the deity of the Father. The Son is “of one substance with Father” and by implication so is the Spirit. 

But when these two truths (that there is one God and that there are three persons who are God) have been stated, the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity has not yet been fully stated. The Creed is at pains to state with incredible repetition and emphasis what we call the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son. The Lord Jesus Christ is the only-begotten 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 with the Father. Unless we believe this doctrine, we do not believe the Nicene Creed; and we do not—by the standard of the Nicene Creed—hold to the Trinitarianism of historic Christianity. Modern evangelicals need to think about that! 

http://www.cbtseminary.org/2011/07/whos-tampering-with-the-trinity-2/

i) I, for one, am an egalitarian about the Trinity, but a complementation about men and women. 

ii) The subtitle ("Do we really believe in the Nicene Creed?") of Waldron's post is ironic. Does he believe in "one baptism for the forgiveness of sins"?

Let's evaluate the Nicene Creed:

WE BELIEVE in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,

i) The English translation has a comma after "one God," which might suggest the "one God" includes the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But to my knowledge, the Greek text doesn't have that punctuation. 

ii) These seem to be parallel clauses:

We believe in one God the Father

We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ

If so, that suggests the Nicene Creed only affirms the Father as the one God–not the Father, Son, and Spirit inclusively. If so, that's a very defective formulation. 

maker of heaven and earth,

i) In Scripture, the creation of the world is not unique to the Father. In fact, the NT typically ascribes that action that to the Son. 

Indeed, the Creed goes on to say "all things were made through" the Son. 

But in that event, it fails to single out any particular act or attribute that distinguishes the Father from the Son. 

ii) The Creed is deficient in that respect because patristic theology was underdeveloped. For instance, a Calvinist would say the work of the Father includes election and justification, as well as raising Jesus from the dead. In the economy of salvation, that's distinctive to the Father.

of all that is, seen and unseen.

Strictly speaking, I wouldn't say everything invisible was created. Numbers weren't created. Possible worlds weren't created. Rather, these inhere in the mind and nature of God.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,

As I've explained before, I do not affirm the eternal generation of the Son. God is not derivative. 

of one Being with the Father.

That's the best part of the Creed. Unfortunately, it fails to extend that principe to the Spirit. It never says the Spirit is consubstantial with the Father. That's a serious omission. 

Through him all things were made.

For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.

For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.

That's all good.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,

i) That's rather perfunctory. It fails to mention the work of the Spirit in regeneration and sanctification. Once again, that deficiency reflects the underdeveloped state of patristic theology. 

who proceeds from the Father and the Son.

By the same token, I do not affirm the eternal procession of the Spirit. God is not derivative.

With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.

That's fine.

We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.

i) Isn't it redundant to say the church is both "one" and "universal"? By definition, there can only be one universal church. 

ii) The other marks are somewhat arbitrary. Yes, the church is "apostolic," but why not say the church is "prophetic, apostolic, and and dominical" (Eph 2:20)?

Likewise, the church is "spiritual." A fellowship of the Holy Spirit  

We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.

I don't acknowledge that baptism confers the remission of sins, if that's what it means. 

We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come.

Fine.

In sum, the Nicene Creed is very uneven. Gets a number of things right, gets some things wrong, and is defective in some of its formulations. 

Everett Ferguson: A Perspective on Early Councils and Creeds

I would like to offer another perspective on the early councils and creeds. It is similar to a viewpoint expressed to me by a theologian from India, Paulos Gregorios, who is a member of the Syrian Orthodox Church, one of the so-called Monophysite churches that rejects the authority of Chalcedon (I say “so-called,” because “Monophysite” is a label the members of these churches emphatically reject). He said that he was respectful of the early councils but did not feel bound by their wording. I would adopt a similar attitude. Given the philosophical context and the language in which the issues were formulated, I judge Nicaea and (unlike this Indian theologian) Chalcedon to be correct. I agree with the outcome in terms of the time and way the issues were phrased. But I do not feel bound by their wording, nor do I think we should bind their terminology on other times and other conceptual worlds. In other words, they may be accepted as confessions of faith but not imposed as tests of fellowship.

Ferguson, Everett (2013-06-10). The Early Church & Today, Vol 1: A Collection of Writings by Everett Ferguson (Kindle Locations 1932-1938). Abilene Christian University Press. Kindle Edition, pg. 120 in the printed edition.

The “Ecumenical” Council of Ephesus (431 AD) and a “Great Schism” that was greater than the Roman Catholic/Eastern Orthodox split of 1054

There is a claim that "the church was unified under the pope until 1054". But there was a "schism" centuries earlier than that, which is a far larger and messier divide than the 1054 schism between the Roman and Orthodox churches. It makes a lie of the "unified under the pope" claims of today's Roman Catholic apologists.

In fact, if you consider that "the papacy" didn't even come fully "developed" until Leo I (461 AD) -- and that it's still "developing" now under "Pope Francis", you've got the "unified Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox church under the pope" from say 461 AD - 1054 AD.

The churches in Asia, "the churches of the east", which had no idea that there was a "Petrine ministry" for many centuries, had as much of a claim to "apostolic succession" as did any of the European churches, and which grew far larger than any of the churches in Europe, before being snuffed out by Islam -- not in the 6th or 7th centuries, but the 12th and 13th centuries, likely a response to (a) the Mongol invasions (which were favorable to Christianity), and (b) the Crusades. (Not saying there were no massacres prior to the Crusades. But the Crusades exacerbated a bad situation).

The Fictional Beginnings of Papal Infallibility, Part 1

It is no stretch at all to call this fictional. The concept of “papal infallibility”, the foundation of the Roman Catholic IP, the epistemological foundation of certitude for a narrow band of Roman Catholics, never existed for the first 1200 years of church history.

Michael Liccione wrote of “papal ratifications of dogmatic canons issued by general councils meant to bind the whole Church”. Of these he says:

Whether purely papal or conciliar, such definitions are exercises of the “extraordinary magisterium” of the Church, and thus require the assent of faith from all believers. All are set forth infallibly.

Of course, it’s not like “popes” had called these councils, or were leading these councils, or even present at these councils, or were even afterthoughts at these councils. In some cases, they didn’t even know about them until after-the-fact.

Of course, “Pope Sylvester” was not present at the First Ecumenical Council (Nicea 325AD). Only two priests from Rome were present (among the 300+ Eastern bishops at the council) and he is neither mentioned by, or even apparently though of at this council. At the Second Ecumenical Council, Constantinople (381AD), from which we have “the Nicene Creed” in its present form, “Pope Damasus” (366–384) didn’t even know it was occurring, and only received reports about the council later.

What was “the papacy” like at this time? This is from Hans Küng: “Infallibility, an Inquiry”:

[the murderer] Bishop Damasus was the first to claim the title of Sedes Apostolica (“Apostolic See”) exclusively for the Roman See; Bishop Siricius (contemporary of the far more important Ambrose, Bishop of Milan), was the first to call himself “pope,” began peremptorily to call his own statutes “apostolic,” adopted the official imperial style, and energetically extended his official powers on all sides; Bishop Innocent I wanted to have every important matter, after it had been been discussed at a synod, put before the Roman pontiff for a decision, and tried to establish liturgical centralization with the aid of historical fictions, and so on.

The historian Eamon Duffy writes of this “official imperial style”:

They [bishops of Rome] set about [creating a Christian Rome] by building churches, converting the modest tituli (community church centres) into something grander, and creating new and more public foundations, though to begin with nothing that rivaled the great basilicas at the Lateran and St. Peter’s. Over the next hundred years their churches advanced into the city – Pope Mark’s (336) San Marco within a stone’s throw of the Capitol, Pope Liberius’ massive basilica on the Esquiline (now Santa Maria Maggiore), Pope Damasus’ Santa Anastasia at the foot of the Palatine, Pope Julius’ foundation on the site of the present Santa Maria in Trastevere, Santa Pudenziana near the Baths of Diocletian under Pope Anastasius (399-401), Santa Sabina among the patrician villas on the Aventine under Pope Celestine (422-32).

These churches were a mark of the upbeat confidence of post-Constantinian Christianity in Rome. The popes were potentates, and began to behave like it. Damasus perfectly embodied this growing grandeur. An urbane career cleric like his predecessor Liberius, at home in the wealthy salons of the city, he was also a ruthless power-broker, and he did not he did not hesitate to mobilize both the city police and [a hired mob of gravediggers with pickaxes] to back up his rule… (Duffy, 37:38).

It was Siricius (384-399), who was the successor of Damasus, who “self-consciously … began to model their actions and style as Christian leaders on the procedures of the Roman state. … [Siricius responded to an inquiry from a neighboring bishop in Spain] in the form of a decretal, modeled directly on an imperial rescript, and like the rescripts, providing authoritative rulings which were designed to establish legal precedents on the issues concerned. Siricius commended the [inquiring] Bishop for consulting Rome ‘as to the head of your body’, and instructed to him to pass on ‘the salutary ordinances we have made’ to the bishops of all the surrounding provinces, for ‘no priest of the Lord is free to be ignorant of the statutes of the Apostolic See’” (Duffy 40)

Regarding the way that “historical fictions” worked their way into papal consolidation of their power, Roger Collins, Keeper of the Keys (New York, NY: Basic Books (Perseus Books Group), ©2009) writes:

In 416 Pope Innocent I (401–417) declared ‘in all of Italy, Gaul, Spain, Africa, Sicily and the isles that lie between them no churches have been established other than by those ordained bishop by the venerable Apostle Peter or his successors”…. (58)

This was totally historically inaccurate, although it wasn’t the only such incident giving sanction to historical inaccuracy.

The purpose of such “novelties”, according to Collins, was “always the” invention “maintenance of tradition” (59).

Later, Collins writes about the “Symmachan forgeries”:

This was the first occasion on which the Roman church had revisited its own history, in particular the third and fourth centuries, in search of precedents…. Some of the periods in question, such as the pontificates of Sylvester (314–355) and Liberius (352–366), were already being seen more through the prism of legend than that of history, and in the Middle Ages texts were often forged because their authors were convinced of the truth of what they contained. Their faked documents provided tangible evidence of what was already believed true.

The Symmachan forgeries reinterpreted some of the more embarrassing episodes in papal history, both real and imaginary. … How convincing these forged texts seemed in the early sixth century is unknown, but when rediscovered in later centuries, they were regarded as authentic records with unequivocal legal authority. … (Collins, 80–82).

This is how Rome does “interpretation”. The reliance of these bishops of Rome on fictions and forgeries to expand their realm is truly staggering. Collins says “It is no coincidence that the first systematic works of papal history appear at the very time the Roman church’s past was being reinvented for polemical purposes.” We have only seen the tip of the iceberg.

* * *

There was a representative of a pope present at the third Ecumenical council. History records a speech from “Philip the Roman Legate” at the Council of Ephesus (431 AD). It is important to note that this was at the third session – after all of the major issues had been decided, “after the conclusion of the whole matter”, after many of the important players had left. Philip stood up in front of an almost-empty room and said:

No one doubts, but rather it has been known to all generations, that the holy and most blessed Peter, chief and head of the Apostles, the pillar of the faith, the foundation stone of the Catholic church, received the keys of the kingdom from our Lord Jesus Christ the Savior and Redeemer of the human race, an that the power of binding and loosing sins was given to him, who up to this moment and always lives in his successors, and judges (D. 112).

For Roman Catholics, this counts as “papal ratification” of a council.

In reality, this speech of Philip’s was a novelty, a burp after a meal, a “don’t-forget-about-me” moment” which wasn’t on anybody’s mind at the time (except for those at Rome), and at Vatican I, we see here the real-life practice of what I’ve been calling “The Roman Catholic Hermeneutic”, returning “to the sources of divine revelation” – interesting how this afterthought of a speech turns into “a source of divine revelation” for the great and certain Roman Catholic IP, that fountain of all epistemological certainty.

This unimportant speech was cited at Vatican I (D. 1824), as precedent for and evidence of “the Perpetuity of the Primacy of Blessed Peter among the Roman Pontiffs.”

(The “D.” stands for Denzinger’s “Sources of Catholic Dogma”).