The Nicene Creed: A Scriptural, Historical, and Theological Commentary by Jared Ortiz and Daniel A. Keating. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2024. Paperback. 224 pp. $24.99.

Many commentaries on the Nicene Creed treat the words of the Creed as mere jumping-off points for a discussion of the theology espoused by the commentary’s author. Others are primarily historical, delving deeply into the complex intricacies of fourth-century Trinitarian theology. There are yet others—especially those aimed at Christians who are suspicious of creeds in general—that try to show that the Nicene Creed is biblical by lining up a multitude of biblical citations to support each of its assertions. In partial contrast to all such commentaries on the Creed, this book’s subtitle reveals its ambitious aims—it seeks to do all three, to be biblical, historical, and theological, in a slender volume accessible to pastors and educated laypeople. Remarkably, in the opinion of this reviewer, the volume not only succeeds, but even manages to set itself apart in three significant ways. As a result, it is of great value not only for Roman Catholics who comprise the book’s primary audience, but for all Christians.

The book begins with an introductory chapter on Christian belief, and then in subsequent chapters, it follows the traditional division of the Creed and discusses each phrase or sentence within each section. The bulk of the discussion in each case has to do with the biblical and theological background to the phrase/sentence under consideration. This is followed by a section called “Living the Mystery,” which describes implications of the Creed’s assertion for Christian life. Along the way, the authors include three kinds of sidebars. One is called “Witness to the Tradition” and includes quotations from significant Church Fathers. The second is “Lex Orandi” (literally, “the law of praying,” or perhaps better, “the pattern by which one should pray”), dealing with the way a particular phrase in the Creed is a basis for Christian worship. The third kind of sidebar deals with a contemporary issue related to the Creed’s assertion. This organizational pattern enables the authors to go into some depth on many aspects of Christian faith and practice without ever straying very far from the words of the Creed itself. 

The first way this volume sets itself apart is the way it attends to the scriptural passages from which the phrases in the Creed come. Books targeting Christians skeptical about the value of creeds generally content themselves with showing how the Creed’s ideas are biblical: There is indeed one true God, the Son is equal to and even identical to the Father in character, and the Holy Spirit is truly divine. This volume goes much further by attending closely to the actual words and phrases used in the Creed and shows that in virtually every instance, those phrases come directly from the Bible. For example, the Creed’s assertion that God is “the maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible” comes directly from Col. 1:16 (pp. 61-62). The phrase “one Lord Jesus Christ” is a quote from 1 Cor. 8:6, and the Creed exactly follows Paul’s move from the confession of one God, the Father, to the confession of one Lord, Jesus Christ. The Creed’s assertions that Jesus is “the only-begotten Son of God” and “begotten, not made” both evoke the biblical word monogenes (“only-begotten”—see, e.g., John 3:16) to demonstrate the unique way in which he is Son of God. 

This extended explanation of the biblical sources behind the Creed’s assertions is important. Many Christians are so familiar with the fact that the Creed uses the nonbiblical, philosophical word homoousios (“of the same substance”) that they think the whole Creed is philosophical rather than biblical. It is surprising to most of us that homoousios is the only nonbiblical word used in the Creed (we are especially shocked when it is pointed out that “essence” and “person” do not appear in the final version) and that the bishops present at Nicaea in 325 used it reluctantly. Thus, we need reassurances that the Creed’s framers deliberately stuck to biblical phrases whenever they could. This volume’s detailed treatment of the biblical basis for each assertion and its careful explanation of the reasons for the inclusion of the word homoousios (see pp. 91-95) provide such needed reassurances. 

A second way in which this book is distinctive is the deft touch with which the authors handle the complex history behind the Nicene Creed. In contrast to many who think the Creed emerged solely as a response to Arianism, Ortiz and Keating correctly argue that creeds began much earlier (even in the New Testament itself), that they were connected to public worship rather than just to polemics, and that they were primarily about whom we trust, not just what we believe (see pp. 4-7, 18). The Nicene Creed was expanded from earlier creeds because of the Arian crisis, but it did not owe its genesis to that crisis. 

The authors’ skillful handling of history is especially impressive as they describe the various heresies opposed by the faith expressed in the Creed. The authors encapsulate the views of the Gnostics (pp. 52-53), Arius (p. 7), Marcellus of Ancyra (p. 138), Apollinaris (p. 114), and Nestorius (p. 115) with summaries that are both brief and precise. For example, Apollinaris’s teaching is normally summarized as denying the human mind of Christ. While this is true, Ortiz and Keating more helpfully explain that he believed the divine mind replaced the human mind in Christ. Likewise, Nestorius is regarded as having separated divinity and humanity within Christ. Again, this is true in a sense, but the authors are much more precise in claiming that he saw Christ as a man indwelt by the Son, not as the Son himself. 

A third way in which this small volume distinguishes itself is that it transcends its most obvious audience—Catholic catechumens—and speaks to all Christians. Much of the book concerns the development of what historians call “the great tradition,” the consensus faith of the entire Christian church based on the Scriptures and expressed preeminently in the Nicene Creed. This great tradition is, to some degree, common to all branches of the Christian church—certainly to Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant believers, but also to Oriental Orthodox Christians and to the Church of the East. (While the authors do not say so, all five of these branches of the Christian tree have accepted the Nicene Creed.) The faith that the Creed encapsulates—the faith that this volume explains—is common to all Christians. Ortiz and Keating subtly underline this fact by discussing and quoting from many fathers of the church, both western fathers writing in Latin (such as Tertullian, Augustine, and Leo the Great) and eastern fathers writing in Greek (such as Irenaeus, Athanasius, Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil the Great, and John of Damascus).  Furthermore, the authors present both the Greek and Latin text of the Creed, translate into English from both of these languages, and sympathetically discuss the differences between the Greek and Latin versions. Most notable among the differences, of course, is the fact that the Latin version was modified in the Middle Ages to proclaim that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and from the Son (not just from the Father), and the book includes a fairly long and very even-handed discussion of this complicated theological difference (pp. 155-61). The authors suggest—again, correctly in this reviewer’s opinion—that the issue of the Holy Spirit’s procession does not need to be a church-dividing difference (p. 161). 

Because of these three ways in which this book distinguishes itself, it is valuable even for Protestants—the primary audience of Ad Fontes. Perhaps the clearest example comes as Ortiz and Keating discuss baptism. Commenting on the Creed’s expression “one baptism for the remission of sins,” they point out correctly that in the New Testament, faith and baptism cannot be separated, and they also insist that baptism is necessary for salvation (p. 20). This is likely to be jarring to many Protestant readers, but the very fact that it jars our sensibilities is itself instructive. It is indisputable that faith, baptism, and salvation are connected in the New Testament. If we Protestants do not believe the authors’ conclusion that baptism is necessary for salvation, then what exactly is the nature of the biblical connection between baptism and salvation? Ortiz and Keating force us to consider an important question that we generally avoid. 

There is one area in which I do not believe the book is as faithful to the Nicene Creed as it might be. This is the tendency of the authors to slide (probably unconsciously) from a Nicene conceptualization of the Trinity to an Augustinian one. In the book’s introduction, the authors credit Augustine with articulating three rules for understanding the Trinity (p. 10): (1) there is only one God; (2) each of the persons is God; and (3) the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Father, and the Holy Spirit is neither the Father nor the Son. This was certainly Augustine’s way of conceptualizing the Trinity, and he has been followed by virtually the entire western Church—Catholic and Protestant. But this is not the way the Nicene Creed conceptualizes the Trinity. The Creed begins by stating, “We believe in one God, the Father.” It identifies the one true God as the Father and then understands the Son and the Spirit in relation to him, rather than seeking to find all three persons within the one true God. The Creed’s conceptualization could be better summarized as follows: (1) there is only one God, the Father; (2) the Son is equal, eternal, and identical in essence to the Father, so he is God from God, constituting the same God as the Father; and (3) the Holy Spirit is called the Lord, just as are the Father and Son. He too is equal, eternal, and constitutes the same God as the Father. This Nicene way of conceptualizing the Trinity was common to the entire pre-Augustinian church and was arguably the way the Bible unveiled the Trinity as well. This conception is not inconsistent with that of Augustine and the later West, but it does reflect a different way of thinking about God. Ortiz and Keating actually follow the Nicene conceptualization very well as they lead the reader through the assertions of the Creed, in spite of their presentation of an Augustinian conception early in the book. But this very good book would have been even better and might have avoided a potential source of confusion among alert readers if it had presented the Creed’s own conceptual scheme in the introduction, rather than that of Augustine and the later western church. Despite this minor weakness, Ortiz and Keating’s little book is well written, insightful, and well worth reading, regardless of the reader’s denominational tradition.  

Donald Fairbairn is the Robert E. Cooley Distinguished Professor of Early Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, as well as Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Union School of Theology (Wales).