%20NEW.jpg)
The NewCity Orlando All of Life Podcast
The All of Life podcast, hosted by Nate Claiborne, provides weekly episodes that help further our mission to call, form, and send disciple-makers. At NewCity, we want to see Orlando flourish by filling it with people who say "Follow me as I follow Jesus in all of life."
The NewCity Orlando All of Life Podcast
Why We Need Creeds with Michael Allen
In this episode, Nate Claiborne is joined by theologian-in-residence Dr. Michael Allen to explore the enduring value of Christian creeds, particularly the Nicene Creed. Together, they consider why creeds exist, what they accomplish, and how they serve both as summaries of the Christian faith and safeguards against theological error. Dr. Allen outlines three key functions of creeds: summarizing the vast narrative of Scripture, highlighting theological priorities, and drawing clear boundaries around unfaithful interpretations.
Through examples from both the Old and New Testaments, they show that creedal formation is a deeply biblical impulse. From poetic declarations in the Pentateuch to hymnic passages in Paul’s letters, the tradition of summarizing and reciting core truths has long served to orient God's people. The conversation also looks at how creeds function within the life of the church—not as a replacement for Scripture, but as interpretive tools shaped by the wisdom of the global and historical church. With 2025 marking the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed, Nate and Mike also share why now is a particularly significant moment to reflect on its meaning and relevance in our worship, witness, and discipleship.
Welcome to another episode of the All of Life podcast. I'm your host, nate Claiborne, and today I'm here with Michael Allen. How are we doing, mike Great to be with you, it's a good day. It is a good day. It's been a while since we've had a conversation about things. Our last two episodes we talked about Hebrews, just in a general sense, talked about reading it in light of the Old Testament. I don't know if we told people we were doing these episodes, but they're going to be excited to know. We've got two more episodes this week, and next we're going to be talking about the Nicene Creed, really specifically about the second article, but that's going to be what we get to next week. I'm just saying that here to build a sense of anticipation.
Speaker 2:Deep and profound anticipation.
Speaker 1:I know right who would have thought we would drop an episode about the importance of Jesus during Holy Week. What are the odds? But before we get to that, though, we're just going to do a big picture sketch of why we have creeds, what they're for, why they're important, and then kind of zoom in a little bit closer to Nicaea in particular. But the big picture question why do we have creeds? Why are they important? Mike?
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, I mean, the first thing to say is what a creed is and what a confession is, and those words are sometimes used synonymously, sometimes they're used in slightly specific, differentiated form. Creeds are statements of faith, things that Christians believe, things that summarize and sometimes say in a specific form so as to highlight something that really matters and sometimes also to challenge something that really threatens. And I think it's important to think about really three facets. I mean one is the need for a summary, the other is the need to highlight certain things that greatly matter, and the third would be to say some things that really do threaten, to state why they are excluded. All three of those elements are really important and evident in this and other creeds, and maybe the first would be the summary.
Speaker 2:I mean, the Bible is a big thing, which is both a remarkable gift, but it also brings with it a challenge.
Speaker 2:The Bible pick an English translation, an edition, and I don't know are we talking about roughly 1400 pages or thereabouts, something of massive scope. So to be able to tell people Christianity involves belief in really opens up a whole range of things that might be said to end that sentence, to complete that prepositional phrase, in one sense, you could read almost any verse of the Bible. That's something Christians believe, but that's not terribly helpful in terms of what most people are after. They want to know what's the main point, what are the key elements? How does this hold together? How does this speak to the way I view myself, the world in light of the God who this book speaks about? And so the need for some sort of summary is something that we see making sense practically because of the scale of the book. It's also something amazing that we see in the Bible itself Already there are summaries that appear in both the Old and New Testaments of what's happened already.
Speaker 1:Right, which that even kind of answers a question I think some people might have is well, why do we need creeds if we have the Bible? And you've kind of hit on this already that well, the Bible is a big book and so as soon as you start to try to summarize what it's about, what it teaches, what we should believe, you've created a creed of some sort. And you've just got a precedent for it in the Old Testament rehearsal of the story of Israel at various points. And then you've got some short little. Sometimes they're set off as poetry in Paul's letters, these little early creedal statements that seem to have already been circulating.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it's amazing. Even just looking at the Pentateuch In Exodus, you know you're in the second book of the Bible, you're experiencing this first great work of redemption where God's delivering Israel and yet by the end of the story we've got sort of a first moment where there's a summative, creedal statement. God proclaims his name as a God. Who's the Lord? Merciful, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love. That's going to be repeated throughout the Bible later, in the Psalms for instance. It's not new, it's just newly stated and summarized. What's named there in Exodus 34, 6, and 7 are the attributes that have been on display in the story of the Exodus and in God's favor to the Israelites. But it's important to be able to remember it rightly, to perceive it accurately and to be able to do so in a way that you can invoke again and again so you don't forget it.
Speaker 2:How often do we see in the Pentateuch also the danger of forgetting, even forgetting God? And so you go on Numbers, leviticus, etc. You get to Deuteronomy and by the end of Deuteronomy we need another summary. So it's not surprising, as Deuteronomy wraps up, you've got this creedal statement. My father was a wandering Aramean and here it's being said by a generation who are later, but they're telling of what God did for their predecessors. They're able to summarize and they're able to claim the story of the Exodus as something that's their own. In very brief fashion, it's a whole lot shorter than reading all of Exodus, leviticus, numbers and Deuteronomy Right, but it catches the big moments, it conveys the most essential elements and it's something, most importantly, they can keep reciting so they remember and they don't forget.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you've got that example in the Pentateuch and then if we move even further, we won't trace all the possibilities, but you have several Psalms that capture the story of Israel and recount some of the mighty works of God. You've got an extended prayer in Nehemiah that does something similar. I think even we just say Solomon's prayer in the dedication of the temple is sort of retreading some of this ground so that the people remember the story.
Speaker 2:But it's not quite a creed, but it's doing the same kind of things a creed, or possibly sung creeds, what we would call a hymn, in texts like Colossians 1, 15 and following and Philippians 2. And in both of those you've got something that's clearly crafted thoughtfully, artfully, not just so that it says true things in brief fashion, but so that it says it in a way that's memorable, that's usable, because the goal of this is communal use for communal memory's sake. And you can think about parallels in different ways. If you think about a big book, oftentimes we get lost in it.
Speaker 2:I'm reading through Tolstoy's War and Peace right now, very slowly, and I'm a reader, a real glutton for punishment, and it's still. It's big scale and Russian names and references that are not exactly my forte. And so having looked at some summary, that helps orient me, enables me to experience what's on this or that page a little more freely and alertly, and so I found that invaluable in reading a big book that's roughly the size of a Bible, that I can make sense of it. I don't read the summary, so I don't need to read Tolstoy. That would rob me of the depth, the beauty, the profundity, the experience. That would be tragic. In the same way, reading the creed, learning that and saying, well, I guess I don't need to read the Bible. That would be to fail to miss where God promises to be. But as a summary, as a guide to help you know what to look for, it very much serves like a brilliant set of reader's notes to guide you as you engage the Bible. And that leads to that second element Creeds really do sort of point to priorities, things that really matter.
Speaker 2:And as we look at the creeds of the universal church, what we sometimes call the ecumenical creeds, because they're early Christian creeds, that all traditions look to, the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed especially, they talk about the same basic things god, god, creating god, saving god, eventually, uh, bringing about the end. Um, and what we, what we see is, you know, they're trying to alert you. There are so many different stories, so many trees to focus on. This helps you catch the forest and to identify what's most important. And you know, those of us who have been Christians for a while, we probably are prone to forgetting how hard that can be for folks who are new to Christianity, new to the Bible. For folks who are new to Christianity, new to the Bible. They might start reading in Lamentations, or they might start reading in 1 Thessalonians.
Speaker 2:Two very different experiences, very different experiences, and neither is going to be necessarily so straightforward to tell you why people are following a religion defined by this at first glance. On the other hand, most people tend to direct people to Mark or John or Romans or Genesis, and there are reasons for that because we understand the importance of having a sensible, clear sort of path to understanding the main elements, and creeds are one crucial help in that regard. They put the main priorities before us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so in that sense it's you kind of. I didn't ask the question this way, but you really answered the question. How do we think about creeds if we are Protestants that affirm sola scriptura and this idea that scripture is? It's not solo scriptura, it's not the only authoritative source, but it is the primary or the principal authoritative source, and the creeds are an interpretive guide to how to understand that source.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's the only final authority. Sure, but one thing the Bible itself commends is that we pass on biblical tradition.
Speaker 1:So Paul writes to Timothy and even uses that word.
Speaker 2:Yes, he commends the idea of guarding the good deposit that's been given to him and following the pattern of sound teaching or doctrine. And those aren't references to the text of Scripture but to the way in which one understands them to cohere and communicate the truth of God in Christ. And so there has already been this tradition of interpretation. Jesus participates in that. It's not enough just to say I know the law is in the Torah.
Speaker 2:Jesus repeatedly gets the question what's the greatest commandment? Well, there's over 600, so that's a standard rabbinic question. How do you sum it up? Sort of what's the big picture, what matters most? And every rabbi is going to have their spin. And Jesus offers us the double love command as this way of summing up the law. And by the time we see not just Jesus but then his apostles, we see that they're summing up this idea that we're given not only the writings of the prophets and those apostles but also a tradition of understanding how they fit together. Tradition's, you know, not divine, it's a blessing. It's a blessing, it's a gift. But it can go bad and it can need to be corrected by Scripture. But Scripture itself tells us how important it is and for most of us, I think we observe that. We observe that.
Speaker 2:You know, when we come to study the Bible, in big and small ways, through tools and through people, we are traditioned into understanding it.
Speaker 2:You've got notes at the top of a study Bible page, or you've got a friend leading you at a coffee shop as you read through Mark, or you're listening to a pastor preach on a passage, or you've read the Creed and recited it and you keep that in mind as you meditate on Scripture Lots of different ways tradition can help you In theory. Sure, there's always the danger that you might somehow not hear something that would challenge you, but that danger is there simply if you read the Bible on your own too. Right, right, that's just to say we're not always attentive and that's always a danger we need to be mindful of and prayerful about. And we're far better able to address that potential problem if it's not merely us doing so, but us doing so with all the blessings and resources and wisdom of the church through the ages, not just our local, parochial, narrow setting, great though that is, but ours amongst the whole community of saints. So the Bible itself says the more biblical you want to be, the more traditional you've got to also train.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And not just because you dress or sing or look like them, but you learn from the way they've heard God, and you learn not to do what they did in every way but, as Hebrews puts it, to run the race set before you, having learned from the great collection of witnesses.
Speaker 1:So we could even say, given sort of what you were saying there and this will lead us back into the third point that you made is it's not just an interpretive guide. In some ways it's interpretive guardrails, because as you're reading scripture, engaging with it, you're going to be interpreting it one way or the other and something needs to not just guide you but to keep you from going off the road. Yeah totally.
Speaker 2:I mean road is a helpful image. I've been the last month or two deep in prayer. My oldest just got a learner's permit. He's a great driver, but it does mean suddenly.
Speaker 2:I'm in the passenger seat often and imagine if I took the approach that some suggest we ought to take with the Bible Just listen to the Bible, just study it yourself, don't listen to the wisdom of others who've gone before you. That would be equivalent to me handing the keys to my teenager and saying go for it and learn as you go, and then sitting mute, never offering wisdom, guidance or, as you put it, warning. I find that, yes, I don't want to remove all agency and responsibility from the young driver. He's got to learn to act and then to react and to learn from it, but it would be tragic if I didn't offer warnings. Hey, by the way, people who do this tend to wind up in an accident, or people who don't pay attention to that tend to get sideswiped, and so it's a loving act for me to pass on wisdom that I and others before me, oftentimes at great expense, have learned, and we know that in other areas of life, like training someone up to drive a car, something that has real effect, and I think we need to be mindful.
Speaker 2:Reading our Bibles and seeking to know God has real effect on our souls for eternity and, by extension, the way in which we might lead or mislead others. And so creeds really do say, hey, we've learned some lessons of, at times, not small errors, but grave errors that have really undone individual lives and communities of faith. And so some of those that are most grave and consequent they're going to be named here, not because we don't want you to read the Bible, we don't want you to follow Jesus and learn as you go, but because we would hate for you to do that and have to reinvent the wheel and learn every lesson on your own. That would be brutally painful, and so the creed represents the best of gathered wisdom up to that point.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it makes me think too of. It's not that you just start off reading on your own and trying to make sense of things yourself, or even just asking a friend. It's the succession of interpretation that you can trace back. So you use your example of driving. It's like, well, somebody taught you how to drive, who taught them how to drive? Who taught them how to drive? And it's putting you in this, this continuity with the earliest drivers.
Speaker 1:For, however, you want to think of it like that, and so the particular creed that we're going to talk about in more detail in the next episode. It goes far back into church history 1700 years to be exact and is something that's at the fountainhead. Can I say fountainhead? I guess I can say fountainhead, you did in fact, I did say it in fact of pretty much all Christian traditions. We mentioned this a little bit before recording, but in this one of my PhD seminars we're studying all the different theological traditions and to a one, they all affirm the Nicene Creed. They vary widely in some of the interpretive moves they might make in light of it, but not that much concerning the creed itself. It's usually in things beyond the creed that there's disagreements, and that's why there's different traditions, but they all trace themselves back to this really early source.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we could land the plane here talking about. So where did this one come from as regards to these three goals, and why are we paying attention to it, especially in this season? As you mentioned, we're paying special attention to it for a couple reasons. First, it's been the creed most employed by Christians across traditions, as you said, and up till now, it's not been a mainstay at all in our worship and in our formative practice at New City, and so it's a good resource that we've underutilized. Secondly, though, it's the 1700th anniversary, and so we're not alone in paying attention to it. A number of Christian communities around the globe, in various traditions, are, in a host of ways, trying to glean from, understand and put to work this creed and what it might do to help them in their witness, in their worship, and so that's the reason we've really devoted ourselves to it in 2025.
Speaker 2:1,700 years ago, christians are, in many respects, doing what we do. They're trying to evangelize, they're trying to grow in communion with God, they're trying to pass on the faith to the next generation, they're trying to love their neighbor and, like today, from time to time there are real problems that arise, errors that can emerge, and sometimes they do seem to be grave or more significant, not just a local problem, but something that's really a potential juggernaut. And one of those issues emerged early in the 4th century, so just over 1,700 years ago, and in North Africa, which was a massive hub of Christianity at that time and especially the center of a lot of Christian intellectual or theological conversations. So many of our best early theologians were there in North Africa and in particular in Alexandria. We know of the famous library there that's renowned and lost, but, don't worry, nick Cage found it in the National Treasure movie. There's also a rich Christian community there for several centuries, with, at most points, the greatest teachers being Alexandrian Christians. Well, not surprisingly, a problem that might emerge in Alexandria could quickly become a problem that's going to influence people around the Mediterranean and beyond.
Speaker 2:And in that time people started to hear of the teaching and the ministry of a character named Arius of Alexandria regarding the Son, the incarnate Son of God, jesus.
Speaker 2:And Arius talks about Jesus on the one hand in ways that sound pretty typical, reveres him, honors him, invokes him in worship services, but at various points it's plain he says things that seem very jarring. And others there including a bishop who, I kid you not, is named Alexander of Alexandria and then very quickly and most famously, a theologian named Athanasius of Alexandria. They're going to be pressing the case, trying to make clear what Arius teaches, why it really challenges not just intellectual ideas but the life of communing with God in Christ, the calling to worship Christ, to pray in Christ's name, to believe Christ is our one true mediator between humanity and God. All these things they're going to say Arius's ideas have taken seriously. They really undercut all that and we can get into the specifics in a following episode. But one key element in addressing that is the convening of a church council, which that's not new. We see that in Acts when the church needs to figure out.
Speaker 2:What do we do with all these Gentiles who seem to possess the Holy Spirit and actually trust Jesus? And we've had Gentiles before who've turned to the God of Israel, but it's always been the rare person here or there, like Rahab of old. But now it's overwhelming. And so the Council of Jerusalem is reported for us in Acts 14 and 15. Well, here we've got a council, obviously long after the time of the New Testament itself, but a similar idea, convening people in Nicaea in 325. About a half century later there'll be a following council in Constantinople in 381, where the creed as we say it today is elaborated and finished. But really beginning in that first council in Nicaea in 325, the goal is summarize the word of God, highlight the priorities, warn against the grave threats, and at that point the main grave threat are these ideas being conveyed by Arius and by the Aryans. We got to clarify Aryan here does not mean white supremacist.
Speaker 2:It's not Aryan with a Y, it's Aryan with an I. They have enough problems. Don't need to be confused with the racists. Racists, but the creed's meaning to target that, and evermore it's been used as a tool to help us catch a main summary of the Bible highlight things that matter much, exclude key things that are grave threats. It's not the only creed. It's played a unique role, though it has.
Speaker 1:And to bring us even more that's a great summary there at the end, mike and to bring us even more full circle Arius is not claiming he's got special revelation outside the Bible or that he thinks what he's doing is faithfully interpreting Scripture. And so a creed is then produced to rule out this particular interpretation and rule in a different interpretation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, arius, he projects as a conservative who thinks he's holding on to this idea of God being one, and he's quoting Bible verses. And so the key is is he really being faithful not just to a phrase in the Bible or to a single verse in all of Scripture, is he actually being faithful to the whole scope and to the unified teaching of Scripture? So I'm so glad you pointed that out. The creed is necessary not to get away from the Bible, but to help communicate what the Bible as a whole means to communicate. And that's challenging.
Speaker 2:That's why it took many figures, deliberating prayerfully. That's why we believe. Ultimately it requires the guidance of the Spirit and the provision of Jesus as the teacher and Lord of the church. Not guarantee that the church never makes mistakes, but promising, as he does in Matthew 16 and elsewhere, that he'll build the church. You know, it will extend the kingdom. The gates of hell will not prevail against it. And so we do believe that, while the church is not infallible, we do believe that Jesus has instructed it, the Spirit has illumined it, and one result of that is we've got great wisdom in a text like this Nicene Creed.
Speaker 1:That's right. Well, mike, it's been a pleasure talking with you about the importance of creeds, how we think about them in relation to Scripture, and just getting our toes wet a little bit on. What is the Nicene Creed, why is it important? And I will look forward to next time when we dig into that second article of it in a little more detail and talk about the significance of the teachings in that creed Sounds great. See you then.
