John 14:6: "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."
Understood relationally, this means: No one comes to the Father except through entering the direct and reciprocal relation by way of Sonship. There is no Father without Son (or Child); there is no Son (Child) without Father.
The importance then lies not in defining the essence of Father, Son, or Holy Spirit, but rather in participating in the relations into which we are invited, into the circulation of divine love, even if it is only two or three involved (or four, in the case of this diagram) who are "gathered in my Name." Anything less than this reciprocal relationship is reduced to an abstract ideological belief in "God," based wholly on discursive reason, and which doesn't participate in the love that God is (in contrast with faith, i.e. "trust," which implies relation-with).
This is the way into not only the church itself but into the life of the Trinity, where it is "Not I that lives [or loves!], but Christ in me." In the same spirit of "Not I, but Christ in me," Simone Weil: "We must not help our neighbor for Christ, but in Christ… In general, the expression ‘for God’ is a bad one. God ought not to be put in the dative [case]. We should not go to our neighbor for the sake of God, but we should be impelled towards our neighbor by God, as the arrow is driven towards its target by the archer" [emphases mine].
Anything less reduces the church to membership in an organization like any other with a set of extrinsic propositions to assent to (many churches do just this — and the more toxic they are, the more likely they resort to this discursive notion of "faith"). This is not to say that Nicene Creed has no value — rather it reveals the underlying erroneous assumption is the Creed is a set of propositions like any other, and so we, living in a profoundly anti-metaphysical age, can't make sense of it any other way. And this limitation is true of worship in general, and of prayer, and of the sacraments. It is in this sense that Nietzsche said "God is dead, and we have killed him." The church is either the “mystical Body of Christ" or it is nothing at all.
One may certainly have to enter into the desert, so to speak, when when there appear to be no available options (and there are not many, espially in the US), but faith is not an individualistic enterprise (which cannot thrive), but a communal sharing which comes by grace, in participation in the life of the Trinity. The Trinity is not mere theological abstraction, but the very life of the church itself.
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