Always Reforming - the Nicene Creed
The Reformers didn’t see themselves as innovators but as renovators. The Reformation was emphatically not the invention of a new religion, but the rediscovery of old apostolic truths that had been lost, obscured and corrupted by centuries of drift and deviation. One of the (many!) slogans of the Reformation was the Latin phrase ad fontes – ‘to the fountainheads’ – back to the springs, the original sources! Above all this referred to the Scriptures in the original languages, but Nicaea was one of those springs as well. Calvin makes this point in his letter to the Roman Catholic Cardinal Sadaleto: ‘Our agreement with the ancient church is far greater than yours.’ It is the Reformers who are the true heirs of Nicaea.
The 1700th anniversary is a good opportunity to be reminded of this. The Nicene Creed belongs to! We stand with it at the heart of orthodox, apostolic Christianity.
Maybe you’re a devoted subscriber of the 1646 Westminster Confession of Faith, or the 1689 London Baptist Confession. Well and good! But maybe you think that because you have that you don’t need to bother thinking about anything that came before it – that spending time studying the Nicene Creed seems as pointless as going back to using an iPhone 3 or a Betamax video recorder! Why would anyone do that? What we have now does all that those earlier models did and does it better and does much more besides!
But it’s good to go back and be encouraged that what we believe today not just invented last Thursday. It’s particularly helpful to remember at a time in the West when Christianity seems to be diminishing and the kingdom of God seems to be on the back foot. The Nicene Creed reminds us of all the people before us in history who said these same words, who believed same things about God as we do – as Gavin Ortlund puts it, the old farmer in Corinth, the wealthy merchant in Rome, the actress in Antioch who was converted out of an immoral lifestyle, the child in a village in ancient England converted trough Augustine’s mission there in C6th – they’re all saying these very words to confess their common faith in the Triune God.
It’s a good antidote to the kind of chronological snobbery we often find in many evangelical churches today – looking down on anything old as old fashioned and out of date. But it also responds to a growing longing in many places for something solid and ancient that has stood the test of time. That’s what these ancient creeds give us.
The Nicene Creed is also a great example of another Reformation principle: ‘always reforming.’ For it is a development of earlier creeds—restating, clarifying and making it more precise according to the needs of the day. This is very clear when we compare it to the Apostles’ Creed (which seems to have had its beginnings in the C2nd. It affirms belief in the Father, Son and Spirit but doesn’t say anything about the divine nature of the Son and nothing at all about the Holy Spirit beyond the implied statement of his deity.
But as different ideas began to develop about how precisely we should understand the nature of the Son of God, fuller and more exact language was needed to explain the Bible’s teaching about the Son. Everyone believed that Jesus was the Son of God—there was no disagreement about that. But in what sense was Jesus the Son of God? What precisely was the relationship between the Father and the Son? These debates came to a head in the C4th because a priest in Alexandria called Arius was teaching that Jesus was a semi-divine creature, not eternal but created by God the Father. He reasoned that if Jesus had been begotten that meant that there was a point at which he came into existence. Begetting implies a beginning. His slogan was ‘There was a time when he was not.’
Arius was a charismatic figure and his teaching spread widely, helped along by catchy songs he composed to get his ideas into people’s heads. And so in 325 AD, 318 bishops gathered in the city of Nicaea to respond to Arius’s teaching. What they were not doing was inventing an esoteric, complex doctrine of the Trinity, but clarifying what Scripture taught about the being of God.
Slightly confusingly(!), what we call the Nicene Creed is actually a later, further refinement of the 325 Creed of Nicaea. Its full name is the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, produced by the Council of Constantinople in 381. It was based on the theology hammered out by the Council of Nicaea, but expanded and clarified it further because of ongoing theological controversy about how best to understand the nature of the Son of God.
As we compare the Apostles’ Creed, the Creed of Nicaea (325) and the Nicene Creed (381), we can see how the unchanging truth about the person and work of Jesus Christ revealed in Scripture was being stated with ever-increasing clarity and precision.
The Nicene Creed is a testimony to us of the importance of being as precise as possible in our thinking and articulation of our beliefs about God. That’s a challenge and encouragement to us in an age when there is so much impatience with theological discussion. Christians say, ‘Let’s just love Jesus and one another. Let’s stop splitting doctrinal hairs and just share the gospel with the lost.
But even these simple statements immediately involve us in the deep theology at the heart of the Nicene Creed. The issue of the Son’s relationship to the Father is not some obscure philosophical riddle. Who is Jesus? What does it mean to love him? Can we worship him as God? What is the gospel we are to share with the lost? How does Jesus save us—what did he do and what do we have to do to get the benefit of that work for us?
We need to do the hard work of rigorous, careful thinking. Peter Sanlon writes, ‘God could have just told us in a voice from heaven what we should believe about his Son—as he did at our Lord’s baptism. Instead God gave us a perfect scriptural revelation which requires agonising time, debate and mutual submission to understand.’
This should make us so thankful for the work of those who have done the hard graft of Reformation—these brothers who hammered these things out without the help of Calvin and Bavinck to guide them! We stand on the shoulders of giants! Are we making the most of the rich inheritance we’ve been left?
The Nicene Creed is an example of God’s sovereignty over heresy. Heresy is not a good thing—it is evil. But in his sovereign wisdom God is able to use it for good. Again and again, God uses heresy and controversy to force the church to think more clearly about the truth. Rom 8.28 applies to the realm of heresy too—all things really does mean all things! In heresy, God raises up thinkers to articulate the truth more precisely for their day: men of Issachar who know the times. It happened at Nicaea and it still happens today.
For example, the LGBTQ+ agenda forces the church to think harder about the doctrine of man and the image of God and the nature of sexuality—all of which is a blessing to the church. Kevin DeYoung says, ‘If the 318 bishops from the Council of Nicaea were alive today, undoubtedly they would see the Christian faith threatened in new and different ways. The Nicene Creed is a creedal floor, not a creedal ceiling.’
We need to be faithful in our day and generation. We don’t fight the battles of 1700 years ago but the issues of 2025. The truth doesn’t change, but the world into which we speak it does.
Heresy leads the church to bring new facets of truth to light that otherwise might have been missed—emphases that might not have been sounded. God’s truth is infinite, so can never exhaust it. We can never say, ‘I know it all now!’ There will always be more to learn, to all eternity.
There is a great scene at the end of the movie National Treasure, where the heroes of the story finally discover the treasure room deep underground, which contains a legendary treasure gathered down the ages. It’s a great, dark cavern. There are channels full of oil that run throughout the cavern and once lit they illuminate the treasure, revealing all the piles of glittering jewels and art and priceless artifacts. But the truly breathtaking thing, the dramatic reveal is that the oil channels run on and on and separate and as they ignite we discover that the treasure is unimaginably more vast than we could have dreamt! The light spreads and shows up acres and acres of priceless riches. To me that is a picture of what eternity will be like for the people of God. More and more light enabling us to see more and more of the splendour and majesty of God, spreading eternally in an ever-widening radius.
And yet there will always be so much that we cannot know, even to all eternity. There will always be mystery because of the infinity and incomprehensibility of God. We have truth—much truth—but we will never possess all truth.
The Nicene Creed didn’t remove all mystery about the eternal generation of the Son, nor have the subsequent 1700 years of reflection. It set boundaries at the edges of what we can say, but there will always be so much more to know that we can’t know, because our minds are not infinite. This shouldn’t trouble us, however.
Mystery is to be expected when it comes to the deep things of God. More than that, mystery is to be desired! A God we can fully understand is not worthy of our worship. Mystery is evidence of the truth of Scripture. If Christianity had been invented by man, there wouldn’t be any mysteries—it would all be perfectly understandable and rational. There would be no need for faith—nothing that baffled or outraged human reason. A mystery is not the same as a contradiction—it’s simply something we don’t understand. Our inability to understand something doesn’t make it untrue
This should lead us to quiet trust in the Lord and worship!