We live in an age when people believe in all sorts of things and don’t know what they believe. People of God, what do you believe?

There is a subversive element to confessing our faith in God during worship. In doing so, we swim against the tide of our culture. When we confess the Nicene Creed, we are saying to each other and the world around us that we stand with the church through history. We are not the first generation to believe, and we have not just come to these things on our own. We stand with our brothers and sisters across the globe. We stand on the shoulders of giants.

Its beginnings

The Nicene Creed is one of the ‘big three creeds’, the Apostles Creed and the Athanasian Creed being the other two. 2025 marks 1700 years since the Council of Nicaea met. From this meeting came the Nicene Formula and the more well-known Nicene Creed followed in 381.

In our churches, we preach that salvation is found in Jesus Christ alone and that Jesus Christ is Lord. At the risk of simplification, the Nicene Creed was born out of thinking through that and the implications flowing from it. In the early 300s, the church was struggling with how best to talk about the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and how they relate to one another. What were the right words to use? How could one express that there is only one God and yet the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God? Who came first? Did one come after the other?

Arius was a pastor from the city of Alexandria in Egypt, and he wasn’t happy with what the church was teaching. He wanted to protect the holiness of God the Father. However, he couldn’t believe that the Holy Almighty God became a man, as to become human would be beneath him, and so Jesus Christ could not be God incarnate. Arius would not have sung, ‘Our God contracted to a span incomprehensibly made man.’ For Arius, Jesus was a created being. There was a time when he did not exist. He was not eternal, and there was a point when God the Father created him. Arius still held that Jesus was God, but that he was created and not eternal.

In the same city lived a minister in training, Athanasius. He was teaching that God the Father and Christ the Son were equally divine. The battle lines were drawn. Arius cried heresy. The church was divided, the city was divided, and very soon, the world was divided.

The Roman Emperor at the time was Constantine, and his recent conversion to Christianity was to have monumental implications for the Christian church, both very good and some bad. Constantine was worried that a divided church would lead to political instability. He gathered together more than a thousand Christian pastors and ministers who met from May to July 325. Around 300 of them were Bishops, and they debated the natures of Christ. This conference made a number of decisions, including when to celebrate Easter (you can blame Nicaea for it moving every year!) and whether kneeling in prayer at worship was permissible. In 381, at the First Council of Constantinople, the creed was expanded to clarify the teaching around the Holy Spirit. Athanasius boldly stood for the truth. At times he was alone, but in the end, he and truth won out.

Its importance

Within the creed, there are four main sections, each starting with ‘We believe’. These focus on the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit and the church. The creed clarified the doctrine of the Trinity. There is no more central question than ‘Who is Jesus?’ It is essential Christianity and the Nicene Creed is a summary of the gospel of Jesus Christ. It tells us who God is and what God has done. Every Christian and every church ought to know it.

There is one God, not two. The Father is God, and the Son is God. The Son is God in the same sense as the Father, and there is divine unity. The Son and the Father are ‘of one substance’ and the Son is ‘begotten’ (John 1:14, 18; 3:16, 18), not made. As J. I. Packer tells us, ‘the Nicene Creed unequivocally recognised the deity of the man from Galilee.’

It is this truth that we need to often meditate on and think deeply about if we are going to be able to speak about who God is. How do we share the good news of the Lord Jesus with those who have never heard of him? When we engage with Muslims about Jesus being the Son of God, we are immediately into the Nicene Creed. When we speak with Jehovah’s Witnesses, the core disagreement is the issue addressed at Nicaea. We need to understand clearly who Jesus Christ is. It is the key to understanding the doctrine of God, the Holy Trinity.

As churches, when we stand together and recite the great grammar of the gospel in the Nicene Creed, we stand with the church in every age as she is strengthened and built up in the Christian faith. This is the shape of what we believe, the form of doctrine that we have been given.

The Nicene Creed is one of the greatest texts available to us in making our confession about Jesus.

Believe it. Learn it. Love it.

This article was originally published by the Evangelical Magazine (www.evangelicalmagazine.com) published by the Evangelical Movement of Wales and is reprinted with permission.