In the year 325 AD, a group of Christian leaders gathered in a Turkish town called Nicea. Today, the city is known as Isnik, but its ancient ruins still testify to the importance of what happened in this corner of Turkey nearly 1,700 years ago.
Why Was the Nicene Creed Written?
Emperor Constantine I—or Constantine the Great—was the first emperor of the Roman Empire to embrace Christianity. He issued the Edict of Milan to decriminalize Christianity, and in 325 AD, Constantine called more than 300 Christian leaders to gather in Nicea.
A handful of the bishops were from Europe, but most came from the East, including leaders from Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. These bishops embarked on a journey to defend a doctrine that had come into question only 300 years after Jesus walked on the earth: the very divinity of Christ himself.
The gathering was a response to a heresy that came to be known as Arianism, named after the theologian Arius. He claimed that Jesus was not truly divine but rather a created being. His claim that Jesus was not always in existence denied the equality of Jesus to the Father and to the Spirit. It opened the door to a heretical question: Is Jesus even God?
In response to Arianism, the Christian leaders in Nicea wrote a clear defense of the incarnation of Christ and a robust teaching on the Trinity. When the Council of Nicea met to finalize their statement in 381 AD, they drafted a document that came to be known as the Nicene Creed.
In the creed, they declared that Christians believe:
This creed painted a clear picture of who Jesus is, the importance of the Trinity, and the source of our salvation.
Why Is the Nicene Creed Still Important to the Church Today?
Two millenia later, the writers of the creed are long gone, and even the church where they likely met lies underwater. But the Nicene Creed lives on. Author and pastor Kevin DeYoung writes in his book The Nicene Creed: “After the Bible, the Nicene Creed may be the most important Christian text ever written. Since the fourth century, the Nicene Creed has served as the most influential, most ecumenical, and arguably most widely used statement of faith in the history of the church.”
Creeds aren’t Scripture, but they are important statements of the Christian faith that help us summarize the doctrines that are central to the Christian faith for all ages and across the globe.
Today, the Nicene Creed is included in the core belief statements of churches across a wide range of denominations and branches of Christianity. It takes us to the core of the Christian faith shared by believers around the world: salvation from sin and death through the risen Jesus Christ.
It also looks to the future. DeYoung notes that the last line of the creed begins with the verb “we look.” He writes: “We look forward to, we desire, we anticipate, we hope for the resurrection of our bodies and eternal life in the world to come….The Nicene Creed deliberately ends on a note of expectation and hope.”
That note of hope and expectation has carried believers across the centuries. And it reminds us to keep making this Jesus known in our neighborhoods and nations—even to the ends of the earth.
Selah Lipsey is a Content Writer at Radical. She is a graduate of Samford University where she studied Journalism and Spanish. Selah and her husband Jeremy are members of Redeemer Community Church.
