What Can We Learn from Traditions that Adopt the Nicene Creed?

Many nineteenth- and twentieth-century Baptists would have balked at the recent idea of adopting a formal creed like the Nicene Creed as part of their confession. As W. B. Johnson (1782–1862), first president of the Southern Baptist Convention, once remarked, “We have constructed for our basis no new creed; acting in this matter upon a Baptist aversion for all creeds but the Bible.”^[1]

Several cultural and theological factors played a role in this aversion to creeds. There was a popular sentiment, however unfounded, that the creeds were “Romish” and contrary to the practices of free churches. The recitation of creeds, it was thought, resulted in a coldhearted, impersonal faith without the life-giving power of the Spirit.^[2]

But the prevailing view of many nineteenth-century Baptists was that the use of creeds like the Nicene Creed ultimately undermined biblical authority.^[3] The ironic credo “no creed but the Bible” was the mantra of an uncritical, anti-creedal biblicism. Alexander Campbell (1788–1866), a former Baptist who later led the Restoration movement, explicitly denounced the Nicene Creed as an exercise in “scholastic jargon” that should be forgotten by the Christian church.^[4] This brand of anti-creedalism was more theologically conservative, even as it criticized the Nicene Creed for using terms not explicitly found in the biblical text.

The Creed has also been incredibly valuable in unifying Christians who share common convictions about the authority of Scripture and the gospel. SHARE ON XLiberal and moderate Baptists opposed the creeds for entirely different reasons. The American Baptist theologian and father of the Social Gospel movement Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) criticized the tendency of creeds “to make the religious thought of one age binding for a later age.”^[5]Rauschenbusch bemoaned that the Council of Nicaea was a weapon of state religion that enforced uniformity and stifled the church’s theological maturity. “It is very hard, almost impossible, to get rid of a creed after it is once adopted.”^[6]

Assuring us that “Baptists are a non-creedal people,” many twentieth-century theological moderates staunchly resisted any attempt to use confessions like The Baptist Faith and Message for doctrinal accountability in SBC entities or churches.[7] They weren’t just against ancient ecumenical creeds like the Nicene Creed. They resisted any effort to restrict their freedom to interpret the Bible in the way they saw fit.[8] Many of these moderate Baptists were more concerned with hermeneutical liberty than fidelity to the truth. But Southern Baptists of the conservative resurgence reinforced another strand of confessional Baptist life, requiring statements like the BFM as an instrument of accountability for their missionaries and seminary professors.

Baptists can learn from the example of other denominations, faith traditions, and even early Baptists, who have demonstrated the value of the Nicene Creed in safeguarding biblical truth and fostering theological unity. The Protestant Reformers who further developed the teaching of the sufficiency of Scripture and biblical authority appealed to the Nicene Creed to safeguard biblical truth from error and as a foundation to their own confessional statements and catechisms regarding the Trinity. The Creed has also been incredibly valuable in unifying Christians who share common convictions about the authority of Scripture and the gospel. And the witness of other faith traditions highlights the value of the Nicene Creed in discipleship and the worship of the local church.

The Polemical Function of the Creed

While Protestant Reformers directed believers back to the primary authority of Scripture in their reform efforts, they also expressed great appreciation for the tradition’s ability to exposit the Bible.[9] When it came to the doctrine of the Trinity, they saw no need to reinvent the wheel or present an alternative to the Nicene Creed. In fact, Luther and Melancthon’s Augsburg Confession (1530) explicitly appealed to the Nicene Creed in its article on God, stating that “the decree of the Council of Nicaea concerning the Unity of the Divine Essence and concerning the Three Persons is true and to be believed without any doubting.”[10]

Calvin likewise wrote, “We willingly embrace reverence as holy the early councils, such as those of Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus I, Chalcedon and the like, which were concerned with refuting errors—in so far as they relate to the teachings of the faith. For they contain nothing but the pure and genuine exposition of Scripture, which the holy fathers applied with spiritual prudence to crush the enemies of religion who had then arisen.”[11] Calvin saw the great need for creeds like the Nicene Creed to address significant theological errors that threatened the church.

Reformed and Protestant Scholastic works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often looked to the Nicene Creed when formulating their doctrine of the Trinity. SHARE ON XThe earliest Baptists also recognized the creeds as statements that properly expressed the Bible’s authority and corrected doctrinal error. Seventeenth-century General Baptists invoked the creeds to defend the consensus quinquesecularis against those within their ranks who subscribed to heterodox Christologies, such as the Socinians and the group associated with Matthew Caffyn (1628-1714).^[12] Caffyn initially drew controversy with his Hoffmannite Christology that denied Jesus a true human nature. He later came to deny the doctrines of the Trinity and the deity of Christ. As a response, the General Baptist statement The Orthodox Creed (1678) incorporated the full text of the Nicene Creed to encourage doctrine accountability among their group and prevent serious theological error.

Reformed and Protestant Scholastic works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often looked to the Nicene Creed when formulating their doctrine of the Trinity. Today’s Southern Baptists can benefit from the theological precision offered by the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed here. We can and should embrace Jesus as the “only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds.”^[13] Against the errant view that Christ will cease to reign over God’s kingdom in eternity (a view derived from a problematic reading of 1 Cor 15:24–25, 28), the Creed explicitly says that the Son’s “kingdom shall have no end.”[14] This seventeen-century-old creed remains relevant to today’s theological debates.

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Notes:

[1] Cited in Walter B. Shurden, “Southern Baptist Responses to Their Confessional Statements,” Review and Expositor 76.1 (1979), 69.

[2] James E. Tull, Shapers of Baptist Thought (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1972), 206.

[3] For more on historical Baptist understandings of sola Scriptura, please see my article, “Baptists, Sola Scriptura, and the Place of the Christian Tradition,” in Baptists and the Christian Tradition: Toward an Evangelical Baptist Catholicity, ed. Matthew Y. Emerson, Christopher W. Morgan, and R. Lucas Stamps (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2020), 27–54.

[4] Alexander Campbell, The Christian System (Pittsburg: Forrester & Campbell, 1839), 130–31.

[5] Walter Rauschenbusch, “Why I Am a Baptist,” in A Baptist Treasury, ed. Syndor L. Stealey (New York: Arno, 1980), 180.

[6] Rauschenbusch, “Why I Am a Baptist,” 181.

[7] Walter B. Shurden, The Baptist Identity: Four Fragile Freedoms (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 1993), 14.

[8] The Baptist distinctive known as “the priesthood of all believers” is the assertion that all believers have direct access to God through Christ our Great High Priest and that all believers share in the fellowship of ministry in the local church. But many moderate and liberal Baptist theologians have redefined this tenet into what they call “the priesthood of the believer,” which they take to mean that every individual is free to read the Bible as they please without any imposition on their conscience.

[9] Heiko Obermann’s distinction between one-source tradition (Tradition I) and two-source tradition (Tradition II) is extremely helpful in understanding how the Reformers approached tradition. See Heiko A. Oberman, Forerunners of the Reformation: The Shape of Late Medieval Thought, with translations by Paul L. Nyhus (New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1966), 51–120.

[10] Augsburg Confession (1530), art. 1.

[11] Calvin Institutes 4.9.8.

[12] See J. Matthew Pinson, Arminian and Baptist: Explorations in a Theological Tradition (Nashville: Randall House, 2015), 153–82.

[13] Of course this view has fallen on hard times, largely due to the work of Baptist theologian Dale Moody (1915–1992) in “God’s Only Son: The Translation of John 3:16 in the Revised Standard Version,” Journal of Biblical Literature 72.4 (1953): 213–19. For a robust response to those claims, see Charles Lee Irons, “A Lexical Defense of the Johannine ‘Only Begotten,’” in Retrieving Eternal Generation, ed. Fred Sanders and Scott R. Swain (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017), 99–102.

[14]  R. B. Jamieson, “1 Corinthians 15:28 and the Grammar of Paul’s Christology,” New Testament Studies 66.2 (Apr 2020): 187–207; Glenn Butner, The Son Who Learned Obedience: A Theological Case Against the Eternal Submission of the Son (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2018), 162–72.