Why Evangelicals Are Recovering Nicaea

The creed feels like a solution. To what?

Part of a talk I gave on November 19 at The Evangelical Theological Society in Boston.

What I am talking about today is not the biggest trend in American evangelicalism. I think if you picked a random evangelical church in a random town on a Sunday, you likely wouldn’t see a recitation of the Nicene Creed or some other incorporation of the creed into worship.

And yet, there is a resurgence. There is something happening. And that something tells us something—can tell us something—about the world we’re living in right now. We can see the shift and discover our felt needs.

Earlier this year I set out to write a story about the Nicene Creed for Christianity Today that we could publish around the time of the 1700th anniversary. I found a bunch of churches using the creed: nondenominational and Baptist and Wesleyan, but also a few Pentecostals and even one Stone-Campbell, an Independent Christian Church from the tradition of “no creed but Christ.” These were different size churches and in different parts of the country and they mostly didn’t know about each other. People didn’t tell me, “hey there’s this trend, it’s a resurgence,” they said, “here’s what we’re doing” and it was similar to what I heard in other places.

Some are reciting Nicaea as a part of worship. Some occasionally. Some regularly. Some are teaching through the creed in a sermon series or Sunday school class. And some—notably large nondenominational churches in Colorado, California, and Oregon—are making the Nicene Creed their statement of faith. It’s on the “what we believe” page.

As far as I can tell, this is new. It wasn’t happening 20 or 30 years ago. And I can’t see any evidence there was similar creedal resurgence in, say, the ’70s or ’50s. Of course there were debates about creeds and the use of creeds. And in every era you see some low church evangelicals discover church history and hierarchy and go Anglican, Roman Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox. But you don’t see a broad assortment of non-creedal churches all start separately using Nicaea.

From my research and the interviews I did, I think there are three reasons, three things going on here behind or beneath this shift. I want to share those here.

Nicaea, as depicted in one historic icon.

First reason: Ted Haggard. I don’t mean him exclusively, of course, but him and people like him and the structure of contemporary, megachurch and megachurch-influenced, CEO-style American evangelicalism which creates space and opportunity, even demand, for magnetic, authoritative, visionary leaders who unify communities through their charisma. That celebrity is quite effective and has a powerful track record in American evangelicalism and also small-d democratic politics, where the very freedom of expanded franchise has historically led to the rise of popular and populist authoritarians.

Dismantle an aristocracy, it seems, and a generation later you get an Andrew Jackson, Napoleon Bonaparte, or Oliver Cromwell claiming priority for the executive. Free your religious tradition from a clerical class and ecclesiastical bureaucracy and you get Christian communities organized through identification with famous men. Some of those men, inevitably, just because of how sin works, will not handle that well, and will fall from their fame rather spectacularly. See, for example, Ted Haggard.

We live in an age of Haggards. And when visionary, celebrity leaders fall, they threaten to take down the whole infrastructure of authority and religious identity. Because of that charismatic identification, because people connect their faith not to a denomination or tradition or building or set of documents or a habitus or historic creed, a scandal like Haggards can shake the whole thing for people.

After Haggard’s scandal in 2006, the experimental evening service at his Colorado Springs megachurch started reciting the Nicene Creed. The minister who led that, Glenn Packiam, told me he grew up in an Anglican Church in Malaysia, so he had that to reach back to. But it wasn’t part of a plan—until he felt the need to reach back and recover some resource for faith because the young people in the church were disillusioned with Haggard and not only him but the model of church that said, trust the guy on the platform, invest in and identify with him.

Packiam said that in that laboratory space, the megachurch’s evening service, Nicaea was something people could latch on to. There was an alternative authority in these words.

Interestingly, the church in Colorado still uses Nicaea. Packiam left and he’s at a megachurch in Southern California. His church also uses it as the statement of faith and recites it.

I was curious: For the unchurched, the SoCal folks who are steeped in secularity, what part of the creed is the hardest to confess? Do they balk at Trinitarianism? Does “begotten not made” or “of one being with the Father” trip them up? And he said, no. The line that’s the most challenging for people coming into the faith is “one holy catholic and apostolic church.” Not catholic and apostolic, though. That’s fine. But they hesitate at they idea of believing in “the church.”

Packiam said, “To ask people to put these words in their mouth … that’s hard! They’re like, ‘no, I don’t. I don’t. Actually, the church is broken. Why would I say this?’”

So they end in discussions, what does it mean to believe in the church? What is church? The creed is an answer and opportunity for an answer to that question, after Haggard. I think that’s the first thing. That’s the shift, the felt need, that’s prompting a resurgence of sorts.

The second reason, second thing I see, is that the way American culture is now, with our culture wars the way they are, Christians communities are regularly confronted with new non-negotiables—litmus tests and shibboleths that didn’t exist last week or last year but now are so important, at least on the internet and to a few people in every congregation.

Spend some time on social media and you’ll see someone saying “if your pastor doesn’t mention [fill in the blank, the issue of the day], you need to walk out.” For some people it’s obviously a joke but you still see it said seriously, on both right and left, and it also captures something of the spirit of our times and the way people associate. We want to be aligned. We sort ideologically. And these conflicts, real and manufactured, produce new tests of fellowship.

Sociologist Katie Gaddini told me that she looked at congregational conflict in several field studies and what she saw was a cycle of suppression and eruption. Basically most congregations are not overtly, expressly politically, not completely culturally homogenous, but they are actively and vocally concerned about division, disunity. So you have these “purple churches” where people don’t talk about contentious cultural issues until, suddenly, they have to. Something happens and it becomes unavoidable and urgent to have opinions and make statements about, say, COVID-19 or Black Lives Matter. Then, people who haven’t been talking about things are distressed to find real disagreements in their community—and there are these eruptions.

One way to respond, of course, is to try to defuse the urgency and the importance of the issue-of-the-day. You say, this might be very important right now, but it doesn’t rank with the issues that have always been essential to orthodoxy. This can’t be essential for Christians throughout time or around the globe. It’s just American culture and the churn of current events. The creed can help people make this shift and offers a way to shift perspective. In my conversations I found some of the newly creedal congregations are especially interested in this. They like Nicaea as a counter to the chaos of culture war and like the way it puts things in perspective.

I heard this most frequently, though not exclusively, from evangelical Anglicans, people who grew up in evangelicalism in, say, the 1990s, and have found their way to the Anglican Church in North America.

Tish Harrison Warren perhaps said it best when she told me “the creed roots us in this much bigger story. It decenters our Americanness. It decenters our moment in history. It decenters our politics. What it centers is the story of Jesus as told for thousands of years in the church. People are drawn to it because it is identity formative, and it provides roots and an alternative to the quote-unquote ‘creeds’ of our culture.”

Partly what people like Warren are saying, I think, is just that the creed is better at discipling into orthodoxy. That’s what the creed does. That’s what the creed is for. But also, and I think is something about our moment specifically, Nicaea provides steadiness in our current culture. It makes orthodoxy—or the experience of trying to adhere to Christian teaching—more stable.

That’s the second thing that’s going on, behind the resurgence. The third is concern about heresy and contemporary Christians apparent inability to articulate the doctrine Trinity. Some concern can be traced specifically to the controversy over the eternal subordination of the son. That’s especially true in Baptist contexts. There are some Baptists who experienced that debate as a kind of wake-up call and realized, maybe, it’s not just those without theological education who suffer some basic misunderstandings of Trinitarianism. It’s leaders too.

But then more broadly there are concerns about regular Christians, churchgoing evangelicals. I’ve had several people tell me that when they look at the evidence, it just doesn’t really seem like we’re Trinitarians. Like, we can say that we are. But any way you try to check the Trinitarianism in American evangelicalism—it’s something, but not Trinitarian.

A few years ago I reported on a study of church music and the scholar, Michael Tapper, found that the most popular songs don’t mention the Father or the Holy Spirit. It’s very rare to mention the first or third person of the Trinity. And you almost never anything about the relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There are songs that do that, but they’re not heard in church very often. Interestingly this study looked at both contemporary and traditional music and found hymns, at least the ones we sing most, are no more likely to be trinitarian. We worship a Triune God, but if you are listen to the praise we sing, you would be hard pressed to prove it.

There are the semi-regular surveys about doctrine that are concerning, notably the State of Theology from Lifeway and Ligioner. The most recent one, we see a kind of first-tier fidelity to the truth there is one God in three persons, but then 58 percent of evangelicals agree with the statement the Holy Spirit is a force, not a personal being. And 28 percent say Jesus was a great teacher, but not God.

Those are distressing stats. And revealing. Maybe they show the deficiency of the default evangelical and American pragmatism. Ministers say, “We believe in the Trinity but let’s not worry about the ontological details. Practically, it’s not where we need to focus.” But then they look up and find that nearly three out of 10 don’t believe Jesus is divine, and a majority think the Spirit is like something from Star Wars.

Jerome van Kuiken, a Wesleyan minister and theology professor, said he often has to argue with the ministers he teaches about the pragmatic importance of Trinitarian theology. He tells pastors, for example, that they’re leaving their people vulnerable to Jehovah’s Witnesses and Latter-day Saints and even Muslim evangelism, when they don’t teach the Trinity. “It’s a mystery,” or “you know it’s kinda like water, ice, and steam” doesn’t seem sufficient when 28 percent can’t say that Jesus is God.

So the Nicene Creed is recovered to teach theology. Several of the people I interviewed said they taught the creed for this reason—doing a series on the Trinity, using this document as the text, and then also reciting it as part of the sermon series. Some of the places, they started reciting it as a church for a series and then decided they liked it and kept it in the liturgy. They told me they found their congregations receptive to the teaching but more critically, more significantly, they found the creed became a kind of open storehouse of theological language and Trinitarian phrasing. If you want to be really evangelical about it: Nicaea was especially useful as something that Christians could hide in their hearts.

For example, Ronni Kurtz at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary introduced a church to the creed in sermon series and they made it a permanent part of their worship after. Kurtz told me that wasn’t the plan, but regular recitation did something to his people: “I could see as a pastor the recitation of the creed helped my church grab hold of a deeper theology. It was no longer mere mechanics, like one plus one plus equals three but still one. Mom and dads, brothers and sisters suddenly had phrases like ‘begotten, not created.’”

Suzanne Nicholson, theology professor at Asbury University and a Global Methodist, told me she tries to imagine a student or someone at her church getting asked if Jesus is really just a good teacher. That’s kind of the test for Trinitarian teaching that she runs on herself. She wants the people she teaches to get to the point where they respond to a question about the identify of Jesus by saying, almost reflectively, well he’s eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light … begotten, not made, of one being with the Father, by whom all things are made.

These are the three reasons, as I understand them. That’s what’s going on in some traditionally non-creedal evangelical churches—not every church but certainly a notable number—where we see a revitalized or renewed interest in the Nicene Creed. One: a response to the crisis of authority, specifically the scandals of celebrity ministers. Two: a response to the culture wars, cultural divisions, and the way contemporary culture churns up new shibboleths. Three: a response to concerns about theological deficiency, specially a lack of language or lack of familiarity with the language of the Trinity.

The Nicene Creed is an answer to ancient questions about the Trinity. And also, today, to questions about how we can have, hold, and profess orthodox faith in times like these.

But the increased adoption does raise some questions for me. (To be continued…)