Fred SandersA scene from the Leben der heiligen Altväter (1482)
Retrieving Nicaea for Evangelicals2025 Hobbs Lecture, Oklahoma Baptist University
I was invited to give the 2025 Hobbs Lecture at Oklahoma Baptist University, on the topic of retrieving Nicaea for evangelicals. The lecture was followed by a symposium featuring lots of excellent Baptist theologians handling the same topic from a variety of angles, and a Center for Baptist Renewal conference as well.
The video starts out with some lighting trouble, and my delivery is not quite scintillating, but here it is, with the text pasted in below.
“We believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth …
We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages…
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life,”
ET CETERA.
It’s the creed of Nicaea, from a council almost exactly 1700 years ago, and VOILA, I’ve just retrieved it for you.
Or maybe you never really lost it, in which case I’ve just recited it for you, or reminded you of it, or refreshed your memory of it, or rejoiced with you in respecting it and reflecting on it. If Nicaea was already Trieved, then I can’t really take credit for RE-Trieving it, trieving it all over again.
So what are we talking about when we talk about retrieving an ancient creed? Well, I’m the one who announced this title, so I’d better have an answer. And fear not, I do: the goal of retrieval is to “rehabilitate classical sources of Christian teaching and draw attention to their potential in furthering the theological task.”[1] It’s an entire mode of doing theology, of thinking theologically here and now, in partnership with a long tradition of time-tested sources, guides, and examples.
And when we pursue that mode of doing theology as evangelicals, or more pointedly as a community of conservative evangelical baptistic believers in the year of our Lord 2025, we might give the impression of being a group that is a little bit of a late arriver to the retrieval party, or somehow playing catch-up. What’s the status of creeds among our people? If we take their temperature, are we still cold towards creeds, or are creeds kind of cool now? Today I want to argue that as we evangelicals take up Nicaea, we need not think of ourselves as second-class partners in the project, or as somehow borrowing it from the Catholics, or of getting by with a dumbed-down version of it, or as just approaching it rather distantly and doing the best we can with it, considering our diminished circumstances. Instead, what I want to propose here today is that evangelicals are the ones who are in a uniquely strong position to make the most of the theology of Nicaea. We are the ones who can get to the heart of it, and can take it to heart.
I. On Not Creeping Around on the Outside
Evangelicals, and perhaps especially Baptists, haven’t adopted a cultural self-presentational style of leading with creeds. Even if we’re not anti-creedal, we nevertheless tend away from being ostentatiously creedal. We don’t generally follow the convention of starting with the recitation of an external form of words received from tradition and presupposed as the authoritative foundation on which we work. That strategy of ceding the opening move to tradition, the “lead with the creed” strategy, always feels to us a little bit in danger of starting on the wrong foot, of derogating from the authority of Scripture. We prefer a style that leads with the Bible, conspicuously deferring to its authority, and only then falls in line with the traditional credal way of speaking precisely because we are convinced that the creeds faithfully repeat and helpfully summarize what Scripture in fact teaches. God says it in scripture: Deus Dixit. So we believe it: ergo credo.
Now these two cultural self-presentational styles stand in contrast but not contradiction. The based-on-the-Bible style gives the impression that we just picked up the Bible and then in fact discovered the creedal truths in it, new every morning. The lead-with-the-creed style gives the impression that we already knew what we thought before we picked up the Bible, because this isn’t our first rodeo and our great great grandparents already worked this out long ago. But as I said, the two are not mutually exclusive: evangelicals have in fact read the Bible before, all the way through several times, and have already made some decisions, generations ago, about little things like the Trinity, which they are willing to write down and sign their names to. And lead-with-the-creed believers gladly acknowledge that in salvation history God spoke first and our formal faith followed along with what he said, so that the creed yields priority to God’s word, coming along later to codify, organize, and operationalize the word of God rightly understood. Provided we can learn from each other, the relative advantage of the lead-with-the-creed strategy is that it invests its credibility in an external and publicly accountable document. The advantage of the based-on-the-bible strategy is that it invests its energy in pointing away from its receptive work to the thing itself, the word of God.
Now the main thing about a creed ought to be its actual content. Creeds are for believing, not just having on hand, printing out on paper, or yammering about. And we all share a besetting human tendency to find ourselves backing away from the actual subject matter on the inside of our faith, and instead hovering around the mere formal existence of it. We find ourselves creeping around on the outside of a reality rather than penetrating to the heart of it. We talk about the creed instead of what’s in the creed. The temptation is subtle but pernicious, and if yielded to, it’s devastating: I’m sure you’ve experienced it. We start with the thing itself and then slide into the thing about the thing, and then the thing about the thing about the thing. When we come to our senses we realize we’ve become alienated from the heart of the matter and have begun to settle for the mere husks and externalities. From creeping around on the outside of what we believe, deliver us, O Lord! Revive us again.
Again, I must emphasize this is a universal human predicament, closely related to the universality of sin and our shared plight of being cognitively deranged, metaphysically distracted, and emotionally vagrant. It is not a problem unique to any one team, and no tribe is immune from it. Team lead-with-the-creed drifts to the mere externality of the creed, and team based-on-the-Bible finds themselves creeping around on the outside of a closed Bible. In fact, a leading spiritual danger for all Christians of every kind is this tendency to let ourselves settle for the outside of God’s word. We all need all the help we can get to re-engage the thing itself, to get to heart of the matter again and again and dwell down in it as long as possible.
But in this regard, when it comes to Nicaea, the less ostentatiously creedal group enjoys the relative advantage of coming afresh to a creed like Nicaea with more interest in its content than its authority. Precisely because our opening move is not programmatic deference to the creed as such, we have the opportunity of appreciating its content from the inside, with less incentive to be prematurely satisfied with holding it externally. Evangelicals of the Baptist type are in a good position for receiving and retrieving Nicaea because they don’t have it authoritatively imposed on them. Someone[2] has defined tradition as the living faith of the dead, while traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Evangelicals retrieving Nicaea in our generation have the opportunity to make the most of that vital impulse from the living faith. This is not a permanent advantage, but an invitation and an opportunity. Nicaea beckons, Come in here and learn the thing itself, the reality of the God of the gospel. Take it up and confess it as evangelicals, meaning do it in a way that emphasizes its biblical basis, its gospel implications, and the richness of our fellowship with the Father and his Son in the Spirit. Assuming that there is such a thing as Nicene theology, and granted that there is such a thing as Protestant evangelicals, the goal of our instruction is to improve the odds on a great awakening of Protestant evangelical Nicene theology, a kind of theology that confesses the God of the gospel in a living way, from a full head and a stirred-up heart.
How? By learning to focus intently on the main point about Nicaea.
II. The Main Thing: The Son
And yes, Nicaea has a main point. Though the creed has the form of a list with numerous items, and it’s possible to get distracted by them, the fact is that the Nicene Creed is tightly constructed around the confession of the identity of Jesus Christ as the Son of God.
Structurally, the Nicene Creed is an expansion of Matthew 28:19’s threefold name, “the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Jesus spoke that name, and the creed answers amen, “I believe in the Father… the Son… and the Holy Spirit.” But it takes this formula, spoken by the risen Lord Jesus in the great commission at the dramatic climax of the first gospel, and greatly elaborates the central term, “the Son.” It does so even at the expense of saying rather little about the Father and the Holy Spirit. The Nicene Creed gives us just enough material to elaborate a doctrine of God the Father, and a little more verbiage on the Holy Spirit for spelling out a pneumatology, but it resolutely drills down on the Christology, making the identity of Jesus Christ as the Son the burden of the long second article. It’s obviously a trinitarian creed, but it’s just as obviously a Christ-centered trinitarian creed. Already from this we learn the lesson that we never need to choose between being Christ-centered or Trinity-centered. These two centers are con-centric. When you believe rightly, you are centered on Christ and centered on the Trinity, with no dichotomizing or eccentricity. In the Nicene sense, there’s no such thing as being “too Christocentric.” Of course you may know believers whose theology is wonky and disordered in that direction. It is, I regret to have to admit it, possible to focus on Jesus Christ in way that is Father-forgetful and Spirit-ignoring. You know what I mean. Sometimes a well-intentioned teacher will tell the gospel story in a lopsided way, like “Jesus loved you so much he came and died for you and rose again so he could live inside you forever.” What’s gone wrong there? That’s a true sentence, but it seems as if it’s going out of its way to avoid mentioning the Father and the Spirit. It would be more biblical, more balanced, and more comprehensive to say God the Father loved the world and sent the Son, who died and rose so the Holy Spirit could live in us. Nicaea knows this, and its focus on Christology doesn’t suppress the Father and the Spirit; instead it gives us radically and resolutely trinitarian Christology of a perfectly integrated sort. Notice that when I proposed a sentence that was more biblical, more balanced, and more comprehensive, it turned out to be a sentence that was more trinitarian, and more Nicene.
In the interest of commending Nicaea as more than a list, and to make the most of our time, I want to show you the one thing that is the center of the creed. And I sincerely mean to claim that it is the center, the central center, the very heart of the heart of heart of our faith. The whole creed is designed to display the crown jewel of Jesus as the Son of God.
The second article of the Nicene creed confesses faith in “one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Lord, Jesus, and Christ are all names and titles for this person, deeply biblical, richly resonant, all worth studying. But what the Nicene Creed actually goes on to claim about this person, and to press, is found in the next title, “Son.” This one is the Son of God. This is of course also a deeply biblical thing to say, taken verbatim from Scripture. But because the Nicene Creed was forged in controversy, it has a sharp definitional edge to what it says about the Son of God. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this about the Nicene Creed. As soon as it calls him Son of God, the creed turns a corner because it wants to say much more about that title, “Son.”
Listen: It says “[We believe] in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-begotten, who was begotten from the Father before all ages, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, the same-in-substance with the Father, through whom all things came to be, who for us humans and for our salvation came down from the heavens.”
You can really picture this almost dialogically, as if the creed proposes “Son of God” and then somebody asks, “what does that mean?” causing the creed to reply, “I will tell you what that means. I will tell you nine different ways what that means.” And indeed, the creed says Son of God and then doubles down, no, triples down, no, quadruples and quintuples and octuples down on it and than adds a ninth. (Nonuples?) It’s really quite resolute about this. Listen again:
[We believe] in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the Son of God, (1 how Son?) the only-begotten,
(2 how begotten?) who was begotten from the Father (3 when begotten?) before all ages,
(4 God is light; is the Son also light? Yes:) light from light,
(5but is he true God? Yes:) true God from true God,
(6But is begottenness a form of creaturehood? No:) begotten, not made,
(7But does he differ from the Father?) the same-in-substance with the Father,
(8If he is not made, how does he relate to creation?) through whom all things came to be,
(9 Okay, but how is he also a human creature?) who for us humans and for our salvation came down from the heavens,
Every one of those 9 specifications would repay close study, and has in fact received close study, classically in the fourth and fifth centuries but also in the millennium and a half since. We lack time this morning to turn the jewel around and admire each facet. But let me point out two features of the whole jewel.
One: of the 9 specifications of what we mean by Son, the fist seven are within the being of God. They are not about what the Son does in creation of salvation; each of those great works of the Son gets one phrase. But the first seven circle around and around the eternal personal union and communion of Father and Son, in the happy land of the Trinity, above all world and all external works. Son for Nicaea fundamentally means begotten of the Father, of the same essence, true God who is light but who is eternally “from” true God who is light. There is personal distinction but essential oneness in an ordered relation of begetting that is not any form of making in any period of time. All seven of those specifications are within the doctrine of God’s own triune identity, above the line that distinguishes God from everything else. I’ve taken to calling that line the Nicene line, because what is most characteristic of Nicaea is to draw that line clearly and place the Son above it. It’s a confession of his full deity that drives the Arians crazy. That’s what it’s for; It was designed to drive the Arians crazy, or rather, as Athanasius would say, to unmask the madness of denying the Son’s divinity.
Two, the Nicene creed asks and answers the question of how this eternal divine Son is also the human savior who we pick out by the titles Lord Jesus Christ. The answer: “For us and our salvation, he came down.” Not because he was man by nature, but for us. Not to enrich his base of experience, but for us. Not out of need and not out of greed, but for us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven and was incarnate and became human. Now obviously there is a lot more we could and should say about incarnational Christology, the Son’s assumption of the human nature, and all matters Chalcedonian. But Nicaea is laser focused with sevenfold force on the identity of the Son of God, true God of true God, above the Nicene line. Creation itself is small compared to that: point 8, through him all things came to be. Salvation itself is put in perspective by that: point 9, for us and our salvation, and only then does Nicaea go on to tell the story found in the gospels of his birth, death, resurrection, and ascension.
This is the main thing in Nicaea, and since Nicaea is true and biblical, rightly dividing the word of God and responsibly canvassing the full counsel of the word of God, it is also the main thing in the faith. If we talk about the Nicene Creed, Nicene theology, or Nicene trinitarianism, we fundamentally mean this Nicene doctrine of the Son of God, his eternal and essential filiality.
Beyond the Bible and the creed itself, I will call only one witness, so I made sure he was a Baptist. Baptist theologian John Gill (1697-1771) retried and rehabilitated the Nicene doctrine of the Son in the 1700s (he was 28 in 1725, so maybe he celebrated Nicaea 1400 in his own day), in controversy with early modern heretics, the Socinians. Their heresy differed from fourth-century heresies in several ways, but Gill rightly identified the root of their problem as exactly this: sub-Nicene doctrine of sonship.
“Socinians, unwilling to own the eternal Sonship of Christ, or that he was the Son of God before he was the Son of Mary; and not caring to acknowledge the true cause of and reason of [his sonship], which is but one, have devised many [different reasons for calling him Son]; which shows the puzzle and confusion they are in.”[3] There is “but one” reason for Christ’s true and eternal sonship, and rejecting it leaves theology scrambling in a hapless quest for alternative grounds. Gill reports that a list of no fewer than thirteen alternative bases for sonship. They think it just means the Father loves him; or just that he is the image of the Father. No, says Gill, that is backwards. “he is not [God’s] Son because he loves him; but he loves him because he is his Son.” (149) Likewise, “the reason why Christ is called the Son of God, is not because he is like him but he is like him because he is his Son; of the same nature and essence with him.” (149). Socinians sometimes explained Christ’s sonship as being reducible to his birth from Mary, or based on his resurrection from the dead, or summarized in his office as mediator. But in all three cases, Socinian interpreters make the same fundamental move: they take an aspect of the economy of salvation and attempt to make it the foundation of Jesus Christ’s Sonship. In each case, they deny that there is such a thing as an eternal Sonship that belongs properly to God, and instead make sonship a way of describing something about God’s external actions in the history of salvation.
In response to the Socinian idea of a merely incarnational sonship, Gill argues that “the incarnation of Christ is not the reason of his being the Son of God, but the manifestation of him as such; he was not made, but manifested thereby to be the Son of God.”[4] The incarnation is the manifestation, in human form, of the divine sonship in which the second hypostasis of the Trinity always existed.
John Gill had much more to say, but my point is just that he articulated the Nicene line with an evangelical Baptist accent. He was focused like a laser beam on the main thing, and he expounded it with special attention to the Bible and our salvation.
If we go and do likewise in our generation, we will truly work out an evangelical retrieval of Nicaea, and in fact a revival of it on the grounds of scripture and gospel. I know that “retrieval” can start to sound fancy, but for most of us it just means reading a lot more old books. To read John Gill and Augustine an the Cappadocian Fathers, all gathered around reading scripture rightly, is already to retrieve and revive classic doctrine.
Before we move on from the Nicene Creed itself, let me point out one implication of the fact that the Creed has an actual main point. The whole creed’s focus and foundation is this particular teaching on the sonship of the son. So when somebody introduces the topic of the Nicene Creed, and the response is that the Nicene Creed is a list of topics which each has to be treated on its own and judged by scripture, I can always detect some important slippage. What I mean is, while acknowledging that the creed has the form of a list and that all doctrinal propositions must be traced to the authority of scripture, deep in my heart I can tell that whoever talks that way about the creed is not yet in on the not-so-secret secret that the main point is the sonship of the on. If I mention the creed and you respond by cataloguing the statement about baptism or the filioque or a handful of other bits and bobs, important though the might be, I confess that I treat that response as a dead giveaway that you have not yet apprehended the main point. Though if you prove you have apprehended it, and you understand why it is the main point, then we can make time to discuss everything else on the list. There’s time and place for all doctrine under the sheltering expanse of the sonship of Chirst.
III. All Things Are Yours
Finally, I want to encourage evangelical retrieval of Nicaea with a reminder to believers that “all things are yours.” I’m quoting 1 Corinthians 3, where Paul is talking about the wide range of teachers who have been responsible for the theological education of the Corinthians:
6 I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. 7 So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. 8 He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. 9 For we are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s field, God’s building.
He goes on to draw the conclusion,
I Cor 3:21: all things are yours, whether Paul or apollos, or cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come, all things are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.”
Why are all these teachers ours? Because we are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s. Paul does not stop at putting us in Christ; he goes further to Christ’s belonging to the Father. There is some kind of trinitarian warrant here for the oneness of believers, and for the fact that the true teachings of all Christian teachers are the direct property of all who are in Christ. Because the Son is from the Father, all that the Father has is his; because we are in Christ, all who teach of Christ are ours.
For the evangelical deep retrieval and revival of Nicane theology, we could paraphase: Nicaea planted, Constantinople and Chalcedon watered, but God gives the increase. Athanasius planted, John Gill watered, but God gives the increase.
The great tradition of trinitarian Christian thought and experience is ours, not because we are postmodern consumers with a license to loot the past, but because of our real union with Christ and his with the Father. Without this real union, all of us are just squatting on the territory of others, or decorating our houses with antiques to make ourselves feel more prestigious. But all things are ours –by which Paul means all Christian teachers—and we are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s. It must become our homeland if we are to be in the company of the Trinity, which is the communion of the saints.
Furthermore, when I say “all things are yours” for retrieval of Nicaea, I am not just recommending a time machine journey to the fourth century. When we retrieve and reclaim the theology and spirituality of the Christian tradition, we should take care not to leapfrog over the time between us and the more distant past. Skipping that “middle distance” is a common mistake, one that seriously weakens our connection to the past. If you think of the present as a jumping-off point, and the remote past as your landing point, you can see that everything depends on your launching power as you leap. And there’s something arbitrary about that: you’re picking a spot to land on and soaring over the intervening territory. But all that ground between the launch and the landing is also significant: it also counts toward how you got where you are.
Skipping the ‘middle distance’ is a common mistake. Or picture it another way: as an actual picture. In composing a painting, the artist has to account for foreground, background, and middle ground. In Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, the lady is in the foreground, while some sky, cloudscape, and pale-bluish mountains are in the background. But in the middle ground—although most people are unable to reconstruct it from memory—are a river, a road, a bridge, and more, all in brown tones that help establish the lady and situate her in a meaningful way. If you sketched a version with just the lady in front and the cloudscape in back, you’d have a much poorer composition. That forgettable middle ground powerfully connects. It ties things together.
In theology and church life, we often take the foreground (here! now!) as the obviously urgent thing, and then, if we’re wise, look away to the distant background to help us get oriented. So far so good: ad fontes! But the middle distance is often where the real connections are. These are the actual things that link us to the past. But it may seem a little too familiar to be interesting and a little too far back to be urgent. It’s middling. In terms of fashion, you may think your grandparents had some cool clothes, but you’re less likely to esteem your parents’ choices. Grandma is retro, but Mom is just old.
But ignoring the middle ground has the curious consequence of suggesting we’re sovereignly in charge of making the remote past serve us in whatever way we choose. We can appropriate the distant things and do with them what we will; they’re far enough away that they don’t obviously carry obligations or organic connections. It’s the figures in the middle distance, though, who can link us and bind us to the distant past.
I’ve said this before, but I want to say it here: The Center for Baptist Renewal is exemplary at retrieving the deep past by cultivating the middle distance. Their 2021 Reading Challenge appropriately focused on theological classics. Starting with Irenaeus and Athanasius, it led Baptist readers on through Anselm and Aquinas and beyond. But what about the middle distance? For their 2022 Reading Challenge, CBR shrewdly turned their attention to reading “Baptist classics” precisely to show “there actually is a Baptist theological tradition.” The picture they’re painting is well composed, complete with a foreground (today’s task), background (the great Christian heritage of patristic theology), and middle ground (their own Baptist heritage).
The temptation to ignore the middle ground afflicts almost all of us. It’s because the middle distance doesn’t have the heft and gravity of the ancient background or the urgency and immediacy of the present foreground. But it’s quite often the place where your real, historical identity takes on its particular accents, hues, and forms. And it’s always what connects the present to the deeper past.
IV. Retrieval and Revival
Next to outright heresy, the disorder I most dread in theology is a failure to apprehend its unity. I hate to see believers who are otherwise biblically informed and spiritually alert but whose mental catalog of theological truths is just that: a catalog, a list, a series of discrete topics. If somebody snuck into your cognitive structure one night and stole away a couple of items, would you have to conduct an inventory in order to find out what was missing? Are the truths unrelated inside your mind?
If doctrine exists in you as a mere list, mere externals, mere list, no linkage, then doctrine exists in you more like a dead thing than a living thing. A living thing would be able to exhibit the vital signs of health, growth, significant form, purpose, power, unity.
What kind of retrieval can we hope for in the evangelical retrieval of Nicaea? The kind of retrieval that is a revival. A retrieval in which Nicaea is still Nicaea, but has been received by evangelicals as a more conspicuously biblical and more gospel-focused thing than ever.
Retrieval is to find again; revival is to live again. Learn Nicaea and preach revival. Go to the heart. Dwell deep. Cultivate the middle distance and enter the distant hinterland of the soul. Claim your birthright and possess your possessions.
Our opportunity today is to take up the ancient faith for the faithful and well-proportioned teaching of the truth of the Bible, for the sake of the gospel, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Sola scriptura, gratia, sola trinitate.
[1] John Webster, “Theologies of Retrieval,” in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology, edited by John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Ian Torrance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 596.
[2] Pelikan?
[3] John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal and Practical Divinity (London: 1839; reprinted Atlanta, Georgia: Turner Lassetter, 1950), 149.
[4] Gill, Body of Divinity, 151.
