What is this page about?
Creed
A creed is a short statement of what Christians believe. The Nicene Creed was written in the year 325 and finished in 381. Churches have said or sung it every Sunday for more than a thousand years.
Almost every kind of Christian church shares the Nicene Creed. In 2025 it was 1,700 years old. In that year the Pope and the leader of the Orthodox churches stood together at the old place of the meeting and said it together.
Some churches today do not use it. There are two views about this.
The old view
Say in public what you believe.The Bible is the only final authority. The creed is not a second Bible. But every church must decide what the Bible means on the great questions. On the question “Who is God?”, the whole church has already answered, carefully, after a long fight. A church should say so openly. Then members can check what they are taught. This page agrees with this view.
The newer view
No creed but the Bible.People who can make mistakes wrote the creeds. Creeds have divided Christians. The Bible never tells us to have one. If we hold on to the Bible, we will hold on to the truth. This page tests this view.
Three things are true, and this page keeps them in mind.
- Most churches that say “no creed but the Bible” believe everything in the creed. They just do not use it.
- Many good churches never say the creed aloud. They have their own longer written statements that say the same thing.
- Both sides agree that the Bible is the final authority.
So the question is small. When a church puts the creed away, what has it put away? And who decides what the church believes?
The short answer
1. The creed was written because Bible words alone could not end an argument about the Bible. A popular preacher named Arius taught that the Son of God was God’s first and greatest creation. He knew the Bible very well. The church leaders tried to answer him with Bible phrases. His group agreed to every one, with a private meaning. A man who was there says that they were seen “whispering to each other and winking with their eyes”. So the leaders chose words that Arius could not accept: the Son is of one substance with the Father. That means the Son is truly God, as the Father is.
2. An emperor did not simply force it on the church. For most of the next fifty years, the emperors helped the other side. A church teacher wrote about one meeting in the year 359: “The whole world groaned, and was astonished to find itself Arian.” The creed lived because ordinary churches kept saying it when it was dangerous.
3. Almost everyone accepted it. Catholic and Orthodox churches sing it every week. The Lutherans put it at the front of their book of beliefs. The Church of England and the Reformed churches of Holland, France and Switzerland accept it by name.
4. The Reformers did not think that “the Bible alone” means throwing the creed away. See Part 2.
5. The saying “no creed but the Bible” has a birthday. It comes from American revival movements between 1804 and 1809. See Part 4.
6. A church with no creed still explains the Bible. Every church decides who is baptized, what the Lord’s Supper means, who can preach, and what the Bible says about God. Those decisions are its creed. The only question is this. Are they written down, where a member can read them? Or are they in the pastor’s head, where they change when he changes?
7. The old mistakes come back. Some groups today teach that Jesus was God’s first creation. Some teach that the Father, the Son and the Spirit are one person with three jobs. They say so in their own printed statements.
A survey in 2022 asked American evangelical Christians about this sentence: “Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God”. Seventy-three out of a hundred agreed. But more than ninety out of a hundred also agreed that God is three persons. These people do not follow Arius. Nobody ever showed them the fence.
8. Every group that does not accept the creed’s teaching has its own written creed. So the real choice was never “creed or Bible”. It was always “one creed or another”.
This is my opinion. “No creed but the Bible” is an honest saying. But it describes something that cannot exist: a church that reads the Bible and does not explain it. What really happens is that the church’s explanation is not written. It has as much power as a creed. But nobody can check it.
A church that believes everything in the creed but never says it would not worry me. A church whose leaders do not know if they believe it would make me ask, “Who decides here what the Bible says?” And a church that does not accept what the creed says is asking me to believe that every reader of the same Bible for 1,700 years was wrong about God. A saying is not enough evidence for that.
Could Arius agree to it?
Imagine that you are at the meeting in 325. The leaders want to answer Arius with Bible words only. Could his group agree to each phrase?
- “The Son is from God.” They agreed at once. In the Bible, all things are from God: “one God, the Father, of whom are all things” (1 Corinthians 8:6). So a created Son is “from God” too.
- “The Son is the image of God.” They agreed. The Bible also calls a human being “the image and glory of God” (1 Corinthians 11:7).
- “The Son is the power of God.” They agreed. In the Bible, God even calls a great cloud of insects his army.
- “The Son is always with the Father.” They agreed. “Always” can mean “all the time since he was made”.
- “The Son is of one substance with the Father.” They could not agree to this. It says that the Son is of the Father’s own being.
This scene is the heart of this page. People who loved the Bible offered its words one after another. The other side accepted every one. The same thing happens today when a church answers the question “What do you believe about Christ?” with one verse only.
What the Reformers said
Many people think that “no creed but the Bible” is the Reformation’s “Bible alone”, carried to its end. People asked the Reformers about this, and we have their answers.
Our Churches, with common consent, do teach that the decree of the Council of Nicaea … is true and to be believed without any doubting.
The Augsburg Confession, 1530, its first sentence
In simple words: All our churches agree and teach this: the decision of the meeting at Nicaea is true, and we must believe it without any doubt.
Three more voices:
- The Lutherans, 1577. The Bible is “the only judge, rule, and standard”. The creeds are not judges. They are witnesses. They show how the church understood the Bible when people argued about it.
- John Calvin, 1559. He said that the great early church meetings contain “nothing but the pure and genuine interpretation of Scripture”. In simple words: only the true meaning of the Bible.
- The Church of England, 1571. The creeds “ought thoroughly to be received and believed”, because they can be proved from the Bible.
Some people say, “The creed uses words that are not in the Bible.” Calvin answered this. If we may use only words from the Bible, then every explanation of the Bible is forbidden. That would forbid every sermon.
One honest difficulty
In 1537 an enemy said that Calvin taught false things. He demanded that Calvin sign one of the old creeds to prove himself. Calvin refused. This is the best evidence from a Reformer for the newer view. But the church examined Calvin and found his teaching true, and later he wrote the words above. So a man can hate it when a creed is used as a weapon, and still hold every word that it protects.
In the time of the Reformation, one movement put the creeds away and read the Bible in a new way. By 1605 it had a book of teaching that said Jesus did not exist before he was born.
Where the saying came from
“No creed but the Bible” sounds as old as the Bible. It is about two hundred years old.
| When | What happened | |
|---|---|---|
| 1719 | In London, a group of ministers voted by a small number not to require a statement that Christ is God. Many of them believed it. But in the next hundred years, many of their churches stopped believing in the Trinity. | |
| 1804 | In Kentucky, in America, some ministers closed their church organisation. They wrote that people should {q | take the Bible as the only sure guide to heaven}. |
| 1809 | A leader named Thomas Campbell wrote that nothing should be asked of Christians unless the Bible clearly teaches it. He added that he was against the wrong use of creeds, not the right use. | |
| 1821 | Barton Stone was the main leader of the 1804 group. He now taught that the Son {q | was not eternally begotten}. This is close to the teaching of Arius. Other teachers in his movement corrected him. Its churches believe in the Trinity today. |
| 1914 to 1916 | A new Pentecostal group began with no statement of faith. Within two years it divided over the question of whether God is one person with three jobs. Then it wrote a statement about the Trinity. Many ministers left. |
This does not prove that churches without creeds must go wrong. Many never do. But it shows how they stay right: they have good teachers at the right moment. That works only while the teachers are good.
Who decides, when nothing is written?
A written statement of belief does three things for an ordinary member.
- He can read it before he joins. He does not have to come for a year to find out.
- He can hold a teacher to it. “Our statement says this, and you taught the opposite.” That sentence has somewhere to go.
- It ties the next pastor. Without it, a church believes what its present pastor teaches.
A creed does not stop a church from going wrong. Many churches have kept the creed on paper and denied it in their preaching. But a creed makes the change easy to see, because people can compare the new teaching with the written words. When nothing is written, the standard moves with the teaching, and nobody can tell.
In a talk for children, a teacher explains the Trinity with water. “Water can be ice, water or steam. It is one thing in three forms.” Everyone likes it. Thirty years later, this is what the church thinks the Trinity is. But it is exactly a mistake that the creed was written against: one God who wears three masks, one after another. Nobody noticed, because the church had no sentence in regular use that would show the mistake.
Why is the water picture wrong? At the baptism of Jesus, the Son is in the water, the Spirit comes down, and the Father speaks, all at the same time.
How serious is it?
“This church does not use the Nicene Creed” can mean three very different things.
Serious
It denies what the creed says.It teaches that the Son was created, or that God is one person with three jobs, or that the Spirit is only a power. This says that the whole church was wrong about God for 1,700 years.
Ask about it
It believes it but will not write it down.This is fine if the church’s own statement says the same thing clearly and its teachers must keep to it. It is weak if not.
No worry
It just does not say it aloud.Its written statement says everything that the creed says. It only does not say the creed on Sundays.
Here are some churches. This page made them up.
- A church says on its website “no creed but the Bible”. But its statement of faith clearly says that God is one God in three equal persons, and its leaders must sign it. No worry. It does not like the word “creed”, but it has done everything the old view asks.
- A church has no written beliefs. Its pastor says that he believes in the Trinity, but he does not want to “put God in a box”. Ask about it. The belief is only in one man’s answer. Nothing ties the next pastor.
- A church teaches that Jesus is “the first and highest thing God made”. Serious. The creed was written against exactly this.
- The leaders of a church say that they have never read the Nicene Creed and that it does not matter. Ask about it. Then who in that church has decided what the Bible says about God?
Fair arguments against this page
“A vote does not make something true.” Right. A teaching is not true because many people said it. But think about who these people were. They read the same Bible carefully. They disagreed about almost everything else. On this point they read it in the same way. It is possible that they were all wrong. But that is a very large claim.
“The Reformers also said that the church had been wrong for hundreds of years.” They said this about some things. But look which way they faced. They said that newer teaching had left the older faith. And they began their first statement with Nicaea, to show that they stood inside the old faith.
“Creeds have divided Christians.” They have. The churches of the East and the West divided partly over a few words that the West added to this creed. But they can argue about those words because they have a shared text. Churches with nothing written do not disagree less. They only have nothing shared to point to.
“Our church believes all of it anyway.” That is probably true, and it matters. Then write it down. The old view asks for nothing more.
It is very small. A church does not have to say the Nicene Creed. It does not have to call anything a creed.
It needs to say in public, in writing, what it believes about God and Christ. It needs words that nobody can accept with a hidden meaning. And it needs to hold its teachers to them.
- The Nicene Creed was written because both sides were using the same Bible words with different meanings.
- Luther, Calvin and the Church of England all kept the creed. They said the Bible is the judge and the creed is a witness.
- “No creed but the Bible” began about 1804.
- Every church has beliefs. A written belief can be checked. An unwritten belief cannot.
Check it yourself
- Read the Nicene Creed slowly. Ask of each phrase: what mistake does this shut out?
- Read the first part of the Augsburg Confession of 1530. It takes two minutes.
- Do this one. Put your own church’s statement of beliefs next to the Nicene Creed, line by line. Does it say what the creed says, in clear words? Must the teachers keep to it? If the answer is yes, that is good to know and good to say.
The Bible words on this page come from the World English Bible. It is a modern translation, and anyone may copy it. The quick version and the full dossier use the King James Version, which is older and harder to read. The words are different, but the meaning is the same.
Want to read more?
The quick version says the same things in ordinary English and adds short exercises. The full dossier gives all the evidence and names every source.
Read the quick version → Read the full dossier →