Nicaea Still Matters 1700 Years Later

Kymberli Cook: 

Welcome to The Table Podcast where we discuss issues of God and culture. My name is Kymberli Cook and I am the Assistant Director of The Hendricks Center here at DTS. And today we are going to be talking about the Nicene Creed and why it still matters 1700 years later. And yes, I said 1700 because we are now in—this is being recorded in—2025, which is 1700 years from 325 AD when the Nicene council originally met, and the confession that came out of the Nicene council is the Nicene Creed. So we are celebrating that as church historians do, by sitting around and talking. 

Michael Svigel: 

Carrying on the tradition. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Exactly. So we are joined by two very qualified gentlemen who've dedicated their lives to talking and thinking about theology and church history and those types of things. And so we just want to thank you so much for being here. We have doctors Malcolm Yarnell, who is a research professor of theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. I always have a hard time saying that strip. I don't know why, but I do. And he's also the editor of the Southwestern Journal of Theology. So thank you so much for being here, Dr. Yarnell. 

Malcolm Yarnell: 

Thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Absolutely. And we're also joined—as always—by Dr. Michael Svigel, the department chair and professor of theological studies here at DTS, as well as one of a couple of our church historians, especially heavy hitters. And so we're thrilled to have you with us once more. 

Michael Svigel: 

Thanks for having me back. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Of course. So let's let you get to know them a little bit better. And first, if you guys wouldn't mind just telling us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up spending your life thinking about church history and theology and all things in that direction. How did you end up sitting in a library that long? We can start with you, Dr. Yarnell. 

Malcolm Yarnell: 

That's a great question, especially when you consider that in high school I did everything possible to avoid the library. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Really? 

Malcolm Yarnell: 

Yeah, no, for me it's a sense of calling. I knew when I surrendered to the ministry that I was called to be a teacher. And I also discovered through experience and through just listening to the Lord through preaching, through Bible study that if I'm going to teach well then I need to have been where the people that I'm teaching are going. So I knew the Lord had called me into the pastorate as well. And so I became a pastor and continued my education. So worked on my master of theology—master of divinity, excuse me—at Southwestern Seminary. Learned basics about not only pastoral ministry, but went deep into the biblical languages, took the basics in historical theology and took all my electives in biblical studies, exegesis and biblical theology. 

Then went to Duke University and worked on a Master of Theology there. David Steinmetz, Reformation scholar, was my supervisor and really enjoyed that time. Got to meet some great theologians like Stanley Hauerwas and others. And then went on to Oxford University and studied Reformation there, wrote my thesis on royal priesthood in the English Reformation, had the most intimidating exams I think that anybody could ever have. I had Rowan Williams who was the archbishop of Canterbury and Diarmaid MacCulloch, who is a profoundly brilliant, retired now, but the professor of Reformation history at Oxford University. They were my examiners. I thought surely I am done for. 

But anyways, so taking the biblical studies and of course I continued to pastor during much of that time. The biblical studies, just love God's word, love to teach it. But also Leo Garrett and David Steinmetz put in me a great desire to understand that the church is not confined to just the people around me, that Bible study is not just me reading the Bible, but me reading the Bible with other believers, not only with other believers that are around me locally or in my same time, but across the field of church history, across the world, and learning more about God, understanding that God is himself greater than my mind can ever comprehend. And every new discovery about God is an invitation to joy. And so that's why I absolutely love to be in the library now. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Yeah. Because it became so much more communal. 

Malcolm Yarnell: 

Oh, absolutely. Communal and honestly, I think I get glimpses periodically of his glory when I'm reading Gregory of Nazianzus or Augustine or Luther, although Luther can be hard to handle at points. He'd like to speak his mind. 

Kymberli Cook: 

He's got feels. 

Malcolm Yarnell: 

He does, yeah. I used to warn my students, "If you've got some Victorian ethics here, you might not want to check out certain volumes by Luther." But just recognizing that I can still learn more. So yeah, that's how I got into theological education, because I knew I had a call to teach. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Wonderful. And we've actually heard two different presentations from you here on campus and I can tell you who are listening, he can preach, he can get after it. So Dr. Svigel, what about you? How did you end up thinking about church history especially? 

Michael Svigel: 

Yeah, I came to Christ in high school before my senior year of high school. I had been led to the Lord by my high school English teacher who was also bivocational pastor. And I've always loved learning. I was kind of the nerd. I actually liked the library and spent as much time in the library as possible. And so yeah, when I came to Christ, I began evangelizing, leading my friends to Christ and was really excited. I felt and was encouraged to go into some kind of ministry. I didn't know, I wasn't really raised in an evangelical Christian home, so I didn't know what that looked like. But as I went to Bible college, I had professors. It was mostly through the counsel of others who saw in me certain gifts and skills and abilities and inclinations. And I was strongly encouraged by a professor of mine back in Bible college—Charles Ryrie, which may mean something to some people—he encouraged me to go on to seminary. 

And I came to Dallas. I did come to Dallas Seminary and never left here. I've been here since 1996 in some capacity. But another figure, Jeff Bingham, who is a Patristic scholar and was a chair of the theological studies department at the time really influenced me in more the direction of where I was going to go in historical theology as well as systematic theology. So I developed a really deep interest in early church and Patristics already back in Bible college. So that was something I've been working at since about 1993 and pretty much ever since. 

And then with that comes not just church history, but history of like what we're talking about here, the councils and the creeds, and what is the role of these thinkers of the past and how are we responsible for taking this faith that has been given to us, a faith once for all delivered to the saints passed down faithfully from one generation to another? And here we have it. And now we have to make sure that what we're receiving is consistent with what has been originally handed down, that we can pass that then on to the next generation. So I see that as a major point in my calling, not just living out understanding, living out the Christian faith for myself, but retrieving sometimes things that have been neglected, lost sometimes. Every generation's responsibility is to check that what we are receiving is what was originally given and pass that faithfully on. 

Kymberli Cook: 

I love that. It makes me think of in the Chronicles of Narnia, I think it's Caspian, Prince Caspian, they're talking to the badger at one point and they say, "Because it's yours to remember," and that's the badger's job. It's for you to remember and so it makes me think of this general field and I love it. Obviously I think it's beautiful. I'm in it as well. 

So let's turn to the matter at hand. The Council of Nicaea, like I said, was held in 325 AD and there was a summary confession that arose out of that. And we'll get into a little bit more of that confession in a second. So we're going to be talking about the Nicene Creed, but first I actually want to talk about a creed first and then we'll get into Nicaea in a second. So as far as a creed, you may not actually know what that is. You may have heard the term before, but here we're actually… First I want us to talk about what is it that a creed is. So either one of you can hop in. What is a creed? 

Michael Svigel: 

Yeah. The word creed comes from the Latin word credo means I believe or credimus we believe. And it's the first line of a confession of faith, "I believe x" and from the very beginning, Christians were expressing their belief in one God, the Father Almighty, one Lord Jesus Christ. It wasn't always as formed and formulaic as we see in some of the later creeds, but we have evidence very early on. Already in the New Testament itself, you have these little summary statements that seem to be incorporated. They existed before the writing of the scriptures, the New Testament writing. So it means that they're being recited, they're being sung, they're functioning in some way. So there's summaries of what Christians believe. So you could tug on the toga of some first century Christian and say, "You're one of those weird Christians, aren't you? What do you believe?" And they would have it ready at hand. They believe in this, they believe in that. And it was usually we could bullet point it. 

And these eventually become a little more formalized in what we call baptismal confessions. And you go around the Christian world at the time, the Roman world different, each individual church oftentimes would have a slight variation perhaps on it, but it was always in this Trinitarian form: I believe in God the Father, I believe in God the Son, I believe in God the Holy Spirit. And there was always a little bit of detail involved in those. And that was what it meant to be baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, you were responding to this confession of faith, the basic Christian faith. So it summarizes and focuses on the fundamentals of what it means to be Christian, what we call the gospel. It's a summary of the gospel. 

Malcolm Yarnell: 

Yeah, and I think that's right, a creed… By the way, I want to make a little distinction here that really has arisen since the Reformation. So the 16th century resulted in the confessionalization of different Christian groups, and this is where we get our modern idea of denominationalism from, for instance. And these denominations are often differentiated over against one another by their confessions. So I make a distinction, as do many scholars, between a creed and a confession. A creed, as Dr. Svigel pointed out, gives the basics of the faith. The basics of the Christian faith have to do with who is God as Father and Son and Holy Spirit. So Trinity. Who is Jesus Christ as truly God, a truly human, one person. And also with Jesus Christ, a description of the gospel, that he is God who has come in the flesh, who's died on the cross, who's risen from the dead, who's ascended to the right hand of the Father, and one day he will return again to judge the living and the dead. And that we need to prepare for this because the resurrection of the body is part of what it means to ultimately fall under judgment. So one's eternal destination is under consideration. 

These are the basics of the Christian creed, and they need to be worked out. And the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Athanasian Creed, and the formula of Chalcedon are typically seen as the four documents—they're short documents—that you go to if you want to understand what is Christianity in its basics. With the longer confessions, so the Lutheran Formula of Concord or the many different confessions in the Reformed tradition, or the Baptist tradition or Bible churches have their confessions, Methodists have their confessions, and so on. You have all these different confessions. Those are broader and bring in a great deal more than do the creeds. The creeds I think are important, from my perspective, for grounding the confessions in the common faith that holds all Christians together. 

Kymberli Cook: 

So if I hear you gentlemen correctly, when we're thinking about what a creed is, it is the core. This is the core element of the Christian faith, and these are the things that it means to be Christian, these are the things that Christians believe. And should someone not hold to something in that core, there would be very serious questions as to whether we are quote-unquote, "Playing the Christian game anymore." Obviously I don't think it's a game, but you've stepped out of bounds. We're no longer talking about Christianity. Is that fair? 

Malcolm Yarnell: 

And the creeds have various functions. So they're used, as Dr. Svigel pointed out, before baptism to help teach someone what their faith is, to make sure they've accepted this faith, that they do believe in the same God, they come out of the baptismal confession. They're continued to be used in worship among the churches, so they have a liturgical function. Pedagogical, liturgical, but they also have a disciplinary function. So the Nicene Creed, for instance, is actually from 325, is a disciplinary creed, and that's why it had anathemas attached to the end of it. And so for a disciplinary creed—and the Athanasian Creed would be like this—it demonstrates that if you disagree with this creed and move beyond it, then for the Athanasian Creed, your very salvation is in doubt. For the Nicene Creed, it's about whether you should be an approved teacher or not, whether you should be a bishop in the church. And so they do have all these different functions, but the primary ones are pedagogical, liturgical, and disciplinary. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Okay. 

Michael Svigel: 

I might add one more function too that is sometimes forgotten is, and we have to be careful about this too, Scripture is a final authority in all matters of faith and practice, but the creeds themselves focus on those things in Scripture that are clear, that are foundational, weighty. I sometimes call them they're the load-bearing doctrines of the faith. And so what creeds can do too, as we are reading Scripture—and I encourage everybody obviously to read the Bible for themselves—the creeds, if you have these memorized and understand this is the faith we're baptized into, it has a hermeneutical function in reminding us consistently what those most important foundational elements of the Christian narrative from Genesis to Revelation really are. So we don't get distracted by issues that divide us and have those things expand, take too big of a place in our understanding of the Christian faith. 

It helps to balance the Christian faith and also balance our reading of Scripture. We can be very confident that Jesus is the God-man who died for our sins and rose from the dead. And when we're sitting next to somebody in the airplane and they're asking us about our Christian faith, we know where to go rather than, let me talk about angels, let's talk about— 

Malcolm Yarnell: 

Or let me talk about laying on of hands or whatever. Yeah. 

Michael Svigel: 

There are other things, but these are the weighty things that help put that in perspective. 

Malcolm Yarnell: 

And they also unite us. That's why they're called ecumenical because they do bring together different flavors, if you will, of Christians. And we recognize that there is something that is the same about us, even if we don't worship in the same church. 

Michael Svigel: 

Even if we don't share those exact same confessions, we share the common core. 

Malcolm Yarnell: 

Yeah. In the early church, your baptismal creed was known as a symbolum. It's like an oral identity card. It's your way. This is the God I believe in. This is the God in whose name I was baptized. I believe in God, the Father, Almighty, Creator of the heavens and the earth of all things visible and invisible. So they would say these things to demonstrate this is the God in whom they believe. And Christians since then, really we owe them a great deal of debt because they have helped us to recognize… 

So when somebody comes to start reading the Bible and they start importing all sorts of ideas, especially from their own contemporary culture and determining, "that's what the Bible means," when actually the Bible's not even talking about that. Or they take an issue that is a narratival issue, and they become so wrapped up in that that they forget what is the core message of Scripture. And so I think Dr. Svigel's right, they have a hermeneutical guiding function to let you know this is the main road. And it also helps you avoid the errors of falling off into the ditches as well, into extremes, into things that are not really part of the faith. 

Kymberli Cook: 

So to somebody who might sit back and say, "I've always gone to a Bible church and the Bible is the most important thing for me, I'm not sure, that could be helpful…" what I hear you all say is it is incredibly helpful even to that person because you say, "No, no, it actually helps you read the Bible better." Would that be fair? Is there anything else you would want to say to that person who would say, "We have the Bible. Why would we need this creed?"? 

Malcolm Yarnell: 

Yeah, I recommend my students to memorize one of the creeds, especially the Apostles' Creed or the Nicene Creed, as they prepare to teach and to preach. Because both creeds, of those creeds, the way they're written is that they put the gospel at the very center. In the midst of discussing who God is, we get a robust description—and it's a summary description, you can memorize it—it's a summary description of the gospel itself. And I encourage my students, "When you preach, you keep the gospel—which is located there right in the center of the creed about the incarnation, the death, the resurrection, the ascension, and the final judgment—these things need to be kept before you so that you can make sure that in your preaching you focus on these things." 

So I really believe that the creeds help us to identify and remember the central teaching of the biblical text, the apostolic preaching, the preaching of the gospel of salvation. And it becomes a difficulty when you get off into all sorts of other tangents, which are not really about preaching the gospel. So when Jesus made his appearance to the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, he taught them the core of the Christian faith. They had no idea who he was because they still didn't understand that he was supposed to suffer and die and rise again. So he proves it to them from the scriptures. In his case, he's giving them teaching from every part of the Old Testament. 

And in doing so, he's actually conveying to them the creed. And in doing so, he has actually reshaped the way that they read Scripture. And we need to take a clue that our reading of Scripture must be ruled by the gospel that Jesus Christ himself gave to the disciples that they didn't understand at first because they did not know how to read Scripture correctly. 

Kymberli Cook: 

And so it helps guide how we read Scripture. And it is in no way, just to be clear, it's in no way to replace Scripture. 

Michael Svigel: 

Oh, no. 

Malcolm Yarnell: 

Oh, no, it's actually— 

Michael Svigel: 

Yeah, there's nothing in the creed— 

Kymberli Cook: 

It's because people really love the Bible and are trying to make sure that they're honest and faithful to the text, that it is out of that conviction that the creeds arose. 

Malcolm Yarnell: 

Yeah. 

Michael Svigel: 

Right. 

Malcolm Yarnell: 

It's not just out of the conviction that the creed represents the message of Scripture, the words of the creed, the emphases of the creed, the structure of the creed, the spirit of the creed, these things are actually coming out of the biblical text. The biblical text itself gives us all of the information and structured in the right way with the primary content and lays it out right there before us. And that's why I think they're very, very helpful for hermeneutics. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Awesome. All right, so we've established the creed and what it is, where it's arisen from, where they have arisen from, and the variety of things that they offer believers, which is wonderful. So now let's talk about Nicaea and the Nicene Creed. You will get there, but Nicaea, the Nicene council, let's hit that first. What was happening that they had to hold a council? What was an early church council? Can you paint that picture for us? 

Malcolm Yarnell: 

Yeah. You want me to start Dr. Svigel? 

Michael Svigel: 

Sure. 

Malcolm Yarnell: 

Yeah. So actually he's more of the Patristic scholar, but I'll give it a stab. 

Michael Svigel: 

I'll give you a grade. 

Malcolm Yarnell: 

Thank you. Yeah. So the Reformation scholar is going to speak to Patristics. So what was happening is that in the early church, in the early part of the fourth century, really somewhere around 318 or so, Arius—a presbyter who was well-regarded, considered to be a good speaker, and an attractive human being to people in his dealing with them… he knew how to engage with music, so his confession the Thalia is actually a hymnic composition—but he begins to teach a series of doctrines that their purpose, while the, as Gregg and Groh have pointed out, his purpose may have actually been somewhat soteriological. So he's not setting out necessarily to try to lead people astray, but he begins to lead them astray. And it's because of what he's teaching about God the Son. 

And so the early church had to establish that God created this world out of nothing, and he applied that creation out of nothing, not only to this world, but to the Son. For Arius, the Son is a creature. And to say that the Son has been begotten of the Father, he interprets generation or begetting of the Son to be the creation of the Son. So he argues that the will of the Father must be respected and that the will of the Son is a response to the will of the Father. As a matter of fact, Jesus Christ, the eternal Word of God is a creature created by the will of the Father. And this created a bit of a furor because he was introducing, for instance… He was taking God's otherness, transcendence in his eternality and reducing it such that he said that for the Son, there was a time when he was not. 

So he has taken Jesus Christ, who is the eternal Word of God, who has become flesh and become a human being, he has reduced this eternal Word to less than the eternal Word. And he actually says he is not of the essence of the Father, directly denies that there is a common nature between the Father and the Son. This began to scandalize people as they stepped back and remembered their baptism. I was baptized in the name, that means in the identity of this one God, who is according to the great commission of Jesus Christ, the Father and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, which creates a unity between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. 

And what Arius has done is created not a unity in his teaching, but a hierarchy such that you have a Father and subordinated to him ontologically and functionally is the Son and then subordinated further is the Spirit who is more of a power, not even a person. So Arius and the Arians create a theology that is not recognizable as what Christians understood through their baptismal confessions and this created a furor. 

Kymberli Cook: 

And so what happened that the council was called, Dr. Svigel? 

Michael Svigel: 

Yeah. So that's created all kinds of controversy in Alexandria where he was a presbyter. They tried to discipline him there. I'm just going to truncate the story. It didn't work. Spoiler alert! He called on some of his friends. 

Kymberli Cook: 

There was lots of drama. 

Michael Svigel: 

There was a lot of drama. He called on some of his friends and supporters who all happened to have a common teacher and maybe the error can be traced back to him. There's a lot of debate about that. In the end, this happened to also be the time that Constantine the Great has established religious liberty and also is now beginning to favor Christianity. His mother had been a Christian and decided he's going to help the church to establish peace here in the midst of the controversy and makes his villa available in Nicaea, which is present day northern Turkey. 

And for the first time ever, all of the bishops from around the world, leaders of the churches from around the world are invited to come together and discuss this issue, come to a solution. Contrary to popular belief, there was not a lot of debate about the substance of the issue, it was more how should we then articulate what we do believe. Arianism was not even really considered seriously as an alternative. But then how do we actually say what the church has always believed for these past 300 years? 

Kymberli Cook: 

So what is it we believe? 

Michael Svigel: 

That's the question, what do we believe? And then even beyond that, what do we believe, but how should we say it? So there was a strong biblicist party that said, "We just need to use the words of Scripture." Athanasius and others said, "I like the idea, but that's the problem." The Arians are picking scriptures and they're reading this, and they're twisting the meaning of Scripture. So they pulled Scripture, as we mentioned together, traditional language, language that had been already used from the second century on, even some of the standard language of God from God, light from light. We see earlier church fathers using that same kind of language. And then this important phrase, it says the Son is of the same essence or the same nature, homoousios, as the Father. And that solidifies the fact that everything that the Father is the Son is, but the Father is the Father, and the Son is the Son. 

And so Arianism is thereby set aside as a Christian option. And this classic language that endured a lot of controversy even afterwards was reaffirmed at the Council of Constantinople in 381, which we're not celebrating because we'll all be dead by then. So we're doing it at 325. So yeah. And that gave us this tried, tested, true language that we… Nobody's ever been able to improve upon it. It's actually a gift that God through all kinds of drama and controversy provided to the church that we now receive. 

Kymberli Cook: 

So what's been done with it over the last 1700 years? 

Malcolm Yarnell: 

It is actually the most universally accepted creed. So it is accepted in the East and the West. The Apostles' Creed, for instance, which is the closest one you might make an argument is universal, is accepted by the East, but not really used much in their liturgy, whereas in the West, it is widely accepted. So it's the oldest, by the way, as far as reaching a settled form. The Apostles' Creed reached a settled form pretty soon after this, but it was primarily Western for the Church of Rome. But it's the oldest and really the earliest of the classical creeds, and therefore it has, I think, still a central role to this day. 

It has been challenged at various points through Christian history. I think for instance, immediately after the Reformation or towards the end of the Reformation, Faustus Socinus and Laelius Socinus and a number of anti-Trinitarians who ended up gathering in Poland, because that's where they had some form of religious liberty and then made their way to the Netherlands and then begin to have an impact through the publication of the Racovian Catechism, which is a Unitarian or Socinian creed, these ideas begin to ferment in the modern period such that Arianism and Socinianism… So Arianism is a subordinationism that upholds the unity of God by reducing the deity of Christ, by reducing the deity of the Spirit. Then you have more Socinianism, which really doesn't even treat Jesus Christ in God-like ways, although Arianism does. Arianism is unstable in that way. But for the Socinians, Jesus is just a man used by God. 

And so their ideas really enter the modern conversation at the beginning of the Enlightenment, and they actually have a great impact even upon the rise of such things as the historical-critical method of Bible study. And so classical liberalism in many ways can be a carrier for anti-Nicene, not Ante-Nicene, not before Nicaea, but against Nicaea. These attitudes get carried into modernity such that you will even find sectors of the evangelical academy who play with the ideas of Arianism and other anti, or against, Nicene outlooks. 

Kymberli Cook: 

What does that look like these days? If somebody were reading someone, you can say names or not, but what would that look like where if we were reading a book where we'd say, "Oh, oh, I think I see that coming in." 

Malcolm Yarnell: 

Yeah, you can see this. We can say this fairly non-controversially, but you can see anti-Nicene attitudes come out, for instance, in the teachings of the Jehovah's Witnesses. 

Michael Svigel: 

The modern sects and cults for sure. 

Malcolm Yarnell: 

Yeah. 

Michael Svigel: 

Those are the obvious ones. 

Malcolm Yarnell: 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you can also see elements of them. I think Mormonism has elements of anti-Nicene ideas in it, and yet Mormonism and Jehovah's Witnesses have had a wide impact because they go door to door often with their ideas, and they can have a huge impact upon people. 

Michael Svigel: 

You also see this subtly sometimes taught even in what would be regarded as conservative Christian circles, as they're reconstructing the history of the church in a pretty slipshod manner, saying, "The church, for the first few centuries, they didn't know what they were. They weren't really Trinitarian. Then they became Trinitarian in the fourth century with the creed." No, the Creed is articulating, and you could actually read all of the Fathers from the first all the way to the fourth century and see, no, the Creed is articulating in precise language what the church has explicitly been teaching. The Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God. The Father's not the Son, the Son's not the Spirit, the Spirit's not the Father. There's one God, not three Gods. The church has consistently been teaching that. 

So there's sometimes this sloppy thinking even among Christians that think, "The church became Trinitarian, and therefore if the first three centuries weren't Trinitarian, then maybe it's optional" and they don't take it as seriously understanding the role of the Creed was not to establish something new. That's not what it did. But the new ones were the Arians. 

Malcolm Yarnell: 

Yeah, that's right. 

Michael Svigel: 

That was unprecedented. It was rejecting the new and reaffirming the old. So that's another way that it had appeared. 

Malcolm Yarnell: 

Yeah, and you can even see this with Irenaeus in the second century. He says, "This rule of faith," which is very much like the Apostle's Creed, he said, "This rule of faith is what I received at my baptism." And so in the second century, he's bringing forward and saying what we would identify as pretty much a version of the Apostle's Creed. He is saying, "This is what I received at my baptism." Of course, you could trace his work back towards John the Apostle. This is not many generations removed, telling us that the faith has been passed on in this way. And so when you have these hierarchical presentations of God, they recognize this is not what we were taught in our baptism. 

So the novelty is not on the side of orthodoxy. That is a liberal mythology that has been placed upon history. It has more to do with the teaching of Adolf Harnack than it does with a proper reading of Christian history. So I agree fully with Dr. Svigel on that presentation. 

Kymberli Cook: 

So let's say somebody finds themselves reading something that does seem to have some kind of something funny happening with the Trinity, something funny happening with the Son specifically to the point where they would say, "I don't know if this would really go in line with the Nicene Creed," but let's say in this instance, it's something from global theology where some believers in a different country, in a different context, a different culture, are trying to take advantage of what is in their culture and what is in their history, what is in their social area, and say, "Okay, maybe it's like this." And so how do we interact with that kind of exercise, which is admirable and something that we want to encourage, we want to encourage contextualized theology, and how do we keep it from being something where the West gets to say no and, "No, you're not playing by our rules"? Is that what's going on here? 

Malcolm Yarnell: 

No, no. I don't think it is because the Nicene Creed, first of all, is occurring in the East. It is primarily the bishops at both the Nicene council of 325 and the Council of Constantinople of 381 are primarily Eastern. There were Western representatives, but they're primarily Eastern bishops. Moreover, the leading theologians of the early church, both with regard to Trinity and Christology, which became a major conversation in the fifth century, are Africans. This is not a Western imposition. This is not a wide Anglo-Saxon Protestant attempt to control issues. I don't think we can see that. As a matter of fact, sometimes the greatest opposition I've seen to people or to orthodoxy comes from people in the West who are not sufficiently grounded in the teaching of the universal church. 

First of all, I would not advocate imposing the Nicene Creed on anybody else. I would advocate adopting the Nicene Creed and using it in order to shape the teaching of your church. And I would argue that denominations need to do the same thing because without that sense of creedal unity with the universal church, without that sense of contending for the faith once for all delivered to the saints, and actually saying what that is, rather than creating something new that sounds great because it matches a modern mythology, I think that we need to personally adopt the Nicene Creed in our churches, in our denominations, in our schools. 

I will have to say this. Let me give you one example. So a recent set of polls called the State of Theology that have been done by Lifeway Research, and you can go and they've usually done about every two years. Recently, one of their polls pointed out that 59% of American evangelicals described the Spirit as a force and not a personal being. That is anti-Nicene theology. It denies the Trinity. 55% said that Jesus Christ was the first and greatest created being of God. Both those positions, one is technically known as Arianism, the other is technically known as Macedonianism or Pneumatochianism, both of those are against Nicaea. And understanding in our seminaries, our divinity schools, our universities that are Christian, in our local churches, having the Nicene Creed, the Apostles' Creed, the formula of Chalcedon, the Athanasian Creed (the so-called Quicunque Vult), these would help our teachers and therefore our people to recognize false teaching. 

And the ultimate purpose, mind you, I believe, ought to be the same thing that Gregory of Nazianzus said was his purpose. So read the last of his great theological orations. And he ends with an affirmation that his whole purpose has to been to glorify the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, one God. And when the bishops of Constantinople, the ones that were there issued a follow-up statement in 382, they said that was their purpose. Their purpose was to bring peace, to bring unity, and to contend for the faith. So they're following Scripture, they're trying to have the right spirit, and they recognized that the unity had been disrupted by the heresy, that the peace was taken away by all of these attempts to rob God of his glory. 

For me, it's about the glory of God as Father, Son, as Holy Spirit. If you reduce the deity of Jesus Christ, if you reduce the deity of the Holy Spirit, that's a God I do not know, and it would be wrong for me, for the unity of the church to recognize someone who disagreed with the faith of the church to say, "Oh, their teaching is okay," because actually their teaching is sundering the church. It is ripping it apart. And so I would argue that we need to do this in the right spirit, but we need to adopt the Nicene Creed in order to be people who worship the one true God and not the figment of some human imagination. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Is there anything you would add, Dr. Svigel? 

Michael Svigel: 

Yeah. I will say too, when we are stepping into new cultures and new languages, just like today when we've been talking about the Nicene creed using English, it was not written in English, which that tells us that the original Greek, its Latin form very early on, and then any translation, you do have to figure out what is the best language and best idiom in that particular language that you're teaching that and translating that into. And so there's always going to be contextualization, you find the right word that would approximate what we mean by "essence" or "substance" and "person". But then you teach that, and I would completely agree with Dr. Yarnell that you have to do it in a way that is putting it in the hands of the teachers, putting it into the churches, putting it into our music, putting it into our liturgies. When we talk about liturgy, every church has a liturgy. So there's a— 

Kymberli Cook: 

It's not just a high church thing. 

Michael Svigel: 

Yeah, it's not just a high church thing. You sing songs, it's part of your liturgy. There's a lot of great music out there, classic hymns and contemporary songs that are reminding us of the God that we serve. But there's also a issue of salvation at stake here because the early fathers affirmed rightly that, look, you worship the wrong God, you're worshiping a false God, you're worshiping a God of your imagination, which is an idol just made out of your mind rather than out of wood. But also, if you think about it, if God did not take on this fully human nature and die for our sins and rise again, then really what did he do? He hasn't taken our place and substituted himself for us and paid the atonement for our sins. That always leads then to a, "well I guess it's up to me. Maybe this is an example. Maybe this is an example of self-giving love that we're supposed to emulate." He in the end becomes an example rather than an objective payment for our sins. 

And so if you think about it, he has to be God. He has to be the God-man who has died and risen again. Otherwise, in some sense, the burden for salvation is placed on me: I have to do my part now instead of trust fully in the atoning sacrifice of the God-man whose death is sufficient for all sinners. And so there are bigger theological implications and practical implications than just thinking, right or wrongly, about the nature and the persons. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Yeah. It's not necessarily if I can take what you all are saying, it's not just semantics. 

Michael Svigel: 

Right, exactly. 

Malcolm Yarnell: 

No, no. 

Kymberli Cook: 

It's believers—and especially what I love about the ecumenical councils, those first councils and the first gatherings of the believers as they were sorting through some of these points of doctrine—is that it was as much as possible in that context, a global exercise. It was an attempt to say, "No, we want all of the voices. We want the perspectives that can come together and think through how God has revealed himself to us and how he has revealed himself to us through Scripture, and what it takes for us to really understand that and come up with something very clear that addresses these heresies, that addresses these false teachings, that helps us avoid idolatry, helps us do all of these things." 

I agree, you said it very, very early on, Dr. Yarnell, but the idea of, we owe them so much… Hopefully as you've been listening to this, you can appreciate how much they have contributed to our understanding of salvation, our understanding of God himself, and the arguments that were necessary, and to maintain orthodoxy throughout, to have people who remembered. All of that goes down to these individuals who were willing to go and meet and hash it out and figure out how best to say it. And I believe very deeply that the Holy Spirit was with them. The fact that it has remained for 1700 years in my mind helps demonstrate that. 

Michael Svigel: 

Amen. 

Kymberli Cook: 

And it's amazing. So thank you gentlemen for being here. 

Michael Svigel: 

Yeah, absolutely. 

Kymberli Cook: 

And for, like I said a little bit earlier, but just your ministry and the time that you have poured into remembering. And we appreciate it. We appreciate your time here. And hopefully you who are listening can appreciate the creed and the Nicene Creed specifically and all the creeds a little bit more than you have in the past. Thank you again for joining us, gentlemen. 

Michael Svigel: 

Thank you. 

Malcolm Yarnell: 

Thank you for having us. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Absolutely. And we want to thank you, our listener, for being with us. If you like our show, leave a rating or review on your favorite podcast app so that others can discover us. And we hope that you'll join us next time when we discuss issues of God and culture to show the relevance of theology to everyday life.