The Nicene Creed confesses that the Lord Jesus Christ is “the only begotten Son of God.” The Greek word translated “only begotten” is monogenēs, a word used five times in the New Testament with reference to Jesus (John 1:14, 18; 3:16, 18; 1 John 4:9).
While most newer translations render the term “only” or “one of a kind,” the King James Version uses “only begotten” in those five Johannine verses. Whatever the proper translation of the word is in each of those five biblical instances, every English translation I’ve ever seen of the Nicene Creed renders the word “only begotten.”
Let’s think about the names “Father” and “Son.” God is Father because he has a Son; Jesus is the Son because he has a Father. That much should be obvious. And the way in which the Father relates to the Son is by “begetting.” The Father generates the Son, and the Son is “from the substance of the Father” (Creed of Nicaea). One thing we can say about the Father that we cannot say about the Son is that the Father is unbegotten. One thing we can say about the Son that we cannot say about the Father is that the Son is begotten.
Okay, but what does that all mean?
The Arians agreed that Jesus Christ was the only begotten Son of God. This specific language wasn’t the issue. The issue was what those words meant. In a letter to Alexander, bishop of Alexandria, Arius explained that God was “the begetter of his only Son before endless ages; through whom he made both the ages and all that is.” Arius would not have objected to saying, as the Nicene Creed does, that Christ was “begotten of his Father before all worlds.” But in the letter to Alexander, Arius also argued that the Son, “timelessly begotten by the Father,” was “created and established before all ages” and “did not exist prior to his begetting.”1 To counter this position, the Nicene Creed made four further statements in definition of “only begotten.”
The Son is “God of God.” The phrase “God of God” is not a superlative like “Holy of Holies” or “King of kings” or “Lord of lords.” The “of” here might better be translated “from,” speaking of derivation. Jesus Christ is God from God, and the fact that God is used in both halves of the formula suggests that the Son is the same kind of God as the God from which he comes. The phrase also communicates that the Son is not a part of God. He is wholly God of wholly God. The generation of the Son does not imply the division of the Godhead or the multiplication of deities.
The Son is God; the Father is God; the Son is of the Father (the Father is not of the Son); and there is only one God. The Son is “Light of Light.” This claim is similar to the last, but not identical. Here we are dealing with a term rather than a title of divine identity. The argument is that if the term light means the same thing with both the Father and the Son, then they must both be of the same essence. The Son is not a different kind of light than the Father. To put it more technically, a property shared in common, with the same meaning in both, signifies a common nature.
The Son is not a lesser light than the Father. The Son is “very God of very God.” This clause is crucial, especially with regard to the Arian controversy. The defenders of Arius might have said that the Son was God of God. They might have affirmed that Jesus Christ was God and that he came from God. They might have affirmed these statements because they reckoned the Son to be a different sort of God than the Father. But the Arians would not have said that the Son is “very God,” for that implies that the Son is no less God than the Father (“very” is an archaic way of saying “truly”). The Word was God—that much was plain from John 1. But for the Arians, the divine Word was a different kind of deity (a created, lesser deity) than the Father. The Nicene Creed will not allow for an Arian misinterpretation of John’s Gospel.
The Son was “not made.” Now we come to the crux of the Nicene argument. There was no way that Arius or his party could possibly defend this assertion. For Arius, one could not be “begotten” unless he was “made” or “created.” Hence, the Nicene Creed is making the all-important affirmation that the Son’s begottenness is not like our begottenness, or not in every respect. The Son’s begottenness is an eternal begottenness. No one created the Son. There never was when the Son was not—not in time and not before time.
A Song to Be Sung
The doctrine of the Son’s begottenness from the Father is called eternal generation. It is a classic and crucial Trinitarian doctrine, but it also a mystery beyond human description. Eternal generation is like human generation in that one essence begets the same essence, but it is unlike human generation in that it does not involve physical reproduction. Eternal generation is hyperphysical (it is outside the physical or material realm), infinite (it does not take place in time), and ineffable (it cannot be fully comprehended). By eternal generation we do not mean that the Father created the Son’s essence, but rather that the Father communicates the essence he shares with the Son.
Nicene orthodoxy teaches us to hold several truths at the same time:
The Son is of the same essence as the Father.
The Son is to be distinguished from the Father.
The Son is of the Father.
The Father is never of the Son.
The language of “only begotten” helps explain how all these truths can stand together. The early church thought long and hard about how to explain that the Godhead can consist of multiple persons without there being multiple essences. The Son is equal with the Father because he was eternally begotten of the Father. The Son is also distinct from the Father because he was eternally begotten from the Father. When Jesus says he is in the Father and the Father is in him, he is speaking to the theological reality that the Nicene Creed means to defend (John 14:11). We know that a son is from the “stuff” of his father, and yet a son is not the same as his father, and the father does not come from his son. What we understand intuitively in an earthly sense, the Nicene Creed is trying to explain and safeguard in an eternal and theological sense.
If you find all of this is hard to understand, you are not alone. The most brilliant theologians in history have gladly acknowledged that the doctrine of the Trinity is full of mystery. We are dealing with realities beyond our ability to fully understand or articulate. But mysterious does not mean unreasonable or irrational. It means that we, as finite creatures, do not possess sufficient intellect to fully grasp the infinite. When faced with such glories, it is often wise to think of how we pray and how we sing. Intuitively, led by the Spirit, full of the word, we know that Jesus Christ is to be worshiped just as the Father is to be worshiped. We know, like the earliest Christians knew, that we should sing songs about Jesus and to Jesus.
Think of what we sing at Christmas in that brilliant hymn Adeste Fidelis (“O Come, All Ye Faithful”): “God of God, Light of Light. / Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb. / Very God, begotten, not created.” The Christ child we worship in the manger is none other than “very God of very God,” the only begotten Son who is from the Father but was not created or made by him. Many of us have been reciting Nicene theology since before we could read or write. We know it to be true. We know it to be glorious. We know it to be beautiful. And so we sing.
Notes:
Quoted in Donald Fairbairn and Ryan M. Reeves, The Story of Creeds and Confessions: Tracing the Development of the Christian Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2019), 55–56.
Kevin DeYoung (PhD, University of Leicester) is the senior pastor at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte. He has written books for children, adults, and academics, including Just Do Something; Impossible Christianity; Daily Doctrine; and The Biggest Story Bible Storybook. Kevin’s work can be found on clearlyreformed.org. Kevin and his wife, Trisha, have nine children.
The eternal communion of Father, Son, and Spirit is the grounds for our communion with him and one another. Our triune God, simple and perfect for all of eternity, has always been the one God.
There are better ways and worse ways to explain the Trinity. We can describe a pie chart where we split God up into parts, and this is one of the worst ways to explain the Trinity.
Each of the three persons of the Trinity is unique in the way they reveal to us this dimension of infinite depth behind their presence, so we ought to attend to them in different ways.
Here are six summary statements—or, we might say, six lessons—we can learn from this seventeen-hundred year-old confession of faith, the Nicene Creed.
1. The Nicene Creed stresses the importance of believing the right thing.
Sadly, we often hear Christian leaders and churches today downplay the importance of doctrinal fidelity. They may not deny essential articles of the faith, but they can talk about doctrinal precision as if it were alien to the Christian faith or something that gets in the way of authentic discipleship. Such a spirit of doctrinal latitudinarianism is antithetical to the spirit of Nicaea. To be a part of the historic, orthodox Christian church, however, we must believe at least as much as is affirmed in the Nicene Creed. This means that Mormons (who do not accept Nicene orthodoxy), Unitarians (who deny the Trinity), and liberals (if they deny the deity of Christ, the virgin birth, and the resurrection) cannot be considered a part of the church catholic.
2. The history of the Nicene Creed teaches us that new statements (and modified statements) are often necessary to combat new errors.
The Nicene Creed doesn’t tell us everything we need to know and believe. If the 318 bishops from the Council of Nicaea were alive today, undoubtedly they would see the Christian faith threatened in new and different ways. The Nicene Creed is a creedal floor, not a creedal ceiling. The Creed of Nicaea itself was significantly changed from Nicaea (325) to Constantinople (381). The church considered it the same creed because it was doctrinally the same, but it represented a significant augmentation and probably started from a separate formula altogether. The church in the fourth century understood that new threats to the faith merit new efforts to delineate truth from error.
3. The Nicene Creed models for us the central importance of the Trinity.
Too many Christians give too little thought to the Trinity, and too few churches teach their people about the Trinity or make sure that their worship is thoroughly Trinitarian. By structuring its “rule of faith” around the Trinity, and by spending so much time trying to carefully explain and vigorously protect truths about the Trinity, the Nicene Creed shows us a better way. The doctrine of the Trinity is not a math problem to avoid or a largely irrelevant doctrine that we can tuck away in the attic of our minds. To be a Christian is to be baptized in the triune name and to worship the God who subsists as three persons sharing one undivided essence. If we want to know God as he is, what could be more important than knowing, studying, and loving the doctrine of the Trinity?
4. The Nicene Creed underscores the importance of “religion” for Christian life and worship.
We often hear that so-and-so is “spiritual but not religious.” Even Christians have gotten into a bad habit of making “religion” the bad guy opposite the good guy of the gospel. If religion means man-made worship or man’s attempt to earn God’s favor on his own, then Christianity has no place for religion. But usually when people talk about being “spiritual but not religious,” they mean that they want a faith that is unencumbered by doctrinal boundaries, sacred rites, and the institution of the church with its authority structure and obligations. The Nicene Creed emphasizes the importance of each of these “religious” elements. The faith of Nicaea assumes that the Christian is part of a church and understands the importance of the sacraments.
The history of the Nicene Creed teaches us that new statements (and modified statements) are often necessary to combat new errors.
5. The Nicene Creed is not embarrassed to view Christianity with a soteriological focus.
At the heart of the creed’s confession is the good news that the Lord Jesus Christ came down from heaven “for us and for our salvation.” Sometimes you hear people say that modern evangelicals invented this salvation-focused gospel, or that Westerners corrupted the gospel by making it so individualistic, or that medieval people were scared into believing in a God of judgment because the church wanted to control them. But we see right here in the fourth century that the church conceived of the Christian faith as irreducibly about sin and salvation, about judgment and forgiveness, about how we can be saved from the human problem that is sin and death.
6. The Nicene Creed points us to the future.
Part of what we respect and honor in the Nicene Creed is its age. It is ancient. It was the first official, ecumenical church creed. And Christians all around the world still use it seventeen hundred years later. But we would miss the point of the creed if we just admired it as a relic of history or as a connection with the past. The Nicene Creed itself ends by sending us into the future. The last line begins with the verb “we look” (prosdokumen in Greek). We look forward to, we desire, we anticipate, we hope for the resurrection of our bodies and eternal life in the world to come. In Latin, that final verb is expectamus. The Nicene Creed deliberately ends on a note of expectation and hope.
And remember, it is not just life that we are longing for—life without pain, life without sin, life with fellow Christians and with fellow family members who died in Christ. We look forward to all that, as well we should. But more importantly, the life we look forward to is life with the triune God—the God that the Nicene Creed does so much to explain and honor. For ages upon ages we will thrill to know and to worship God the Father Almighty, to bow before his only begotten Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and to sing praise to the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life.
Kevin DeYoung (PhD, University of Leicester) is the senior pastor at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte. He has written books for children, adults, and academics, including Just Do Something; Impossible Christianity; Daily Doctrine; and The Biggest Story Bible Storybook. Kevin’s work can be found on clearlyreformed.org. Kevin and his wife, Trisha, have nine children.
Many Christians may well have heard the phrase ”no creed but the Bible“ at some point. Is it a faithful and useful principle for guiding how we think about Christian truth and authority?
My conviction that creeds and confessions are a good and necessary part of healthy, biblical church life rests on a host of different arguments and convictions; but, at root, there are four basic presuppositions.
Kevin DeYoung talks on the importance of theology for all Christians, why it matters for our everyday lives, and why it's worth the effort to dig in, even if it sometimes feels a bit unfamiliar.
In this episode, Kevin DeYoung shows us how the Nicene Creed allows us to learn from the great accomplishments that the Christians before us have fought so hard to establish and defend. Dr. DeYoung also clarifies confusing aspects of this creed and highlights how it has played a central role throughout much of church history.
Matt Tully
Kevin, thanks so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.
Kevin DeYoung
Great to be with you.
Matt Tully
The Council of Nicaea happened in the city of Nicaea in AD 325, and we’re going to jump into a lot of the details there of what happened, who was there, why it all happened, and how it ultimately led to this thing called the Nicene Creed. But I wonder, as a first question, about terminology. The creed that came from the council in the city of Nicaea is called the Nicene Creed. I don’t know if our listeners can hear the difference there. Nicaea was the city, and that was the council, but the creed is called the Nicene Creed. Why isn’t it the Nicaean Creed, which is probably actually what often we refer to it as?
Kevin DeYoung
And it’s even more confusing than that, as you know, because the council that met in 325, the statement that they came up with we sometimes call the creed of Nicaea. And then what we call the Nicene creed, which I guess is just a way of taking the noun, the place named Nicaea, and turning it into an adjective. What kind of creed is it? It’s the Nicene. I never thought about how the derivation worked there. But that Nicene Creed, which we’re talking about and what the book is about, is from the Council of Constantinople in 381. So some people, to be very technically correct, call it the (and I don’t even know if I can get it all right) the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. But that’s going to be very difficult for people to say. “And now, congregation, let’s recite together this whole thing.” But it’s important because, and I’m sure we’ll talk about it, but the council in Constantinople understood that what they were doing, though it was a significant revision, was the same faith and the same truth of the Council of Nicaea. So we call that 381 document the Nicene Creed, which has its origin in the Council of Nicaea (325), and this, of course, is the 1,700 year anniversary. And you don’t get 1,700 year anniversaries very often.
Matt Tully
Already there are some people listening right now and they’re feeling a little bit of, Oh man, this is so technical and nuanced and they’re talking about things that happened almost 2,000 years ago, and maybe they’re wondering, Is this really that central? We have the Bible. We have God’s word. Do we really need to be too worried about this creed or that confession happening at this conference or council back a long time ago? But I wanted to highlight one thing that you write in your new book. You write, “After the Bible, the Nicene Creed may be the most important Christian text ever written.” So I wonder if you can unpack that. You just raised the stakes for us and made a pretty bold statement, that this actually does matter. So I wonder if you can just, in a couple sentences, start to explain why you view this document as so central to our faith.
Kevin DeYoung
I’ll try a couple paragraphs if I can’t get it in a couple sentences. And in that sentence that you quoted, I think I used the words “may be,” so there’s a little hedging. But I probably should take out the “may be.” I’m not sure what would qualify as a more important, non-inspired text than the Nicene Creed, because it has served as the definitional boundary for every branch of the Christian church. The Protestant Church owns this, the Roman Catholic Church owns this, the Eastern Orthodox Church owns it. Now, there’s a word that gets added later that becomes a source of division between the Western and the Eastern Church, but all three of these major branches of Christendom say, “Yes, we are Nicene Christians.” It gave us the vocabulary to talk about the person of the Son in relation to the person of the Father. It helped to define Trinitarian orthodoxy—it gave us the language—and it has served the church for 1,700 years. People are still—and if you’re just hearing about it for the first time, then it’s not too late to learn about it. But hopefully many of us are in churches where this has at least been said on some occasion. Now, I know I grew up in the Reformed Church in America, and so we would say this sometimes. And I can’t remember a series on it, but I remember it being there. Matt, I was surprised. I gave a talk on this at the Cross Conference in January. There were maybe 500 or 600 people at this breakout, and I asked, “How many of you ever grew up in church hearing about the Nicene Creed?” And it was very paltry. There were 500 people in that room, and I bet there were twenty-five hands that went up. So not very many people in our general evangelical, maybe it’s more in Presbyterian and more confessional traditions than low church Baptist folks. But you should know it if you don’t, because not only does it give us the shape of Trinitarian Orthodoxy and the language of Trinitarian Orthodoxy but it establishes what kind of church the Christian church is. To say that to be a Christian church is to believe certain things. That may sound just obvious to us, but that’s not how Roman religion worked. You didn’t have to have certain doctrinal parameters. It was about ritual and a number of other things. So it is really impossible to overstate the importance of the Nicene Creed for the 2,000-year-history of the Church.
Matt Tully
Let me play a little devil’s advocate here. I’ll come at it from a “lower church position,” where someone who has not grown up reciting the creed, perhaps. And maybe, again, the pushback would be that that’s all well and good. The Roman Christians of their day needed to have this meeting to figure some things out. But ultimately, the definition of the church or an understanding of the Trinity, that’s got to be rooted in Scripture. That comes from Scripture. And so is there really that much value in a man-made document that summarizes Scripture, maybe helpfully, but really that’s all it’s doing? And if we don’t need that today, if my understanding or my church’s understanding of the Trinity is sound from Scripture, then that’s totally sufficient.
Kevin DeYoung
Very good and very bad objections. Very good in that they’re common, and they need to be dealt with fairly, and people feel them honestly. Someone wants to honor the Bible, and they say, “No creed but the Bible,” well, of course, that sentence in itself is a creed, which states something. And almost every church that might say, “Hey, we got no creed but the Bible,” they probably have a statement of faith somewhere on their website. They probably have something that says, “Well, we’re this kind of Christian. We’re not a liberal Christian.” Or as soon as somebody says, “Why do we need man made creeds? Why don’t we just all quote the Bible together?” Okay, well, there are people who quote the Bible and believe that gay marriage is okay. That person’s probably going to say, “Well, obviously that’s not what the Bible really teaches, so we better be clear about that.” Yep, you’re right. So in order to protect what the Bible teaches, sometimes, oftentimes, we need words outside the Bible to say that. And that was one of the main things that Athanasius, who’s one of the defenders of Nicene Orthodoxy, was arguing. Because it was the Aryans, and we’ll say more about that, but it was the rival party, it was the Aryans sometimes who said, “Can’t we just say what we all agree from Scripture? Because everybody believes the Bible, why don’t we just quote the Bible?” Because they understood that they don’t mean the same thing by those Bible passages. And even though it sounds pious on a surface level—“Let’s just quote the Bible. Let’s just be Bible Christians. Let’s just use Bible language to say what we believe.”—every one of us at some point is going to say, “Well, but what do we really mean by the kingdom? And what do I really mean that Jesus died on the cross? And how do we really interpret this verse?” At which point you have to do some systematic theology. You have to try to answer big questions by testing Scripture against Scripture, and you need to use some other words in order to defend what the Bible really says. And though it sounds humble on one level to say, “I’m just a Bible-only guy,” it really is a mark of hubris to think that we’re going to come up with something that’s better than the formula that has served the church for 1,700 years. Now, everything needs to be tested against Scripture. No one was inerrant at that council, and the Nicene Creed is not inerrant. To think that anyone alive today is spending more time than they were—as a collective unit, let alone the ordinary Christian in the pew—they were giving such finely tuned, theological, philosophical reflection to these categories. And we also believe that that’s how the Holy Spirit works in the church. The church isn’t infallible, but it is the buttress and pillar of truth. It’s the Spirit working through the church to help define these things and to give us the language to talk about them. And so it’s really an aspect of humility to say, “Let’s learn from the great accomplishments that the Christians before us have fought so hard to establish and defend.”
Matt Tully
It also seems true to me that if you consider a very solid, theologically conservative Bible church that has a really strong orthodox understanding of the Trinity, they are indebted to things like the Nicene Creed in ways that maybe they don’t even realize. They just assume truths from the creed or formulations or an understanding of God that that really is indebted to the work that these people did.
Kevin DeYoung
Yeah, that’s a really good point. Sometimes it’s like climbing up to the second story and then you kick the ladder down and you forget, “Oh, I needed that ladder.”
Matt Tully
We didn’t need that ladder!
Kevin DeYoung
Yeah, we don’t need that ladder. No, that’s how you got up there. The person who says, “Look, we don’t need the Nicene Creed. We all believe God is one God in three persons.” Well, time out right there. That’s using some language that the church developed in the third and fourth and fifth centuries to talk about it. And Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, these issues have not gone away. There are still these same questions in different form, but how do we understand the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Oneness Pentecostals. Prominent prosperity gospel preachers are Oneness Pentecostals—so these Trinitarian issues. And then the last thing I would say is if this is about knowing God, why wouldn’t we want to learn from those who have gone before and know as much about God as we can? So I’m just thinking of the person who very honestly says, “Hey, I just love Jesus. It’s me and Jesus,” or “I read my Bible.” Well, don’t you want to see more of those mountain peaks? Don’t you want more of those heights? I think a verse that gives us warrant for this is that, in Ephesians 4, that Jesus gifts to the church teachers. Think about that. Not only the Holy Spirit, which will lead you into all the truth (that is all the truth about Jesus and who he was and what he accomplished, he promised), but he gives to the church teachers. So Christ established that the way in which he is going to guard and guide and govern his church are through human teachers. Yes, the word and the Spirit, ultimately, but through teachers. And so this is a way of saying, okay, God has given to us teachers in the history of the church, and some of those teachers have put down statements that have served us well for centuries. So let’s learn about them and seek to understand them.
Matt Tully
Let’s dig into some of the issues that were at play here and the people who were involved with this. I wonder if you can set the stage for us when it comes to this council at Nicaea. What was going on in the church at the time? What was the major issue that was being discussed? You’ve already alluded to this a little bit. And who were some of the key figures?
Kevin DeYoung
So there’s a presbyter in Alexandria in Egypt named Arius. This is where the the Darth Vader music, the Imperial March, would come in. So Arius comes down to history as a bad guy to us, but it’s important to remember that when these things happened, it’s not like the heretics are always, or even often, are rotten, terrible people, and they would say, “Well, that guy’s obviously a jerk, and he doesn’t care about the Bible.” No, often they’re very serious about the Bible. They’re intent on what they’re doing and trying to do the best they can. So you can’t just say, “Well, the bad guys will always look bad. It will be obvious, and they’re really terrible people.” So Arius starts airing his opinions publicly in Alexandria, which gets the attention of the bishop there, Alexander, who is concerned.
Matt Tully
So Alexander is the Bishop in Alexandria, right?
Kevin DeYoung
Yes. Just to make it difficult. Arius is a presbyter, which now we know as a presbytery. Presbyter just means elder, but in that hierarchy, he’s a lower position in the church, but he’s an ordained person in the church. So he starts airing these opinions. What we know about Arius comes to us from his opponents—those who quote him and include some of his writings—and some of it from letters. But insofar as we think we’re getting an accurate view of what Arius was teaching, one of the pregnant phrases that he used was, referencing the Son: “There was when he was not.” Now, notice sometimes it gets translated as “There was a time when the Son was not.” But he’s not even saying time. He’s saying “there was.” There was some thing even before time as we know it before creation. So when he says “There was when the Son was not,” he’s not saying God made the world on Monday, and then he created Jesus on Tuesday. He’s just saying there’s some eon past in the mystery of eternity when there was a time when the Son did not exist. He understands that “begotten” has to mean a beginning. The Nicene Creed has “only begotten,” and that’s an important phrase, but that itself wasn’t the issue. Everyone understood the Son is begotten of the Father. The question was, What does it mean that the Son is begotten of the Father? You can understand Arius is thinking, Well, for every human that we know, and the incarnate Son was human, so every human son to be begotten of a father means that he was created. He had a beginning. You and I were begotten. There was a time when Kevin DeYoung was not. That’s what it means to be begotten. So Arius says if he’s a son and he’s begotten of the father, then by definition, begottenness implies a beginning. That’s what it means—“There was when he was not.” Now, this has massive ramifications, because this means however special the Son of God is—the divine logos and the incarnate word, Jesus of Nazareth—however special he was, and Arius might even call him God. So that’s why we have to be really careful, because there are groups today that will call Jesus God, but then you look carefully and Mormons will say he’s God the second. Or Jehovah’s Witnesses say he’s a god. So Arius would say, yeah, he’s God. But when you really press in, if he had a beginning and the Father did not have a beginning, then he’s not God in exactly the same way the Father is. He’s not made of the same god-ness. So this is where we get into terms like essence, and being, and ousia. How do we explain the stuff of God, and is the Son of the same God’s stuff (now, that puts it materially, but just trying to get it in our heads) as the Father? So Arius has this poem, or maybe a hymn, it’s called “Talia,” which means banquet or feast. And you can look at translations of it. It’s not very catchy, it doesn’t rhyme, it’s very deep and philosophical. But at one part he talks about the Trinity, and he says, “a Trinity of unequal glories.” So this is where the rubber meets the road. He’s got Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but because of his understanding of the Son, and this all is going to relate to the Spirit, he sees, yes, Father, Son, Holy Spirit; they share in unequal glories. Well, this really strikes at the heart of the Christian faith. Who is the Son of God? And as so often happens, orthodoxy and orthopraxy come together, and part of what alarms the church, even if you don’t have a sophisticated understanding of the theology, people are saying, “Now wait a minute. I pray to Jesus. I pray to the Father in the name of the Son. Don’t we sing songs of worship to the Son? So how can it be that the Son is something less than the Father?” So that is part of what makes it such a big deal. The whole empire—Constantine’s conversion is less than a decade earlier when this starts erupting—
Matt Tully
Constantine is the emperor of the Roman Empire.
Kevin DeYoung
He’s the emperor of the Roman Empire who famously converts and becomes a Christian and then favors Christianity and is going to figure prominently in this story and then summoning the council in 325. So bishop against bishop and empire against empire. It’s hard for us to think of this, because we think of theology as, oh, it’s really important, but is a civil war going to happen? But that’s how seriously they took these matters and how intertwined it was with the operation of the realm and the bishoprics, which maintain a lot of the positions of key authority throughout the empire—and it’s especially in the East, because Alexandria is more in the Eastern part. So it becomes a huge controversy, and the empire is threatening to implode over it, and something needs to be done. And hence, a council.
Matt Tully
It strikes me that Arius’s position, what he was arguing for, there is a certain logic to it. It makes sense on a certain level. So how would you summarize the core wrong assumption or wrong perspective that he had that then led him down this road towards ultimately heresy?
Kevin DeYoung
The key mistake is his central assumption that a begottenness implies beginning—begetting must mean beginning. That’s why the eternal begottenness of the Son is so important. And that defies complete human comprehension, but that in eternity, God the Father is communicating the essence to God the Son. Often what makes heresy implausible initially is it often is too neat and tidy and cuts through the difficulties of holding together, not contradictory ever, but truths that are beyond our comprehension. So this is really important. When we talk about theology and we talk about God’s word, it’s never irrational. God is not asking us to say two plus two equals five. He’s never telling us flat contradictions. But there are things we have to believe that are suprarational, meaning they are beyond our ability to completely understand or comprehend. And it’s important to say that the debate came down to Scripture. So one is the assumption Arius made about how begotten means beginning, and then the other, because you might say, well, then the orthodox side was just imposing a theology on Arius. Well, no, the orthodox side had the Bible on their side. They had all of these passages where Thomas will say, “My Lord and my God,” and of course John 1 is key, the worship that he receives, the attributes that we ascribe to God are the same attributes that we can see belonging to the Son. So it becomes an argument of Scripture. And Arius is the one who comes with certain philosophical assumptions. So here’s the last thing to answer your good question, Matt. Part of what he has, and it’s not quite dualism, but he has this very common Greek understanding that matter and physical stuff is bad, less than, dirty, taints you. So part of what he’s coming in with is how can God as God—I mean fully, eternally, impassively, omnipotent, immutable God—take on human flesh? For him that’s a contradiction. God cannot do that. So he thinks, Well, it has to be something a little bit less than God. It has to be one even tiny step removed from God in all of his Godness for this to happen. And so he cuts that mystery and majesty and wonder that is the incarnation. As Charles Wesley will write years later, “‘Tis mystery all! The immortal dies.”
Matt Tully
I’m just struck hearing you explain this and helping us understand Arius’s thinking here, how seriously he was wrestling with the implications of what we see in the New Testament. We see Jesus taking on human flesh. And sometimes I think for us as Christians today, because we assume so much of these formulations, we maybe actually don’t think about them always very deeply. We don’t feel internally the challenge of the doctrine of the Trinity, or the doctrine of the hypostatic union. We don’t feel the, “Wow! This actually really does go beyond my understanding.” We just casually accept the formulation, and maybe that’s a good thing in some ways, but I’m just struck that Arius was really trying to make sense of something that really does go beyond us, and that was where he, unfortunately, erred.
Kevin DeYoung
And it brings up an important point that part of the reason why it was so immediately controversial is because what he was saying was novel. It was new. It’s not that the church had everything formulated in the way that they would over the next few generations. But we really want to make sure people don’t think of it as, well, until 325, it was sort of 50/50. People were just taking votes. What do you think? Jesus is God, yay or nay? What do you think? Well, and then Nicaea comes along, and then the kind of Dan Brown, Da Vinci Code slant, which is not historically accurate. So we always want to be fair with the historical record, and it is possible for some Christians to get turned sideways when they say, “Oh wow! There were a lot of these controversies.” And so we want to be honest about that. We don't want to hide from any truths. At the same time, we don’t want people to think that this was an open question of whether or not Jesus was really God, and there were a bunch of churches that said, “Nope. Jesus is God, Jesus is not God.” No. As I said at the beginning, because people were already praying to the Son and worshiping the Son, that was obvious. And the Eucharist was, along with the preaching, the center of the worship, where you take the body and the blood and the bread and the cup of the Son, and you pray to him. It was instinctive. Yes, this is One that we worship. Irenaeus, in the second century, is already talking about the rule of faith. There’s already this understanding that you believe certain things about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So this is from the very earliest days. So Irenaeus is taught by Polycarp, who’s taught by John, so you’re a couple generations away from the apostles themselves. We’re going back a couple centuries here, but just to point out that these things were already talked about. Arius, in God’s providence, brings up a new and wrong way, which God is going to use through the church to add clarity to it. But there were baptismal formulas that go back to the very beginning of the church that adult converts who are coming for baptism are asked, What do you believe about the Father? What do you believe about the Son? What do you believe about the Holy Spirit? And the seeds of that become the Apostles’ Creed, which isn’t written by the apostles, but is a summary of their teaching. And then it gets put forward for the council. The Creed of Nicaea, which becomes the Nicene Creed, was likely a confession that another part of the church was already using. At least that’s a starting point, and many people have thought that Eusebius of Caesarea—so there’s a couple of Eusebius’s here. One is on the Arius side at first, and then Eusebius of Caesarea is in the middle. But he brings a confession that gets used. So these things are already developed and established, and it falls upon the church at different times to clarify and come up with the right language to describe what is already there in practice. So I don’t want to exaggerate and say that people weren’t sure if Jesus was God. In fact, Arius would have said, if you would have asked him, “Is Jesus God?” “Yeah.” “What kind of God?” Oh, okay. Well, that’s the debate.
Matt Tully
I want to go back a little bit to emperor Constantine. You’ve mentioned him already once, and again, anyone who knows a little bit of the history will know that, as you said, he calls this council together in 325 in Nicaea for the purpose of hashing through this idea, hashing through Arius’s ideas that he’s presented to the church and really trying to figure out what they actually believe. And I think some people— modern scholars or historians—have looked back on that council and what Constantine did there and maybe cast it in a more political light. Rather than him being interested in coming to some kind of pure theological orthodoxy, they would argue that Constantine’s real purpose there was just empire unity. He’s just trying to make sure that there isn’t political division in his empire, and so he’s going to just side with the stronger theological camp and push that through and use the power of the sword to enforce conformity. And that would be a critique. I think there are Christians, and I know people myself, who, as they came to understand the history a little bit more, it just felt messy. It felt non-theological. It felt like there were a lot of other motives at play beyond just a desire to know the truth about God. So how do you think about that dynamic and Constantine’s role when it comes to this whole council?
Kevin DeYoung
It is messy. There were other motives. And it’s important to say that saying there were other motives or it’s messy is not to say that there weren’t also really good motives and true theological, pious motives. So both need some correction. Yes, if someone thinks that to go back to these councils, or at any time in the history of the church, it was simply just pious hand holding and, especially in these empire-wide skirmishes, that you’re not going to find a lot of messy politics, you’re going to be disabused of that. And so it’s good to help people see that. At the same time, to make it as if this was only a political calculation is undeniably not the case. By tradition, there were 318 bishops, mostly from the East, and you just have to put yourself a little bit in what this must have been like. So you’re getting called by the emperor in 325, and you’re coming to this palace resort, and you’re being provided for, and he comes in, if Eusebius of Caesarea, who’s one of the first church historians is right. Now, Eusebius lays it on pretty thick.
Matt Tully
He loves Constantine.
Kevin DeYoung
He loves Constantine. He thinks Constantine is God’s man. And we can take it with a little grain of salt, but you have to understand there are bishops there who literally bear the scars of persecution. The last wave of persecution just happened at the beginning of the fourth century. This is in their lifetime. They saw it. Eusebius of Caesarea saw persecution in Caesarea and in Palestine, the area where he was. So they may be missing eyes. They may have burnished brand marks on them. So of course they’re going to think, This is the man who put an end to our persecution. Their head must have been spinning. And now we’re being called in, we’re being provided for, he’s paying for us, we’re here in the presence of the emperor. But it’s not as if everyone was starry eyed and just fawning over Constantine. There were some also who were worried, Might we be too close to the emperor? It was a little clearer who the good guys and the bad guys were when it cost you your life for standing up for. And these are going to be the same things that are going to be a part of the tension in Christianity until the very present. One of the ways I put it is, Are we (the church) better when it’s very hard to be a Christian or very easy to be a Christian? And even some of the debates in our own day over church and state, Christian nationalism, cultural Christianity, they come back to those kind of things. Well, no, the church is better when you get persecuted and you have to stand up for it and you might die. That’s when the church is pure. And someone else says, “Now wait a minute. A lot of people capitulate when that happens. And it’s really hard for the church to evangelize and to plant churches and to have buildings. So nominalism is a danger, but overall we’re better when there’s some momentum. Is it better to have to opt in to be a Christian or opt out?” Now, ultimately and theologically, we all need to opt in, and yet a covenant understanding, even Baptists or Presbyterians, that in some sense, we also have these privileges. So that’s getting far afield from your question, but it’s just to illustrate that the dynamic with Constantine is going to be conversation for Christians to have right up to the present. And Constantine, yes, undoubtedly, he is concerned about unity in his empire. What emperor wouldn’t be? And there are all sorts of questions about his conversion and how serious was it. I think that he probably was a Christian. Not a very good one in some ways. Some things he, like the kings of old, had high places that he never tore down, and he certainly seemed to be full of himself. But as somebody has pointed out, even though he didn’t talk about Jesus very much in his official correspondence, he probably talked about Jesus more than James Madison did in his official writings. And James Madison studied with John Witherspoon, and that’s my guy. So I think there’s even the possibility that Constantine was the one who proposed the homoousios solution. Homoousios, same essence, that the Son is the same essence of the Father. That becomes the key phrase. And if it came from Constantine, then it certainly came from one of his theological advisors, Hosius of Cordova. So give it up to Spain for Hosius there, who would have given it to him. So it wasn’t that Constantine was this great theologian, but with these advisors, it’s quite possible he was the one, at least according to some accounts, who proposed what will become the most important word in the entire creed.
Matt Tully
You mentioned the church today and just some of the connections and the similar dynamics that we face as Christians living today, and there’s one more that I wanted to ask you about. You argue in this book that throughout church history, the Holy Spirit has used—and the Holy Spirit, not just that this has happened this way, but the Spirit himself—has often used controversy in the church to help bring clarity on orthodoxy. And you reference 1 Corinthians 11:19 and then write, “Sometimes there must be arguments and factions in order for the truth to be more fully known and articulated.” So my first question is why do you think (and this is speculative) why does God allow conflict to play such a major role in shaping and developing and clarifying Christian theology? And then number two, does the fact that he does that affect how you think about the controversies that swirl around the evangelical church today?
Kevin DeYoung
It takes a lot of wisdom, because as soon as someone says heresy or factions are how God guides the church, then, therefore, I’m fighting with everyone, so I must be right, because I’m just trying to protect the church and prove what is true. On the other hand, the person who points to all sorts of passages about unity and says, “Jesus’s last prayer, the high priestly prayer, is for unity. Why are you fighting about it?” Well, the Bible is a big book and there are a lot of things in it, and what we find is some things are worth fighting about and some things aren’t. Paul clearly says that in the pastoral epistles. You’re making war about words, you’re quarreling about things that don’t matter, you’re fighting over genealogies. So we absolutely need the category of—and this is social media so often—you’re arguing about things that don’t matter. This is not producing. This is all heat, no light. There’s nothing at stake here. So that’s true. And we see from the pastoral epistles, Paul is all over the place there, saying, “Guard the good deposit. What I received, I passed on to you” (1 Cor. 15). He absolutely thinks there is this core deposit of apostolic truth. It must be protected. It must be defended. And in that passage you quoted from 1 Corinthians 11, he even says, hey, sometimes factions are God’s way of bringing clarity, because God uses means. He can work miracles. He could just drop down leaflets of creeds to us, but he guides by his Spirit in the church. That’s how he always works. That’s how he worked with Israel, through prophets, and it’s how he continues to work through the church, through teachers. So yes, it is controversy. I think about in my own denominations, the PCA. Some people will know we had this Revoice conference that came up in 2018, and it stirred up a lot of controversy about how we understand same sex attraction and gay identity.
And now, seven years later, I think God used it to provide a lot of clarity. I had my thinking sharpened in some areas, because controversy is what drives a bunch of people to say, “What have people said about this before? What are the most careful arguments we can make?”
Turretin. I love Turretin. He’ll always say, “We distinguish . . .”—that’s what good theologians need to say. “We distinguish.” I’m making a careful point to say not this but that. And I’m sure people have thought of this before, but it just does seem like in our digital age, people have lost the ability to think. They’ve lost any patience to follow an argument. If somebody tries to say, “We need to distinguish . . . I’m not saying this, I’m saying that,” then you’re effeminate, you don’t know what time it is, you’re not fighting. Well, praise God, on the one hand, that the bishops at Nicaea were willing to fight. Edward Gibbon, the Enlightenment historian, who’s a skeptic, but he famously said that they fought over a diphthong—homoousios or homoiousios. Now, that’s a little bit anachronistic, because that comes out later in the century. But he’s right. Is Christ of the same essence of the Father or just a similar, like essence? Praise God that they cared enough about theology to fight over a diphthong. And at the same time, they were patient enough to want to make very fine arguments. And it wasn’t like 325 tied it up in a bow. This is the peril of having the emperor on your side. When the emperor’s on your side, the next emperor might not be on your side. And then what? And so we see the blessings and curses of being very tied to the Roman apparatus as emperors come and go. Then the Arians will have the upper hand, and then the Orthodox in Nicaea will have the upper hand. And that’s why in 381, Constantinople, the Nicene Creed, as we know it today, is having to reassert various other arguments and clarify and try to tidy up what exactly they meant by that creed in 325.
Matt Tully
Let’s talk a little bit about the creed itself now. We can’t go into all the detail—every line like you do in your book, where you really walk through it in a lot of detail. But the English translation of the creed that you include in the book is a mere 226 words, and 132 of those words are about the Son in some way, thirty-eight are about the Holy Spirit, and just nineteen concern the Father directly. And then there are thirty-seven other words at the end that talk about the church and baptism and the end times. What do you make of that balance of just word count given to the Son compared to the other two members of the Trinity and anything else that has to do with our faith?
Kevin DeYoung
I think there’s a historical and a theological answer. The historical answer is simply that that was the issue that they had to deal with. That’s what Arius kicked up. That’s what then in the subsequent years the Cappadocian fathers, so these are different theologians from that area, are wrestling with. The questions of the day had to deal with the person of the Son—his two natures and then his relation to the Father. So you’re going to have two more of these ecumenical creeds. You’re going to have Ephesus in 431 and then Chalcedon in 451, which are then dealing more with the two natures of the Son. It’s because for this century and a plus, this is the main thing they’ve got to not figure out like they didn’t know, but they have to clarify what’s the language to protect what we see in Scripture. So there’s a historical reason, just like today we’d want to affirm all those things. But for the most part, that’s not where the heat is. It’s anthropology, it’s the human person, it’s sexuality, those, it’s gender. Every age has different things. So there’s a historical reason, but theologically, it’s true, too, that you never say the Son is the most important person of the Trinity. That would be heretical. We can say that God has chosen to reveal himself in the Son as one of us, and that the Old Testament is all looking forward to the revelation of God on earth, and then the New Testament is the revelation of God on earth, and then the epistles are pointing back to that. So we are right that though we pray to the Father through the Son by the Spirit (that’s usually how we think of it), that the focus of our faith, our worship, and what the Bible spends most of its time about is the revelation of the Son and the anticipation of the Son. So it’s not at all any ranking of the three persons of the Trinity, but it is a measure of the historical moment and also what we see there. There’s a reason why, if churches are going to have a cross (and Puritans would say maybe you shouldn’t), but that the cross is a better symbol than the dove. It’s not because we don’t believe in the dove and we don’t believe in the Holy Spirit. The Nicene Creed confesses, “I believe in the Holy Spirit.” But the work of the Holy Spirit is to throw a spotlight on Christ, to magnify Christ, to lead people to believe in Christ. So the Holy Spirit is to show us who Jesus is. So if you have a church that’s got a dove up in the front of your sanctuary, you should probably think about whether or not that is what the Holy Spirit would even want. So the Spirit shows us Christ and gives us an understanding of Christ, so that when we know Christ, we are seeing the image of the Father. That's the logic of the Bible.
Matt Tully
There’s a certain visibility both literally in human history but even theologically that the Son seems to enjoy that the Father and the Spirit don’t quite enjoy to the same extent.
Kevin DeYoung
Yeah, and it’s what you said. It’s because of the incarnation, the visible God come to earth. You could touch, you could hear, you could see with your own eyes he is the Son.
Matt Tully
So I wonder if you can point us to, and this is, again, probably a hard thing to do, but what would you say is your favorite line in the creed? If you could pick one line, can you highlight what that might be and even read that for us?
Kevin DeYoung
Well, I don’t have the Nicene Creed in front of me, but one of the lines that I always love is in the middle there. After the focus is on homoousios and what it means to be begotten but no beginning, “For us and our salvation, he came down.” So I love the connection there between, you might say, the person of Christ and the work of Christ, or the benefits of Christ. The whole point, the whole reason why we are wanting to be so precise about the Son is because this is the one who for us and for our salvation came down. So there’s a soteriological aim in the whole creed, lest we think this is rarefied. No, it is rarefied. It is theological precision. But lest we think this is just ivory tower speculation on things that don’t matter, theologians have too much time, no, it really matters because we’re talking about how are you saved? How can someone who’s not fully God as God save you? And yet how can he save men if he’s not fully man? A century later the Creed of Chalcedon will affirm that the Son is not only consubstantial with the Father (of the same substance or essence with the Father) but in the incarnation, consubstantial with us. He also shares our humanity. So it’s that line that I often think of as the most precious, because it connects all of that. I’m at a Presbyterian church and most of our folks, myself included, are not super expressive in worship. When John Piper was here, he was probably saying, “What’s wrong with you people?” No, he was gracious. He wasn’t. But for those who are expressive and raise their hands in a great worship song, I always say we ought to feel that same thing when we read the Nicene Creed. I know the music God inspires or uses music to touch affections in that way. If we’re touched by truth and we’re touched by the precious realities of who Christ is and what he did for us, then the Nicene Creed ought to have that same visceral response in the believer.
Matt Tully
And as anyone who has read the creed, or I encourage anyone listening to read the creed this year, 2025 is the 700th anniversary of this incredible document. So it’s worth taking some time out to dig in. You’ll find it’s beautifully written. It has almost a poetic quality to it. It’s not dry theologizing. It’s beautiful. So Kevin, maybe as a final question for you, this is one that many of our listeners have been clamoring to hear your opinion on when it comes to the Nicene Creed and the Council of Nicaea. Legend has it that Saint Nicholas, yes, that Saint Nicholas, slapped Arius on the face because of his position on this particular doctrine that we’ve been talking about. If people were wondering where the connection to their lives came, maybe this is it. Christmas and the Council of Nicaea come together. What do you think of that traditional idea or that legend that’s come down to us?
Kevin DeYoung
I hope it’s true. There are some stories that don’t even fit the right time. No, Nicholas of Myra, he was a bishop, and according to later sources, he was at the Council of Nicaea. I think that seems very likely. Whether he slapped Arius or punched him in the face, a skeptical reading could say that’s not a contemporaneous account. And obviously they’re trying to make him seem as good as possible. And yet there’s no corroborating evidence. And yet there’s no historical evidence to say why that couldn’t be true. So I’m going to say we can’t be sure, but we got some historical records that say it, and I’m going to believe it.
Matt Tully
Yeah, that’s great. Santa Claus slapping Arius was not where we thought this was going.
Kevin DeYoung
But that’s where it ends up.
Matt Tully
Kevin, thank you so much for walking us through this incredible document and the context and the history behind the creation of this resource for us. We just appreciate you helping us make the connection to something that happened almost two millennia ago and the church today.
Kevin DeYoung
Well, thanks for having me. I’m grateful to Crossway for publishing the book. It’s under 100 pages. There’s going to be a lot of good stuff that’s already come out and will come out this year, so by all means read longer stuff. But hopefully, at just under 100 pages, it’s something that everybody in the church can read. It’s going to go deep, and you can probably hear some of that in just this conversation, but this can be read fairly quickly, and hopefully if it gets people loving God more and loving the truth of the Nicene Creed, it’ll be wonderful.
Jim Hamilton discusses what to do when you hate your job, offering encouragement for those frustrated in their work and explaining the difference between a job and a vocation.
Rosaria Butterfield encourages us to engage our LGBTQ neighbors for Christ, highlighting how God used the radically ordinary hospitality of Christians to draw her to himself.
How should the word of revelation, the witness of Christian thought, and the world of human brokenness be related to one another? This, I believe, is a work of wisdom.
What is wisdom? In biblical perspective, wisdom is not reducible to the accumulation of data, information gathering, or knowledge acquisition, even though all three have their place. Wisdom knows what to do with data, information, and knowledge for both thought and life. Moreover, wisdom is predicated on an attitude:
The fear of the Lord. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge;
fools despise wisdom and instruction. (Prov. 1:7)
This reverent attitude recognizes that God is God and that we are not God. The contrast is striking between the wise person characterized by one attitude and the fool by another. Additionally, wisdom involves an activity of both acute and astute observation. The wise person knows how to pay attention to reality and take instruction from what is seen. Proverbs 6:6–11 provides a good example:
Go to the ant,
O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise.
Without having any chief,
officer, or ruler,
she prepares her bread in summer
and gathers her food in harvest.
The lesson is then drawn:
How long will you lie there, O sluggard?
When will you arise from your sleep?
A little sleep, a little slumber,
a little folding of the hands to rest,
and poverty will come upon you like a robber,
and want like an armed man.
The wise person prospers, the fool does not. The wise person can make a connection between what is observed in nature (the ant’s behavior in summer with winter coming) and human life.
In theology, wisdom is reasoning employed as the servant of Scripture and not as the master of Scripture. I have chosen “reasoning” quite deliberately. Reason must not be reified as though it were a thing separate from us. Reason does not function on its own, in a spiritual vacuum. Persons reason. Persons mount arguments, question or demolish them, and marshal or dismiss evidence. And persons do that either in submission to God or in conflict with him.
So where does human reasoning fit in the story of wisdom? It was the philosopher William James (1842–1910) who defined philosophy as “the unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.”1 No less a stubborn attempt is necessary for doing theology or reasoning in general. Yet reason can only ever be norma normata (a ruled norm), as we’ve seen. To place reason above Scripture was the error of the Sadducees. Jesus chided them, “You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God” (Matt. 22:29). Their formal mistake lay in their ignorance of relevant Scripture. Their material mistake was their not seeing how Exodus 3:6 affected the resurrection question.
Importantly, there is a moral dimension to knowing. Early in the twentieth century, the Scottish theologian P. T. Forsyth captured that dimension in writing: “Logic is rooted in Ethic, for the truth we see depends upon the men we are.”2 Forsyth must not be misunderstood. He did not argue that the truth depends upon the kind of moral agents we are. But our ability to recognize the truth, see the truth, has a moral component. Virtue epistemology has its place.3 Jesus taught that it is the pure in heart who see God (Matt. 5:8). It is those who do the will of God who know (John 7:17). In fact, the wise person is the virtuous one.
Some may think that the fall has so damaged the human mind that without the aid of the Spirit there can be no true thought about anything. Some confuse this notion with the noetic effects of sin.4 However, Jesus thought that the crowds were able to interpret natural phenomena like weather patterns (e.g., Luke 12:54–56). Moreover, he expected Nicodemus as a teacher of Israel to have understood his teaching about the new birth, even though Nicodemus needed the new birth himself (John 3:1–10). Nicodemus asked, “How can these things be?” (John 3:9). Jesus’s reply had a certain sharpness to it: “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?” (John 3:10). Even Pilate understood on some level what Jesus was claiming, though he did not believe it: “Pilate also wrote an inscription and put it on the cross. It read, ‘Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews’” (John 19:19). The chief priests also understood what Jesus was claiming but wanted the inscription nuanced: “Many of the Jews read this inscription, for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and it was written in Aramaic, in Latin, and in Greek. So the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, ‘Do not write, “The King of the Jews,” but rather, “This man said, I am King of the Jews”’” (John 19:20–21).
Sin causes not a cognitive disability but an affective disinclination to trust in God, honor him, or give thanks to him (Rom. 1:21). As both John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards taught, the Spirit in the new birth changes our affections so that we embrace the things of God.5 In particular, this change in our affections shows itself in our hospitable reception to the word of God (see Acts 17:17; 1 Thess. 2:13; and in contrast, 1 Cor. 2:13–14).6 There is, therefore, a crucial spiritual dimension to knowing God through his word.
The Appeal to Reason in Scripture
In so many of the prophetic writings of the Old Testament, God is arguing his case against his people, who have trodden under foot their covenant with him. Even so, God comes with an invitation:
Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord:
though your sins are like scarlet,
they shall be as white as snow,
though they are red like crimson,
they shall become like wool. (Isa. 1:1)
The sins in view are delineated in the earlier part of Isaiah 1: rebellion, iniquity, corruption, vain offerings, and blood on guilty hands. The prospect of a change of fortune is offered:
If you are willing and obedient,
you shall eat the good of the land. (Isa. 1:19)
Then logic of the alternative is spelled out:
But if you refuse and rebel,
you shall be eaten by the sword;
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken. (Isa. 1:20)
In Isaiah 41, God challenges the gods of the nations:
Set forth your case, says the Lord;
bring your proofs, says the King of Jacob. (Isa. 41:21)
Among other things, the God of Israel can declare what is to come (Isa. 41:22–23). The gods are impotent on that point (Isa. 41:24). As in a courtroom, the living God knows how to argue and mount a case.
Sin causes not a cognitive disability but an affective disinclination to trust in God, honor him, or give thanks to him.
In the New Testament we see Jesus in debate with opponents and using well-known forms of logical argument. Indeed, philosopher Dallas Willard describes Jesus as “the Logician” because of “his use of logic and his obvious powers of logical thinking as manifested in the Gospels of the New Testament.”7 Mark 3 presents an interesting example. Jesus’s ministry in Galilee has attracted scribes from Jerusalem to come down and take a look. They cannot deny the miraculous. Instead, they offer an alternative explanation: Jesus’s exorcisms are the work of the devil, not God. Jesus counters:
And he called them to him and said to them in parables, “How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but is coming to an end.” (Isa. 1:23–26)
This example is a classic reductio ad absurdum (reduction to absurdity) argument. If the scribes were right, then think it through: Satan would be in the process of self-destruction by destroying his own minions. Jesus offers a much more plausible explanation with his own self-reference implied: “But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man. Then indeed he may plunder his house” (Isa. 1:27).
Jesus also uses argument in a positive way to instruct disciples. So, to encourage prayer, for example, he teaches in the Sermon on the Mount, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matt. 7:11). This is an a fortiori (for the stronger) argument. If the lesser is so, how much more the greater.8
The apostle Paul also knew how to appeal to reason. He offers the Corinthians a cumulative case for believing in Christ’s resurrection. The Old Testament Scriptures predicted resurrection. The risen Christ was seen by the apostles, his brother James, by Paul himself, and some five hundred others, most of whom were still alive at the time of Paul’s writing (1 Cor. 15:1–11). But Paul does not leave it at that. He also explores the logic of the alternative in a series of hypothetical syllogisms (1 Cor. 15:12–19). If Christ were not risen, then what would follow step after step? The logical form of this part of his case is called a sorites.
Peter in his first letter makes the point more generally when he calls for “always being prepared to make a defense [apologia, “apology”] to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope [the gospel] that is in you.” Christians are to share not only what they believe but also why they believe it when challenged to do so. Defending the faith is Christian apology, and such a defense requires a reason (logos, “word,” “reason”).
In the light of the cumulative testimony of both the Old Testament and the New, the appeal to reasoning has its place in the life of God’s people. Biblical religion is a religion of the heart, but in biblical thought the heart includes the mind.9
Notes:
Quoted in Gary E. Kessler, Voices of Wisdom: A Multicultural Philosophy Reader (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1992), 9. Wisdom is especially needed when we appeal to Scripture to address issues not mentioned in Scripture (e.g., abortion). It is important to make a distinction between philosophy as an activity of careful thought and philosophy as the doctrines taught by this philosopher or that, which may be thoroughly anti-Christian (see, e.g., Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon). The theologian can greatly profit from knowing and using the tools generated by the activity of philosophy (e.g., conceptual analysis). Christians who are philosophers and theologians who can philosophize have their place in the theological enterprise.
P. T. Forsyth, The Principle of Authority in Relation to Certainty, Sanctity and Society: An Essay in the Philosophy of Experimental Religion, 2nd ed. (London: Independent Press, 1952), 9.
Indeed, the wise person is characterized by virtue, and the foolish one is characterized by vice. It is also important to recognize that the possession of knowledge does not guarantee either virtue or wisdom. Paul wrote to the Corinthians how knowledge can puff one up (1 Cor. 8:1).
Nous is the Greek word for “mind.”
I have on my bookshelf a New Testament study Bible annotated by Jewish scholars. I was struck, in reading the notes on, e.g., Eph. 2:8–10, that I could have written them myself. The writer understands what Paul is asserting about salvation by faith and not works. But believing it is another thing. See Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds., The Jewish Annotated New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 347.
Was a change in affection also the experience of Old Testament saints? This question raises the issue of whether Old Testament believers were born again, and with it the matter of the continuity or discontinuity between the old covenant and the new covenant. On this question see Graham A. Cole, He Who Gives Life: The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007), 143–45. I argue that indeed Old Testament believers were regenerated.
Dallas Willard, “Jesus the Logician,” Dallas Willard (website), http://www.dwillard .org/articles/artview.asp?artID=39, accessed November 29, 2017. Also see Juan Valdes, “Jesus: The Master of Critical Thinking,” Reasons for Hope (website), https://www.rforh .com/resources/know-it/diving-deeper/jesus-the-master-of-critical-thinking, accessed November 29, 2017.
The book of Hebrews offers an a fortiori argument in Heb. 9:13–14: “For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more [a fortiori] will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.”
For an excellent discussion of reason in the service of God, see John Webster, Holiness (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 10–30. I am grateful to Oren Martin for reminding me of this fine work.
Graham A. Cole (ThD, Australian College of Theology) is emeritus dean and emeritus professor of biblical and systematic theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. An ordained Anglican minister, he has served in two parishes and was formerly the principal of Ridley College. Graham lives in Australia with his wife, Jules.
The Bible teaches that we are continuously dependent on God. This dependence includes not only dependence on him for food and physical sustenance, but dependence on him mentally.
Justification and sanctification, though related, are different gifts. The most serious, and potentially damning, errors surface when the two are not carefully distinguished.
The Bible typically uses the language of “sanctified” or “sanctify” to refer to the believer’s positional holiness as one set apart unto God. In systematic theology, however, sanctification usually means the renovation of men and women by which God takes the joined-to-Christ, justified believer and transforms him more and more into the divine image. That is the sense we are talking about right now—progressive sanctification rather than definitive sanctification.
Sanctification can be understood passively and actively—passively, inasmuch as the transforming work “is wrought by God in us,” and also actively, inasmuch as sanctification “ought to be done by us, God performing this work in us and by us.”1 This is a crucial point. In sanctification, God is doing the work in us, but at the same time we are also working. Any theology that ignores either the passive or the active dimension of sanctification is going to be lopsided and unbiblical.
From this definition, we can already see that justification and sanctification, though related, are different gifts. The most serious, and potentially damning, errors surface when the two are not carefully distinguished. According to Turretin, justification and sanctification differ in at least five ways.2
They differ with regard to their object. Justification is concerned with guilt; sanctification with pollution.
They differ as to their form. Justification is a judicial and forensic act whereby our sins are forgiven and the righteousness of Christ is imputed to us. Sanctification is a moral act whereby righteousness is infused in the believer and personal renewal is begun and over a long process carried to completion.
They differ as to the recipient subject. In justification, man is given a new objective status based on God’s acquittal. In sanctification, we are subjectively renewed by God.
They differ as to degrees. Justification is given in this life fully, without any possible increase. Sanctification is begun in this life but only made perfect in the next. The declaration of justification is once for all. The inward work of sanctification takes place by degrees.
They differ as to the order. God only sanctifies those who are already reconciled and justified by faith.
In sanctification, God is doing the work in us, but at the same time we are also working.
Some Christians have argued that sanctification is also “by faith alone.” While we are right to stress that sanctification is a gift that comes only to those who put their faith in Christ, and that we grow in godliness by believing in the promises of God, the phrase “by faith alone” is not helpful. Both justification and sanctification are by faith, but whereas faith is the instrument through which we receive the righteousness of Christ, faith is the root and principle out of which sanctification grows.3 We say that justification is by faith alone, because we want to safeguard justification from any notion of striving or working. But sanctification explicitly includes these co-operations, making the description of “alone” misleading at best and inaccurate at worst. We are apt to misunderstand both justification and sanctification if we describe them in ways that are too similar.
Notes:
Turretin, Francis. Institutes of Elenctic Theology. 3 vols. Translated by George Musgrave
Giger. Edited by James T. Dennison Jr. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1997, 2:689.
Kevin DeYoung (PhD, University of Leicester) is the senior pastor at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte. He has written books for children, adults, and academics, including Just Do Something; Impossible Christianity; Daily Doctrine; and The Biggest Story Bible Storybook. Kevin’s work can be found on clearlyreformed.org. Kevin and his wife, Trisha, have nine children.
Certainly Paul teaches that Christians are transformed by God’s grace. But we must not make the mistake of reading Paul’s theology as a whole into every word he uses.
Does the Old Testament teach justification by faith alone? We certainly don’t find the explicit teaching on the doctrine that is present in the New Testament.
Matthew Barrett sheds light on the meaning of justification by faith alone, explaining why it’s so central to the Christian faith, and he explores why the book of James says that we’re not justified by faith alone.
Addressing Doubts about God’s Justice and Goodness in the Face of Evil
When considering the horrific events of the Holocaust, you can’t help but ask yourself the question, “How could God allow such evil?” In this video, Collin Hansen offers encouragement for those who struggle to trust God’s justice and goodness in the face of evil and suffering.
TGC Hard Questions is a series of short booklets that seek to answer common but difficult questions people ask about Christianity. The series serves the church by providing tools that answer people’s deep longings for community, their concerns about biblical ethics, and their doubts about confessional faith.
Collin Hansen’s short and accessible guide answers suffering peoples’ questions about God’s character by exploring the stories of Job, Jesus, and the Jewish people during the horrific events of the Holocaust. Ideal for both skeptics and Christians who want to help others in their pain, this booklet reminds us that God speaks through the cries of his people and offers us the gift of his Son—a suffering servant who makes all things new.
“The problem of evil is the biggest challenge to Christian faith in every generation. Collin Hansen’s short, wise, and thoughtful book is a superb resource for thinking deeply about it and responding with compassion and clarity.”
—Andrew Wilson, Teaching Pastor, King’s Church London
Collin Hansen (MDiv, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is the vice president for content and editor in chief for the Gospel Coalition and the executive director of the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. He hosts the Gospelbound podcast and wrote Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation. He is an adjunct professor and cochair of the advisory board at Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama. You can follow him on X at @collinhansen.
In this video, Samuel D. Ferguson carefully walks through the core beliefs of the transgender movement, comparing them with fundamental truths expressed in Scripture.
Kathryn Butler speaks to some of the misconceptions about clinical depression, which can be especially challenging for those of us who are followers of Christ.
In this video, Jeremy Linneman takes time to explain why the mounting problem of loneliness matters and offers suggestions for how we might build spiritual communities for ourselves.
Some claim that Christianity is oppressive and toxic, but in this video, Dr. Sharon James argues that a biblical worldview is essential for human freedom, flourishing, and fulfillment.
