The new 10 Questions series invites children ages 8–14 to investigate spiritual questions and provides reliable theological and practical answers on their level.
April 08, 2025
by:
Crossway
A New Devotional Series Written Especially for Tweens
Everyone has questions about religion, but when you’re young, finding the answers can be difficult. Some books are too complex and others don’t dive deeply enough into the faith topics that matter most to kids and teens. So where can young readers go to grow in their understanding of God and his word?
The new 10 Questions series invites children ages 8–14 to investigate spiritual questions and provides reliable theological and practical answers on their level.
Faith-Building Devotionals for Kids and Teens: With 30 devotional readings, prayers, and reflection questions, each of these books makes a great supplement to regular Bible study
Comprehensive: The 10 questions range from the content of the Bible to the experience of living out your personal faith
Flexible: The 10 questions can be read in any order—alone or as a family
Available Now
The first book, 10 Questions about Salvation, helps readers find joy, security, and hope in God’s gracious love. Each 10 Questions book presents one main topic, poses 10 vital questions on the topic, and answers each question through 3 short devotions. Readers can work through the 30 readings in any order they choose. Written to be read alone or aloud with family, 10 Questions about Salvation is the perfect way to start or end each day reflecting on the things of God.
The second book in the series, 10 Questions about Pain and Suffering, will be released in October. In this volume, Beth Broom offers biblical answers about the origin and purpose of suffering, helping young readers navigate their pain, seek comfort in God, and help others in their distress.
The land of Israel promised to Abraham and subsequently occupied by Joshua and Israel throughout their history is a typological re-manifestation of the Garden of Eden.
When thinking of exile and return in the Bible, it’s critical to understand that the land of Israel promised to Abraham and subsequently occupied by Joshua and Israel throughout their history is a typological re-manifestation of the Garden of Eden. It is described in similar ways, as is the Garden of Eden.
This is especially true in Exodus, Numbers, and Joshua, but you can also see it in the book of Genesis. The land is not just a generic, geographically marked off space but serves this theological purpose of remembering Eden and hoping that someday the whole earth will return to that edenic state after a resurrection.
And that’s where Joseph’s story comes in. He knows he’s about to die, but he also has hope for a resurrection. And so he asks the children of Israel to remember to carry him up into the land—that new typological Garden of Eden—when they go.
And this does two things. Not only does it express hope for resurrection—why else would someone care so much about their bones?—but specifically where that resurrection will happen. He could be raised just as well in Egypt or anywhere else, but he wants to be raised in that space that represents the Garden of Eden, because someday the whole earth will revert back to those edenic conditions.
To put it in another way, Joseph believes that when he is raised to life, he will be raised in the Garden of Eden, in the very presence of God. This is significant for us because what it teaches us is the Christian hope of resurrection is not just, Oh, I get to live forever, but specifically, I will live forever in the presence of God, where there is true fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore.
Nicholas G. Piotrowski (PhD, Wheaton College) is the president of Indianapolis Theological Seminary where he also teaches hermeneutics and New Testament courses. His other books include In All the Scriptures and Matthew’s New David at the End of Exile.
Given the theological severity of the historic exile, it is no surprise that emblems of exile and the hope for return would appear throughout the Bible.
The plan of the Lord to bring his people into everlasting fellowship with him is not going to be Eden 2.0. The garden itself was designed by the Lord to aim at a global project.
Andrew Steinmann discusses the timeline of the Bible, when key events actually happened, and why it all matters for our understanding of the Bible's message for us today.
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.
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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.
Though society loves to swim in the sea of uncertainty, God does not rule that way. He declares what is right and wrong (Gen. 2:9; Ex. 15:26; Isa. 5:20), abhors chaos and confusion (1 Cor. 14:33), and will judge all based on his objective and righteous standard (Rev. 20:13). While people may use the excuse of interpretation now, that will not stand in the end, a reminder that hermeneutics is not just an academic subject but crucial to rightly understanding the truth and to living a life that pleases God.
For this reason, the Lord has not stayed silent on the issue of interpretation. Even in biblical times, false teachers were already appealing to the supposed subjectivity of interpretation, and God declared that Scripture is of no private interpretation (2 Pet. 1:20). The God who revealed his word also revealed how to study it and how all things should be understood. This should come as no surprise, as his word subjects all areas of this world to the lordship of Christ (2 Cor. 10:3–5). This hermeneutical standard revolves around three ideas: literal, grammatical, historical interpretation. Though some may argue that these ideas are late developments or simply insufficient, authorial intent expressed by the rules of grammar and in light of the facts of history is the way God wrote his word and demands it to be read. There is a standard for interpretation, and one can and must abide by it.
So instead of letting hermeneutics undermine sola Scriptura, sola Scriptura must capture hermeneutics. The meaning of Scripture is not lost in uncertainty and pluralism. God’s word is the final authority on all that it decrees, including its own interpretation, and going back to Scripture provides clarity that the interpretation of everything is not just a matter of interpretation.
Literal Interpretation
In the midst of interpretative confusion and convolution, God clearly decrees that the point of biblical interpretation is to determine the author’s intent. Second Timothy 3:16 establishes that the text of Scripture is God breathed, God’s very intent. God himself is the author, even as he worked through human authors. The biblical writers introduced Scripture with “Thus says the Lord” (Isa. 43:1; Jer. 49:1; Zech. 1:16), describing it as that which the prophet spoke (Matt. 2:17; 3:3; 15:7; John 1:23; 12:41) and that which came by “the word of the Lord” (Gen. 15:1; 1 Kings 6:11; Isa. 2:3; Zech. 1:1), declaring that the meaning of the Bible comes from God. They also called Scripture the “word of God” (1 Thess. 2:13), asserting that its meaning belongs to God. The apostles affirmed authorial intent as they confirmed that their writings were “as” (Rom. 11:26) and “in accordance with” (1 Cor. 15:3–4) what was revealed in the past by God through his prophets.
In addition to the prophets and apostles, Christ himself also insisted that the meaning of Scripture is what the author intended, describing it as “all that the prophets have spoken” (Luke 24:25). He declared that Scripture is fixed to this meaning and cannot be changed by the reader (John 10:35). To that end, the Lord showed that one cannot even use the Scripture in a way that God did not intend, condemning Satan when he tried to do so (Matt. 4:5–7). The Lord Jesus demonstrated that the only legitimate meaning of Scripture is that which the author willed, and God warned that those who twist this meaning do so to their own destruction (2 Pet. 3:16). While a text could have many potential meanings, God is unequivocal that a literal reading, one that aims at authorial intent, is the standard, a standard backed by God’s own authority. For God, hermeneutics is a moral issue.
The Lord not only established authorial intent as the standard for interpretation but also ensured that this intent was accessible. Some have argued that understanding authorial intent is an impossible task. After all, authors can miscommunicate, texts can be ambiguous, and readers cannot look into the mind of the author. Scripture reveals, however, that God ordained an unbreakable chain of communication. The doctrine of revelation shows that God purposed to make his message plain to his people (cf. Job 12:22; Isa. 45:18–19). To accomplish this, the doctrine of inspiration describes that God used human writers in their own speech to write down exactly what he meant (2 Tim. 3:16; 2 Pet. 1:19–21). Being guided by the Spirit, they spoke from God (2 Pet. 1:21), such that their intent is his intent and their words are his words. This ensures that divine truth is conveyed in human language, language that people can understand. Furthermore, what was written is inerrant (Ps. 19:8; John 17:17), demonstrating that human fallibility did not contaminate any expression of these truths in any way. Every word of Scripture, then, is divine communication, and God guaranteed that his people can understand it. The Lord regenerates people such that those who suppress the truth in unrighteousness (Rom. 1:18) become those who embrace it (Jer. 31:31). The Spirit, the very author of Scripture (2 Pet. 1:21), dwells in the hearts of believers, guiding and convicting them of all truth (Eph. 1:17; 5:18). So the God who purposed to make his truth known has not failed. He supernaturally ensured that his intent was preserved by the author through the text to the reader. Because of this, while clarity should not be confused with ease (cf. 2 Pet. 3:15), a believer who demonstrates hard work and follows the rules of language can access what the author intended.
In addition to ensuring the accessibility of authorial intent, God demonstrated that what the authors said is all-sufficient, for the writers of Scripture are nothing short of profound. Fundamentally, God, the author of all sixty-six books, knows all things (Ps. 139:3–4), making Scripture the source of the highest truth. Moreover, the men whom he used to write his word were also exegetes and theologians in their own right. The prophets and apostles knew their Bibles well, in both depth and breadth, constantly alluding to other parts of Scripture to develop the theology of earlier revelation. They addressed the current issues of their times by expounding universal truths, giving a theology that they knew would have implications beyond their time (Pss. 22:30–31; 102:18; 1 Pet. 1:10–12). As opposed to the viewpoint of higher criticism, which maintains that the scriptural writers knew only limited sources, were fixated on their present moment, and wrote limited theology insincerely with political aims, Scripture presents a completely different picture. The biblical writers were, under inspiration, foremost theologians who knew God’s word and whose mission was to declare its theological message not only for their time but for all time.
When people truly tremble before God, they become wise because they listen to the only one who knows what he is talking about.
The prophets’ and apostles’ theological purpose can be especially observed when one considers that they not only wrote information but wrote with intent—and this covers what they said, why they said it, and the “so what” of these truths. That the authors wrote with intent is why Jesus can claim that the law not only concerned adultery but lust (Matt. 5:27–28), why Paul stated that muzzling the ox related to paying one’s pastor (1 Cor. 9:9–10), or why the same apostle declared that narratives had theological ideas (Gal. 4:21–31). To be sure, the biblical authors wrote stories, laws, and poetry. But while that is what they wrote, that is not all they purposed or meant by it. The reason why they wrote these things was to declaretheological truth set by context for the instruction and hope of those whowould read it (Rom. 15:4).
Thus, to any who wonder if Scripture can really address the complexities of life, it is designed for that very purpose. Its stories weave together the reason that things are the way they are, its prophecies reveal the goal of history and life, its theology categorizes all existence, and its imperatives articulate the right way to live in light of the truth. All these components formulate a complete worldview, demonstrating that Scripture supplies all one needs for life and godliness (2 Pet. 1:3). While humanity has come up with reasons—from inaccessibility to irrelevance—to disregard authorial intent, the way God has ordained his word leaves us without excuse.
Why do people so oppose the demand to read the Bible in light of the author’s intent? Inherent in the word authority is the word author, which reveals the heart of the issue. People resist authorial intent in order to resist divine authority. From the Jews of the Old Testament who misrepresented God’s promises (Jer. 7:4) to the Judaizers of the New Testament who twisted God’s law (Matt. 15:3; Gal. 2:11–14), people have constantly attempted to add or subtract from Scripture (cf. Deut. 4:2). Humanity’s interpretative philosophies and creativity are efforts to justify breaking free from the authority of Scripture and live the way they want. These efforts to undermine authorial intent go back to Genesis 3:1 and the serpent’s question “Did God actually say . . . ?” While humans, however, have persistently attempted to reshape God’s word into their own image, God has never accepted such reformulations. As for Adam and his wife, who doubted and disobeyed his word, God cast them out of the garden (Gen. 3:24). As for the Israelites who misapplied his promises, God taught them never to presume on his grace (Jer. 7:12–15). As for the Judaizers who perverted God’s law, the Lord judged the entire nation (Luke 23:28–29). Those who twist the Scriptures do so to their own destruction (2 Pet. 3:16), a reminder that God not only says he defines the meaning of Scripture but takes the matter seriously.
So the first rule of hermeneutics is that humanity does not have hermeneutical freedom. God is not ambiguous about his interpretative standard but has revealed truth that is to be heard and done on his terms (James 1:25). As opposed to ignoring, talking over, or adding one’s own commentary over Scripture, the saint is simply to hear and obey. That is why God constantly calls his people to listen to his word (cf. Josh. 3:9; 1 Kings 22:19; 2 Chron. 18:18; Isa. 1:10; 28:14; Jer. 2:4; Ezek. 16:35; Acts 15:7; Rom. 10:17; Rev. 1:3). Hermeneutics is all about surrender. And that pertains not only to Bible interpretation but also to the rest of life. There is a reason that one is not to lean on one’s own understanding (Prov. 3:5–6) and that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Prov. 1:7; cf. Job 28:28). When people truly tremble before God, they become wise because they listen to the only one who knows what he is talking about. There is a fundamental rule, established by God, for interpreting Scripture and life. Properly understanding the text is not a matter of thinking about what it could mean, what one desires it to mean, or what a community assigns it to mean. It is about surrendering to what the author meant—that is, to what God meant through his inspiration of the biblical writers. If one desires to study Scripture and all of life rightly, he or she must master this discipline.
Abner Chou (ThD, The Master’s Seminary) is president and John F. MacArthur endowed fellow at the Master’s University. He has taught classes in Bible and theology and is a plenary speaker and guest lecturer. He and his wife, Johanna, have four children.
The point of interpreting Scripture is not to rob us of the joy of the journey but rather to protect us from wrong turns and unnecessary repairs that will slow us down.
And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.Read More
These verses bring to a conclusion the opening section of Genesis by emphasizing that God has completed the process of ordering creation. The repeated comment that God rested does not imply that he was weary from labor. The effortless ease with which everything is done in ch. 1 suggests otherwise. Rather, the motif of God’s resting hints at the purpose of creation. As reflected in various ancient Near Eastern accounts, divine rest is associated with temple building. God’s purpose for the earth is that it should become his dwelling place; it is not simply made to house his creatures. God’s “activities” on this day (he finished, “rested,” “blessed,” “made it holy”) all fit this delightful pattern. The concept of the earth as a divine sanctuary, which is developed further in Gen. 2:4–25, runs throughout the whole Bible, coming to a climax in the future reality that the apostle John sees in his vision of a “new heaven and a new earth” in Rev. 21:1–22:5. God blessed the seventh day and made it holy (Gen. 2:3). These words provide the basis for the obligation that God placed on the Israelites to rest from their normal labor on the Sabbath day (see Ex. 20:8–11). There is no evening-followed-by-morning refrain for this day, prompting many to conclude that the seventh day still continues (which seems to underlie John 5:17; Heb. 4:3–11).
2. Exodus 20:8–11
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.Read More
Israel is to remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy (Ex. 20:8). The Lord had already begun to form the people’s life in the rhythm of working for six days(Ex. 20:9) and resting on the seventh day as a Sabbath (Ex. 20:10) through the instructions for collecting manna (see Ex. 16:22–26). Here the command is grounded further in the way that it imitates the Lord’s pattern in creation (Ex. 20:11; see Gen. 2:1–3). Every aspect of Israel’s life is to reflect that the people belong to the Lord and are sustained by his hand. The weekly pattern of work and rest is to be a regular and essential part of this (see Ex. 31:12–18). In Deut. 5:15, Moses gives another reason for observing the day: it recalls their redemption from slavery in Egypt.
3. Psalm 92:1–4
It is good to give thanks to the LORD, to sing praises to your name, O Most High; to declare your steadfast love in the morning, and your faithfulness by night, to the music of the lute and the harp, to the melody of the lyre. For you, O LORD, have made me glad by your work; at the works of your hands I sing for joy.Read More
Weekly Sabbath Worship Is Good. One of the most basic features of worship on the Sabbath day is celebrating God’s greatness in presiding over his creation and his goodness toward his faithful. The words give thanks, sing praises, declare, and sing for joy all describe the significance of the songs sung in gathered worship, along with musical accompaniment (lute, harp, lyre). The songs honor God for what he has revealed about himself, recalling Ex. 34:5–7, where God explained his name (Ps. 92:1), especially his benevolence toward his people (he is abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness).
4. Isaiah 56:2
Blessed is the man who does this, and the son of man who holds it fast, who keeps the Sabbath, not profaning it, and keeps his hand from doing any evil.Read More
The Sabbath is a covenant sign that represents a lifestyle of devotion to the Lord, for it requires the practical reorganization of every week around him (cf. Ex. 31:12–17; Ezek. 20:18–20). True observance of the Sabbath entails not just refraining from work but also refraining from doing any evil.
5. Romans 14:5–6
One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. The one who observes the day, observes it in honor of the Lord. The one who eats, eats in honor of the Lord, since he gives thanks to God, while the one who abstains, abstains in honor of the Lord and gives thanks to God.Read More
The weak thought some days were more important than others. Given the Jewish background here (Rom.14:14), the day that is supremely in view is certainly the Sabbath. The strong think every day is the same. Both views are permissible. Each person must follow his own conscience. What is remarkable is that the Sabbath is no longer a binding commitment for Paul but a matter of one’s personal conviction. Unlike the other nine commandments in Ex. 20:1–17, the Sabbath commandment seems to have been part of the “ceremonial laws” of the Mosaic covenant, like the dietary laws and the laws about sacrifices, all of which are no longer binding on new covenant believers (see also Gal. 4:10; Col. 2:16–17). However, it is still wise to take regular times of rest from work, and regular times of worship are commanded for Christians (Heb. 10:24–25; cf. Acts 20:7).
Whether one observes a special day, or eats all foods, or abstains from some foods, the important thing is the honor of the Lord and to give thanks to God.
6. Matthew 12:5–8
Or have you not read in the Law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless? I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. And if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.Read More
The fact that priests, in carrying out their duties, had to work on (and thus “profane”) the Sabbath, but were guiltless in doing so, shows that God made allowances within the law.
something greater. The Sabbath points to Christ (see Matt.12:8) and to the “rest” he gives from the impossible task of earning salvation by good works (Matt. 11:28).
the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath. Jesus does not challenge the Sabbath law itself but rather the Pharisees’ interpretation of it. As Messiah, Jesus authoritatively interprets every aspect of the law (Matt. 5:17–48) and here points out the Pharisees’ blindness to the actual intent of the Sabbath—to bring rest and well-being. This final argument in response to the Pharisees’ challenge (Matt. 12:2) is the decisive argument—that because of who Jesus is, he has the authority to interpret the law.
7. Mark 2:27–28
And he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.”Read More
The Sabbath was made for man. Jesus next emphasizes that man is not to be confined by the Sabbath but rather that the Sabbath is given as a gift to man (for spiritual and physical refreshment). Again Jesus emphasizes his authority as Son of Man. If the Sabbath is for the benefit of mankind, and if the Son of Man is Lord over all mankind, then the Son of Man is surely lord even of the Sabbath.
8. John 5:16–17
And this was why the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because he was doing these things on the Sabbath. But Jesus answered them, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.”Read More
Jesus’ Jewish opponents were putting their merely human religious tradition above genuine love and compassion for others, which the OT commanded (e.g., Lev. 19:18) and Jesus exemplified. It was Jesus, not these Jews, who was truly obeying the Scriptures.
My Father suggests a far closer relationship with God than other people had (see 20:17). When Jesus says, “My Father is working until now, and I am working,” he implies that he, like the Father, is lord over the Sabbath. Therefore this is a claim to deity. These Jews recognize what he is claiming (see John 5:18). While Gen. 2:2–3 teaches that God rested (Hb. shabat) on the seventh day of creation, Jewish rabbis agreed that God continually upholds the universe, yet without breaking the Sabbath. (In John 7:22–23 Jesus makes a different argument about healing on the Sabbath.)
9. Colossians 2:16–17
Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.Read More
food and drink . . . a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. The false teacher(s) were advocating a number of Jewish observances, arguing that they were essential for spiritual advancement.
a shadow of the things to come. The old covenant observances pointed to a future reality that was fulfilled in the Lord Jesus Christ (cf. Heb. 10:1). Hence, Christians are no longer under the Mosaic covenant (cf. Rom. 6:14–15; 7:1–6; 2 Cor. 3:4–18; Gal. 3:15–4:7). Christians are no longer obligated to observe OT dietary laws (“food and drink”) or festivals, holidays, and special days (“a festival . . . new moon . . . Sabbath,” Col. 2:16), for what these things foreshadowed has been fulfilled in Christ. It is debated whether the Sabbaths in question included the regular seventh-day rest of the fourth commandment, or were only the special Sabbaths of the Jewish festal calendar.
10. Hebrews 4:8–10
For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on. So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.Read More
For if Joshua had given them rest. One could conceivably argue that the “rest” that the exodus generation sought was their entrance into the Promised Land. However, that entrance occurred in the days of Joshua, and Psalm 95 (with its promise of “today” entering into God’s rest) is subsequent to Joshua’s day (referred to as “so long afterward” in Heb. 4:7). Therefore, the Sabbath rest remains possible for God’s people to enter even now, in this life (Heb. 4:9). The promise of entering now into this rest means ceasing from the spiritual strivings that reflect uncertainty about one’s final destiny; it means enjoyment of being established in the presence of God, to share in the everlasting joy that God entered when he rested on the seventh day (Heb. 4:10).
Jesus’s promise that the gates of hell would not prevail against his church (Matt. 16:18) was not given to any particular church but to the church universal.
Jesus’s promise that the gates of hell would not prevail against his church (Matt. 16:18) was not given to any particular church but to the church universal. No local church is promised that it will remain until Christ’s return. Rather, from the days of the apostles, new churches have been birthed and rebirthed, died and disappeared to this day. But though not given to any particular church, Jesus’s promise to the church universal will not be fulfilled apart from the local church as members faithfully pass the torch of the gospel from one generation to the next.
Oftentimes, however, our zeal for gospel advance exceeds our wisdom and our trust in God’s ordinary means. Like the Israelites of old, we are more impressed with the height of Saul than the heart of David. So we overestimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what God can do in the long run. We settle for new programs rather than investing in people. And we operate in fear rather than by faith in God’s promises. In a dizzying world of distractions and new methods, where do we look for models of quiet faithfulness that endures?
From Celestia A. Ferris’s first prayer meeting in November 1867 onward, the story of Capitol Hill Baptist Church reminds us that the work of God has been carried on by ordinary people who lived hidden lives and who rest in unvisited tombs. Some, such as Celestia’s husband, Abraham Ferris, did not even live to see the church planted in 1878. But they believed that the local church was a cause worth giving their lives for, even if they did not see the results in their own lifetimes. And it is only because of their quiet faithfulness that the church is what it is today. As Francis McLean wrote in 1886, “We are working partly for those who come after us.”1 Or as Matt Schmucker told his wife at one of the church’s lowest moments in 1992, “We’re here for the people who will come.”2
In our age of megachurches and celebrity pastors who burn hot and fast and rarely last, the idea of unpaid lay members spending their lives for local churches sounds absurd. But the fruit speaks for itself, and 150 years later, the gospel is still being proclaimed from the pulpit of Capitol Hill Baptist Church. What factors and conditions contribute to gospel faithfulness? How does a church preserve the gospel? What factors contribute to church health? How does a healthy church steward success and grow without becoming unhealthy?
The relevance of these questions is nowhere more clearly indicated than in the alarming rate that churches are closing their doors around our nation and cities today. In their 2023 book The Great Dechurching, Jim Davis, Michael Graham, and Ryan Burge describe a religious shift in the last twenty-five years greater than at any other time in American history, as more people have left the church than all those who became Christians during the First and Second Great Awakenings and the Billy Graham crusades combined.3 Many of these empty pews indicate churches that abandoned the gospel and ceased to be churches long before their buildings were converted to condominiums. Others left the city due to rising rates of crime and have yet to return to their neighborhoods of origin. To this day, few of Washington’s oldest churches remain centered on the gospel and present in their neighborhoods.
Though hardly the oldest Baptist church in Washington, DC, Capitol Hill Baptist Church has not moved on from the gospel nor moved on from its location. Ultimately, the church stayed centered on the gospel and present in the place God planted it because of the ordinary people who worked, prayed, sowed, and stayed. This is the story of the church that stayed.
What will it take for the torch of the gospel to be passed to another generation?
This is not a story of a perfect church. It contains as many warnings as it does positive examples. There were fights, splits, conflicts, and dissensions. There were contentious members’ meetings filled with vitriol and spite. There were as many nights of tearful sowing as there were days of joyful reaping. But throughout seasons of plenty and seasons of scarcity, the light of the gospel has continued to shine on Capitol Hill.
Early in the life of Capitol Hill Baptist Church, the bulletins often contained this prayer: “May the Metropolitan Baptist Church continue to be ‘A Light Set on a Hill.’”4 The prayer combines the two images from Jesus’s words in Matthew 5:14: “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.” From its earliest days, Capitol Hill Baptist Church understood itself to be a light on the Hill. Not the light but a light. As the church’s music director wrote in 1963, “Therefore we will look to the future and work in the present and those future generations shall look back on us and say, ‘Yes, the light still burned brightly on Capitol Hill.’”5
Capitol Hill Baptist Church has navigated the past century and a half as an evangelical witness in Washington. Through wars and pandemics, racial unrest and church splits, God has kept the light of the gospel shining on Capitol Hill. Along the way, we are introduced to the ordinary people who made history, as Capitol Hill Baptist Church was transformed from a small congregation in sleepy East Washington to a thriving congregation just blocks away from the center of world power.
Behind all of the events and figures through the history of Capitol Hill Baptist Church is the eternal God and Lord of history who is writing the story of this church, and of every church, into a tapestry of grace that will stretch through eternity.
Is the light of the gospel still shining in your church? What will it take for the torch of the gospel to be passed to another generation? It will take ordinary men and women who share the conviction of missionary Jim Elliot, whose immortal words are etched into a pillar on the edge of CHBC’s property: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”6 It will take patience, perseverance, and—above all—prayer so that if the Lord tarries, it will yet be said, “The light still burns brightly on Capitol Hill.”
Notes:
Clerk’s Annual Report, December 31, 1886, MS 1583b, box 6, folder 5, CHBC Archives.
Matt Schmucker, interview with the author, September 7, 2022, part 1, Washington, DC.
Jim Davis and Michael Graham with Ryan P. Burge, The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Reflective, 2023), 5.
Fortieth Anniversary Celebration of Gilbert A. Clark’s Class, March 4, 1938, MS 1360, box 5, folder 25, CHBC Archives.
John D. Cochran, “85 Years on Capitol Hill,” February 24, 1963, MS 1371, box 5, folder 27, CHBC Archives.
Quoted in Elisabeth Elliot, Through Gates of Splendor (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1981), 172.
Caleb Morell (MDiv, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is an assistant pastor at Capitol Hill Baptist Church and a doctoral student in historical theology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He lives with his wife and three children on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.
On September 17, 1944, a relatively unknown pastor named Kenneth Owen White arrived at Metropolitan Baptist Church in Washington, D. C. (later known as Capitol Hill Baptist Church), eager to prove himself.
Caleb Morell traces the story of Capitol Hill Baptist Church and how God sovereignly worked through history to both build his church and bring himself glory.
