What Is the Filioque? The Latin Word Added to the Nicene Creed

Denominations ComparedSee all 113 articles in this series

The filioque is one Latin word that means “and from the Son,” and it is the word Western Christians added to the Nicene Creed. Where the creed of 381 says the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father,” the Latin version says he proceeds from the Father and the Son. Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Christians have never taken it up, Latin Catholics say it at Mass in their own languages and leave it out when the creed is said in Greek, and most Protestant confessions received it from the medieval West.

Early in the ninth century a pope who agreed with the teaching behind that word had the creed set up in silver without it. He held the teaching to be true and still would not change the creed, and Christians have been asking those same two things ever since. One is about God himself, whether the Son has any part in the Spirit’s eternal origin or whether all of it begins with the Father. The other is about us, whether one part of the Church may change a creed that a council gave to all of it.

Church	The Spirit’s origin	Where it says so
Eastern Orthodox	From the Father; the added word is refused	Creed of 381; Patriarchs’ Encyclical, 1848
Oriental Orthodox (Coptic and others)	From the Father alone; sent by the Son	Coptic diocese’s published answer; 2017 statement with Anglicans
Catholic	From the Father and the Son, as one principle; the Greek text stays without the word	Catechism 246–248; Vatican clarification, 1995
Lutheran	From the Father and the Son	Book of Concord
Presbyterian and Reformed	From the Father and the Son	Westminster Confession 2.3
Anglican and Episcopal	Article V says both; the Lambeth bishops asked member churches to consider dropping it from the Creed	Thirty-nine Articles; Lambeth 1978
Methodist	From the Father and the Son	Articles of Religion IV
Baptist	Bodies differ: both in the 1689 confession, no ruling in the 2000 one	Second London Confession; Baptist Faith and Message
Assemblies of God	From the Father and the Son	Statement of Fundamental Truths
Evangelical Friends (Quaker)	From the Father and the Son	Mid-America Faith and Practice
United Church of Christ	Both, in the creed it posts	Nicene Creed, 1988 text
Nazarene, Salvation Army, Amish and Mennonite, Adventist, Lausanne evangelicals, Churches of Christ, Disciples	No ruling on this question	See below
Oneness Pentecostal, Latter-day Saints, Jehovah’s Witnesses	The question does not arise in their teaching	See below

Our free tool, Compare Christian Denominations, sets any two of 22 churches side by side on this question and 54 others.

The bishops who met at Constantinople in 381, whose words we say as the Nicene Creed, had another worry altogether. People were calling the Holy Spirit a creature, so the bishops took a phrase from the Gospel of John and confessed faith “in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of life, who proceeds (ekporeuetai) from the Father, who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets.” When the North American Orthodox-Catholic Theological Consultation, a body of theologians from both churches, went through this history together in 2003, they wrote that “it was not a concern of the Council to specify the manner of the Spirit’s origin.”

In the Latin West, meanwhile, Christians had long spoken of the Spirit as coming from both. Ambrose of Milan wrote so in the 380s, Augustine gave the teaching its lasting form when he spoke of the Spirit as the gift of both, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church notes that Pope Leo I had “already confessed it dogmatically in 447.” In 589 the word turned up in a profession of faith at a local council in Toledo, in Spain, when King Reccared’s Visigoths came over from Arianism. It seems the Spanish bishops thought it had been in the creed all along, and for people leaving Arianism behind it was a way of saying that the Son is no less than the Father.

From Spain the longer creed travelled through Gaul and reached the court of Charlemagne at the end of the eighth century, and his theologians, rivals of Constantinople, began to treat it as the test of right faith. Around 808 some Western monks living in Jerusalem were denounced for using it, and they defended themselves by pointing to what was sung in Charlemagne’s own chapel at Aachen. A council at Aachen affirmed the doctrine in 809 or 810 and sent to Rome for approval. Pope Leo III told Charlemagne’s delegates that the teaching was orthodox, and he also told them he would not approve putting it in the creed, because the fathers of 381 had left it out. Around that time, the Liber Pontificalis says, he had two heavy silver shields made and displayed in St. Peter’s, carrying the creed of 381 in Greek and in Latin without the word. Charlemagne’s churches went on singing it anyway.

Rome itself held out for two more centuries, until the creed with the filioque was sung at a papal Mass for the first time in 1014, after Henry II was crowned emperor. Pope Leo XIV, writing on the creed in 2025, noted that the phrase “was inserted into the Latin Creed by Pope Benedict VIII in 1014 and is a subject of Orthodox-Catholic dialogue.”

The Byzantines had paid it little mind until Frankish missionaries brought it to their door in Bulgaria. In 867 Patriarch Photios of Constantinople wrote to the other Eastern patriarchs and called the addition a blasphemy, and he gave his reason, which was that the word implied two causes in God and took away the Father’s place as the one source of the Son and the Spirit. A council at Constantinople in 879–880, with representatives of Rome present, reaffirmed the creed of 381 without the filioque.

The date people remember is 1054, when the papal legate Cardinal Humbert excommunicated Patriarch Michael Cerularios at Constantinople and, among other charges, accused the Greeks of cutting the filioque out of the creed, though it was the West that had added it. The patriarch answered with anathemas of his own on the legates and condemned the Western use of the word. Yet those same scholars write that the exchange “did not lead, by itself, to a formal schism between Rome and Constantinople,” and the estrangement went on deepening until the sack of Constantinople in 1204 made it far worse. People still ask how Catholics and Orthodox differ and why they split.

Reunion was declared twice, at Lyons in 1274 and at Florence in 1439, and the East turned it down both times. Florence taught that the Spirit “proceeds from both eternally as from one principle and a single spiration,” and Constantinople formally rejected that council in 1484. In 1894 Pope Leo XIII addressed “you all of Greek or other Oriental Rites who are separated from the Catholic Church,” asking them to come back, and the reply from Constantinople the next year reached for the old pope’s silver. Leo III, the Patriarchate’s encyclical said, had “engraved on two silver plates, in Greek and Latin, the holy Creed of the first and second Ecumenical Councils, entire and without any addition,” and had written on them, “These words I, Leo, have set down for love and as a safeguard of the orthodox faith.”

Some of the trouble comes from translation, and Orthodox and Catholic scholars have said so together. The verb in John’s Gospel and in the creed is ekporeuesthai, and the Greek fathers kept it for the Spirit’s coming forth from the Father, as from the one source of the Godhead. The Latin Bible put procedere in its place, and the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity explained in 1995 that “a false equivalence was involuntarily created” by that choice, since “The Latin processio, on the contrary, is a more common term,” wide enough to cover the Son’s share in giving the Spirit without making him a second source.

So a Latin Christian who says the Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son” need not mean what a Greek Christian hears in those words. That is the Catholic case, and the same Vatican text insists that the filioque must never “appear to contradict the Monarchy of the Father nor the fact that he is the sole origin” of the Spirit’s coming forth in the Greek sense. The Orthodox and Catholic scholars take all of that seriously and still say the difference is “more than simply a verbal one,” so a better dictionary would not have spared us the argument.

Everyone starts in the same place, with Jesus at the supper saying, “But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me” (John 15:26). The Orthodox hear two different things in that one verse. Jesus will send the Spirit, and that happens in time, at Pentecost and whenever the Spirit is given, while the Spirit’s proceeding from the Father belongs to the eternal life of God. So when the Lord says, “If I depart, I will send him unto you” (John 16:7), and when he “breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost” (John 20:22), the Orthodox understand him to be giving the Spirit to his disciples. A Coptic diocese says it in one line, “the Spirit proceeds from the Father only, but is sent by the Son.”

Western readers notice how closely the Son is bound to the Spirit, and they find it in the same Gospel and in Paul. Jesus says of the Spirit, “he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you,” and goes straight on to “All things that the Father hath are mine” (John 16:14–15), and Paul says that “God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts” (Galatians 4:6) and speaks of “the Spirit of Christ” (Romans 8:9). Catholic theologians have reasoned that if the Son sends the Spirit in time, that must tell us something about who the Son is in eternity, for as the old Catholic Encyclopedia argued, “the inspired writers present the Holy Ghost as proceeding from the Son, since they present Him as sent by the Son.” The Greeks answer that all these passages speak of the Spirit’s mission in time, and the Latins reply that mission and procession run parallel.

No verse says in so many words “and from the Son,” and none says “from the Father alone,” so each side is reasoning from what Jesus did say toward what he left unsaid about the life of God. Those Orthodox and Catholic scholars wrote that “the first habit of mind to be cultivated is doubtless a reverent modesty,” and we do well to bring that to these verses, because the Holy Spirit they argue over is the one both sides confess as God, worshipped with the Father and the Son.

The Orthodox families

The Eastern Orthodox Church says only “from the Father,” following Jesus’ words in John 15:26, and the Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs of 1848 declared that “the said novel doctrine of the Holy Ghost proceeding from the Father and the Son is essentially heresy.” That is hard language, and Orthodox teaching holds something gentler beside it. As long ago as 1285 a council under Patriarch Gregory II at Blachernae, while rejecting the double procession, spoke of an “eternal manifestation” of the Spirit through the Son, and the Orthodox and Catholic scholars of our own day say that mainstream Orthodox theology does not think of the Spirit “as not ‘belonging’ properly to the Son when the Spirit is sent forth in history.”

The Coptic Orthodox Diocese of the Southern United States teaches that “The Orthodox Churches (non-Chalcedonian and Chalcedonians) believe in the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father alone.” The other Oriental Orthodox churches stand with them, and in their 2017 agreed statement with Anglicans the Oriental Orthodox churches said that they “consider the addition of Filioque as an error since it breaks the order within the Trinity and puts into question the Father’s role as source, cause, and principle of both the Son and the Spirit.”

Catholics

The Catholic Church teaches, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, that “The Latin tradition of the Creed confesses that the Spirit ‘proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque).’” Catholics do not mean by this that there are two sources in God. They mean that the Father is the first origin of the Spirit, and that because he is Father of the Son, the Father and the Son together are one source of the Spirit’s coming forth, and they count the Eastern way of saying it and the Western way as complementary so long as neither becomes rigid. The Catholic Church has also refused to add the phrase to the Greek text of the creed, even when Latins say the creed in Greek, so in Greek the creed still reads for Catholics as it read on Leo III’s shield. Among Eastern Catholics, who are in communion with Rome and worship in the rites of the East, the Byzantine Catholic Archeparchy of Pittsburgh has published a text, written in 1981, that prints “Who proceeds from the Father (and the Son)” with the last words in brackets.

Protestants who confess it

Protestants in general, where they state the doctrine at all, confess with the medieval West that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, and Presbyterian and Reformed churches say it in the Westminster Confession of Faith: “the Father is of none, neither begotten, nor proceeding; the Son is eternally begotten of the Father; the Holy Ghost eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son.” Lutherans confess in the Book of Concord’s text of the Nicene Creed the Holy Ghost “who proceedeth from the Father and the Son,” and Luther’s Smalcald Articles say the same, “the Holy Ghost proceeds from Father and Son.”

Methodists and Anglicans speak in very nearly the same words. The United Methodist Church says in Article IV of its Articles of Religion, “The Holy Ghost, proceeding from the Father and the Son, is of one substance, majesty, and glory with the Father and the Son, very and eternal God.” Anglicans say in Article V of the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles, “The Holy Ghost, proceeding from the Father and the Son, is of one substance, majesty, and glory, with the Father and the Son, very and eternal God.”

Yet Anglicans print the word in their Articles and keep asking whether it belongs in the creed. When Anglican and Orthodox theologians met at Moscow in 1976 they agreed that “The Filioque clause should not be included in this Creed,” and two years later the bishops of the Lambeth Conference asked “that all member Churches of the Anglican Communion should consider omitting the Filioque from the Nicene Creed.” The Episcopal Church in 1994 reaffirmed “its intention to remove the words ‘and the Son’ from the third paragraph of the Nicene Creed at the next revision of the Book of Common Prayer,” and as that revision has not come, the 1979 book still prints them. And when Anglicans sat down with the Oriental Orthodox in 2017, they said that their churches “generally interpret this addition in the sense of the temporal mission of the Holy Spirit,” which means his being sent into the world, the very distinction the Orthodox draw from John 15:26.

Baptists differ among themselves here, since a Baptist body chooses its own confession. The Second London Baptist Confession of 1689 says, “the Father is of none, neither begotten nor proceeding; the Son is eternally begotten of the Father; the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son.” The Baptist Faith and Message of 2000, held by Southern Baptists, says “The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of God, fully divine,” and does not take up his procession at all.

The word runs on into churches much younger than the creed. The Assemblies of God says in its Statement of Fundamental Truths that “the Father is the Begetter, the Son is the Begotten, and the Holy Spirit is the one proceeding from the Father and the Son.” The Evangelical Friends Church Mid-America Yearly Meeting says in its Faith and Practice that “The third person of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit, proceeds from the Father and the Son but is equal with Them.” Friends speak through their yearly meetings, so other meetings may say it differently. The United Church of Christ posts the Nicene Creed among its testimonies of faith in the 1988 English ecumenical text, which reads “who proceeds from the Father and the Son.”

Churches that have made no ruling

A good many churches have never ruled on this exact question, and we should not put words in their mouths. The Church of the Nazarene says in its Manual, “Our denomination receives the creeds of the first five Christian centuries as expressions of its own faith,” and the Manual does not rule on the filioque. The Salvation Army’s Handbook of Doctrine reports both sides, that “Most Christian churches affirm that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son” and that “Eastern Orthodox churches have held that the Spirit proceeds only from the Father,” and it chooses neither, saying, “All Christians uphold the co-equality of the three persons, however this may be expressed.”

Others speak of the Spirit being sent, which both sides of this dispute already accept, and stop there. Amish and Mennonites share Anabaptist roots, and the Mennonite Confession of Faith of 1963 confesses “the Holy Spirit, who was sent by the Father and the Son,” and does not say where the Spirit eternally comes from. Seventh-day Adventists say in Fundamental Belief 5 that the Holy Spirit is “Sent by the Father and the Son to be always with His children,” and that belief leaves his eternal origin unaddressed. The Cape Town Commitment of the Lausanne Movement, a statement many evangelical and nondenominational Christians share, calls the Holy Spirit “the missionary Spirit sent by the missionary Father and the missionary Son,” and it makes no ruling on procession.

Others again ask for nothing beyond the Bible or the confession of Christ himself. Churches of Christ have no creed that rules on the filioque, and the tract Who Are the Churches of Christ and What Do They Believe In? explains, “There is no other manual or discipline to which the members of the church of Christ give their allegiance.” The Disciples of Christ confess in their Principles of Identity that Jesus is the Christ and Lord, “requiring nothing more – and nothing less – as a basis of our life together,” and they have made no statement on the Spirit’s procession.

Churches where the question does not arise

Three more bodies understand God differently enough that the argument never reaches them. The United Pentecostal Church International teaches that “There is one God, who has revealed Himself as Father; through His Son, in redemption; and as the Holy Spirit, by emanation,” so Oneness Pentecostals have no procession between divine persons to dispute. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that “the members of the Godhead are three separate beings” and that “the Holy Ghost is a personage of spirit,” and its statement does not use the language of procession. Jehovah’s Witnesses teach that “The holy spirit is God’s power in action, his active force,” and not a person, so for them there is no origin of a person to discuss.

Each side has at times used the harshest word it had, for the Second Council of Lyons condemned those who denied that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, and the Patriarchs of 1848 called the teaching heresy. Those same Orthodox and Catholic theologians recommended that “Orthodox and Catholics refrain from labeling as heretical the traditions of the other side on the subject of the procession of the Holy Spirit,” and they asked the Catholic Church to use the original Greek text alone in making translations of the creed and to declare that the condemnation made at Lyons “is no longer applicable.” They made these requests, they wrote, in the conviction that their traditions’ different ways of understanding the procession of the Spirit “need no longer divide us.” Theirs is a recommendation to their bishops, and they say themselves that their statement will not end the disagreement, and that the Pope’s authority “remains the root issue” behind all that divides the two churches.

Popes have nevertheless been saying the creed without the word when the Orthodox stand beside them. John Paul II said it in Greek with Patriarch Bartholomew in St. Peter’s in June 1995, and the Vatican’s Dominus Iesus of 2000 quotes the creed of 381 without it. On November 28, 2025, at Iznik, the site of ancient Nicaea, overlooking the ruins of a basilica on the lake, Pope Leo XIV and Patriarch Bartholomew marked 1,700 years since the council by reciting the creed together, and it “did not include the phrase known as the ‘filioque.’” Twelve centuries after Leo III set up his silver, another Leo stood beside a patriarch and said the creed the way the shields have it.

Those scholars end their statement by praying about the Spirit “that the one truth towards which he guides us may truly be ‘a bond of peace,’” and those last words are Paul’s. Whichever way we say the creed on Sunday, we can pray that with them, and go on “Endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:3).

---

• Compare Christian Denominations: what 22 churches teach on 55 questions
• Byzantine Catholic vs Roman Catholic: One Church, Two Ways of Worship
• Lutheran vs. Eastern Orthodox: Scripture, Salvation and Communion Compared
• Baptist vs. Eastern Orthodox Beliefs
• What Does the Bible Say About the Holy Trinity?
• Pentecostals and the Trinity: What Do They Believe?

More from this seriesDenominations ComparedSee all 113 articles