Helping the Church Love Nicaea

A few Sundays ago, our church members stood up and confessed the Nicene Creed, along with millions of others around the world, and the millions more who’ve gone before us into the presence of our Lord. It was clunky. Strange. Everyone’s recitation was slightly ajar from their neighbor’s pace. But we made it through. And we did something significant: we yoked ourselves to the historic and catholic faith.

A few of our congregants walked up to me after the service and asked, “Why is the Creed so important? Why do churches recite it?” In the service review a few days later, there were similar questions about the relevance of the Creed to our life as Christians today. These interactions reminded me that an understanding and love for the Nicene Creed is not a habit that is infused into the Christian upon regeneration. It must be carefully cultivated in the church by Christians who are zealous for orthodoxy and a pure love for the God who loves them. As a pastor, my central concern is not just that our people know the Creed. My central concern is that our people would love the Creed.As a pastor, my central concern is not just that our people know the Creed. My central concern is that our people would love the Creed. Share on X

Jared Ortiz and Daniel Keating’s The Nicene Creed: A Scriptural, Historical & Theological Commentary is an excellent resource for pilgrims on this journey. Because “The Nicene Creed briefly articulates the central mysteries of our Christian faith: the Trinity, the incarnation, and our redemption in Christ” (9), every pastor should want to participate in this pilgrimage into a deeper love for the central teachings of our faith. And he should want this for his church, too.

Though I have a few quibbles with the book, I think Ortiz and Keating’s commentary is a helpful waypoint on the pilgrimage to a deeper love of the Creed.

The Creed and Its Contents

Ortiz and Keating trace the theological narrative at the heart of the Nicene Creed, namely the story of God in Himself and God for His people. This is because the Creed upholds the distinction between theologia and oikonomia – God in Himself and then His economic acts. Or, in their words, “The first part of the Creed treats the Trinity, whereas the second part treats our life in the Trinity” (173). Going line by line, they explain a particular teaching according to its historical context, demonstrate this teaching’s relationship to Scripture, and explain it in its mature and developed form.

Ortiz and Keating frame the book with a chapter on “Belief” and “Life in the Trinity.” Broadly construed, these chapters are the beginning and end of the Christian life: faith in the triune God and fellowship with Him. Ortiz and Keating helpfully discuss the Christian relationship between faith and reality: faith is not an opinion, but a statement about what we believe is true. Citing Irenaeus, “faith . . . enables ‘a true comprehension of what is,’” (16). And “what is” is the triune God’s existence and His mission of salvation. The final chapter outlines the church’s existence as an act of love determined by God’s existence as love, or, as John Webster memorably describes it, the church is “a creaturely counterpart to the fellowship of love which is the inner life of the Holy Trinity.”^[1]

The middle four chapters follow the trinitarian structure of the Creed – with a chapter on the Father, two on the Son (the Son as God and the Son as Man), and a fourth on the Holy Spirit.

In Nicene theology, the Father is Almighty because He can eternally beget a Son who is equal to Him. Share on XIn the chapter on God the Father, the authors explain the significance of the Creed’s “One God” and how this does not violate God’s trinitarian existence. Quite simply, to say God is one with respect to persons does not square with the biblical data. Naturally, the question arises, “Why is God the Father Almighty? Is the Son not Almighty, also? What about the Spirit?” Ortiz and Keating helpfully show us how God the Father’s “Almightiness” is said with respect to God’s fatherhood, that He is the source of all that exists. With respect to the persons, however, God the Father is Almighty because the Son and Spirit are both from Him. This invokes the taxis of the persons, preserving their consubstantiality. Ortiz and Keating helpfully draw out how this makes a clear delineation between the Roman Gods (Jupiter was the Father of gods, too, after all) and men like Arius who believed God the Father’s almightiness precluded the Son’s existence as deity. In Nicene theology, the Father is Almighty because He can eternally beget a Son who is equal to Him.

The two chapters on the Son help us to speak about the Son in two ways: according to His divine nature and according to His taking on the form of a servant. The authors examine how the Creed uses biblical language first (“Lord,” “Only Begotten,” “Light,” etc.) and only then moves to extra-biblical language which only serves to clarify the already-mentioned scriptural language. The next chapter looks at Christ’s mission: incarnation, life, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and His return. These are not incidental to the Creed, but its climax, its narrative and theological center. Christ’s incarnation as man makes possible our redemption. What He is by nature, through His gospel, we become by grace.

The chapter on the Holy Spirit examines how the language used in the Creed confirms the Spirit’s deity and processional relationship to the Father and the Son. That the Spirit is said to “proceed” from the Father and Son is to acknowledge the Spirit’s divinity, to place Him on the “Creator” side of the Creator/Creature distinction, as it were. Ortiz and Keating rightly note that the expanded sections in 381 are significant because there were many – even in the Nicene coalition – who outright denied the divinity of the Spirit because Scripture never calls the Spirit God. “Lord” and “Giver of life,” then, are used to “show that the Spirit is fully God and worthy of common adoration with the Father and the Son” (149). Though Paul does not call the Spirit God, he everywhere associates God’s activity with the Spirit’s work. The Nicene Creed preserves as much.

Commendations and Cautions

Ortiz and Keating have written a helpful and accessible commentary on the Creed. While the subtitle “Scriptural, Historical, and Theological” sounds like a tall order, the authors do a fine job of integrating each of these aspects into the book. In fact, I was delighted to see how much Scripture is in this book. By design, Ortiz and Keating make the compelling case that the Nicene Creed naturally arises from Scripture. The Creed is not a foreign imposition, but the organic outgrowth of Scripture’s clear teaching. Understood this way, the Creed sends us back, better prepared to read according to Scripture’s theological grammar.

This is a fundamentally reformed way of reading Scripture. Ursinus reminds us that studying doctrine is so “that we may be well prepared for the reading, understanding, and exposition of the Holy Scriptures. For as the doctrine of the catechism and Common Places are taken out of the Scriptures, and are directed by them as their rule, so they again lead us, as it were, by the hand to the Scriptures.”^[2] The Nicene Creed is taken out of Scripture, directed by Scripture, and leads us back to Scripture. So it is useful for learning how to read Scripture.The Nicene Creed is taken out of Scripture, directed by Scripture, and leads us back to Scripture. Share on X

The authors are experts in patristic theology. This heightens the usefulness of this book, which doubles as a nice introduction to patristic theology and the historical context of patristic theology. For example, in the chapter on Christ’s divinity, the authors dedicate a paragraph to explaining the often-confusing historical fact that many of our theological fathers were, at least initially, uncomfortable with the word homoousios. Ortiz and Keating helpfully explain that this term had a “mixed heritage” (92), specifically in some Gnostic texts that meant a lesser deity had part of the divine nature, but not all of it. Even though Nicaea did not give a strict definition to this word originally, the intervening years, especially through Athanasius and Basil’s (eventual) insistence on the word, secured for us its theological usefulness.

Now, would I offer this book to one of my congregants? I would, but with a few cautions.

Ortiz and Keating are Roman Catholic, so the book may have confusing elements to the undiscerning reader. Sentences like “We must always remember that faith is a grace of God that we receive from the Church. The Church is our Mother who brings us to new birth through faith” (32), “Baptism sanctifies and justifies us” (192, emphasis added), or “If baptism communicated the Holy Spirit, as Scripture amply attests . . .” (194, interestingly a point made with no scriptural attestation in tow) will be confusing to many. Importantly, each of these statements goes well past what the Nicene Creed actually says. The final chapter has a number of questionable statements about the Eucharist and Baptism, some of which we just mentioned. As a pastor, my concern for my congregants is that they are built up and mature enough to discern what is helpful and wrestle with the important differences between our church’s statement of faith and Roman Catholic theology. Depending on where they are in that process of maturity, I am more or less likely to offer them a book that might confuse them on significant doctrinal issues. For the mature, it’s a hearty recommendation, a commendation with a few cautions.

For those who do take up and read, Roman Catholic particulars aside, I think Ortiz and Keating’s book is a marvelous and helpful exploration of the Creed.

Notes:

^[1] John Webster, Confessing God: Essays in Christian Dogmatics II (New York: NY, T&T Clark, 2005), 153.

^[2] Zacharias Ursinus, Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954), pg. 10