
Why Should We Submit to an Early Christian Creed?
What should a pastor do when he finds a member of his church promoting the ancient heresy of Arianism? I recently returned home to Canada from Melbourne, Australia where I undertook doctoral research on fourth century Trinitarian theology. While there, I had the pleasure of spending some time with a Baptist pastor from up north. At the time, he was leading his church through a case of church discipline. A young member denied that Jesus Christ is one essence with the Father and maintained that he is a creature. Out of curiosity, he had come across self-proclaimed YouTube or podcast personalities and wound up finding himself in the court of the local church. Could this have been avoided? With all the talk these days around issues of race, sexuality, politics, issues of gender roles, is there any need for Baptists to go digging through a creed written in the 300s from a place called Nicaea? After speaking with this pastor, I was reminded that we need not only dig, but to confess, and not only confess, but teach our congregants to submit to it. But don’t our confessions, such as the Second London Baptist Confession, The New Hampshire Confession of Faith, the Abstract of Principles, or the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, already presuppose the Nicene Creed? If so, why bother submitting to another creed—from the early church, no less?
The Nicene Creed is like no other statement in the history of the Church. It was confessed in confusion, abruptly abandoned, forgotten, chanced upon, polished, lifted up as the rallying point for orthodoxy, and all this in a span of sixty odd years. For those unfamiliar with this history, I will briefly trace it below. It is rivaled only by the Apostles Creed in terms of antiquity and unanimity—or what we Baptists once upon a time were comfortable calling “catholicity”. The reaffirmation of the Nicene Creed at the Council of Constantinople in 381 proves to be one of the greatest comeback stories in the history of the church. As true and glorious as this may be, why should Baptists submit to it today?
There are several compelling reasons to do so. I will, however, limit myself to only two. Baptists should cheerfully and eagerly submit to a creed from the early church if it is necessary and useful. I will explain how I use the word “necessary” below. The Nicene Creed was and still is necessary and useful. Therefore, Baptist churches should submit to it. To show this, in the first part of the article, I will give an overview of the conditions that made it useful and necessary for Christians in the fourth century. In the second part, I will show how these conditions have not fundamentally changed. In the final section, I will consider in what context it is possible to submit the Nicene Creed.
The Nicene Creed: Necessary and Useful in the Fourth Century
It is neither useful nor necessary for Baptists to affirm any old creed or confession. Antiquity does not equal veracity. The Dedication Creed of 341, for example, had quite a bit of traction among certain bishops in the East (and West if you include Hilary of Poitiers). Yet it is in many ways theologically deficient, at best, and theologically erroneous, at worst. This creed was the most influential of its kind in the mid-fourth century, as it formed the basis for numerous other creeds throughout the 340s and 350s. But it ceased to be the basis of theological and ecclesiastical unity after the debate shifted in the late 350s to whether the Father and Son are similar or dissimilar in essence. The Dedication Creed’s language speaks of the unity of the Father and Son in imprecise terms, and in ways that were open to more extreme subordinationist readings, like Asterius the Sophist, or more conservative readings, such as with Hilary of Poitiers. All that to say, the Dedication Creed is important in the history of doctrine in the fourth century, but it would neither be useful nor necessary for Baptists to submit to it because it is theologically erroneous, it was only confessed by a smaller contingent of the early church for a short window of time, and it became, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant after the 360s. But what about the Nicene Creed of 325? Well, the Nicene Creed is also not without its difficulties. But in time, the creed did become useful and even necessary for the church to confess.
The Nicene Creed has proven to be the fulcrum of basic theological unity among Christians with diverse theological beliefs across the Christian world and down through the centuries. Share on XThe Nicene Creed’s now shining legacy often obscures its early checkered history. Yes, it was “catholic” in the sense that it was signed by hundreds of bishops throughout the church. Yet it was not initially given the kind of weight that it would later receive some 40 years later. It was also plagued by suspicions of modalism due to the involvement of Marcellus of Ancyra and Eustathius of Antioch at the council and the phrase “homoousios”. The original words of the creed were not a silver bullet to solving the quandary of unity and diversity in God. It was effective only in ousting Arius. Yet some around him seem to have escaped unscathed. Even Eusebius of Caesarea could sign on despite articulating a doctrine of God of a subordinationist bent. So if the Nicene creed did not resolve the “Arian controversy”, what made it so necessary and useful to the early church?
The forty years that followed the council of Nicaea 325 are convoluted and often difficult to parse. What seems to be clear is that the Nicene creed and the language of homoousios (“one in essence”) was not appealed to as an authority until the 350s, some 30 years after Nicaea. It is not that prior to this that Christian leaders were opposed to the Nicene creed. They were simply non-Nicene. There were some, namely the Heterousians, in the 350s who were openly opposed to the Nicene language of essence because they insisted that the Father and Son were dissimilar in essence. They are referred to as “anti-Nicene”.
In the 350s, Athanasius found the Nicene language of homoousios as theologically necessary for forcing the issue of how the Father and Son are said to be one. The theological waters were muddy as various parties sought to articulate how in God there is unity and diversity. His way of articulating homoousios lacked the technical precision we see in later thinkers like Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa. We see this especially in his De Decretis and De Synodis. The Nicene creed was also strategically useful to build a theological coalition unified around a set confession that their greatest opponents, Heterousians, could in no way compromise with.
In the late 350s the Heterousians, led by Aetius, and eventually his student Eunomius, pushed a more radical subordinationism which maintained that the Son is unlike the Father in essence but like the Father only in will. This theological pressure alienated the conservative wing of the Eusebian alliance, such as George of Laodicea, Basil of Ancyra, and Cyril of Jerusalem. Scholars often refer to these three as Homoiousians. As a result, the ad hoc Eusebian alliance among predominantly eastern bishops, that began in the early 320s with Eusebius of Caesarea and Eusebius of Nicomedia, splintered. For the Homoiousians wished to maintain that the Son is like the Father in essence. On the other hand, Athanasius made irenic overtures to the Homoiousians in the 350s, beckoning them to the Nicene Creed. We see this irenic plea in Athanasius’ Tomus ad Antiochenos where disparate parties were encouraged to denounce Arius’s doctrines and to affirm that the Father and Son are one in essence and that they are not different beings. The homoiousians welcomed the olive branch from Athanasius and the emerging pro-Nicene coalition.
As a result of these realignments and the reunification of certain eastern and western bishops, the theological and political middle was hollowed out, leaving no room for indifference to the Nicene Creed. It became the rallying point for orthodoxy. There was no consistent alternative to the anti-Nicene or pro-Nicene positions after the theological debates of the 360s and 370s. Given the historical pressures, it was theologically necessary to affirm the Nicene creed. Either you confess the Nicene creed or you reject it. This diverse coalition that nonetheless found unity around the Nicene Creed triumphed at the Council of Constantinople. The Heterousians, led by Eunomius of Cyzicus, were routed. It seems to me that no alternative doctrinal confession could have possibly resolved the dispute.
What made the Nicene Creed necessary at the time was that there was not a tenable alternative for confessing the doctrine of the Trinity as taught by the Holy Scriptures. What made it useful is that, although there could have been alternative means of promoting unity among Christians and promulgating orthodox doctrine, no means would do as prudently and effectively. Not all roads lead to Rome, and those that do vary in their expediency. The Nicene Creed has proven to be the fulcrum of basic theological unity among Christians with diverse theological beliefs across the Christian world and down through the centuries. It was a point of common cooperation between local churches and synods. It was also most useful for liturgically shaping the mind and instructing the young in the confession of the church. The creed has proven itself most necessary and useful.