In celebration of the 1700th anniversary of one of the greatest creeds of Christendom, the Nicene Creed, the Philippine Gospel Network held a conference. The title of this conference was taken from a line of this creed.
For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven; he became incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary, and was made human.
The two-day conference expounds the glory of this creed as a faithful expression of what our forefathers believe and what the Scripture teaches.
Session 1 set the terms. Ptr. James Bryner Chu opened with van Dixhorn's observation that cults hide what they believe, while only Trinitarian Christians can confess the Nicene Creed and mean every word of it. Ptr. James gave three reasons why the creed still matters: (1) it is scripturally grounded, not scripture-adjacent; (2) it is part of our family inheritance, functioning like a grammar book that teaches us how the early Christians spoke of God; (3) and familiarity with it is itself a mode of honoring the fifth commandment, honoring the fathers who handed the faith down to us.
He ended with a suggestion on the practical use of the creed: public confession in worship, personal familiarity, contemplative memorization, and persistence in doing so. In our home, this has become a part of our family worship. Gladly, there are helpful ways to memorize the creed. One way is to sing it! Jaroslav Pelikan's question nailed the whole session: what do you value most in the Nicene Creed? For Ptr. James, it was the first word, "We."
Session 2, on the Father Almighty, Ptr. Ferrer pressed into classical theism proper with this line:* "God's singularity and simplicity allow us to understand the Trinity better."* This captures the long-held tradition's commitment to the fact that Simplicity as the divine identity is a Trinitarian grammar. We believe in one God. In other words, Simplicity is a precondition for confessing the Trinity rightly. Scott Swain's reminder that "Christian praise of the Trinity is praise of the one God" and Kevin DeYoung's The Good News We Almost Forgot both did the same work. The work of recovering divine simplicity and aseity (Psalm 90:1–4) is not a scholastic riddle but an invitation to behold God as He is in Himself. Ptr. Ferrer's application was pastoral, not academic. He advances the belief that the one true God is first the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. This compels us to behold Him as the one who has deep affection for His people. To know Him deeply prepares us for the beatific vision. We do well to pass this knowledge to the next generation, and to build biblically healthy churches on it.
Session 3 was, for me, the theological center of the conference. Ptr. Jerome Ocampo took up "Very God of Very God," using Hilary of Poitiers' prayer as his starting point and contrasting it with Arius's error. Eternal generation, he argued, is the Father's ad intra act of originating the person of the Son while communicating the same undivided substance. This is an origination without time, without subordination, without creation. The line, "there was never a time when the Father was without a Son," robustly supports this doctrine.
If there was a time when the Son was not, it would follow then that there was a time when the Father had no Son, which is a clear antithesis of what the Scripture principally teaches. The Father's eternality necessitates the Son's eternal generation. Ptr. Jerome was careful to distinguish analogy from identity. The creed's statement "light from light... true God from true God" must be taken meticulously. Augustine warns that "every analogy means some kind of likeness," never equivalence. The idea of begottenness must be purified of any creaturely concept. The Son is the natural Son born of the Father. He does not belong in the category of the creatures. "Nobody can create God. However, God can beget God... The Son is not the creation of the Father." To deny eternal generation is to eventually deny the Son's aseity, His immutability, and God's simplicity itself. As he put it, "the doctrine of eternal generation establishes the uniqueness of Jesus as the only one qualified to provide redemption." We say "Amen" to this!
Session 4 turned from the Son's eternal generation to His mission. Ptr. John Hofileña begins, "The Nicene Creed remains vital in a time where Jesus is most familiar yet not rightly understood." This is a common predicament in our culture: a Jesus everyone quotes, and almost no one confesses rightly. After providing the theological and scriptural foundations that the incarnation is God's initiative and starts with God not ours where He came down from heaven, he furnishes the historical clarifications that this doctrine was purged in the furnace of controversy. Heresies like Arianism, Apollinarianism, adoptionism, and Docetism, and their modern cousins in liberal Christology's "quest for the historical Jesus" and New Age spirituality's Jesus-as-form, will be banished if we hold to his dear doctrine firmly. The heresy of the past shows us how easy it is to lose the gospel by losing the dual nature of Jesus.
This doctrine is presently relevant to our worship, mission, and hope. Our hope rests upon the incarnate, risen, and returning God-man, the LORD Jesus Christ. This creed helps us to recover the firm and true and joyful and hopeful belief in Christ. We must consider adding the Nicene Creed to our churches' foremost confession today.
Session 5, on the Holy Spirit, gave Ptr. Raffy Garcia room to correct a real deficiency in Reformed pneumatology at street level. He cited Barna's finding that many self-identified Christians treat the Spirit as an impersonal force. Ptr. Raffy warned that losing sight of the Spirit's personhood turns Him into "a genie that can be manipulated, not a God who has to be honored." I am amazed by his treatment of the filioque controversy, and Calvin's language of "distinction without division" modeled how to hold East and West with charity rather than dismissing it quickly. The practical payoff was Christ-centered: we worship the Spirit rightly by directing our attention to the Son.
Session 6 closed the conference on where ecclesiology, “the holy Catholic Church,” belongs, under the doctrine of God. Ptr. Derick Parfan built on John Webster's principle that "there can be no doctrine of the church that is not fully about God." He gave a careful walk-through of the four marks: one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, as a corrective to our era's individualism. Cyprian's dictum, echoed by Augustine and Calvin, that "you cannot have God as your Father if you do not have the church as your mother," is a hard word for low-ecclesiology evangelicalism to hear, but it is precisely the word this conference was built to deliver.
Taken together, these six sessions make a simple but urgent case: a church that cannot confess the Nicene Creed will eventually lose the gospel it was written to protect. Attending such a conference in the context of broad evangelicalism is refreshing. I love the creeds, and the Nicene Creed as it was handed down to us by the providence of the simple and merciful God, and the theological retrieval of our day will be advanced freshly if we preserve what our forebears confessed. But in all these things, we must study, appropriate, and confess this creed in the posture of humility.
I pray that more churches will hold more conferences on the retrieval of the riches of what true Christianity believes. We need churches that will recover the doctrines, convictions, and practices that have shaped faithful Christianity through the centuries. I believe that there is a great need to teach these truths again, not as relics of the past, but as biblical convictions that still govern how Christians understand God, Christ, salvation, the church, and the Christian life.
I pray that pastors will open the Scriptures and lead their congregations back to the truths that have been neglected, forgotten, or replaced by lesser things. I pray that churches will give their people more than inspirational messages. Give them doctrine. Give them substance. Give them the faith once delivered to the saints. Give them Scriptures!
May these conferences become places where Christians learn to read the Bible with greater care, along with communal reading of it, recover the riches of historic creeds and confessions, and gain a deeper love for the truth. We have much to recover. And the riches are still there for us and for our salvation.
To the Triune God alone be the glory!