This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.
The Nicene Creed
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.
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Topics Addressed in This Interview:
- Why Do We Need a Creed? Isn’t the Bible Enough?
- Key Figures and Issues Surrounding the Council of Nicaea
- Does God Use Theological Controversy for His Glory?
- Why Is the Son the Focus of the Creed?
- “He Came Down”
- Did Santa Claus Slap Arius?
01:06 - Why Do We Need a Creed? Isn’t the Bible Enough?
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.
13:07 - Key Figures and Issues Surrounding the Council of Nicaea
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.
33:30 - Does God Use Theological Controversy for His Glory?
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.
38:46 - Why Is the Son the Focus of the Creed?
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.
42:48 - “He Came Down”
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.
45:24 - Did Santa Claus Slap Arius?
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.
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