The Ecumenical Creeds

Long before anyone was called Protestant, Reformed, or even Roman Catholic in the sense we mean today, the church was already confessing its faith in fixed words. The three ecumenical creeds are those words. They are older than the Reformation by more than a thousand years, and Christians across the world, in churches that agree on little else, still say them. When we recite them at Midland Reformed Church, we are not reading something distinctively ours. We are joining a confession the whole church has held from near its beginning.

“Ecumenical” simply means the whole church, not one tradition or region. Of the three, the Nicene Creed is the one received in common across East and West; the Apostles’ and Athanasian creeds belong especially to the Western church, though all three confess the same faith. The Apostles’ Creed grew out of the questions and answers spoken at baptism in the early church, especially in the West, where a person being baptized confessed faith in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Over time those baptismal confessions hardened into a fixed text that believers learned by heart. The Nicene Creed came from two councils, Nicaea in AD 325 and Constantinople in AD 381, called to settle what the church must say about Christ. The Athanasian Creed is later still, a careful Latin statement that took its final form in the West and was used to teach and guard the doctrine of the Trinity.

The questions they answered

The creeds were not written to be ornamental. They were written because real teachers were saying false things about God, and the church had to answer plainly. The sharpest dispute was over Jesus. A presbyter named Arius taught that the Son was a created being, exalted but not truly God. If he was right, then the one Christians worshiped was a creature, and the gospel was a different thing entirely.

The Council of Nicaea drew the line. It confessed the Son as “very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father.” That phrase, one substance, was the hinge. It meant the Son is not a lesser god or a high creature but is fully and truly God, of the same being as the Father. The council at Constantinople confirmed this and said more about the Holy Spirit, so that the church confessed one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father.

What they confess

Across the three creeds, the same core stands out. There is one God in three persons, the Trinity. The Son is fully God and became fully man, born, crucified under Pontius Pilate, dead, buried, and raised on the third day, and he will return to judge. The Spirit is God and gives life. The church is one and holy, sins are forgiven, and the dead will be raised. None of this is a Reformed distinctive. It is simply the Christian faith, the floor that orthodox Christian churches stand on.

The Athanasian Creed states all of this with unusual precision, distinguishing the persons of the Trinity and the two natures of Christ almost like a legal brief. It also carries strong warnings that whoever does not hold this faith cannot be saved.

Why we still say them

Many believers today have never recited a creed, and some assume that a written confession is cold, or even unbiblical, compared with a faith spoken freshly in one’s own words. A faith that is only ever spontaneous and individual is a recent development. The church has always also confessed together, in words it tested and agreed on, precisely so the gospel would not drift from one generation to the next. The creeds are how the early church kept the faith intact under pressure, and they have done that job for centuries.

We confess them at MRC because they are true and because they tie us to the whole church across time and place. Before we ever reach anything distinctively Reformed, we stand on this shared ground with believers who came long before us and with believers who differ from us today. The creeds mark out what no Christian may give up.

These three texts are genuinely short, far shorter than the confessions and catechisms that came later. The Apostles’ Creed can be read in under a minute. You can read all three for yourself in the links below.