Confessing Nicene faith: why 1662?

Then shall be sung or said the Creed following, commonly called the Nicene Creed - Church of Ireland BCP 1926.

Following on from yesterday's post, it is worth considering two further aspects of the Prayer Book tradition's form of the Nicene Creed.

In a 1994 paper (Modern Theology 10:4 October 1994), Catherine Pickstock superbly analysed the theological implications of the syntax employed in the ICEL form of the Nicene Creed.  She notes, for example, how the Christological section of the Prayer Book Nicene Creed commences, 'And in one Lord Jesus Christ':

The second section, pertaining to the Son, does not lexically repeat the 'I believe', but refers anaphorically to the opening clause, (indeed, the first eighteen lines of text depend upon the opening 'I believe' as the main verb), so setting it within the same frame: we cannot utter 'I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ' except by means of belief in God 'the Father Almighty', and belief in one or belief in the other is belief in one and the same thing.

After a thorough analysis of the syntax in the ICEL form, Pickstock's conclusion is devastating:

[It] leaves the traditional Credal functions of performative enactment of Trinitarian relations, catechetical explanation, doxology, synaxis of participants, and representation of a sacred temporal order, unfulfilled ... False lacunae are created which fragment the narrative of salvation history, eliminating its continuity and purpose.

A second issue was flagged up by a recent Covenant post by Dr. Elizabeth Anderson on the implications for Trinitarian theology of future liturgical revision in TEC.  Anderson takes care to state that "the Episcopal Church has no authority to change the historic Creeds of the Church".  Regarding the use of gendered language in the Christological section of the Creed, however, she goes on to note that "both the Latin and the Greek versions of the Nicene Creed don’t use gendered pronouns here at all". Her conclusion is significant:

It is also worth noting that the translation of the Nicene Creed in the 1662 BCP — and thus in Rite I of the 1979 BCP — largely avoids this problem. It follows the Latin and Greek texts in beginning most of the Christological clauses with the third person singular verb: and was crucified…and ascended…and sitteth.

The contrast is actually quite stark.  The Christological section of the Nicene Creed in TEC BCP 1979 (Rite Two) uses he/his/him 9 times; Common Worship 8 times; and 1662 4 times.  1662 is then much closer to the traditional Latin and Greek forms regarding the use of gendered pronouns and, thus, the traditional conciliar confession of the Incarnation.  The repeated used of gendered pronouns in the contemporary form runs the risk of exalting the significance of gender in the Incarnation.  As Anderson states:

our current practice of using gendered pronouns in the creed asks us to make a dogmatic claim that simply isn’t present in either of the original languages. Perhaps a translation that retained the ambiguity of the original would therefore actually be both more generous and more prudent.

Of course, a translation retaining "the ambiguity of the original" is available: 1662.

Contending for the superiority of the Prayer Book tradition's form of the Nicene Creed is, therefore, no mere traditionalism or liturgical conservatism.  Rather, it is a recognition of the theological and liturgical strengths of this form in confessing the faith of Nicaea and Constantinople.  This is not least so when contrasted with the profound weaknesses in the contemporary form(s). It is another reason for contemporary Anglicanism to more fully retrieve the classical Prayer Book tradition, to be enriched by its profession of Nicene faith.