The Nicene Creed
The Nicene Creed: What You Need to Know about the Most Important Creed Ever Written
By: Kevin DeYoung
[On my list of Most Anticipated Books of 2025]
On this day 1700 years ago The Nicene Creed was first adopted.
This is a very short (85 pages) book taking you through the Nicene Creed— what the Council was all about, what the creed says, what it means, and why it matters.
DeYoung wrote a similarly short book on The Lord’s Prayer and these also remind me of Jen Wilkin’s book, Ten Words to Live By, about the ten commandments. All three books take specific ‘statements’ that the church practices or believes and fleshes them out in deeper ways than an average church-goer may even know about.
Just because something is tradition and been taught for years and years doesn’t mean it’s to be discarded, but you should know what it means and why you memorize it and quote it. These books help your understanding.
I was interested in The Nicene Creed book because I realized I had never memorized it and knew only a little about the creed and the Council of Nicaea.
When I heard people making claims about the council and the creed saying that it was where people of power got to decide what books would be in the Bible or claiming that the council was evidence that the church has never agreed about anything, I knew that I needed to learn a little more about what actually went on there.
To the first argument, THIS is also a good, succinct explanation about how the Council of Nicaea was not a council to pick the books of the Bible (Kruger is a New Testament scholar and an expert in how the Bible was canonized). The Council was about articulating what the Church believed about the divinity of Jesus.
Historical Context
I thought Kevin DeYoung did a really good job of explaining the history and context of the Council and acknowledging the intentions behind the differing views.
“We learn something about heresy by examining Arius’s logic: heresy almost always involves denying one truth in an attempt to safeguard another truth.”
In Egypt, 318 AD, Arius publicly declared his theological views on the divinity of Christ.
“The issue in Arius’s mind was not how a man could be God but how God could become a man. Arius wanted to protect monotheism and the unity of God. He saw himself as defending the majesty and sovereignty of God the Father.”
“The issue was how to understand the Son’s begottenness. Arius argued that begetting implies a beginning…. Arius’s famous phrase was ‘there was a time when he was not.’”
So the Council met to better articulate what we believe about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In the end, Arianism was condemned and the divinity of Jesus upheld.
One of the key words in the creed is homoousios which was the term they landed on to describe how the Son was of the ‘same essence’ as the Father.
It should be noted that the original creed was overwritten in 381, but the theology remained the same:
“The Council of Constantinople (381) didn’t simply repeat or revise the Creed of Nicaea (325). In fact, Nicaea’s creed is largely forgotten. In one sense, Constantinople established a “new” creed, probably taken from a liturgical formula that had developed since the original council. At the same time, it is important to recognize that the bishops at Constantinople did not see themselves as writing a new creed but merely expanding and reestablishing the orthodox truth affirmed in 325… Even though the words didn’t come directly from Nicaea, the theology did.”
I will say that I think it could have been helpful to have some sort of diagrams or maps to help visualize what groups were located where, etc.
Solid Doctrine or Right Living?
If you’re wondering about creeds in general, I thought it was interesting that DeYoung reminds us how different Roman religion was in the ancient world compared to what Jesus taught. Roman religion cared far less about doctrines and focused more on cultic rituals of sacrifices, experiences, civic virtue, and the practices done in temples.
It can’t be overstated that for Christians— what we believe (our doctrines) are of utmost importance. Right doctrine (orthodoxy) should lead to right living (orthopraxy) but we can’t have one without the other.
“To be sure, the apostolic message exhorted people to live godly lives but only in conjunction with a robust message about sin, salvation, incarnation, resurrection, atonement, reconciliation, and eternal life. Any gospel that denies these essentials or ignores them or skips over them to get to something else or leads people to doubt them or does not deal straightforwardly with them is, in effect, a different gospel. The Christian faith is more than a doctrine to be believed, but it is never less.”
This is forefront in my mind because having read Alisa Childer’s book, Another Gospel?, and watching a video from The New Evangelicals (linked in previous linked review), it is clear that Progressive Christianity has chosen leniency and ‘freedom’ in doctrine and it truly changes the gospel message and everything about what Jesus taught.
Here are just a few verses that remind us that right doctrine is not just a modern convention or a tactic invented for control or power, it was understood by Jesus’s disciples as essential to the faith:
“And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” (Acts 2:42)
“but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone…” (Eph 2:19-20)
“so that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine, nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies, which promote speculations rather than the stewardship from God that is by faith.” (1 Tim 1:3)
“O Timothy, guard the deposit entrusted to you. Avoid the irreverent babble and contradictions of what is falsely called ‘knowledge,’ for by professing it some have swerved from the faith.” (1 Tim 6:20)
“He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it… This testimony is true. Therefore rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith.” (Titus 1:9, 13)
“I appeal to you, brothers, to watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught; avoid them.” (Rom 16:17)
“‘If you love me, you will keep my commandments.’” (John 14:15)
Having established the importance of the creed (the first of its kind), DeYoung spends the next chapters taking specific phrases from the creed, explaining why it was included or the principle of truth that it was articulating:
Only Begotten; One Substance; For Us and for Our Salvation; Who Proceeds from the Father and the Son; One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church; One Baptism for the Remission of Sins
[If you are interested in the doctrine of the Trinity and how we can believe this doctrine, I would recommend this narrative, logic-focused book called Monothreeism that explores how believing the Trinity makes as much sense as believing in our own existence.]
Church Unity and False Teachers
I won’t go into all of them, but one that stuck out to me was the one holy catholic and apostolic church. Again, because of the claims of Progressive Christianity.
Progressives often condemn conservative Christians for sacrificing unity in the church by holding to traditional doctrine. Conservatives are being the divisive ones, not progressives, they say.
But DeYoung rightly states
“The oneness of the church is not a call to discount doctrine and to foster institutional unity at all costs… Paul celebrated unity in the midst of diversity, but that diversity was not theological.”
Ephesians 4:1-16 describes the unity of the church including that it is called to “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all”.
As the verses earlier stated— sound doctrine is important and at the center of what binds Christians together in Christ because it is about Christ and his work on the cross.
We don’t have councils to make up new doctrine, “new threats to the faith merit new efforts to delineate truth from error” and The Nicene Creed, which has stood the test of time, is an example of when better articulating the doctrine taught in Scripture keeps the Church unified in what matters most.
We are warned about false teachers. And I think a lot of Christians get false teachers mixed up with pagans. Those who practice other religions are not the false teachers, those are just pagans. The false teachers are in the church, twisting God’s words. They are masquerading as light; they are often subtle and hard to detect.
This helpful article delineates the patterns of false teachers: question what God says, defy or reject what God says, and offer a ‘better’ alternative that appeals to natural appetites.
The way we protect against false teachers is by guarding the deposit of sound doctrine that Jesus taught and entrusted the apostles to uphold. Jesus told them he would send the Holy Spirit to help them understand everything he had already been teaching them so we can trust what they say.
That is why ‘apostolic’ is important and the basis for which the New Testament books had authority.
I can’t help but also think of Gavin Ortlund’s book— Finding the Right Hills to Die On— which is a book about theological triage. He seeks to consider a gradation system on issues that are top tier, nonnegotiable doctrines (i.e. what is stated in the Nicene Creed), down to the lowest tier issues that are matter of opinion (i.e. what worship musical instrumentation should be).
He writes to give a good reminder not to let your passion for truth and upholding solid doctrine cause you to lose humility or care for others’ hearts. These things are not opposed to one another. To be upholding truth and following Jesus’s teachings and example should also look like humility and love. Humility and love, when practiced, should not be void of truth and the light of salvation as taught by Jesus.
To be a unified, global church does not require our worship services to look the same or even our baptism practices to be identical, but it does require theological unity in salvific doctrines.
Summary Statements
I really liked that he included six statements of summary— our takeaways from looking at the Nicene Creed. I’m including them simplified here, but he gives a little bit more explanation in the book
The Nicene Creed stresses the importance of believing the right thing
The history of the Nicene Creed teaches us that new statements (and modified statements) are often necessary to combat new errors
“The Nicene Creed is a creedal floor, not a creedal ceiling…”
The Nicene Creed models for us the central importance of the Trinity
The Nicene Creed underscores the importance of “religion” for Christian life and worship
“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 is not embarrassed to view Christianity with a soteriological focus
“Sometimes you hear people say that modern evangelicals invented this salvation-focused gospel… 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.”
The Nicene Creed points us to the future… it deliberately ends on a note of expectation and hope
Recommendation
I definitely recommend this book. You can probably read it in one or two sittings and it will bring clarity and transparency to some of the doctrines you may have started wondering why you adhere to or recite.
It’s not meant to be exhaustive, but the ancient creeds the Church has upheld has not done so for no apparent reason or for nefarious purposes. We have creeds that affirm what God’s Word already revealed and if you haven’t been taught the ‘why’ then you should read the book.
And definitely, if you think the Council of Nicaea was a power struggle about choosing the books of the Bible, you should do some more research about that, including reading this book.
This is a low commitment, high reward kind of read.
I hope DeYoung continues to put out these short books that help the average church-goer to see the foundation of the church as it pertains to Scripture instead of a set of traditions with no real meaning.
**Received a copy via Crossway Publishers in exchange for an honest review**
This book just released in April, 2025. You can order a copy of this book using my affiliate link below.
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