Celebrating the Nicene Creed

January 26, 2025

This year marks the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea which first formulated the beautiful, illuminating words of what came to be known as the Nicene Creed, common to a huge number of Christian denominations across the world.

Last Sunday, to mark the beginning of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, BBC’s Radio 4’s Sunday Worship programme dedicated its entire programme to a celebration of this extraordinary prayer.

In introducing it, the Anglican poet/priest, Malcolm Guite says: The Nicene Creed has summarised, expressed, and opened out the heart of our shared Christian faith for seventeen centuries! Almost nothing else in our culture and heritage has lasted that long. This creed has persisted through wars and revolutions, through changes of dynasty, the birth and development of languages, the rise and fall of empires. It has even survived the tragic divisions of Christendom. For even as Churches and nations battled each other over different understandings of church order, of scripture and of sacrament, they still held this creed in common.

The Sunday Worship programme draws on prayer, poetry, music and drama to explore how ““Each clause of the Creed is a highly concentrated and highly charged “nucleus” of Christian thought and belief and experience”. Access it at www.newpilgrimpath.ie.