The Nicene Creed

A Scriptural, Historical & Theological Commentary

By Jared Ortiz and Daniel A. Keating Baker Academic, 2024 224 pages, $24.99 Order via Baker Academic

“It is the dogma that is the drama,” wrote Dorothy Sayers in Creed or Chaos? (1947), a work — as the title indicates — in which the brilliant writer and translator argued that Christianity without creeds, dogma and doctrine is sentimental nonsense. Her contemporary, Msgr. Ronald Knox (they both died in 1957), once lamented how many people “have made a dogma of a dogmatism” and “have a creed of creedlessness ...” In fact, Knox asserted in Caliban in Grub Street (1930), the “protest against formulas is, in this age of catchwords, the most stereotyped formula of the lot.”

Jared Ortiz and Daniel A. Keating begin their exceptional book on The Nicene Creed on a similar note, observing that many people are little concerned with truth and, further, don’t like truth expressed with authority:

“To recite a creed — to make a common confession of faith that is already worked out and defined — just doesn’t fit with our desire to go our own way as individuals and to establish our own truth. We are told that people today are hungry for stories — for narratives — not for statements and declarations that seem detached from real life. In a sense, everything connected to the idea of a creed seems out of step with the drift and direction of our culture.”

However, it is exactly this apparent fact, the authors assert — correctly, I believe — that makes the creeds so necessary today. And the creeds, when read with humility and context and depth, offer “the genuine narrative of our world,” an insight that would surely have been applauded by Sayers and Knox. And this sentence sets the tone and stage for this entire study: “Through their densely packed summaries of the Christian faith, the creeds are precisely the medicine we need.”

The subtitle describes the book as “a scriptural, historical and theological commentary,” and the book readily lives up to this promise. Both authors are known for their study of patristics and their theological writings about theosis (or deification). They both contributed chapters — Ortiz on deification in the Greek Fathers; Keating on deification in the Latin Fathers — to Called To Be the Children of God: The Catholic Theology of Human Deification (Ignatius, 2016), which I co-edited, so I know how exceptional they are at conveying theological and historical complexity with masterful ease.

The introduction, in just a dozen pages, explains the origin and nature of creeds, zooms in the specific background of The Nicene Creed, and explains the approach taken by the authors, which reflects the approach taken by St. Augustine in On the Trinity. This book — originally conceived as a companion to the Baker Academic’s exemplary Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture — “is directed primarily to preachers, teacher, and other thoughtful Christians who enjoy studying as a way to deepen their understanding of what to believe and how to live a Christian life.”

This volume is ideal for high school and undergraduate students, catechetical settings, homily preparation and personal study. And the emphasis on both intellectual growth and spiritual growth is especially welcome, as the doctrinal content of the faith and the moral teachings of the Church are meant to go hand in hand, not artificially detached from one another.

The six chapters all focus on Trinitarian dogma and doctrine. They begin with the nature of belief and then move to God the Father, God the Son Divine, God the Son Incarnate, God the Holy Spirit, and then “Life in the Trinity.” There are many helpful aids throughout, including several sidebars (with quotes from Church Fathers, doctors, popes, councils, etc.) and a helpful glossary (in case, for example, one needs to quickly compare the difference between homoiousios and homooousios). The scriptural roots of the Creed are, of course, emphasized and explained with clarity and context, along with references to the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

The opening chapter on belief is a masterclass in challenging possible misconceptions and in deepening existing understandings. Drawing on the writings of St. Irenaeus, the authors emphasize that “faith is not a subjective opinion but is based on objective reality. Faith not about feelings but concerns both action and morality. ... Faith leads us to the solid ground of truth on which we can stake our lives ...” Professing the Creed, then, is a bold proclamation about truth and reality; it is also an act of entering “into the realities we profess.” It brings to mind G.K. Chesterton’s joyful exclamation in Orthodoxy (1908) about “the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. ... There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.” This fact is demonstrated with both pith and wit by Ortiz and Keating.

The final chapter, titled “Life in the Trinity,” is a stellar example of the authors’ ability to present The Nicene Creed in a way fresh and even surprising for some readers. The last section of the Creed is about the Church, baptism, the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. But why is it there? After all, none of those four topics were really debated or considered controversial in the fourth century, either at Nicaea (325) or Constantinople (381). But they do have an essential connection to the previous section on the Holy Spirit, which was added during the second Council to the Creed as it had come down from the first Council. They are rooted, then, in what the early Church believed about the Holy Spirit: that He “was divine and, consequently, ... could give divine life.” As Ortiz and Keating explain:

“At stake was salvation understood as sharing in the divine life. The one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church is the locus of that salvation, which happens through baptism and culminates in eternal life in the world to come. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit naturally flows into the doctrines of the Church, baptism, and resurrection.”

And so, while the first part of the Creed is about the immanent Trinity (the relations in God between the three divine Persons), the second half of the Creed is about the economic Trinity (the relation of God to mankind and salvation). To that end — or, better, to The End — the authors note that “we must recognize that with the coming of Christ the end times have already begun, for ‘heaven’ is union with God, and ‘eternal life’ is sharing in God’s own trinitarian communion.”

The great Swiss theologian Father Hans Urs von Balthasar, in the conclusion of his short book Credo, one of the last things he wrote before dying, stated: “All the individual statements dissolve into one another, because they were all — even as historical facts — but the expression of the life everlasting in the symbolic language of finitude.”

The words of the Creed express divinely revealed truths, but they are in service to Truth that is ultimately beyond the limits of human expression, shining forth in the glory of the Incarnate Word. Ortiz and Keating know this very well, and it is to their credit that they shed light on the great symbol of faith (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 185) in a way that is both intellectually rewarding and spiritually edifying.