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-title: Why the creeds matter
-hidden: true
-description: >-
-  Plenty of Christians don't think the creeds are important for their faith.
-  Plenty others take the creeds for granted. But Christians ought to appreciate
-  that the creeds are a sophisticated, profound and essential foundation of the
-  church.
-pubDate: 2025-09-24
----
-
-<blockquote>
-  But you, man of God, flee from all this, and pursue righteousness, godliness,
-  faith, love, endurance and gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith. Take
-  hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made your good
-  confession in the presence of many witnesses.
-
-<cite>1 Tim 6:12</cite>
-
-</blockquote>
-
-Since the earliest days of the church, Christians have confessed their faith.
-That is to say, we have declared what we believe to each other and to the world.
-For the vast majority of the world's Christians, this frequently takes the form
-of one of two fixed texts, respectively, the Apostle's Creed and the Nicene
-Creed. The Nicene Creed in particular unites almost all Christians worldwide,
-including the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic denominations and almost all
-Protestant denominations. Despite celebrating its 1700th anniversary this year,
-and despite all the ways in which the global church is sadly divided, the Nicene
-Creed stands as a symbol of Christian unity and a faithful summary of what
-Christians believe.
-
-Yet not all Christians fully appreciate their creeds.
-
-Perhaps you're familiar with the creeds from your church's form of worship, or
-maybe you've heard it used at baptisms. You might have even confessed one
-yourself at your own baptism. But if you've never given it much thought, you
-might have assumed the creeds are simply neutral summaries of Christian belief,
-abstracted out of any historical context. You might think it dates to a
-primitive time in the Church's history, before the Church went through the
-refining fire of advanced theology.
-
-In fact, in the fourth century, when the text of the Nicene Creed and the
-ancestor of what became the Apostle's Creed was fixed, the creeds were
-formulated in response to some very particular challenges of that time. They do
-not represent primitive Christianity, but on the contrary, they exist in the way
-they do precisely because of the need for exact, exclusive theology.
-
-In the fourth century, the Church was straining within itself to understand what
-the revelation of Jesus Christ revealed about God and his purposes.
-
-For an earlier generation, the main threat had been that Christians might adopt
-ideas from the gnostics, a mystical religious community which probably formed
-about the time of Christ. In some respects, gnostic ideas cohered nicely with
-the revelation of Jesus. But the fusion of gnostic ideas with Christianity also
-meant mutilating the New Testament and ditching the Old altogether. It meant
-giving up on the idea of a God who cared for his people and was willing to die
-to save us. It meant dividing the world into people who were by nature
-spiritual, and those destined for death. And it meant giving up on the hope that
-the world might be redeemed, settling instead for a future where those lucky
-enough to have the magic spark within their souls could escape the world and
-leave it for dust.
-
-The first generations of Christian theologians fought to steer the church away
-from these harmful ideas, including Irenaeus, Justin Martyr and Origen. In so
-doing, they made a huge contribution to the fundamentals of our faith.
-
-We can see the influence of this battle in the creeds. For example, the first
-article of the Nicene Creed asserts that God the Father created the heavens and
-the earth. This corrected the gnostic notion that a truly good God would never
-have anything to do with something so rotten as creation. Instead, the creed
-reminds us that God made the world good, that despite its fallen state, it still
-bears his likeness, and through his unfolding plan, he intends to make it
-perfect.
-
-By the fourth century, the main controversy was over the ideas of an Alexandrian
-Christian teacher called Arius. He claimed that Jesus Christ, the Son of God,
-was not truly divine, nor an eternal Person of the Triune God, but rather a
-created being.
-
-This might sound like a technical issue, but the consequences are massive. If
-Jesus is not God, then he has no power to save us. The Christian hope is that
-God came down to bring his life to a dead world. But if he isn't truly God, but
-a lesser being, not much more than an angel, then he doesn't possess God's life,
-so he can't do any of that.
-
-The Nicene Creed was formulated to try and specify exactly what was wrong with
-this view. Thus we get the assertion that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is of
-one substance with the Father, light of light, very God of very God, who for our
-sake and for our salvation was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary,
-and was made man.
-
-But maybe none of this is new to you, and perhaps all this chat about heresy is
-summing up for you exactly why you aren't into the creeds. If it's just a tool
-for manhandling fourth-century heretics, then why should I care about it today?
-
-Well, I could point out how the same heresies have repeatedly re-occurred
-throughout church history, including the present -- but instead, I'll highlight
-that the creeds are not in fact just a stick for bashing heretics with. Some
-words are surgically inserted to force Arius to make a choice, yes. But that's
-not the whole story.
-
-Large parts of the Nicene Creed were not up for discussion at the Councils which
-formed them. For example, nobody questioned the basic trinitarian form: 'We
-believe in God the Father ... and in Jesus Christ, the Son of God ... and in the
-Holy Spirit.' So something else has to be playing a huge role here.
-
-Indeed, we have evidence that the trinitarian formula was one way that
-Christians had been confessing their faith at their baptism since the early
-second century. By the time of the Nicene Creed, it was probably dominant. So
-the Nicene Creed isn't just a list of things Arius can't say: the bulk of it
-comes from an existing tradition built up within the church from its earliest
-days, for Christians to affirm to other Christians the basics of what we
-believe.
-
-Furthermore, the creeds are far from unimportant. Even if you're not part of one
-of those denominations, representing an overwhelming majority of global
-Christians, which use the creeds to aid their worship, the creeds should matter
-to you. They are formed in large part from material from the New Testament. They
-represent apostolic and catholic teaching. And they remain the best symbol of
-what Christians believe both within the church, and to the world outside the
-church.
-
-As for me, I'm trying to memorise the Nicene Creed. If you don't know it
-already, I'd recommend you do, too!