31st July 2025

Before the Nicene Creed was written there was a long tradition, both from scripture and the Church Fathers teaching that Jesus is God. John begins his gospel with ‘the Word was God’ (John 1:1) and ends with Thomas’s words, ‘My Lord and my God!’ (John 20:28). Paul tells us that Jesus was ‘in very nature God’ (Philippians 2:6) and that ‘God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him…in bodily form’ (Colossians 1:19; 2:9). Additionally, several Church Fathers proclaimed Jesus is God. ¹ 

The Arians challenged this tradition, claiming that the Son is a creature, ‘not like or of the same “substance” as the Father, and that there had to be a time when he did not exist.’ ²  To refute this heresy, the Creed declares Christ to be ‘of one being with the Father’ (Greek: homoousios tō Patri). The point is that Jesus Christ, as fully God, shares with the Father the ‘same, one’ (Greek: homo) ‘being, essence, substance’ (Greek: ousia), of God. Jesus Christ is fully God in his very being and nature, as T.F. Torrance explains, ‘The Father/Son relation falls within the one being of God, the Father and the Son inhering and coexisting eternally, wholly and perfectly in one another.’ ³

The phrase ‘Through him all things were made’ (John 1:3) highlights that the Son is identified with the Creator and existed before creation. Athanasius asserted that ‘the Son is continuously co-eternal with the Father’ ⁴  and this thought is expressed in the Creed through the image of light (from light): ‘[Just as] light is never without its radiance, so the Father is never without his Son…Moreover, just as light and radiance are one and are not alien to one another, so the Father and the Son are one and are not alien to one another but are of one and the same being. And just as God is eternal light, so the Son of God as eternal radiance of God is himself eternally light without beginning and without end.’ ⁵

The significance of this understanding for us today is that God is perfectly revealed in Jesus Christ. Philip once asked Jesus, ‘Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.’ To which, Jesus answered: ‘Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, “Show us the Father”? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me?’ (John 14:8-10). The implication being, ‘To believe in the Lord Jesus Christ is to believe in God himself…In the incarnation God has revealed himself to us…God is completely identical with his self-revelation in Jesus Christ…The Son of God in his incarnate Person is the place where we may know the Father as he is in himself…The utterly astonishing thing proclaimed in the Gospel is that God himself came among us precisely as man…in body, mind and soul.’ ⁶ 

By becoming truly man while remaining truly God, Jesus was able to achieve our salvation. It’s to this good news the Creed now turns.

¹ Including Ignatius of Antioch, Irenaeus of Lyons, Tertullian, and Origen in the second and third centuries, Ray, Stephen, and Walters, Dennis, The Faith For Beginners: Understanding the Creeds, p 47. 
² ibid.
³ Torrance, T.F.  The Trinitarian Faith, p 119.
⁴ ibid., footnote 28, p 120.
⁵ ibid., p 121.
⁶ ibid., pp. 135-136.

Local congregation:
Grace Communion West Hampstead 
Sidings Community Centre
150 Brassey Road
West Hampstead
London
NW6 2BA

Meeting time:
Sunday 12.30 pm

Local congregational contact:
Gordon Brown
gordon.brown@gracecom.church

Word of Life contact:  
wordoflife@gracecom.church