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+# Why the creeds matter
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+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.
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+Published on: 24 Sep 2025 
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+1 Tim 6:12:
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+> 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.
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+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.
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+Yet not all Christians fully appreciate their creeds.
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+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.
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+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.
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+In the fourth century, the Church was straining within itself to understand what the revelation of Jesus Christ revealed about God and his purposes.
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+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.
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+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.
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+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.
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+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.
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+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.
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+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.
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+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?
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+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.
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+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.
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+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.
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+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.
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+As for me, I'm trying to memorise the Nicene Creed. If you don't know it already, I'd recommend you do, too!
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