Celebrating Christian Centenaries
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 68, No. 1 - Fall 2025
Editor: Malcolm B. Yarnell III
By Kevin DeYoung. Wheaton: Crossway, 2025, 96 pp., $12.99.
Kevin L. DeYoung, an associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, serves as senior pastor at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina. As the title bespeaks, the Nicene Creed is universally considered as “the most important creed ever written” due to its being the first ecumenical creed in church history, which signifies it is “officially adopted with the express purpose that it should be binding on every church everywhere” (9, 23).
The three-fold method laying out the book, i.e., historical, theological, and devotional, brings the appropriate structure enough to draw attention as an introductory resource of the Nicene Creed (10). Forming seven chapters with each wording sourced from the Creed itself, the author makes specific emphases on what the readers need to be reminded in terms of the phrases.
The starting phrase of the Creed, “We believe,” implies from the early church era the gravity of the Christian creeds and confessions, which is, according to Jaroslav Pelikan cited by the author, “the utter seriousness with which they treat the issues of Christian doctrine as, quite literally, a matter of life and death, both here in time and hereafter in eternity” (33). The natural consequence of this conceptual and practical thought of ‘gravity’ developed the formation of the Nicene Creed, through which the author follows unfolding the succession of the theological flow of the Creed.
Defending consubstantiality among the three divine persons in the Godhead has prerequisite; that is, to nail firmly down the divine status and eternal authority of the second person of the Trinity, the “only begotten Son.” Up against Arius’s unreasonable, illogical, and distorted comprehension of monotheistic God, which argued the Son, “timelessly begotten by the Father,” was “created and established before all ages” and “did not exist prior to his begetting,” the Creed affirms categorically that the Son is “God of God,” “God from God,” “Light of Light,” and “the very God of very God” (38–40).
An interesting point of considerations dealing with the “esoteric formulas” like homoousios and hypostatic union, comes from the question, “Why not just stick to the language of the Bible?” (45). Among three responses suggested by the author, the third is fair to be mentioned, though the first two also make sense: “We need nonbiblical words to summarize and protect biblical truth” (46). “Clarifying rather than obscuring” the biblical teaching by using non-biblical terms helps Christians be more focused on “what Scripture actually teaches,” not just having arguments about the words themselves, according to Athanasius (47).
The theological thought of the “gravity” of the Creed flows to man’s salvation totally relying on the person of Christ because “only a Savior who is true God of true God can save us from our God-defying sin” (53). Explaining two categories of the work of Christ, the author gives three overarching observations that are directly related to the salvific gospel in and through Jesus Christ. In particular, the author brings one of the crucial statements from Gregory of Nazianzus, “the unassumed is the unhealed” (58). It means Christ “cannot save human beings if he has a rational soul that is of the same ‘stuff’ as the Logos instead of the same ‘stuff’ as man,” which was targeting the heresy of Apollinarianism which denied Christ’s human mind (57–59).
Finally, the “gravity” of the Creed reaches the full deity of the Holy Spirit who is called “the Lord,” “giver of life,” and being equal to the Father and the Son in rank and then, reaches the “four adjectives” of “church: one, holy, catholic, and apostolic,” which “is connected to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit” (62, 71–72). Though having a different interpretational understanding with the reviewer regarding the Filioque and baptism, the author provides a theological reflection and reasoning based upon the historical consideration.
As an introduction to the first ecumenical creed, this book, published in a timely manner, is recommended for those who are looking for a general guide to the theological journey into the fourth century.
