Parish Magazine Item for The Year of Faith 2025

 

From The Rectory

 

It is the Diocesan Year of Faith! Well, obviously every year is, or ought to be, a Year of Faith. But 2025 is very special for at least two reasons.

First, the global church is celebrating 1700 years since The First Council of Nicaea which was called by the Emperor Constantine in 325AD. Pedants will want to pedant, but the Council was involved in giving us the Nicene Creed. Technically what we traditionally use at every Communion service is the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed which was promulgated at the Council of Constantinople in 381AD, but we can look forward to celebrating that at a future date!

 

Many books have been and could be written about the Nicene faith. What is the essence of it? The traditional Christian claim is that the Creeds don’t say anything which isn’t taught in or implied by the Scriptures. But the Creed is quite short and the Bible is very long. Creeds provide a convenient summary for teaching purposes. And importantly they respond to the errors of the moment. The Creed was intended to promote Christian unity and truth by including all those of the catholic (“universal”, worldwide) Christian faith and excluding those who had wandered off into heresy.

 

We can get a sense of the heart of the Nicene Creed by comparing it to the shorter so-called Apostles’ Creed, which we also continue to use today. They both tell the same story of the Triune God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, focused on his saving work in Jesus Christ and our vital response of belief, manifested in faith, trust and a changed life. Nicaea goes into more details about who the Son is:

 

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,

the only Son of God,

eternally begotten of the Father,

God from God, Light from Light,

true God from true God,

begotten, not made,

of one Being with the Father;

through him all things were made.

 

The Son is distinguished from the Father by his eternal relation of origin. The Son is all that the Father is, except Father. The Son is eternally begotten of the Father. He is not made. He is not a creature. Arius was wrong to say that the Son was just the best, holiest, most divine of God’s works. Arius thought “there was when he [the Son] was not” but God the Son was not made. He did not come into being. He has always and will always exist, eternally, necessarily. He is not a being but of one Being with the Father. The Father and the Son are never without one another. The Father is not before the Son in time for they are one eternal God.  

 

The word “of one Being” is homoousios in the Greek of the creed. Consubstantial in Latin. This extra-biblical technical terms means of one and the same substance or essence or being. Not that Father and Son are made out of the same third stuff, but that they share or are the same God-ness. They are both God in the same sense. So the Son is God from God, but there are not two Gods.

 

I know it is heady stuff!

 

Homousious (‘same substance’) was contrasted with homoiosious (which means ‘like substance’). And the second is heresy. Notice there is only one “i"s difference – one iota. But the church came to see that this one “i" makes all the difference in the world. Jesus is not just God-like, god-ish, sort of divine, God-lite but God Himself, True God. This is not theological hair splitting but the difference between truth and error, life and death, darkness and light.

 

The one true God is Father, Son and Spirit.

 

And, even if this is somewhat technical, it really matters. Jesus saves us. And only God could save us. If we know Jesus we know God.

 

So, as you can no doubt tell, this is all very important, fun and exciting.

 

Second, there is some Sussex history to celebrate in 2025 too. St Wilfrid evangelised the South Saxons in the Kingdom of Sussex and founded the Diocese of Selsey in 681 AD. This year we’re marking 950 years since the translation of the Cathedral (the Bishop’s seat and mother church of the diocese) from Selsey to Chichester. I think one of the claims to fame of our diocese is that our borders have been perhaps uniquely more less unchanged for almost a thousand years.

 

There is something very special about this combination of global and local. It is this great Christian faith shared by millions around the world that we are seeking to live out in our own way here and now.

 

And with our Christian brothers and sisters of other denominations, we are still seeking to live out the Christian mission to Sussex and the world afresh in our own generation.

 

You can read more about The Year of Faith on the Diocesan website or at: https://celebratingfaith.co.uk/

 

In January and February there will be a special celebration service in each deanery. Ours is at St Mary’s, Hailsham on Tuesday 25 February at 7:30pm with Bishops Martin and Will, followed by refreshments.

 

Also planned during the year are an ecumenical conference and the clergy conference.

 

There will be a Lent Course, a family camp and pilgrimages for young people.

 

The Cathedral has its own special programme of events and is inviting everyone to visit.

 

The Revd Marc Lloyd