Truth Unites - How Baptists Viewed the Nicene Creed Historically

Episode Date: June 19, 2024

Gavin Ortlund argues that Baptist have historically affirmed the Nicene Creed, and should do so today. The Center for Baptist Renewal: https://www.centerforbaptistrenewal.com/ Stan Fowler's More Than a Symbol: https://www.amazon.com/More-than-Symbol-Baptismal-Sacramentalism/dp/1597527335 Church Leaders' Article on the SBC Annual Gathering: https://churchleaders.com/news/487608-southern-baptists-do-not-adopt-nicene-creed-at-annual-meeting.html Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

Recently at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, there was discussion about whether to add the Nicene Creed onto the Southern Baptist Confession, Statement of Faith, the Baptist Faith and Message. Now, I'm not Southern Baptist myself. I never have been, actually. My previous church was a Baptist church, but it was actually American Baptist. My current church is broadly reformed, but not Baptist per se. But by theology, though, is baptistic broadly. And I feel a little defensive of Baptist sometimes. Sometimes we deserve, we deserve a little bit of the abuse we take. Sometimes, though, it's not always deserved. And, you know, things get sensationalized and distorted on social media sometimes, and people, some people are saying like, wow, look,

Baptist don't even believe in the Nicene Creed and stuff like this. But what's going on at one particular annual gathering doesn't represent all Baptists, and even within the SBC, it was not rejected. The motion was referred to an executive committee, so there's sort of procedural dynamics at play here that we, so we don't want to be judging. Yeah, it gets, like I said, it gets to, social media has a way of, we can use it to make our opponents seem just a little more ridiculous than they actually are, and it's often very unkind, so we need to be careful about that at the same time. There has been discussion about concerns that some Baptists have about the Nicene Creed, especially the phrase one baptism for the remission of sins, which came up in a clip of concerns about this and

discussion about this got circulated widely on social media. And so as someone who's a Baptist and who feels affection for fellow Baptists, I think we need to acknowledge that there's some real weaknesses among contemporary Baptists. If you spend time among Baptists, you will see this. There's a lot of times an kind of anti-historical posture, suspicion toward creeds and confessions in general, sometimes even kind of an anti-theological posture, an individualism, no creed but the Bible, this kind of mentality, and so forth. And so now in fairness, there's not just Baptists that you can find these things. But when we see a weakness in our own tribe, I think that what we have to do is not try to distance ourselves or mock people. I think the best thing to do is basically just to try to work at reform and try to.

where there are areas of weakness, try to strengthen them. This is what I want to give my life to is renewal in the church today. That's why Truth Unites exists. I want to spend myself to try to help people find a sense of renewal personally, but then also in the church. And I think one way that I can try to do that is through church history. I actually think knowing church history is really important. It's not the only thing, but it's one ingredient that helps us seek renewal and revival in the church today. So in this video, I want to take this episode and use it as an occasion to encourage and promote and champion Baptists reclaiming their own historical roots and their own heritage. So I'm not going to be so much defending Baptists from criticisms

from other kinds of Christians. That'll come in briefly at the finish. But mainly I want to speak to my fellow Baptists and sort of encourage and promote that we should affirm the Nicene Creed today without hesitation and with great enthusiasm, because that's part of the of our own heritage. That's part of our own tradition, and we'll talk about specific creeds where you see this, and just basically the historic Baptist view of these things. So let's go quick video. Real quick. First, we'll talk about the Baptist view of the Nicene Creed, and creeds in general, and then we'll talk about this specific phrase, one baptism for the remission of sins. There are a lot of great renewal movements among Baptists. I talk a lot

about the Center for Baptist Renewal, wonderful organization. I'll link to them in the video description, check out their great work. I talk a lot about Matthew Barrett's book on the Reformation and some of the great work that he and others are doing, defending and retrieving classical Trinitarianism, for example. He's got some great books on the Trinity. I remember visiting southeastern seminary and other Southern Baptist institution to speak there last fall, and I remember talking with students, there's all these PhD students doing their doctorate, doing their dissertation on the church fathers. It's really cool to see. It's awesome. Lots of great things happening among Baptists. So a lot of times people don't realize that. However, these kinds of things are needed, these renewal

efforts are needed because a lot of Baptists today have fallen away from a historic Baptist posture towards church history and even just awareness, you know. For example, one of the things you see is people will conflate the term Baptist and Anna Baptist. This happens a lot in criticisms against us. And, but, but, you know, just to be real clear and brief on this, these two terms are totally different. Baptist and Anabaptist. So Anabaptist is a sociological term. It describes a bunch of different sort of disparate movements. You've got all kinds of, you got Menno Simons on the one side, and then you've got these like anarchist people on the other, and there's all kinds of different people. So it's more of a social, a general sociological term to describe people in the 16th century in

continental Europe who are basically outside of the mainstream reformation. The Lutherans and the Reformed Christians don't like them. They're as harsh against many of them as they are against Roman Catholicism in many cases. The term Baptist is a century later, 17th century. This is a denominational term, not a sociological term. So we're kind of apples and oranges in what we're even talking about. and this basically refers to a tradition within the reformed stream of historic Protestantism, and we're talking about Great Britain specifically. So in 17th century, English Puritanism, you have these different streams. You have the Presbyterians represented by the Westminster Confession of Faith.

You have the Congregationalists represented by the Savoy Declaration. That's their confession of faith. That's people like Thomas Goodwin and John Owen and people like this. And then you have the Baptists. and they have their own confessions of faith, lots of them actually, and catechetical texts and so forth. And I've gone into all of this a little more elsewhere, but I have recommended Matthew Bingham's great book, Orthodox Radicals, if you want to learn a little bit more about Baptist origins. But the point for now is just to say, so this is what the Baptist tradition is, that's where it begins, and it's always, from the beginning, been confessional.

So Second London Baptist Confession of 1689 is the best known Baptist Confession, but there's lots of others. And my favorite Baptist Confession, the Orthodox Creed of 1679, let's just talk about this a little bit. Okay. What is this Baptist? This Baptist confession has a lot to say about the Nicene Creed and actually enfolds it along with the Apostles Creed and the Athanasian Creed within its own creed. in, I think it's Article 38 or something. If you, I would really love to encourage people to, I'll put a link to this in the video description as well.

Just go read the Orthodox Creed of 1679. It's a Baptist confession. And it's amazing how self-consciously Protestant and lowercase O Orthodox, it is. It starts off in the very first sentence affirming adherence to the ancient and apostolical faith that was once delivered unto the saints. It goes on to identify these three different kinds of, of Protestants in England, of which the Baptists were won, but then it emphasizes that their disagreements with these other two Protestant traditions are in circumstantial things,

and they agree on the fundamentals. And then it goes on to list a bunch of heretical groups from the early church and condemns their views, and then it condemns the reappearance of some of these heretical groups among the anti-trinitarian groups of their own day. I should say these reappearance at these heretical doctrines among some of the anti-Trinitarian groups of their own day, like the Sosinians, for example, and over and against these heretical movements, it affirms what it calls the ancient way, the truths of Christ, evidenced by the holy oracles in Scripture. The first several articles of this confession of faith by the Baptists goes through the Trinity, goes through Christology, thoroughly orthodox. And then, yeah, when you get to Article 38,

It includes within it the Apostles, Nicene, and Athanasian creeds. It calls them thoroughly to be received and believed. It says they're necessary to be understood of all Christians, and it commends the role that they play for family catechesis, so like teaching children in the faith, and it also says they're helpful to prevent heresy. You can put all these quotes up on the screen, you can see. So this is a Baptist confession of faith that unfolds within it the Nicene Creed,

along with Apostles Creed and Athanasian Creed. And that's not eccentric. That's the historic Baptist posture. I know that people find it, this is an adjustment for people today, but historically, the sort of Baptist ethos has been more like that. It's been more lowercase C Catholic, been more confessional. So you can find this, for example, in the Orthodox Catechism of Hercules Collins. He's a 17th century Baptist pastor.

This is modeled from the Heidelberg Catechism, so it's question and answer, a teaching document, wonderful resource. And he says all of these creeds, the same three I just mentioned, apostles, Nicene, Athanasian, are thoroughly to be believed and embraced by all those that would be accounted of Christians. And in particular, he calls the Apostles' Creed the sum of the gospel industriously opened and explained. I've thought about doing a video series. My dad encouraged me to do this.

I thought it was a great idea. You know, it's always like the thing of like, this won't get a lot of views, but who cares? Just do what's edifying, you know, a video series just working through each phrase of the Apostles' Creed. So I thought it might be a good video, just because it's such a wonderful resource that we need to know more today. So suffice to say, like I said, brief video, just hitting the main point here. This is pretty simple. Affirming the Nicene Creed has been a historic, uncontroversial Baptist conviction. What is happening today is that some Baptists are falling away a little bit from our own roots.

And so we need reform. We need to go back to basically revitalize our own tradition and go back to our historic, more Catholic posture. And that is one reason why I hope that all Baptists would just, without hesitation, you know, it's like, not to be too blunt, but we have a lot of complicated issues to face today. Lots. Affirming the Nicene Creed is not one of them. This is one that should be simple. We should be able to get right on board with it. But what about this phrase?

You know, some people worry about this phrase. One baptism for the remission of sins. And this came up. This was the clip, I think it was from David Allen, who was commenting on this, and there were some concerns about this. But I read an article about this at churchleaders.com. I'll link to this as well, if I can remember, three links to put in the video description. Remember that in my brain.

And even Alan says, Baptist can wholeheartedly endorse the nice, creed when properly interpreted. So even him is not saying it's the nice and creed is bad. So just to be clear about that. But I think it's unfortunate that there would even be worries or hesitations about this language because it's straight out of the Bible. And I know that Alan knows that as well. But this is Peter at the day of Pentecost when he says, repent and be baptized, every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. Now, so in other words, if we have a problem with that phrase, we're not just having a problem with the Nicene Creed, one of the most universal creeds in all of church history and universally accepted, but we have a problem with Scripture.

We have a problem with Peter, the Apostle Peter. Now, I think the concern that could come up is someone can say, yeah, but this can be misinterpreted. And to meet that concern, I would simply say, look, biblical language can always be misinterpreted. The solution to that is not to avoid biblical language, the solution to that is to oppose bad interpretations. If we start, you know, think, think how that can go if we start avoiding language just because it can be misinterpreted, right? If the language, it's just, it's healthy and salutary to follow the language of Holy Scripture. Okay, so now here, but the worry is this. The worry is, but does this commit Baptists to affirming baptismal regeneration? Now, a lot of people watching

this video are not Baptists and are going to say, you know, instead of worrying about baptism regeneration, you should be just, you should be what I said about the Nicene Creed. You should be without hesitation and enthusiastic about that. Okay, I'll address that just briefly at the end in a moment, but first just to speak again to my fellow Baptist here, historically, Baptist had no trouble affirming this language and just clarifying what we think it means. And this would be true for not just Baptists, but other traditions as well. Here's how Hercules Collins puts it in the Orthodox Catechism. Does this outward washing with water itself wash away sins?

This is question 78, and he says, no, only Christ's blood and the Holy Spirit cleanse us from all sins. Next question, why then does the Holy Spirit call baptism the washing of rebirth and the washing away of sins? Answer, God has good reason for these words. He wants to teach us that the blood and spirit of Christ wash away our sins, just as water washes away dirt from our bodies. But more important, he wants to assure us by this divine pledge and sign that the washing away of our sins spiritually is as real as physical washing with water.

Now, I know a lot of non-Baptists right now are going to be wanting to disagree with Hercules Collins right now. So if that's you, just hang with me for just a moment. I'll try to address that concern a little bit. But just to speak to Baptists here for a moment and just to make this clear, historically, this language has not been a concern for us, and it shouldn't be today. It's also worth pointing out that historically Baptists have believed in sacraments. First of all, we call them sacraments historically, as well as ordinances, you know, but also we've believed in sacramental efficacy, meaning the sacraments do something. God is at work through the sacraments. They are effective signs. So the idea of it's just a symbol, you know, this is how it's often thought of today. That's not really the historic way of thinking about

baptism or the Lord's Supper. We historically have spoken of them as means of grace, and we, especially with baptism, we have historically thought of it as a public sealing and confirmation of faith. God is at work through baptism. I did another video on this, I won't go into it here. Check out Stan Fowler's book, an excellent book that goes into that. So basically, the argument here is pretty simple. If you find yourself going against the Apostle Peter and the First Council of Nicaea, Collins and historic Baptists, you're out of alignment with scripture, Catholicity, and historic Baptist views, right? So this one should be easy. Baptists, let's just get in with the Nicene Creed. And, okay, most people get the point. But now, final wing of the video, let's address

this concern from the non-Baptists looking in saying, you know, basically, oh, how cute, you Baptist, you want to affirm the Nicene Creed, good for you. There's a lot of condescension toward Baptist as well. Again, some of that's warranted because of the street-level perceptions. But basically, the concern here is you can't really authentically say baptism for the remission of sins because historically, every single person until Zwingli believed in baptism or regeneration, so you don't mean by that what the Nicene Creed meant, right? that's the concern, how to respond to that. A couple things. First of all, just to say,

it is a little odd when Baptists are singled out on this. If this argument is true, it applies so far as I can tell, pretty much equally, with only a few exceptions, pretty much equally to the Presbyterians, the Congregationalists, a few other Protestant denominations as well. They have a pretty similar view of baptismal efficacy. They just differ on who are the subjects of baptism, not what is baptism doing. So this isn't just about Baptists, but sometimes we get a little bit singled out. But second and more to the point, basically just to say here, try to make this point briefly. We do need to interpret this phrase, one baptism for the remission of sins. What does that mean? What does the preposition four mean there? Peter's language in Acts two,

okay, go eight chapters later to where Peter is preaching the gospel to Cornelius and his household, and Luke says the Holy Spirit falls on those who are hearing. They are speaking in tongues. Peter says, look, they have the Holy Spirit, just like we have the Holy Spirit. And for that reason, he commands them to be baptized. So the order of events here is conversion first, which I'm defining as faith and repentance in response to the proclamation of the gospel. Secondarily, and really kind of during that, you have reception of the Holy Spirit manifested by speaking in tongues, and then subsequent to the reception of the Spirit, which Peter recognizes as the same spirit we have, there's the baptism. Now, there are different definitions of the phrase baptismal regeneration on that

one thing that plagues these discussions a little bit, but most commonly, and the most rigorous and common definition is that baptism causes salvation. So when you get to passages like this, and I would actually say most of the times you actually see it play out in the Book of Acts, but this is the clearest example. It's kind of intuitive. It's not that nuanced to wonder, how does this work? You know, if it causes salvation, how does the effect come prior to the cause? right? And basically one of the reasons that a lot of us, I've gotten to points where I've kind of wondered, like maybe I should believe in baptism or regeneration. I'm open to that, try to be open. Now make sure I'm not being stubborn, you know, like, hey, you know, life is complicated.

Sometimes you have to think things through and kind of come at it and say, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm really missing something. But what I kind of come back to is basically in every direction I look, and by every metric I know how to evaluate, I see Cornelius is everywhere. So for me, Acts 10 is not just like one really strange exceptional circumstances. Like, this is just a normal paradigm that I see everywhere. And this is typically where this discussion plays out, is those who believe in baptism or regeneration, typically will see Cornelius as an exception. I had a dialogue with Trent Horn on this. We talked a lot about Cornelius. And then there was a video, I think it was from like a Sative Vacantist type who was criticizing both of us, saying both Gavin and

Trent get this wrong, Cornelius was not baptized or was not regenerated yet. So there, and then I had a conversation on Twitter with somebody who was saying, well, Cornelius had the Holy Spirit, but he didn't have forgiveness yet. So you can find some hybrid views like that. So there's a little bit of a different, different ways of understanding Acts 10 from the baptismal regeneration perspective. But I think Trent's position is the best one and the most common one. This is what I see in Thomas Aquinas, for example, where you just allow for exceptions. And sometimes the category of baptism of desire will be how this is explained. But even in the most rigorous views, you usually, like in the early church, at least for the martyrs, usually there are exceptions where you can

get regenerated apart from God is not bound to the sacraments and so forth. In the Lutheran tradition, which very staunchly affirms baptismal regeneration, you find Johann Gerhard, he allows for exceptions. He says, when, therefore, they are baptized who have already been regenerated through the word, that's like Cornelius, as a seed, they have no need of regeneration through baptism, but in them baptism is a confirmation and sealing of regeneration. So those words are the words I use as a Baptist, and that historically Baptists have used confirmation and sealing of the regeneration that has already taken place through faith. And the difference then is Geerhard is saying that's an exceptional circumstance, and the Baptists historically have said, no, that's more of the norm. And we say that's more

of the norm because it looks like that's more what you see in Acts throughout Acts almost every time. And we say that, again, I just, everywhere I look, I see the fruits of regeneration, like, whether it be speaking in tongues or whatever, I see Cornelius as every direction I look. It just looks like the fruits of regeneration are manifest while people are still in the catechetical process. I don't know how to make sense of that if these people aren't really regenerated. But suppose that is wrong. For the present purposes of this video, my point is simply this very modest point. Whether or not Cornelius is the exception or he is the norm, we can still say that baptism

was for the forgiveness of Cornelius's sins in those cases. Whether those cases are 2%, 1%, 99%, whatever, they do happen, and we can still use the language of four, baptism for the forgiveness of sins. This is how language can work. And in other videos, I've teased this out, talking about the term metonymy to describe how baptism can function as the sort of public and official expression of salvation, but be used to refer to the whole of salvation. And a metaphor I've given is a king's coronation service. So, you know, we can say that Queen Elizabeth the second, exceeded to the throne on June 2nd, 1953, which she did during her ceremony, the coronation service. There's this public recognition of her as the queen, and there's lots of

language about how she's becoming the queen. People are going through the rituals and swearing fealty to her and so forth. But technically, it wasn't causative. She was already the queen starting in early February of that year when her father died and she was in Kenya, and, you know, basically very quickly, she inherits the royal powers and is sworn in, and then the coronation service is this public official expression of that, but it can still be spoken of as that's when she becomes the queen or takes the throne and so forth. That's just one metaphor to try to get it how we think in the Baptist tradition, baptism is functioning, and we see it as comparable to circumcision, which can also be spoken of as representative of the entire package that it

symbolizes, and you see that in Romans 229 and elsewhere. The sign and the thing signified can sort of stand in for one another. Language can work like this. So basically, this is how we see the Cornelius's of the world. We see them as more of the norm. That, obviously, we'll disagree about that. We can have a disagreeing about that. What should not be in dispute is that we can all say baptism is for the forgiveness of sins, including Cornelius. That's acceptable language. thing. Some people, because I have to say this, because some people are going to say that just goes against all of church history. Everybody in church history everywhere didn't think like that. But actually, that's just not true. Again, if you get into the details, you get into the weeds, you see, this is

tricky because you can find Christians who will speak of baptism as regenerating and saving, even while they're recognizing, well, actually, technically, kind of like Queen Elizabeth had all her royal powers in March and April and May, technically these catechumans are regenerated already. And I've drawn attention to that in Justin Martyr, for example. Cyril of Jerusalem is another example who uses Cornelius as an example to the catacumans he's talking to, and he says that because, he was baptized, because his soul had been born again at faith. He sees baptism and faith as this kind of process, a two-stage process, but the being born-again part starts at faith. That's his language, being born again or regenerated at faith and then sort of consummated in baptism.

Okay. That's one example of the complexity here. It's like, is that baptism or regeneration? Well, yeah, kind of. But these are all the nuances that get glossed over. It's not in the rigorous sense of a cause. You see, he's recognizing Cornelius has already been born again at the moment of faith. That's just one example of that.

So I'm just trying to, I guess, flag, like, because there's a lot of triumphalism against anybody who questions baptismal regeneration. I've thought about maybe I just need to start saying, I believe in baptismal regeneration, just so that then people will say, well, what do you mean by that? And then we can define it, and then we can get traction in the discussion. Probably shouldn't do that, though. But I'm trying to find ways to get the conversation to move forward so the people don't just say, everybody believed in baptism or regeneration, you don't, and we glide over all these nuances of how we need to define the word, even just defining the word regeneration will help us, because it had a little more loose meaning early on, I think.

Anyways, the main point is not to argue for a Baptist view of these things, but the main point is to say Baptist historically have affirmed the Nicene Creed, and today should do so without any hesitation and with enthusiasm. We have complicated issues, but this is one I think we can all get on board with. All right, thanks for watching, and if you are supportive of Truth Unites, there's a lot of people out there who express gratitude for my videos. Thank you. I read every email that comes in, by the way.

They come into my website. I'm sorry that I can't reply to them all. I'm just inundated. I'm trying to pull away from my screen and be with my family more, be outside more. I'm going to go for a bike ride right now. You know, it's good for my brain to not be on the screen too much. So I'm sorry I don't respond to all the emails. I do read them all.

I appreciate them all. For those who feel a sense of joy and supporting Truth Unites, I do really appreciate it. People who give regularly, either on the website or on Patreon, get involved in the community. You get early access to a lot of the videos. I get feedback from you. You come to supporter-only Zoom meetings. It's kind of fun, you know. and you don't have to do any of that, but you have access to that if you give regularly,

and I do need the support. I do really appreciate it, so thanks for those of you who do that. Don't forget to like, subscribe all that stuff too. That always helps. I always forget to say those things, but thanks. All right, let me know what you think in the comments, and we'll keep talking about baptism or regeneration. This is one of those issues that I think it actually is more complicated than some people make it, so we've got to keep talking about it. All right, thanks for watching, everybody.