Theology: Spirituality: Creeds

The Nicene Creed's powerful summary of Christian faith has stood the test of time, embodying core truths and distinguishing essential Christian teachings from those of lesser importance. As respected thinker and educator David Willis explores the Nicene Creed in this new book, he provides clues for meaningfully interpreting this most ecumenical of church creeds in the twenty-first century. Writing especially for educated laypeople, advanced students, and theological educators, Willis eloquently links the ancient creed to life today. As he points out, faith is constantly taking different shapes within broad boundaries like the creed's perennial truths, and even these truths need to be reinterpreted in each age to keep them intelligible and compelling. Willis admirably achieves this task for our day by elucidating the creed's statement of faith with analogies drawn from such diverse areas as architecture, graphic art, poetry, sculpture, and psychological theory. Those seeking to delve into the creed or to deepen a lifelong encounter with it will be enriched by Willis's reflections.

A comprehensive study of the rise, development and use of credal formulaines in the creative centuries of the Church's history.

The first part of Nicaea and its Legacy offers a narrative of the fourth-century trinitarian controversy. It does not assume that the controversy begins with Arius, but with tensions among existing theological strategies. Lewis Ayres argues that, just as we cannot speak of one `Arian'theology, so we cannot speak of one `Nicene' theology either, in 325 or in 381. The second part of the book offers an account of the theological practices and assumptions within which pro-Nicene theologians assumed their short formulae and creeds were to be understood. Ayres also argues that thereis no fundamental division between eastern and western trinitarian theologies at the end of the fourth century. The last section of the book challenges modern post-Hegelian trinitarian theology to engage with Nicaea more deeply.

In our world of research, logics and measurement many of the ideas of (the New Testament and of) the Fathers (pre-existence, incarnation, Virgin Birth, demons,etc.) are today no longer acceptable. For those people who, like the author, see in the Chalcedonian Jesus Christ a mythological creature, Markus' christology is an alternative which at present will surely be more welcome. «Jesus could be, ontologically speaking, nothing more than a man and, nevertheless, he could have been used by God... in a unique way for the sake of our salvation».