---
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!
