creeds

website/src/content/blog/2025/09/24/creeds.md

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+---
+title: Why the creeds matter
+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!