A Brief Book Notice from Books At a Glance
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. What Is a Creed?
Part 1 The Emergence of Old Testament Monotheism
2. Out of Nature, Many Gods
3. Out of Many Gods, One Lord
4. Does Yahweh Have a Son?
Part 2 Jesus: Fully God and Fully Man
5. Jesus the Son of God
6. Maybe Jesus Is the Father?
7. Always a Father, Always a Son
8. The Rise of Heresy
Part 3 Nicene Christianity
9. Constantine’s Council: Nicaea, 325
10. The Debate Rages On, Part 1: Consubstantial, Similar, or Dissimilar?
11. The Debate Rages On, Part 2: Is the Holy Spirit Divine?
12. Triumph of the Nicene Creed: Constantinople, 381
Part 4 The Legacy of Nicaea
13. Later History of the Nicene
14. The Trinity as the Gospel
Selected Quotes
- Creeds, then, were more than just doctrinal summaries. They were short stories that served as abridgements of a longer tale. (24)
- For a Christian, it is more important to determine what the Bible teaches than what some tribal shaman might have told his village. We want a biblical worldview, not a primitive one, even if that primitive one is incredibly widespread. (37)
- A fair assessment of the entire Old Testament reveals that the earliest Hebrews functioned with what is called henotheism. (45)
- The Trinity, then, isn’t some alien Christian doctrine that was forced onto the Hebrew Scriptures by the early church fathers. Just the opposite: The ancient Christians clarified what was already latent in the Old Testament. (52)
- Clearly, when Jesus called himself the Son of Man eighty-two times in the New Testament, he meant to identify himself as the promised, glorious king from God. (70)
- For the early church, then, there could be no question that Jesus was the Son of God. The witness of the New Testament was unanimous from the first Gospels to the book of Revelation. Yet one obvious question remained. How was the glory of God’s Son related to the glory of his Father? (76)
- The most important terminological addition was the Greek word homoousios to describe the relationship of the Father and Son. It meant “same substance.” The Latin- based version of the word, which we still use in English today, is “consubstantial.” This was a term that no Arian could accept, a line in the sand they couldn’t cross. (123)
- The Council of Constantinople adjourned in July 381 with its primary objective accomplished: to confirm and reestablish the creed of 325—and thus Nicene Trinitarianism—as the official faith of the Christian church. (156)
- As we will see in our final chapter, the Trinity isn’t just a metaphysical abstraction or a quirk of church history. It is a fundamental description of the God who saves. To confess the Nicene view of the Trinity is to proclaim the Christian gospel. (169)