Jared Ortiz on the Dramatic Nature of the Nicene Creed

The Creed, I mean, it's a dramatic statement. We say it at my church. We say it every week; every Sunday we profess the Creed, and it can become pretty routine. But when you slow down—and this is what we try to bring out in the book—when you slow down and read it, every word is like a declaration of war. Every word is saying yes to the truth and no to many falsehoods.

From the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, you are listening to Public Worship and the Christian Life, a podcast that amplifies people and stories that share wisdom and wonder about Christian public worship. This season's guests, hosted by my colleague Dr. Noel Snyder, reflect on the affirmation of faith in the Nicene Creed in commemoration of its 1,700th anniversary. The first ecumenical council in 325 was a gathering of Christian bishops in Nicaea, located in present-day Turkey, as the first attempt to reach consensus in the church through an assembly representing all of Christendom and to affirm the Christian faith in the triune God. Much has changed in the life of the church these past 1,700 years, but the creed the council agreed upon is still recited and continues to shape us as a church. Welcome to the podcast.

Hello, and welcome. My name is Noel Snyder, and I'll be your host for this brief season of the podcast in which we will focus on the Nicene Creed, because it is the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. My guest for today is Dr. Jared Ortiz, who teaches at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. Jared is the Lavern and Betty DePree Van Kley Professor of Religion at Hope, and he also serves as the religion department chair. Dr. Ortiz specializes in early Christian theology, especially Saint Augustine, and he has recently co-authored a book with Daniel Keating which is titled The Nicene Creed: A Scriptural, Historical, and Theological Commentary, and that's published with Baker Academic, 2024. Jared, welcome.

Thank you very much for having me.

I wonder if we could start by just talking about the book and what prompted you and Daniel to write the book, and maybe even a little bit about how the Nicene Creed became a scholarly interest of yours.

I'll start with that second question. I've been teaching the Creed and Christology at Hope College for the last thirteen years. I've taught a course called Mystery of the Incarnation where we start in the New Testament and go through the Council of Nicaea up to the Council of Chalcedon in the fifth century, just kind of tracing the development of the understanding of Jesus. And that course has been very popular and very fruitful for students. They really love learning about their faith. They love learning about Jesus. In many ways, it's a very technical theological course, but it really comes alive. And I've taught that course maybe fifty times, and it's never gotten boring, and it doesn't get boring because the students, again, just love coming to that kind of clarity about Jesus. So I've been teaching this for a long time, and then a few years ago, Dave Nelson over at Baker had the idea of a commentary on the Creed. There's a great series called The Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture, which is meant to be a useful scriptural commentary, useful for pastors and seminarians and people who want a little bit of the scholarship subsumed a little, and then what do I need to know, and how does this make sense in the lives of Christians? And so that's a really wonderful commentary. It's been very popular, and so this is meant to—was envisioned as a kind of companion to that. So Dave invited Dan Keating, and Dan invited me to join that project, and so together we as friends and as patristic scholars, we put this book together.

And it sounds like, I can imagine for a lot of students, one of the reasons that it would be so popular to teach that course over and over again and have such great engagement is because many students could come in having grown up in the church but just not knowing how we got from the New Testament and what the New Testament says to the defined doctrines of the church and why those were so important, especially in the early centuries of the Christian faith, to be defined those ways.

Calvin [University] has a reputation for being more pious than Hope. So we have a wide range of students here, some who grew up in their Bible and then others who have never opened a Bible. And so I think both have appreciated it—the ones who grow up knowing scripture and loving it to get some theological clarity about what they've read. I teach it largely through heresies. What are the heresies and challenges, and how do we come to clarity? The students find that they actually believe a lot of these heresies. So I think it's a process of discovery for themselves. Then for those who don't know much, it's really, I think, a compelling introduction that this is not just Sunday school stuff that they can blow off, but that this is an intellectually serious vision of religion that they hadn't considered before. I think students have found it attractive for those reasons.

One of the most sobering moments of my own life was when I was around 23 or 24, and I found a book about the major heresies that the church had rejected over the course of the centuries and was sobered to realize how many of them I thought that I had invented myself.

Yeah, I tell the students this story: We read Tertullian, who talks about the tertium quid heresy, this idea that Jesus is a mix of God and man—half God, half man, just kind of melded together into a third thing. And when I came back to the church in college, my junior year of college, and I remember reading the gospel of John, the Word became flesh, and thinking about that, and saying ”Yeah, Jesus is neither God nor man, but a mix between the two, so he can serve as a bridge between us and God, and so he must be a third thing.” I remember saying that out loud and feeling like it was a great insight that I came to by reading the gospel of John only to be later disabused of that. But it's a nice way in with the students when we get there to say, yeah, I'm with you, I've been there, I've a heretic too; don't worry, I'll help you.

Praise God! I'm glad that you're doing that work. You've been teaching this so long, studying it for so long, and then now writing this book. I wonder if there's anything that you learned in the course of writing this book about the Nicene Creed.

Yeah, there's a lot of interesting nooks and crannies I learned. One of the chapters I wrote was the final one on one holy catholic and apostolic church, at the end. We call that chapter “Life in the Trinity”—baptism and resurrection and our hope for resurrection. But one of the things I found really fascinating was putting together the section on what [it means] to be a holy church. And, you know, I certainly had some ideas about that. It's holy because the Holy Spirit animates it; it’s holy because it can communicate holy, maybe through the sacraments. But one of the things that was really sort of a surprise to me was the role that penance played in the understanding of the church. I'm Catholic, so I go to confession and do those nice things, and I argue with my Protestant friends about how we confess our sins and whether it's a sacrament or not. That's usually where we engage on the Reformation debate level. But it really was essential to the way we conceive of the church today. So take the persecutions of Christians; in the 250s is where the main controversies come out of the Decian persecutions, and you have some Christians who are martyred; you have some Christians who are tortured but then don't deny the faith. Then you have others who are tortured and deny Jesus; you have others who bribe officials to get out of sacrificing to the emperor; and then you have others who just willingly go and sacrifice just to avoid trouble. And then when the persecutions end, these people come back together at church, and you say, well, are these apostates allowed in the church? Are the priests and bishops who handed over the scriptures and who denied Jesus, do they have any place in the church? And there's some very stark language in scripture that might suggest no, right? If you deny Jesus, he will deny you, so the church can't accept you back. So you have the hardliners who say, no, the church is holy because the members are holy, right? But that's not the argument that wins the day. You have this growing understanding of penance and say, well, there has to be a way back in, so Cyprian and Pope Stephen in the third century [were] sort of saying yes, it's very bad; these people apostatized and deny Jesus, but look, Peter denied Jesus, he repented, he was allowed back in, he died a martyr later, so we need a way to bring these people back in. So you have this growing understanding of penitential disciplines growing up in the third century. And then you have this understanding of the church not as the church of the pure, but as the church of the holy—but as a mixed body, as a church with wheat and weeds in it. And we can't sort all that out right now because we don't want to pull up the wheat along with the weeds. And so then holiness looks very different; to be a holy church looks very different, right? It can't be simply the members, because they're mixed. So . . . it's not the holiness of the minister that makes the sacraments holy. That was one of the arguments: These people can't baptize because if they're sinners they can't give forgiveness of sins; if they are unholy they can’t give the Holy Eucharist. But the argument that then develops is to say, no, it's not the holiness of the minister or the holiness of the people; it's the holiness of God, which works through imperfect ministers to give the grace of baptism and forgiveness and to give the Holy Eucharist. It's the Holy Spirit that can make us holy through the church, and the church is the locus of that communication of the Spirit. So penance sort of shifts the boundaries of the church in really interesting ways that I just didn't realize as you know the history of the church is developing.

And it really reframes that concept of what it means to profess faith in one holy catholic and apostolic church, and especially the holiness piece. It sounds like . . . not only do we then root it in God's holiness, but it comes to us as more of a gift and a promise as much as it's something that is then also being worked out through the Holy Spirit in our individual lives.

Yeah, I think that's right. The Holy Spirit and then, at least in the Catholic understanding, the sacraments as well are going to communicate that holiness, and it's the church and their ministers who can provide those holy sacraments and communicate that holiness to others, even if they're unholy themselves. But then also, you do have the examples of the great saints and the holy ones who actually do live the life of integrity and show forth God's holiness to others. And again, they're the exemplars of what should be and what could be for all of us if we allowed God to transform us.

Yes, yes, I love that. Such a rich understanding of those different dimensions of understanding the holiness of the church and how that comes through God's own holiness. So that's a fun little part of what happens when you look more closely at the history and how the church ended up defining this. I wonder if there's other historical vignettes that you could share with our listeners that would help us to really enter into the Creed and engage with it more deeply.

The one that comes to mind is a historical vignette which may not have happened, but I'll tell it anyway and tell you what I think is interesting about it. So there's some of you who know a little bit about the history or know your Christian memes have seen the meme of Santa Claus slapping Arius, right? So Arius is the great heretic there of the early fourth century who leads the Council of Nicaea who says that Jesus as the Son of God is not equally divine to the Father [but is] the first and highest creature, and that's what leads to the Council of Nicaea. And then supposedly Saint Nicholas, who became Santa Claus a thousand years later, is so offended by Arius that he walks across and slaps him in the face. The naysayers on Twitter and Facebook will say, well, this didn't happen, and saints shouldn't slap people, and these sorts of things. I don't think I'm encouraging any of your listeners to slap heretics, but you might have a desire to slap heretics, and that's not a bad thing. It's because I think we can, in our pluralistic society and in our ecumenism— and there's many salutary things about both of those—tend to tolerate a lot more than maybe we should tolerate, and we go a little bit easier on people. Saint Nicholas, at least in that story was truly appalled by this heresy that someone would deny that Christ was divine, that a Christian, a fellow Christian, would deny that Christ was divine, and if reason is not working, then rebuke some other way—you come to blows. Again, it's not that I want to slap my heretic friends or family members, but you just have to realize that the truth is at stake, and that this is something worth dying for—maybe not worth killing for, but maybe worth slapping someone for their own good, to bring them into the truth, because this truth has everything to do with our salvation. But the other thing that that vignette, apocryphal or not, makes me think of is, even if that part's not true, it was not just a congenial gathering of bishops who kind of talked things out. It was a rather raucous exchange, and all these councils in the early church are pretty raucous, and it’s to me a good reminder of how the Holy Spirit works in history. We tend to think it's all a very clean process, that the Bible just kind of fell out of heaven completely bound in one book and in the order we find it, and it's the nice word of God, but it's like a completely messy, chaotic process to get us the Bible, and it's a completely messy and chaotic process to clarify the truth about who Jesus is so that we can worship him properly. This maybe goes back to the previous comment about holiness too, which is that the church is a mess, and God didn't clean it up when he left. He sent us the Spirit to console us and to guide us into all truth, but that is not a nice, smooth Roman road. It's full of twists and turns and potholes. And again, stories like that just bring me down to earth and say, yeah, God is going to work through us fallible humans, but he is going to work through us, right? I truly believe that what we got in the Nicene Creed, and as it developed again in the Council of Constantinople to get our final form, was the work of the Holy Spirit, but it was a very messy process. It didn't just come out of heaven on a beam of light, but through arguing, through disagreeing, perhaps through slapping others, that God worked out through that process the truth that he wanted to guide us into.

Yeah, that's a great insight. I mean, on the one hand, you could have people who are inclined toward conspiracy theories point out all the power dynamics and things that are at play in the councils. And yet, if you think of it the other way, where if it were just a purely clean council that proceeded without any sort of human mess, it's hard to relate to that. It's hard to even trust that the council really did hit upon the truth if it's just a very clean, peaceful process, and it sort of helps us to enter it more fully and to understand our own place in the history of how the Spirit is at work in the world.

I mean, if it was that clean, I would probably be putting forward conspiracy theories too. It's a much messier, much bloodier process to get us where we need to get. And again, we shouldn't expect anything different, right? God didn't just save Adam and Eve right away and put them back in the garden and clean it all up. We had a big mess, we had a flood, we had Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and it's a big mess. We had Jesus, right? Who, again, didn't live a nice, comfortable life, and so died a human failure to save us. So this seems to be the way that God works, is through the mess.

I love that. That feels much more like real life. So I want to ask you about the first chapter of the book. A lot of the latter chapters in the book are looking at the nature of God—God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. But the first begins with even just this one phrase where the Creed begins, which is this phrase “I believe,” or, in a corporate setting, “We believe.” Could you talk a little bit about what it means to say “I believe” or “We believe” and how we can sometimes misunderstand that concept of faith or belief?

Yeah, this was my suggestion to have a chapter on belief. It’s just something close to my heart, in part because there are a lot of misunderstandings and in part because in the early church this was seen as a weakness of Christianity— that it emphasized belief rather than knowledge. And so they were criticized by pagans, by philosophers, by Gnostics that they were leading with faith, leading with belief rather than with reasoned arguments, and depending on authority, which are the weakest kind of arguments as opposed to demonstrating the truth of things. So I thought it needed its own chapter. I think today we think about faith in ways that come up short in a number of different ways. One of the ways my students will talk about this is they'll say, “Faith is an important part of my life,” or “I'm trying to figure out where faith fits in my life.” When we speak like that, then faith becomes this one thing alongside other things, and our life is the frame, and the faith is one thing alongside our musical talents, and our studies, and our sports, and my girlfriend. So faith is just one important part, but it's just a part of other things as opposed to being the thing that frames your life. So your life is framing the faith as opposed to the faith framing your life, right? With that flipped understanding, we'll say things like, “I'm trying to figure out how to apply my faith in my life,” or how faith applies to this part of my life. And again, I'm always leery of that language of application. I'm sure it's well intended, but it seems to me that faith is not a tool that we can use, that we can manipulate, that we can apply to things. It's a much more totalizing reality, and in a sense, faith applies us rather than us applying the faith. I think that's one set of traps that we fall into. The other traps, I think, with modern-day faith, probably depend on what tradition you grow up in. A lot of my students have a very individualistic understanding of the faith. They go to Christian summer camp, they accept Jesus into their heart. It's a beautiful thing, so don't want to naysay it. It's an important moment in their life. But it's like, “I did this thing when I was 14. I accepted Jesus in my heart. I'm saved. Done.” It's a limited understanding for I think a number of reasons. One is—what I think is nice, you know the “I” and the “We believe”? The Latin says “I believe,” the Greek says “We believe,” and the church keeps both of those. And I think both are essential. There's the corporate dimension of the “we”; there's the individual dimension of the “I.” But I would say that the “we” always precedes the “I,” that we always receive our faith from others. It's always a gift that we receive. It's never something I do. I mean, maybe God appeared in a cave to a few people in the history of the world and they believed in him. But most of us come to the faith through the church, and not necessarily going to church, but we receive it from our parents, who are members of the body of Christ. They are the church to us, and they're passing on the faith of the church to us. Or our friends who brought us to Young Life or, summer camp—wherever you come to Jesus, that's the “we” of the church preceding the “I.” So the “we,” the faith of the “we” precedes the “I believe.” I think that's really important. And again, it's not something I do, right? It's something that actually God does and that God does through others. So the faith is not an act, first and foremost; the faith is first and foremost a gift that I have received from God through others.

And then again, what do we mean when we say faith? I think our traditions lead us into different temptations here. So sometimes it is just, oh, faith means I accept that God is God, or I accept these ideas, these true ideas, maybe the ideas in the Creed. I accept those; there's a kind of notional assent. And that's not wrong; that's true. I assent to these truths. And others it's again, it's a much more heart posture: I love God. That's what faith means. I trust in him. And I think those are good, but I think we need to bring those together into a more comprehensive picture. In scripture, you know faith is, first of all, it refers to God. It's God's faithfulness That's where the word first arises in the Old Testament; it’s God's faithfulness and what God does, God's fidelity to us. And then our faith is our response to God, our faithful response. There's a Protestant author [Matthew Bates] who wrote a book . . .  called Salvation by Allegiance Alone. So you guys like faith alone, but he thinks allegiance is actually a better translation of what faith means, because allegiance—it's kind of an old-fashioned word, right? You pledge allegiance to the flag—but it's more allegiance to a king, right? It's not just “I assent that this guy is my king,” or “I kind of like this guy.” It's like, “I put my body and soul on the line devoted to this leader And I will lay down my life for him. If he tells me to go to war, I'm going to go to war. That's the kind of allegiance we need to have toward God is to put our body and soul, our mind, heart, strength, all of us on the line for God. And it's really cool—I know this is supposed to be a short interview, but it's just really cool [that] in the Old Testament, the opposite of faith is idolatry. The opposite of faithfulness is unfaithfulness, adultery, idolatry. But then when you get to the New Testament, that language is still there, in Paul especially. But in the Greek context, you have the word changes to pistis for faith, and faith is contrasted with knowledge. So we walk by faith and not by sight. So in heaven, we won't have faith. We're going to see God face to face. So we walk by faith; that's the light. The light of faith is how we see God in this world. So it's this comprehensive, totalizing reality, this allegiance to God, that involves our intellect, it involves our will, and it's this complete giving over of ourselves, which we've received from God through others, but it's transformed us into these soldiers for Christ and these citizens for God who are willing to lay down our lives for our King.

So what you're saying about the different ways of conceiving faith in Old Testament terms and in New Testament terms, if you put those two together, you get this comprehensive vision of what faith is and can be. I like that. There's other things, like even the concept of repentance, that if you put the Old Testament word together with the New Testament word that in the Old Testament it's sort of a turning around; in the New Testament it’s of a change of mind. And when you look at those two sort of visual images together, you get a much more comprehensive picture of what it means to repent. And so it sounds like you're saying that when we study it closely, we can come to such a rich understanding of this concept of faith as well.

Yeah, and I have a very short section going through the language of faith in that first chapter where I actually even talk about the English words for faith and belief, and belief, lief is related to the word for love, which is very interesting, and belief is like beloved, right? So just the word belief, if you trace the etymology, has this kind of spousal language to it, a spousal meaning to it, a spousal heritage, and so that works very well with that Old Testament meaning, especially of fidelity and infidelity, and fidelity to God who “espouses” us in love. You get this especially in the prophet Hosea, that marital imagery with God, and then of course the wedding feast of the Lamb and all these things. So that English resonance really brings that out really nicely. That has this dimension of total self-gift in a way that maybe “allegiance,”—at least our understanding of allegiance—doesn't bring out, that sense of love, as clearly. So I think all the words in the variety of languages have real keen insights into the meaning.

Yeah, I love that. It's one of my favorite things. My students, I think, maybe get sick of me talking about word origins and trying to pull out the concepts that are embedded in the words themselves. And I often apologize, but it's like, I'm sorry/ not sorry.

Yeah, don't apologize. You’re doing them a service.

Well, we could talk about this for a very long time. I do want to ask you a few more questions. And one of them is, so you have a chapter on God the Father, God the Holy Spirit, but you actually have two chapters on God the Son. One's on God the Son divine, one is on God the Son incarnate. What is the reason for that?

In part because just one chapter would have been way too long. And, at the Council of Nicaea, the main debate is over the divinity of Christ, so that's the section that gets expanded. That's a really long section in the Creed and, like the whole Creed, but especially in that section, lots of phrases, lots of key words, lots to be unpacked. And that's the heart of the controversy there in 325 at the Council. But Jesus is one divine person in two natures, so we have to understand both of those natures fully. If he's not God, he can't save us. If he's not human, then humans are not saved. And if they're not united, then we can't be transformed and share in God's divine life. So in those first centuries and then even today, because this is the thing with heresies, right? Sometimes when we talk about these ancient heretics, we think these are like mustache-twisting villains trying to destroy the faith. But really most of them are just well-intentioned Christians trying to sort out scripture. What heresies are, they're generally just natural temptations of the human mind to reduce the mystery of God. The Arian idea that only God the Father is true God and that Jesus is the first and highest creature is way more understandable than the Trinity. I teach this for a living, but it’s just way easier to understand, right? And that's the thing with all heresies, it's like they're satisfying because they're way easier to understand, but they are a reduction of the mystery. So there, the divinity of Christ in the Arian controversy is being attacked. But the humanity of Christ was also attacked in previous centuries and then subsequently, right after the Council of Nicaea. And so you really do need two chapters to defend the full divinity of Christ and the full humanity of Christ.

I wonder if I can ask you a final question and see if I can put enough ideas out there that you can latch onto one of them and answer. But I'm wondering, so this is the 1,700th anniversary of the Creed. Why do you think—you wrote a book on it, so you obviously think it's an important thing for people to be reading and studying still afresh today—what do you think is the value of this 1,700-year-old creed? We should say that it's actually the Creed of Nicaea is different than the Nicene Creed, which was the edited version after the Council of Constantinople in 381, but I didn't want to get overly complicated about that dating there. But what do you hope that people will see as the value of this creed?

Probably most importantly is that it's true, and the truth is always timely, right? It's timeless and therefore timely. So if it's true, then it's the thing that needs to orient our life if we're going to live in the truth. The Creed is a dramatic statement. We say it in my church every week. Every Sunday, we profess the creed, and it can become pretty routine. But when you slow down—and this is what we try to bring out in the book—when you slow down and read it, every word is like a declaration of war. Saying yes to the truth and no to many falsehoods. And then when we profess it, we're taking our stand for the truth. Look, either God exists or doesn't exist; either God created all things or he didn't; either Jesus is God or he's not. You actually have to take a stand at some point on these questions, and if you do, it changes the whole orientation of your life. And the Creed tells us where to stand if we want to live in the fullness of truth about ultimate reality, God, and the reality of all things, the world that he's made. I get some students who are a little skeptical of creeds. They think it puts God in a box or something like that. “No creed but Christ” was the old saying. But this is the thing, is that I always think of the creeds like the foul lines in baseball. I love baseball; it’s a sport revealed by God, God's greatest gift to America, and America's greatest gift to the world is baseball. But it's a game that starts at home. And of course the whole goal is to come home counterclockwise, so it has a kind of timeless quality to it, but it starts at home, and you get the foul line's out and then you get the outfield fence, but anything within the foul lines is fair, but the foul lines open up to an infinite horizon, because you could hit the ball over the fence, you could hit it in the parking lot, you can hit it into the river, you could hit it to the moon, [but] as long as it [stays in] the foul lines, it’s a fair ball. So it starts at a point, but it opens up to an infinite horizon. And this is what theology is, and this what the creeds do. You have to start somewhere in our limited perspective, but the creeds are the foul lines that say, look, if you want to get to God, if you want to get to the infinite horizon, these are the lines that are going to get you there. And if you go out of the lines, you're going to fall into untruth, into falsehood, into unreality, into death. . . . But if you stay within the foul lines, then you can play the game of God, and you can open yourself up to that infinite horizon. and you can get there if you play the game long enough. To me, the great value of the creeds is they show us where the foul lines are [and] very, very clearly tell us where to take our stand. And then they allow us to play the game in this life so that we can reach the next life.

Well, that's beautiful. And there's something that's so powerful of what you describe of being able to say the Creed in a corporate setting and to say yes, this is where I stand. It's not only where the church has declared this is where we stand, but it's also where I stand as a part of this. And then to watch and see what God can do once you have that place to stand to open up those horizons that are infinite beyond that. What a great image.

The thing is that we like new ideas because newer is better for us, but this is time-tested. This has lasted for 1,700 years, and it's lasted through all the historical changes and times and seasons, and it’s lasted however many multitudes of cultures and settings. This is something enduring. You actually have pretty good reason to say I can assent to this with some confidence.

Jared, it's been such a great pleasure to talk with you today, and I really appreciate you taking the time to share with us.

Thank you so much for having me.

Find resources related to the Nicene Creed and more at our website, worship.calvin.edu.