The Creed We Still Need [Firebrand Big Read]
Icon of the First Council of Nicea (Source: WikiCommons)
Anniversaries matter. They remind us of our past and contribute to our identity as individuals and communities in the present. The month of May includes such national anniversaries as Cinco de Mayo in the USA and parts of Mexico, National Patriots’ Day in Québec and Victoria Day across the rest of Canada, and Constitution Memorial Day in Japan. The Christian liturgical calendar commemorates the anniversary of Jesus’ departure to heaven on Ascension Day (May 29 this year). But this month in 2025 also marks the seventeen hundredth anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, the first and most widely honored ecumenical council in church history. Protestants join Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Christians from ancient Asian and African communions like the Mar Thoma Church in India, the Armenian Apostolic Church, and the Ethiopian and Syrian Orthodox Churches in sharing an allegiance to the statement of sound doctrine set forth at Nicaea (A.D. 325) and later refined at Constantinople (A.D. 381): the Nicene Creed. Why, though, should contemporary Christians—especially Wesleyan/Methodist Christians—care about all the above? Who needs creeds?
I Feel the Need… the Need for a Creed
The truth is, everyone has a creed, whether explicit or implicit. A church history student once accidentally asked me about the “Niceness Creed.” It’s tempting to think that this was a Freudian slip, symptomatic of a therapeutic culture whose legitimate concern for human well-being has devolved into valuing “you do you” over sound doctrine and the common good. In such a setting, the passionate claim to universal, life-giving truth made by the Nicene Creed comes across as an oppressive embarrassment to be muted or diluted. The “Niceness Creed” is strong on feelings and weak on facts. The trouble is that feelings and cultural conventions about what counts as “nice” quickly shift from one moment or social movement to the next, making an unstable foundation for individual and communal life. Besides, as Anglican lay theologian Dorothy Sayers noted in her speech “Creed or Chaos?” during World War II, mere niceness will not suffice when confronted by a hostile ideology (in her day, Nazism). Instead, she prescribed meeting conviction with conviction and creed with creed—preferably with a blend of tough-mindedness and good humor! The faith-discerned facts set forth in the Nicene Creed have stood the test of time and offer a solid, multi-generational, cross-cultural, interdenominational consensus on which to build for the future. This is as true for those of the house and lineage of Wesley as for any other variety of Christian.
Wesley himself, though, left his followers an ambivalent legacy regarding the creedal tradition. In 1725, the fourteen hundredth anniversary of Nicaea, the young Mr. Wesley experienced his “Oxford conversion,” in which he committed himself intellectually and practically to wholehearted devotion to God as the crux of true religion. He spent the next thirteen years struggling to achieve personal sanctity until at last, at Aldersgate, he came into the assurance of acceptance with God through simple faith in Christ. But he never lost sight of the vision of serving God with a pure heart and the entirety of one’s life as the goal of being a Christian. This lifelong commitment led him at times to downplay mere adherence to orthodox doctrine and the ancient church councils in favor of the “heart-religion” of love for God and neighbor. Yet he also articulated the fledgling Methodist faith using Nicene and later creedal language, while opposing old heresies that demoted Christ to a less-than-fully-divine status—heresies that were being revived in Wesley’s day. His ambivalence shows in his revisions to the Anglican doctrinal standards and liturgy for American Methodism: in his edits to the Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion he retained several articles that employed creedal terminology yet omitted Anglican Article Eight, which affirms the Nicene, Athanasian, and Apostles’ Creeds as authoritative summaries of the biblical witness. He also replaced the Nicene Creed with the less theologically robust Apostles’ Creed in the revised Sunday Service. Since then, Methodism has passed through seasons of liberal skepticism of orthodoxy, pluralistic relativization of orthodoxy, and, in recent decades, conservative recovery efforts under such labels as “paleo-orthodoxy” (Tom Oden) and “canonical theism” (Billy Abraham) that lay claim to the classic creeds and councils with none of Wesley’s scruples. For instance, the Global Methodist Church’s 2024 Book of Doctrines and Discipline lists the Nicene Creed among its normative documents for Methodist doctrine (¶105).
A Better Set of Measurements
To demonstrate the value of the Nicene Creed as a summary of the historic, global Christian faith, let me compare it with another influential instrument for testing Christians’ fidelity to the gospel. Over the past several decades, various Christian thought leaders have raised concerns about the spread of the kind of subpar beliefs that I parodied above in the Niceness Creed. One of them is evangelical pollster George Barna. Since 1995, his biblical worldview survey has measured Americans’ religious views. Barna uses the following six criteria to determine a biblical worldview:
[A]bsolute moral truth exists; the Bible is totally accurate in all of the principles it teaches; Satan is considered to be a real being or force, not merely symbolic; a person cannot earn their way into Heaven by trying to be good or do good works; Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on earth; and God is the all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the world who still rules the universe today.
The Nicene Creed also sets forth a half-dozen key beliefs. It begins where Barna’s ends, with one God who is creator and sovereign. But the creed adds that this God is the Father. This word-picture suggests two elements that are muted in Barna’s criteria: the facts that God is love and that God is a Trinity. These two elements have a direct bearing on how we understand salvation. Is it simply a matter of God coldly, calculatingly rebalancing the scales of cosmic justice to counter our moral failures? Or is salvation the restoration of interpersonal intimacy with God and an invitation to share at a finite level in the parent-child relationship that has characterized God’s own life for all eternity?
If Barna’s last criterion is Nicaea’s first, so also Barna’s penultimate criterion shares the same subject as the creed’s second article: Jesus Christ. For Barna, all one needs to believe about Jesus in order to have a biblical worldview is that he lived a sinless earthly life. The creed is much more expansive: Jesus is not just a sinless man but is the unique Son of God who shares fully in the deity of God the Father, who cooperated in creating the universe, and who came into the world for our salvation, becoming a human being in the Virgin Mary’s womb, undergoing crucifixion and burial, then rising from the dead, ascending to heaven, and taking authority to judge and rule over all.
Where Barna makes Satan’s reality a criterion of true belief, the creed focuses instead on the reality of the Holy Spirit. The creedal tradition from which the Nicene Creed was adapted developed from Jesus’ commission to baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Matt 28:19). At their baptism, new converts renounced the devil but pledged faith to the triune God. The Nicene Creed spells out the logic of Jesus’ baptismal commission by treating the Holy Spirit as equally divine along with the Father and the Son. Just as the Father is almighty (that is, all-sovereign) and Jesus is the Lord who reigns over and judges all, so the Holy Spirit too is called Lord (compare 2 Cor 3:17–18). Just as creation comes from the Father through the Son, so also the Holy Spirit is the giver of life. Just as the Father and the Son are to receive worship, so should the Holy Spirit.
The creed also confesses that the Holy Spirit has spoken by the prophets, referring to the divine inspiration of Scripture (compare 2 Pet 1:19–21). Barna’s parallel criterion affirms Scripture’s total accuracy in all the principles it teaches. Barna helpfully makes explicit the trustworthiness that Christians historically have associated with the inspiration of Scripture, but he leaves out both its directionality—the Bible is no encyclopedia of miscellaneous timeless “principles” but rather a body of prophecy that finds its center and fulfillment in Christ—and its director (the Holy Spirit).
Speaking of “principles,” the very first of Barna’s criteria for a biblical worldview, superseding even acknowledgment of God, Christ, or Scripture, is belief in absolute moral truth. The logic of Barna’s order of criteria seems to be that once one is committed to such truth, one then turns to the Bible to learn the contents of that truth and so comes to accept the reality of the devil, salvation by grace, the sinlessness of Christ, and the existence of God. One starts with principles and ends with persons. By contrast, the creed prioritizes persons, moving from Father to Son to Holy Spirit to the church, which is composed of saints reaching all the way back to the apostles and all the way around to embrace all peoples (what “catholic” implies). Where Barna’s criteria could be satisfied by a solo believer alone with a Bible, the creed beckons us to belong to a community of faith.
How are we saved? Barna puts it negatively: trying to be or do good does not save. The creed states positively that salvation takes the form of our sins’ forgiveness, the sign and seal of which is Christian baptism. Here again we catch the creedal themes of relationship and community. Forgiveness is an interpersonal act that restores a relationship. Baptism is a communal event in which the whole church invokes the whole Trinity on behalf of the one being baptized.
Finally, for Barna the goal of salvation is going to heaven, which could easily be taken as meaning simply that our souls depart this world at death to enjoy a disembodied afterlife forever. The Nicene Creed, by contrast, insists that the same Jesus who resurrected and ascended will return to judge both the living and the dead, that the dead will themselves be resurrected bodily just as Christ was, and that we may look forward to life in the world to come—meaning not merely heaven as it presently exists but the prophesied new heavens and new earth (Rev 21–22). All in all, the creed’s vision of the culmination of salvation is much meatier than Barna’s.
The glaring omissions in Barna’s criteria leave ample room for faulty notions and false teachings to find acceptance under the banner of a “biblical worldview.” If all that we need believe about Jesus is that he was a sinless human being, then the ancient heretics known as Ebionites, various liberal Christians of the nineteenth century, and many Muslims yet to this day can pass this test. If the Holy Spirit does not even merit a mention, then the Apostle Paul should not have bothered to rebaptize the Ephesian disciples who had never heard of the Holy Spirit (Acts 19:1–7). Likewise, it would have been news to Paul that one can receive full marks for a biblical worldview without believing in the resurrection—whether Christ’s or ours! The poor benighted apostle thought that the whole of the Christian faith hinged on this belief (1 Cor 15:1–34). Jesus himself also had some strong words for those who denied the resurrection (Matt 22:23–33). On all these points and more, the Nicene Creed offers a sturdier support system for a truly Christian faith.
Adding to Scripture?
Some Christians, though, fear that the sturdy support supplied by the creed may turn out to be a straitjacket of mere human opinion imposed on the body of Christ to restrict its freedom. The Bible and the Spirit alone should guide our lives as believers, they urge. But the Scriptures themselves tell us to test the spirits. The Spirit of Truth will not encourage the worship of false gods (Deut 13:1–5) or blaspheme Jesus rather than confessing him as Lord (1 Cor 12:3) or deny that he is the Christ who has come in the flesh (1 John 2:18–27; 4:1–6). Nor is the creed a substitute for or supplement to Scripture’s teaching; it’s a summary of that teaching. The Nicene Creed echoes Paul’s synopsis of Christian doctrine:
There is one body [“one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church”] and one Spirit [“the Holy Spirit”], just as you were called to the one hope of your calling [“I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come”], one Lord [“one Lord Jesus Christ”], one faith [“I believe in” the articles of the creed], one baptism [“one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins”], one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all [“one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth”]. (Eph 4:4–6 NRSV)
Beyond this correlation between the articles of the Nicene Creed and Ephesians 4, the vast majority of the creed’s phraseology reflects the language of Scripture. Let me briefly consider two exceptions: the expressions “consubstantial with the Father” for Christ and “catholic” for the church.
When the Council of Nicaea met, the item that headlined its agenda was the teaching of a popular preacher named Arius. He insisted that because Jesus was the Son of God, he must not have always existed and in fact was nothing but the first and best of God’s creations. (Today, the Jehovah’s Witnesses still hold to this view.) The council discovered that it could not defeat Arius’s teaching simply by quoting Bible verses—Arius and those of like mind could reinterpret any verse to fit with their disbelief in Jesus as truly, fully God, equal in deity to God the Father. The council found that it had to borrow a nonbiblical term, the Greek word homoousios (“consubstantial”), to make clear what the Bible really taught about Jesus. When Thomas confessed Jesus as “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28 NRSV) or Paul described him as preexisting all things and creating and sustaining them all (Col 1:16–17) or John the Revelator saw him receiving worship as God’s equal from every being in creation (Rev 5), the correct implication was that Jesus Christ is “consubstantial with the Father.” The term “consubstantial” explains rather than undermines the meaning of Scripture.
The term “catholic” functions similarly. It comes from a Greek phrase that means “according to the whole.” This term had come into use already by the generation after the apostles, long before Nicaea, as a way to underscore the biblical truth that membership in God’s people was not limited to a single region, ethnicity, socioeconomic group, or sect but was open to the whole world (see, for instance, Matt 28:19–20; Gal 3:28; Rev 7:9–10). Centuries later, John Wesley’s famous quip that the whole world was his parish captures the same wide vision, as does his advocacy of a “catholic spirit” that would bring together Roman Catholics and Protestants, Calvinists and Arminians, Anglicans and Nonconformists in the common pursuit of repentance, faith in Christ as Savior, and holiness of heart and life. For Wesley, confining “catholic” to being Roman Catholic was decidedly uncatholic!
Sunken Treasure
In his book The Underwater Basilica of Nicaea, archaeologist Mark Fairchild lays out the evidence that the ruins of a church beneath the waters of Lake Iznik, Turkey, are in fact the very venue at which the Council of Nicaea met. Its long-lost location only came to light again in 2014. It stands as a fitting parable for how the council’s greatest legacy, the Nicene Creed, itself has stayed submerged for so long in Methodist memory. Only recently has it started to be retrieved. My own contribution to these recovery efforts is a short, popular-level book designed to help laypeople, students, and busy pastors to become (re)acquainted with the Nicene Creed. I’ve titled it The Creed We Need: Nicene Faith for Wesleyan Witness.
In the year of our Lord 2025, on the seventeen hundredth anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, let us reconnect with the Nicene Creed. It binds us to believers across history, cultures, nations, and denominations. It anchors us in the Holy Scriptures whose contents it summarizes. Above all, it points us to the triune God and Savior to whom it bears faithful witness. Anniversaries matter. Let’s not miss this one!
Jerome Van Kuiken is Professor of Christian Thought at Oklahoma Wesleyan University. He serves on the editorial board of Firebrand.