"[And the Son]"

In the Nicene Creed we confess: “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father.” The Western, Latin text of the Nicene Creed has an extra word after “from the Father”: filioque which translated means “and the Son.” In the text of the creed we recite on Sundays, I’ve put “and the Son” in square brackets, to mark the addition. 

Why is there a difference? And what difference does it make whether we confess that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father or we confess that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. In this note I will briefly consider why there is a difference. In my next note, I’ll consider what difference it makes.

To begin, let’s not dismiss this as a silly controversy in history that doesn’t really matter for us. Our confession of who God is, as he has made himself known in Scripture, really does matter. God is who he is. If we’re not surrendered to his self-revelation, we’re making God who we want him to be and that’s idolatry. Idolatry is the worship of idols. We call right theology orthodoxy (right doxology) because it gives us the language of true and faithful worship. 

As we’ve seen in previous notes, our confession that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father cites thewords of Jesus himself in John 15:26 and reveals something very important about the triune God. God is one because he is one in being. The Spirit and Son have their being from the Father and they are one in being with the Father. The Son is eternally begotten from the Father and the Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father. Begetting and proceeding distinguishes Father, Son, and Spirit: the Trinity. 

The word filioque (“and the Son”) was added to the creed by a council of Western bishops in Toledo in 589. The church in Spain was still fighting Arianism, a heresy that denied the divinity of the Son and the Son’s unity in being with the Father. By saying that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, the council was trying to say that the Father and the Son are one in being.

This addition was not widely accepted among Western churches. In the early 800s, the Emperor Charlemagne promoted the addition, but Pope Leo III opposed it. It was not adopted in Rome until the year 1014, when the Holy Roman Emperor Henry II wanted the filioque added to the creed at his coronation mass. 

The year 1054 marks the official schism between the Eastern (Orthodox) and Western (Roman Catholic) churches. The addition of filioque (“and the Son”) in the creed was one of the reasons the Eastern and Western churches split. A proper history of this schism must consider various political, cultural, ecclesiastical, and theological factors; however, the filioque was a major theological factor.

Why was the Eastern Church so concerned? What difference does it make? I want to consider the theological implications of the filioque in my next note.