God the Father Almighty: The Trinitarian Depth of the First Article of the Creed

Throughout Scripture, in both the Old and New Testaments, God reveals himself as Father. He comes to the aid of Israel, his firstborn son, to rescue them from the land of Egypt (see Exod. 4:22-23 and Hos. 11:1). Centuries later, Isaiah appeals to this special Father-son relationship when he pleads with God to “rend the heavens and come down” (Isa. 64:1). He cries out, “You are our Father; we are the clay and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand” (Isa. 64:8). In the New Testament, the Lord Jesus repeatedly identifies God as his Father and invites his followers to do the same (e.g., Matt. 6:9, John 20:17). The full revelation of the gospel of Jesus Christ discloses to us the truth that God is our Father because of the union we have with Jesus the Son by the mighty working of the Holy Spirit. The apostle Paul puts the matter succinctly and profoundly:

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God (Gal. 4:4–6).

It is hard to imagine a more precious name by which the redeemed can address God than this one: “Abba! Father!”

It is no wonder then, that the Nicene Creed, perhaps the most widely beloved ancient confession of the Christian faith, would begin its confession by evoking the name Father:

I believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
and of all things visible and invisible;[1]

1. All quotations of the Nicene Creed are taken from Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, Vol. II: The Greek and Latin Creeds (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1984), 58–59.

This first article of the creed resonates with believers, in part because of the simplicity of the truth contained in it. Nevertheless, these simple words invite those who confess them into the unfathomable depths of the beauty and mystery of God’s very life. In this brief article, my aim is to help readers see how the first article of the Nicene Creed gives faithful expression to a double truth revealed in Scripture: (1) God is Father to creatures in his work of creation and redemption, and (2) the first person of the Trinity is the eternal Father of the eternal, only begotten Son.

The Central Question of Nicaea: Who is Jesus?

The Council of Nicaea (325 AD), the Council of Constantinople (381 AD), and the resulting Nicene Creed came about because of the Arian controversy, a fourth-century debate that revolved around the ever-important question of the true identity of Jesus Christ. Recall Jesus’s question to the disciples at Caesarea Philippi. “Who do you say that I am?” (Matt. 16:15). The two sides of the fourth-century debate answered that question in radically different ways. The Arians claimed that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is not truly God. Rather, they contended that he is a creature—exalted above all other creatures, to be sure—but a creature nonetheless. For them, only the Father is the true God; the Son is not. Faithful Christians, whose view was eventually enshrined in confessional form in the Nicene Creed, recognized that Scripture presents Jesus as truly God, equal with the Father, worthy of all worship, and true author of all the works of God. The Son of God, the orthodox contended, is not a creature but the eternal Creator of heaven and earth (John 1:1–3, 5:18–19, 10:30; Phil. 2:6; Col. 1:16; Heb. 1:1–4; etc.).

Nicaea and the Father

Although the true identity of the Son was central to the controversy, the Nicene fathers understood that the disagreement about the Son was also a disagreement about the Father, indeed, a disagreement about the very nature and identity of the one true God. For them, the divine name Father names God in two distinct ways, one of which the Arians blatantly denied—to the detriment of their souls and the souls of all who would imbibe their erroneous teaching.

God as Father to Creatures

Both parties agreed that the one true God reveals himself as Father in relation to creatures. Scripture is clear that there is a sense in which God is a father to all creatures by virtue of the fact that he made them. When Isaiah refers to God as the Father of Israel, he refers, not only to the covenant God entered with Israel but to the fact that God created them—“You are our Father . . .  we all are the work of your hand” (Isa. 64:8). Paul acknowledges this fact when he favorably quotes the Athenian poet, who said, “We are indeed his offspring” (Acts 17:28). The Nicene fathers seem to have this great truth in view in the first article of the creed because they confess faith in “God the Father Almighty” and then follow that immediately with the recognition that he is the “maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.” The Nicene fathers also seem to have in view the fact that the one true God is the Father of the redeemed in a special way since, in the second article of the creed, they specify that the Lord Jesus assumed a human nature in the incarnation “for us men and for our salvation.” It is those whom Christ came to save, therefore, that are confessing their faith in “God the Father Almighty.” The fact that God is Father to all creatures in one sense and the special Father of the redeemed in another sense is a glorious truth that we should not pass over quickly or take for granted. However, this is not the only rich truth about divine Fatherhood that the Nicene fathers wanted the church to believe and confess.

Eternal Father of the Eternal Son

For the church fathers at Nicaea (and later at Constantinople where the creed came into the form more familiar to us today), the divine name Father also names the first person of the Trinity in his eternal relation to the second person, the only begotten Son. One does not discern this merely by reading the first article of the creed, the article about the Father. Rather, one must read on and contemplate the claims of the second article of the creed, the one about the Son, in order to understand the meaning of Father as a divine name more fully. It should not be surprising that the article about the Son is needed to fully understand the article about the Father (and vice-versa) since the names Father and Son are irreducibly relational names. The name Father only has meaning in relation to another, in this case the Son. And the name Son only has meaning in relation to another, in this case the Father.

The second article of the creed refers to the “one Lord, Jesus Christ” with a series of descriptive phrases to help Christians understand who Jesus is. He is “the only begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds,” a statement which clearly locates the sonship of Jesus as logically prior to the creation of the universe. Furthermore, the creed describes the Son as “very God of very God, begotten, not made.” Thus, the Son, though eternally begotten of the Father, is not a creature. Rather, in terms of his being (his nature or substance), he is the same thing the Father is—“very God”—a phrase that could be translated as “true God.” The creed is saying that Jesus is not some lesser divine spirit, like an angel. Rather, he is the one true and living God. Cementing this fact, the Nicene fathers describe Jesus as “being of one substance with the Father.” The phrase “being of one substance” translates the Greek word homoousios, which is perhaps the most famous word of the whole creed. The authors of the creed want Christians to understand the biblical teaching that the Son is truly equal to the Father, sharing identically the same divine nature with him. Everything it means for the Father to be God is true of the Son, and vice-versa. The deity of the Father and Son is identical.

Having established the unity of the Father and the Son in one divine nature, the creed then instructs Christians regarding the unity of the Father and the Son in their works. The first article says that “God the Father almighty” is “maker of heaven and earth.” The second article then says that the Son is the one “through whom all things were made.” According to the Nicene Creed, it is not the case that the Father creates and the Son is created. Rather, the Father creates, and the Son also creates.[2] Thus, the Nicene Creed teaches the classical Christian doctrine of the inseparable operations of the Trinity.[3]

For the Nicene fathers, as for Scripture, the name Father is doing more than naming the relation between God and creatures. It is naming the divine person who eternally begets the eternal Son. Thus, the fatherhood of God is an eternal and necessary reality, in no way contingent on the existence of creation. This is exactly what the Arians denied. In their denial that the Son is God, they denied that God is eternally Father. For the Arians, the fatherhood of God only names the relation between God and creatures, never the relation between one truly divine person and another. This is detrimental to the splendor of the gospel, robbing this glorious message of its coherence. If the eternal relation between the Father and the Son is not true, then our union with the Son is merely a union with a created person, and the claim that such a person could forgive our sins and make us right with God becomes incoherent.

Conclusion

When Christians confess the Nicene Creed, we are confessing profound and glorious truths revealed in holy Scripture. When we confess the first article of the creed, “I believe in God the Father almighty,” we are confessing faith that God is our Father because of our union with the Son by the Spirit. But we are also confessing a truth far more sublime. Infinitely more glorious than God’s relationship to me as my Father is the eternal relation of God the Father with the eternal and only begotten Son. Apart from the more sublime truth of the eternal relation between Father and Son, there could be no relation between God and me by which I cry out to him as “Abba, Father!”