NICENE CREED AND OLD SCHOOL BAPTISTS

By: Guillermo Santamaria

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

The book traces the Nicene Creed from its fourth-century origins into its later reception among Old School Baptists, using both patristic history and Trott/Beebe as lenses. It begins by outlining what the Creed is in its 381 (Niceno-Constantinopolitan) form: a compact confession of one God the Father, one Lord Jesus Christ “true God from true God” and “of one substance with the Father,” the Holy Spirit as “Lord and giver of life” worshiped with Father and Son, and one holy catholic and apostolic Church, one baptism, and the hope of resurrection. It situates this formula within the Arian controversy—Arius’ claim that the Son was a created, subordinate being—and notes how the council of Nicaea (325) used the term homoousios to deny any creatureliness in the Son, while Constantinople (381) expanded the Creed especially in its pneumatology. Later Western addition of the filioque and the divergent Eastern and Western receptions are sketched as part of the broader history of the Creed and its role as a doctrinal boundary-line for much of Christendom.

The study then reconstructs Arius’ biblical strategy (Proverbs 8; Colossians 1:15; Psalm 2:7; John 14:28; 1 Corinthians 15; Mark 13:32; 1 Corinthians 8:6; Romans 8:29) and shows how pro-Nicene theologians answered him by distinguishing eternal being from economic role, and by reading the “hard” texts in light of passages that unequivocally ascribe full deity to the Son. The political dimension of Nicaea and its aftermath is highlighted: imperial aims at unity; factional alliances at the council; post-Nicene intrigues and exiles; Homoian and Anomoean reactions; and the eventual consolidation of Nicene orthodoxy under Theodosius and Constantinople. Against that backdrop, the document turns to Samuel Trott’s and Gilbert Beebe’s Trinitarian thought. Trott affirms an eternal “three-oneness” of God—Father, Word, and Spirit each as “the one Jehovah”—while sharply rejecting the traditional language of “three distinct persons in the Godhead” and the Nicene machinery of eternal begetting and procession as speculative and unscriptural. Beebe fully asserts Christ’s eternal, underived Godhead and practical Nicene Christology, but is wary of glib “first person / second person” talk and prefers to frame Son–Father relations in mediatorial and biblical categories rather than scholastic ones.

Finally, the piece explains why Old School Baptists were uneasy with liturgical recitation of the Nicene Creed even when they agreed with much of its substance. Their objections are principled: the Creed is uninspired and, when inserted into worship, occupies a place they reserve for Scripture; in practice, creeds tend to become tests of fellowship that can overshadow a plain biblical confession of Christ; certain formulations (“begotten before all worlds,” “one baptism for the remission of sins,” “one holy catholic and apostolic Church”) sit awkwardly with their soteriology and ecclesiology; and the Creed itself emerged from, and was later wielded by, the imperial/state-church complex they reject. Trott’s explicit critiques of “the Nicene system” and his insistence on “my creed concerning the divine Three” epitomize this stance: gratitude for the Creed’s defense of Christ’s deity, combined with a refusal to let it govern the language, worship, or boundaries of Old School Baptist churches.