Anniversaries matter. If you’re a cancer survivor, each year of remission offers a fresh lease on life. If you’re married, every annual commemoration of your wedding is an opportunity to recommit to your vows. Your work anniversary may include a bonus or raise. The anniversary of a loved one’s death summons both grief and remembrance.
This summer features a monumental anniversary for Christians. Seventeen hundred years ago, the Council of Nicaea met in what today is Türkiye (Turkey) and produced the first draft of what became the Nicene Creed—the most widely-recognized synopsis of the Christian faith in history. It represents the beliefs held in common by Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Anglicans, Protestants of various persuasions, and the ancient Church of the East in Asia and “miaphysite” churches of Africa and Asia. It is indeed a global, ecumenical creed.
The Nicene Creed serves as the doctrinal DNA that links us to fellow believers across space, time, and other divisions. It also works well for assessing the adequacy of other articulations of a Christian (or biblical) worldview. To demonstrate this point, let me employ the Creed to briefly analyze three summaries or evaluative instruments for a Christian/biblical worldview that have gained popularity among evangelicals over the past few decades.
The Four-Act Drama
One approach to capturing a snapshot of a Christian worldview is to focus on the main contours of the biblical metanarrative: Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration/New Creation. (See, e.g., the late Chuck Colson and Nancy Pearcey’s award-winning How Now Shall We Live? [Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, 1999].) Commendably, this approach refuses to transmute the storied structure of Scripture into a set of ahistorical timeless principles, and yet the four acts of the biblical drama provide a script that can be applied to a wide variety of issues and disciplines. Trouble arises, though, when this script loses its distinctively biblical content and morphs into a generic plot formula.
For instance, after barbarian invaders sacked the seemingly invincible city of Rome in A.D. 410, some horrified inhabitants of the empire proposed their own version of the four-act drama:
- Creation – The war god Mars had sired Romulus, founder of Rome. After casting off the oppressive rule of Etruscan kings, the Romans had conquered the world and established law, justice, peace, and order.
- Fall – The legalization and favoring of Christianity by Constantine and later emperors at the expense of traditional Roman worship had angered the old gods, who had withdrawn their protection of Rome and permitted its pillaging.
- Redemption – Only a return to traditional Roman polytheism would save the empire.
- Restoration – With the gods placated, the Eternal City and its imperium would endure and enjoy glory as in days of yore.
Against this pagan metanarrative, St. Augustine penned his epochal City of God, which redefined each of its four elements using biblical and creedal material: the creation of all things, both spiritual and material, originates in the sovereign will of the one and only true God; the fall of God’s good creatures into sin has brought all manner of evils into the world; redemption came about through the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the unique Son of God, who is of one Being with God the Father, and this redemption is made available to us through the Holy Spirit at work in the church; and restoration will be complete when Christ comes again to judge the world, raise the dead, and usher in the eternal Kingdom of God. The Creed sums up the basics of this expansive vision.
The Six-Point Survey
Do only 17% of Christians today have a biblical worldview? This headline-grabbing statistic arises from polls conducted by the Barna Group. To determine respondents’ worldview, Barna has applied half a dozen criteria: a biblical worldview comprises belief in absolute moral truth; the Bible’s total accuracy in the principles it espouses; Satan as real, not symbolic; the inability of persons to earn heaven by being or doing good; the sinless earthly life of Jesus Christ; and God as the omniscient, almighty Creator and Ruler of the world.
Set this survey alongside the Creed and we find some glaring discrepancies. The Barna criteria are effectively non-trinitarian: there is no mention of the Holy Spirit (only Satan!) and no clue that Jesus’ identity goes beyond being a very good man. My Muslim acquaintances could affirm everything this survey says about Christ. There is also nothing about the church, the forgiveness of sins (the remedy for our inability to earn our goodness), or the future return of Christ and resurrection of the dead (versus the purely disembodied afterlife that the term “heaven” evokes). On the other hand, Barna’s first two criteria find creedal counterparts in the insistence that Jesus is Lord and Judge of all and that the Holy Spirit has spoken through the biblical prophets. The difference is that where Barna uses abstract, impersonal language (“absolute moral truth”; totally accurate biblical “principles”), the Creed grounds truth ultimately in the Persons of the Holy Trinity.
The Twelve-Step Checkup
Although Summit Ministries’ free online Worldview Checkup repeats Barna’s statistic that only 17% of Christians fully embrace a biblical worldview, the checkup uses a different set of standards to assist users in identifying their own worldview(s). Summit improves on the Barna criterion about Jesus by referencing his crucifixion, resurrection, and identity as “the divine Son of God”—though this latter phrase sounds redundant while leaving the meaning vague. Likewise, the Summit questionnaire specifies that one goes to heaven due to receiving forgiveness of sins through faith in Jesus. Other questions ask the participant’s opinion on God, holy books, sexuality, cosmic origins, abortion and euthanasia, moral absolutes, social ills, and the nature of humanity and of history. Still missing are the Creed’s emphases on the Holy Spirit, the church, and the future return of Christ and resurrection of the dead. In the checkup’s question regarding history, the answer deemed correct is, “God has worked through history for his purposes” (emphasis mine). But divine action is not confined to the past—Christians in the present can celebrate the sure hope that God’s future goal for history will reach fulfillment.
Conclusion: Anniversary Gifts
Anything that endures for seventeen centuries deserves careful consideration. The Nicene Creed still has great value today, as shown above. Let’s seize the chance to (re)acquaint ourselves with it. Helpful resources for doing so include Jared Ortiz and Daniel Keating’s substantial The Nicene Creed: A Scriptural, Historical, and Theological Commentary from a Catholic perspective; Kevin DeYoung’s trim primer The Nicene Creed: What You Need to Know about the Most Important Creed Ever Written for Reformed readers; and my own comparably-sized The Creed We Need: Nicene Faith for Wesleyan Witness for Methodists and pan-Wesleyans. Whatever we do, though, may we not simply ignore or forget it this summer. Anniversaries matter!
