THE MEANING OF THE CHRISTIAN CONFESSION OF FAITH: EXPLAINING THE NICENE CREED THROUGH UNIVERSAL HUMAN CONCEPTS

This paper is part of a larger project, aiming at re-thinking Christian faith through universal human concepts, and at the same time exploring the scope of possible human understanding, across languages and cultures. Semantics can be divided into three main branches: lexical semantics, grammatical semantics and “textual semantics.” The first is concerned with the meaning of words, the second with the meaning of grammatical constructions, and the third with the meaning of entire texts. This paper belongs to the third kind, as its purpose is to explicate the meaning of a text, or, more precisely, part of a text. The text in question, the ‘Nicene Creed,’ is a fixed text articulating the core of Christian belief, agreed upon in its Greek version at two great councils of the Church in the fourth century, Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381, when the Church was still undivided. It is a text which to this day expresses the common faith of Christians in Western and Eastern Christianity. The paper seeks to “unpack” the meaning of the opening lines of the Nicene Creed: “I believe in one God, Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.” It relies on the methodology known as NSM (from Natural Semantic Metalanguage). The three semantic texts arrived at in the paper present the meaning of the opening lines of the Creed in words, phrases and sentences which are simple, clear, and universally cross-translatable.