Editorial Nicaea at 1700: Roots and Branches in African Christianity

This issue of African Christian Theology is a themed issue celebrating the seventeenth centennial of the Nicene Creed. For the majority of Christians around the world, the Nicene Creed of 325 and the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381 remain normative. But many dismiss Nicene articulations of Christian faith as a corrupted hellenization of Christianity. Calls to de-hellenize Christianity are as common as calls for decolonization. ... The Nicene Creed (325) and its revision, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (381), arose equally from the testimony of the Apostles, the witness of Scripture, and the Church’s lived experience of God in Christ. ... From Athanasius (c. 296 – 373) and Augustine (354–430) to Yared the Melodist (500s) of Aksum in the patristic era, to medieval Coptic and Nubian and Ethiopian Christian communities, to millions of contemporary Christians from Senegal to Eritrea and Morocco to Madagascar and Angola to Zimbabwe, the Creed is not mere western dogma but is also an African doxology which arises not from philosophical speculation but from lived experience of God in Christ. Moreover, the Nicene Creed was not created from the top down (and was certainly not written by the emperor) — the attendees represented a suffering people who had just emerged from a period of intense persecution at the hands of Empire — and the Creed arose as an ecumenical and global expression of a lived faith.