A Rule for Reading
Catechisms were not alternatives to Bible reading but rules for reading the Bible rightly. The early church developed a system of Christian education, the catechumenate. It helped new believers transition from their pagan practices to a different way of life and thought. The catechumenate, says Fogleman, was “arguably the only educational institution unique to Christianity in its first 500 years.”
The early creeds were executive summaries of the storyline of the Bible. Candidates for baptism were expected to demonstrate their understanding of the biblical story by memorizing and commenting on each line of the Creed, whose three parts set forth the identity and saving work of the Father, Son and Spirit. This ensured that believers knew the significance of the “name” in which they were to be baptized when they officially became church members.
Baptism marked the new Christian’s entry into a “a chosen race … a holy nation” (1 Peter 2:9), neither Jew nor pagan. New believers needed schooling in their new identity. Indeed, the patristic scholar Frances M. Young observes that in many respects, “the early Church was more like a school than a religion” (Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture). Moreover, the goal of teaching disciples how to read the Bible rightly, Young goes on to say, “was to form the practice and belief of Christian people, individually and collectively.”
The Creeds, then, were both summaries of Scripture and guides to reading it rightly. And the Nicene Creed, in particular, was a rule for rightly identifying the man Jesus as the divine Son of God, begotten of the Father. As Coleman M. Ford and Shawn J. Wilhite say in Nicaea for Today, “Insofar as the church reads the Bible correctly and profitably, we do so in accordance with the Nicene Creed.”
Speaking Nicenese Today
In an age of religious and other kinds of pluralism, learning how to walk as children of light does not come naturally. These new first-generation Christians in the Global South, like preceding generations and their counterparts in the West, will need to learn to worship in spirit and truth.
As in the second century, the 21st-century church must take Jesus’ Great Commission with all seriousness. We make disciples by helping them to read, understand and inhabit the wonderful new world of the Bible. But how can they read rightly, and understand without someone teaching? And how can they teach without some kind of catechism?
It is thanks to creeds like Nicaea that newly awakened believers learn to speak truly of Jesus, to identify him as “light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made.” The fields are ripe, not only for evangelism (that’s already happening), but for making disciples. The Sixth Awakening learners are plentiful, but the instructors are few.