On the Council of Nicaea’s 1700th anniversary, can its creed still be confessed by contemporary Christians in a culture full of “buffered selves” (C. Taylor) and suspicious of long-ago metaphysical worldviews and appeals to transcendence? This essay retrieves the “thinkability” and “experienceability” of the Nicene Creed by (1) considering its place in its usual performative liturgical setting, (2) recalling its provocative historical solution and the still-remaining ontotheological problem, (3) retrieving as much as possible the experience of revelation and salvation that the creed articulates, and (4) applying a performance hermeneutic that considers the creed as analogous to a musical score that needs performance-over-time for its meaning to be thinkable, experienceable, and revelatory.

How does political theology, with its eschatologically themed commitment to both
critique and constructive transformation of the social, economic, and political in the
light of the Gospel, break through to a distressed Western polis focused on the
immediate and the short-term, with almost no sense of a “future”? I suggest discipleshipas-performance and a temporal and sacramental “natural theology of desire,” in tune
with the revelation of the grace of God in Christ in time, as ways of addressing this
conundrum and seconding Pope Francis’s insight that “time is greater than space.