If both creeds lay out core Christian beliefs, why are there two of them? I’ve looked over both and they seem pretty similar. What are the main differences?
A plain-language explanation from someone more familiar with this would be great.
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The Apostles’ Creed is the shorter one. It’s also older, a baptismal summary used mostly in the Western church. The apostles didn’t write it themselves. It’s a summary of what they taught, laid out in a simple narrative.
The Nicene Creed came out of the councils of Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381, mostly because Christians were arguing over who Christ actually is. So it gets specific. Jesus is ‘begotten, not made’ and fully divine, and there’s more said about the Holy Spirit, the church, baptism, and resurrection.
One is a compact overview and the other is a fuller clarification, especially on the Trinity and Christ’s divinity. Same core faith, they just came about for different reasons.
I think the similarity is on purpose.
Both follow the same basic Trinitarian shape but do slightly different jobs. The Apostles’ Creed reads more like a personal summary of the gospel story. The Nicene Creed works as a shared public confession across a lot of churches. There are a couple of differences worth pointing out. The Apostles’ Creed mentions Christ’s descent to the dead. The Nicene Creed doesn’t use that wording. The bigger one is the Holy Spirit. Western versions of the Nicene Creed say the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, and Eastern churches leave that phrase out. That one phrase, the filioque, turned into a major fight between East and West.
I think of them as two angles on the same faith. One works for basic personal instruction, the other for the church confessing together.
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Short version: the Apostles’ Creed tells the story and the Nicene Creed defends it.
I grew up in a church that said the Apostles’ Creed every Sunday, so I could say it without thinking. Then a friend took me to a more liturgical service in college. Everyone stood for the Nicene Creed, and about a third of the way through I got lost. “God from God, light from light, true God from true God.”
It seemed like the same idea repeated. I stood there wondering why anyone would write it that way. Later I understood the reason for the repetition. The Apostles’ Creed says “Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord” and keeps going with the story. The Nicene Creed stops and won’t continue until it has made clear what “Son” means, because some people then were saying Jesus was created, just a very important creature. So the creed… adds phrase after phrase to rule that out. After that, those lines seemed like a firm stand. Someone insisting you won’t twist this around. Which creed a church uses usually depends on its tradition and the length of the service. What threw me off as a kid was the word “catholic” in “the holy catholic church.”
I asked my Sunday school teacher why we were mentioning Catholics and got a confused answer about it meaning “universal.” Both creeds have it. I think that word confuses more new people than any of the actual beliefs.
In the early church, when you got baptized, someone asked you “Do you believe in God the Father almighty?” You said “I believe” and under the water you went, then the same again for the Son and the Spirit. Over time the questions got smoothed into a paragraph you could recite. That’s why it reads like a story someone is telling you. Born, suffered, died, buried, rose, ascended. It was written for one person standing in the water, saying yes for the first time. The Nicene Creed was written for a different room—bishops in a fight to settle. In the original Greek it opens with “We believe” instead of “I believe,” though English translations switched it back to “I” for centuries and muddied the difference. So it’s a whole church agreeing on the terms and nailing the wording down tight so nobody could slip a different Jesus in sideways. Even the line about the church is more detailed. The Apostles’ Creed just says “holy catholic church,” while the Nicene adds “one” and “apostolic,” which were live issues at the time.
So, to the original question of why there are two: one is how you enter, the other is how the church stays in one piece once you’re in. My congregation uses the Apostles’ Creed at baptisms and the Nicene on communion Sundays, and once I saw that pattern the two stopped feeling redundant to me. It also explains why an Orthodox friend of mine had never once said the Apostles’ Creed in church. It was never part of their tradition, only ours in the West.
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It still gives me chills that “begotten, not made” came out of such fierce debate, and yet we get to speak those words every Sunday.
The little c catholic mix-up got me too as a kid, and I still call that line the universal remote clause in my head.
The original Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed says the Spirit proceeds from the Father, and that’s all it says. “And the Son” was added later in the West.
So Eastern churches see themselves as keeping the council’s original wording. That’s part of why the dispute is about theology, but also about whether one part of the church had the right to change a creed everyone shared.
Our congregation went back to the question-and-answer form for baptisms a few years ago. The pastor asks “Do you believe in God the Father almighty?” and waits for the answer. The first time I watched it, a teenager’s voice shook on “I believe.”
Each question gets answered out loud, and that makes it personal. The Orthodox friend who had never said the Apostles’ Creed also stuck with me. A coworker of mine from an Eastern parish told me they use the Nicene Creed at baptism too, since it’s the only creed they have, and the “I believe” sounds normal to them there. So the split between a creed for entering and a creed for staying together may just be a Western habit that happens to work for us. I’d still like to see more churches do Apostles’ at baptisms and Nicene on communion Sundays deliberately.
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The point about ‘catholic’ doing more damage than the doctrine lines matches what I’ve seen. I’ve taught a few adult classes for people joining the church, and that one word comes up every single time. Usually phrased as an apology, like the person is embarrassed to even ask. Nobody asks about ‘begotten, not made.’ They assume that part is hard and they’ll get to it later. But ‘catholic’ looks like a word they already know, so it feels like the creed is slipping in something they never signed up for.
Some Lutheran hymnals swapped in ‘Christian’ for this reason. I get the impulse, even if I think it gives something up. The lowercase c carries a lot of weight a listener can’t hear. What has worked for me is pointing out where the line sits, right after ‘the Holy Spirit’ and before ‘the communion of saints,’ so the creed is describing one church spread across every place and time. That usually settles it faster than the word ‘universal’ on its own, which tends to get the same puzzled look the Sunday school teacher got.
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I didn’t know some hymnals had changed the wording, though it makes sense given how often that line trips people up.
To my untrained ear it seems like a reasonable fix. Is it that ‘Christian’ loses the ‘one church everywhere and always’ sense you described, or is there more to it?
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The word ‘catholic’ comes from the Greek kath’ holou, which means something like ‘according to the whole,’ so it covers the church being spread out everywhere as well as being whole and complete.
The explanation that opened this up for me comes from Cyril of Jerusalem, who taught new believers in the 300s. He said the church is called catholic for several reasons:, It extends through the whole world., It teaches the whole faith, not bits of it., It gathers all kinds of people., It heals every sin.
‘Christian’ is true, but it mostly tells you the church belongs to Christ, which the creed has already established by that point.
Ignatius of Antioch used it around 107 AD, which is the earliest use we know of. So keeping the word ties you to that long history and to all the other churches still saying the same line. From what I read, the Lutheran swap even goes back to Luther’s German, which used ‘christliche,’ so it wasn’t a modern invention. I’d rather keep the word and have someone explain it, like with the ‘where the line sits’ trick.
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The Maronites use the Nicene Creed despite being in communion with Rome.
Nearly every apostolic church leans Nicene over the Apostles’ Creed, as far as I know. The Roman Church might be the main exception, where both get regular use, so the “why two creeds” question could partly come down to which tradition you’re standing in.