Digging Out the Embedded Church - The Maranatha Community

Later, the Western Church added the filioque clause in order to state that the Holy Spirit
proceeded from the Father „and from the Son‟ (filioque).
Gerald Bray writes:
„The filioque clause was never accepted in the East, and although it did not provoke
the great schism of 1054, it helped to prevent a reunion of the Churches in 1274 and
again in 1439. Today it is a major difference between the Eastern and Western
Churches.‟ 203
At one level, the filioque debate is a matter of semantics, a question of a Greek or Latin word
being preferred. The Greek (Eastern) church, in speaking of the relation of the Holy Spirit to
the Father, used „ekporeuesthai‟, to go forth as from a source, and the Latin (Western)
Church used „proceder‟, to come from, without involving any idea of origin.
The Western Church was keen to emphasize the full Deity of the Son, and filioque says that
the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and also from the Son. The Eastern Church, while
also holding to the full Deity of Christ, wished to safeguard the sole origin of the Holy Spirit
in the Father, as the source of all things, and so could not accept the filioque. The debate goes
on and there are theologians on both sides who maintain that theological truth, not just
semantics, is the issue at stake.
One way forward that has been suggested is that the Holy Spirit, proceeding from the Father,
should be seen as coming through the Son. Some Eastern theologians seem happy with this
definition.
The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed is the only Creed that all branches of the Church,
Orthodox (without the filioque), Roman Catholic and mainstream Protestant, can accept, and
so is an important basis for Christian Unity. Since 797 AD, no Council has been convened
which is truly ecumenical, binding on both Eastern and Western Churches; the Niceno-
Constantinopolitan Creed is a Creed coming from this period of the „undivided‟ Church.
At first, creeds were used as baptismal confessions; later thay were incorporated into
liturgies. So creeds are meant to be assertions of faith, a faith that binds all Christians to God
and to one another. These classical creeds have bound the people of God together through the
long history of the Church. Here is the value of retaining the creeds substantially as they were
first formed.
Where churches have dispensed with creedal confessions, they have tended to lapse into
some form of Unitarianism. This is graphically illustrated by the history of the English
Presbyterians, who abandoned creeds in the mid-18 th Century: all their congregations ended
up as Unitarian churches. Modern groups like the Brethren and the Pentecostal Churches,
while not reciting Creeds liturgically, have strong commitments to their doctrines. Cults like
the Jehovah‟s Witnesses and the Mormons reject the Creeds.
203 Bray, Gerald, Creeds, Councils and Christ, Mentor Books, 1997, p 183.
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