A Books At a Glance Book Review
by Ryan M. McGraw
Kevin DeYoung’s opening line in this small book on the Nicene Creed (A.D. 381) should be arresting: “After the Bible, the Nicene Creed may be the most important Christian text every written” (9). “May” is dramatic understatement. Though not inspired like Scripture, the Creed has neither peers nor competitors in speaking with universal ministerial authority to all Christians in all times. It reminds us that the Trinity is like the sun to Christianity, and that where the Trinity is eclipsed Christians are blind. Obtaining universal consent, both in the East and the West, and in Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Protestantism, without the Nicene Creed, there is little to left to say about Christian salvation because Christian faith and life are built on the Christian God. In this respect, every Christian should return to, mediate on, read about, and pray through the Creed. Kevin DeYoung offers readers an eminently readable, manageably sized, and persuasively biblical treatment of the Creed, that should benefit believers at every stage of the Christian life.
If readers are familiar with both the Apostle’s Creed and the Nicene Creed, then they will likely note the similarities between the two. However, as DeYoung notes in his introduction, the Nicene Creed has the advantage both of being more expansive about the Trinity and in that we know where and when it arose. Though there are other ways of dividing the material in the Creed, he opts to present the material in seven chapters, highlighting seven key phrases marking progressive momentum in the Creed. Father, Son, and Spirit are the three focal points of the Creed itself, with most attention devoted to the Son. Keeping this fact in mind, DeYoung draws our attention to the phrases “we believe,” “only-Begotten,” “one substance,” “for us and for our salvation,” “who proceeds from the Father and the Son,” “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church,” and “one baptism for the remission of sins.” His phrase-by-phrase explanations are helpful and well informed, both biblically and historically, which will help readers through details that may appear strange to them at first glance. Though I cannot offer a full explanation and defense of each of these here, some examples may help whet reader’s appetites to read the book.
For instance, when the Creed says that the Son is “God of God, light of light, very God of very God,” many people might not realize that the early church believed that retaining full divine equality as well as ordered relations between Father and Son required a full communication of the whole divine essence from Father to Son (and from both to Spirit), without beginning or end. Far from implying rank or subordination, the church fathers, and all Christians following them, believed that the Son being God from the Father was the only way to secure the idea that the Son and the Father were the same in being. Modern readers also stumble over the ideas like the meaning of the church’s being “catholic and apostolic,” let alone connecting baptism to the remission of sins. DeYoung wades carefully through such questions, providing both adequate historical context and biblical support to promote understanding of and confidence in such statements. The church is catholic because it is universal, which being Roman Catholic undercuts with some irony. She is apostolic because she is founded on the doctrine and authority of Christ’s original apostles, whose teaching the Creed seeks to encapsulate in extra-biblical language. And while Christ alone can forgive sins, baptism is a sign and seal through which he draws believers to trust wholly in himself.
DeYoung’s integration of historical controversies and contexts behind the statements in the Creed will help today’s readers better understand why its authors used the language that they did in seeking to explain what they came to believe from Scripture. Combined with his practical counsel on how to use the Creed today in the closing pages of chapter seven (83-85), his book is a solid step towards a practical Trinitarian theology that every believer needs to cultivate.
A couple of minor historical issues in the book admit a little refinement. Though DeYoung recounts the common narrative that many Christians divided the Apostle’s Creed, and the Nicene with it, into twelve articles for the twelve apostles (25). Yet this was not universally true. Writing just prior to the production of the final Nicene Creed, Cyril of Jerusalem (315-386) assigned ten articles to the Creed, and shortly afterwards, Augustine (354-430) enumerated fifteen. Loving the symmetry and perfection of the number seven, Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and Bonaventure (1217-1274) divided both Creeds into fourteen articles. Differing pedagogical structures assigned to the Creeds throughout history illustrates that Christians neither naively nor monolithically sought to root them directly in apostolic teaching. Recognizing this fact is helpful because it shows that post-Reformation approaches to the Creed do not stand in contrast to alleged earlier views seeking to root the Creed, like Scripture, in apostolic inspiration like the Scriptures. More substantively, DeYoung argues that we believe “in” the church as an article of faith (73). While recognizing rightly that the article on the church “is connected to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit” (72), both Protestants and Roman Catholics have distinguished carefully between believing in the Holy Spirit as an object of faith, while only believing that the church is an article of faith under the Spirit’s work. Lest this sound like nitpicking, Protestants and Catholics alike emphasize that we do not believe in the church in the way that we believe in God. This distinction is commonplace in authors as diverse as Herman Witsius (1636-1708) on the Apostle’s Creed, and the modern Catechism of the Catholic Church. Both of these points help us better understand how the church has used and read the Creed a little more clearly.
The saddest commentary on modern Christianity is that many Christians never learn why the Trinity is integral to Scripture and the gospel. DeYoung did not design his book to give readers everything they need to see the Triune God everywhere in Scripture and to pray, read, worship, and live from, through, and in the Trinity. However, he lays a necessary foundation to build on to keep going in this direction. Christians need short digestible introductions to the Nicene Creed like this one. If this is the first book believers read on the Creed, then, hopefully, it will not be the last one. DeYoung’s work is a great entry point into cultivating a healthy obsession with the Triune God, who is expansive and glorious enough to occupy our attention both now and forevermore.
Ryan McGraw
Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary