Jeremy Taylor Week: the Nicene Creed and the Rule of Faith

On this 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, this year's Jeremy Taylor Week - the days around his commemoration on 13th August - will be considering Taylor's understanding and use of the Nicene Creed. We begin with a text from Taylor's writings that has often produced some puzzlement, The Liberty of Prophesying (1646). There is, I think, little cause for such puzzlement. The Liberty of Prophesying reflects two contexts. 

The first is the theological thought centred on the Great Tew Circle, not least Chillingworth's The Religion of Protestants (1637). Taylor's affinity with Great Tew is well established, as are his interactions with Chillingworth. The Liberty of Prophesying breathes the same air as The Religion of Protestants, setting forth a generous Protestant irenicism, best embodied, in the view of both works, in the Church of England.

The second context, however, is the radically different political landscape addressed by the The Liberty of Prophesying. With Royalist forces having been defeated in the first Civil War (1642-46), the policy of Charles I - in, to say the least, an incredibly challenging political context - was to attempt to appeal to the Independents amongst the Parliamentarians, against those seeking to impose a Presbyterian settlement. Taylor's work was a theological justification of this royal policy, aiming to create theological, political, and legal space for Episcopalianism amongst the ruins of the constitutional and ecclesiastical order.

How does this relate to the Nicene Creed? Taylor, following Chillingworth, set forth the sufficiency of the Apostles' Creed. As Chillingworth declared, it was "a common saying of Protestants, that it is sufficient for salvation, to believe the Apostles Creed, which they hold to be a Summary of all fundamental points of Faith". In the Apostles' Creed contains "all points of simple belief which they [i.e. the Apostles] taught as necessary to be explicitly believed". This was also Taylor's insistence in The Liberty of Prophesying: 

the faith of the apostles' creed is entire, and he that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; that is, he that believeth such a belief as is sufficient disposition to be baptized, that faith with the sacrament is sufficient for heaven.

This may seem a very unpromising start for a discussion of the Nicene Creed. And, indeed, Taylor states that pre-Nicaea the Apostles' Creed was the sufficient rule of faith:

For whatever private men's opinions were, yet, till the Nicene council, the rule of faith was entire in the apostles' creed; and provided they retained that, easily they broke not the unity of faith, however differing opinions might possibly commence in such things in which a liberty were better suffered than prohibited with a breach of charity.

What is more, Taylor almost anticipates contemporary historical accounts of Nicaea by pointing to the role of contingency and misunderstanding in the Alexandrian debates leading to the Council, and portrays Arius in a manner not unlike that proposed by Rowan Williams:

For the first Alexander, bishop of Alexandria, in the presence of his clergy, entreats somewhat more curiously of the secret of the mysterious Trinity and Unity; so curiously, that Arius (who was a sophister too subtle as it afterward appeared) misunderstood him; and thought he intended to bring in the heresy of Sabellius. For while he taught the unity of the Trinity, either he did it so inartificially or so intricately, that Arius thought he did not distinguish the persons, when the bishop intended only the unity of nature. Against this Arius furiously drives; and to confute Sabellius, and in him (as he thought) the bishop, distinguishes the natures too, and so to secure the article of the Trinity, destroys the Unity. It was the first time the question was disputed in the world; and in such mysterious niceties, possibly every wise man may understand something, but few can understand all, and therefore suspect what they understand not, and are furiously zealous for that part of it which they do perceive. 

Why, then, the need for the Council and its Creed?

Now, then, that [Constantine] afterward called the Nicene council, it was upon occasion of the vileness of the men of the  Arian part, their eternal discord and pertinacious wrangling, and to bring peace into the church; that was the necessity; and in order to it was the determination of the article.

The Council's Creed functioned as a means to restore peace to the Church after the Alexandrian controversies because of its relationship to Scripture and to the Apostles' Creed, the rule of faith. The definition of Nicaea prevailed against Arian formulations because it was more faithful to Scripture: "if they [i.e the Nicenes] had not had better arguments from Scripture than from tradition, they would have failed much in so good a cause". 

This was it which the good emperor Constantine propounded to the fathers met at Nice: "The Gospels, the writings of the apostles and ancient prophets, plainly teach us what we ought to believe in religion."

The Creed of Nicaea was also an explication of the rule of faith as contained in the Apostles' Creed:

a further explication of the articles apostolical; which is a certain confirmation that they did not believe more articles to be of belief necessary to salvation ... therefore, although they took liberty in Nice to add some articles, or at least more explicitly to declare the first creed, yet they then would have all the world to rest upon that, and go no farther, as believing that to be sufficient. St. Athanasius declares their opinion: "That faith, which those fathers there confessed, was sufficient for the refutation of all impiety, and the establishment of all faith in Christ and true religion." 

It is on this basis that Taylor declares, "I am much pleased with the enlarging of the creed, which the council of Nice made, because they enlarged it to my sense", that is, in faithfulness to the Scriptures and as an exposition of the Apostles' Creed. And, in contrast to the Athanasian Creed, Taylor also points to "that moderate sentence and gentleness of charity ... as there was in the Nicene Creed". Thus are the Christological declarations of the first four general councils affirmed by Taylor:

And therefore the council of Nice did well, and Constantinople did well; so did Ephesus and Chalcedon; but it is because the articles were truly determined (for that is part of my belief).

What, however, the Creed of Nicaea is not dependent upon is the authority of a general council.  Taylor is here concerned to refute the view that the role of the Nicene Creed begins and justifies a process whereby conciliar authority adds to the rule of faith:

Therefore the Nicene council, although it have the advantage of an acquired and prescribing authority, yet it must not become a precedent to others, lest the inconveniences of multiplying more articles, upon as great pretence of reason as then, make the act of the Nicene fathers, in straitening prophesying, and enlarging the creed, become accidentally an inconvenience.

He therefore explicitly states:

There is no general council that hath determined that a general council is infallible: no Scripture hath recorded it; no tradition universal hath transmitted to us any such proposition; so that we must receive the authority at a lower rate, and upon a less probability than the things consigned by that authority.

Furthermore, Taylor reminds us of the realities of Nicaea:

in respect of the whole church, even Nice itself was but a small assembly.

To faithfully profess the Creed of Nicaea, therefore, is not to recognise a right of general councils to add to the rule of faith, never mind to accept any notion of conciliar infallibility. It is, rather, to acknowledge that the faith of Nicaea is dependent upon the Scriptures and is inherent to the rule of faith that is the Apostles' Creed. Here, I think, is the most significant insight of Taylor's reflection on the Creed of Nicaea in The Liberty of Prophesying: to confess the Apostles' Creed is to confess the truth of the Christological proclamation of Nicaea, for "it was an explication of an article of the creed of the apostles, as sermons are of places of Scripture".