Gathering the Doctrine of God: Nicaea’s Strategies of Deep Collation

Ad Fontes: A Journal of Protestant Letters devoted the Winter 2025 issue to Nicaea. I contributed a short article (3300 words) that tried to stick very closely to the Davenant Institute‘s mission of recovering classical Protestant thought for the contemporary church. Here is the introduction:

It might seem like faint praise to commend the Nicene Creed as a summary of the Christian faith. At best it might register as repeating everyday common sense. In a year spent celebrating Nicaea’s 1700th anniversary, surely “summary of the faith” is little more than a bland introduction for an entry on any creed in any reference work. But if it strikes us that way, that may be a sign that we ought to give some fresh attention to the greatness and complexity of the task represented by the deepest kind of effective summarizing. Nicaea (for our purposes either 325 or 381) makes it look easy. But to have canvassed, collated, and synthesized the message of Scripture is to have accomplished something of astonishing import. Perhaps we need a stronger word than “summary,” since what Nicaea accomplishes is no simple abbreviation or condensing. Rather, in many ways and using many strategies, Nicaea has traced the message of Scripture back to its actual principles, and then fashioned from those principles a tool for effective catechizing.

Let us consider this in four phases: first, the patristic background of the collational strategies that coalesced at Nicaea; second, the form they took in the classic creedal text itself; third, the Protestant appreciation of this accomplishment; and fourth, its ongoing benefits for the task of teaching the faith.

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