Jared Ortiz and Daniel A. Keating. 2024. The Nicene Creed: A Scriptural, Historical, and Theological Commentary. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic.

In 381, more than thirty bishops of the “Macedonian” party who denied the full divinity of the Holy Spirit arrived at the Council of Constantinople, decided the decision was rigged, and walked out. The council fathers hoped to keep the door open, so, when they drafted the article on the Holy Spirit—the most significant addition to the original creed of 325—they reached for careful scriptural language rather than declaring outright that the Spirit is “God” and consubstantial with the Father. The diplomacy failed, yet the wording they chose to confess the Holy Spirit remains the church’s fundamental confession to this day. Most Christians have recited that article their whole lives without ever wondering why it stops short of the word “God.” Jared Ortiz and Daniel Keating not only pose the question about the curious change in wording in the creed, they also answer it, and the answer is a small master class in how creeds actually get written—by real bishops, under real pressure, with real losses (148).

That instinct to discuss the development of the Nicene Creed is the signature of this book, and it is what lifts the volume above nearly all other books of its kind. Ortiz and Keating, both patristics scholars, announce a modest aim: “not to break new ground in research or interpretation but to present the faith in a winsome, compelling, and helpful way” for “preachers, teachers, and other thoughtful Christians” (11). But their working standard is more ambitious: each phrase of the creed “excludes other real possibilities,” and they want readers “to feel the weight of the alternative choices so they can appreciate the achievement of the Creed” (12). By my count they deliver on that promise in every chapter without exception. They restore “begotten, not made” and homoousios to their polemical settings. The apparently decorative “and his kingdom will have no end” turns out to be a targeted strike against Marcellus of Ancyra (137–38). Even “one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins,” which most listeners hear as devotional boilerplate, emerges as a ruling in the third-century rebaptism crisis, with Cyprian named, fairly and without disparagement, as the side that lost (194–96).

This historical honesty extends to concessions few popular treatments would risk. Ortiz and Keating’s homoousios discussion volunteers that the term is unscriptural, first appears among Gnostic writers, was condemned at Antioch in 268, and was adopted at Nicaea largely because Arius could not accept it (92–95). The chapter on creation concedes that creatio ex nihilo was not the position of the earliest Christians and that Scripture alone does not settle the question. The final chapter opens by quoting R. P. C. Hanson—an Anglican, and the standard critical historian of the controversy—on the influence of baptismal formulae on the articles on the church, baptism, and resurrection (172). A commentary that opens its ecclesiology chapter with that admission earns a reader’s trust. The authors’ exposition rests throughout on the best current scholarship (Ayres, Behr, Anatolios, Daley, Levering) while their sidebars set patristic witnesses, liturgical texts, and contemporary questions alongside the main line of argument. Their three-language creedal apparatus and parallel Latin-Greek text of appendix 2 assume an intelligent reader, and the assumption is a compliment.

What surprised this reviewer most is the book’s ecumenical range. Ortiz and Keating’s treatment of the Filioque is a highlight (152–61). The authors separate the theological question from the procedural one and concede the latter frankly: “Across the board, the Orthodox believe that it was improper for the Western Church to insert a new word unilaterally into the Creed” (159). They note that Rome never added the words “and the Son” to the Greek text nor required them of Eastern Catholics (156), cite the 2003 North American Orthodox-Catholic Consultation, and give the witness not to a Latin writer but to Maximus the Confessor. Even in appendix 1 they bracket “[and the Son]” in their own reference text of the creed with a note explaining that it is a later addition. Add the defense of Nicene soteriology conducted through the Methodist patristics scholar Frances Young (106–7), Congar paired with the Anglican Thiselton, and Byzantine hymnody quoted by permission of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, and a pattern emerges: at precisely the points where a Catholic commentary might be expected to turn defensive, this one reaches outward. Protestant and Orthodox readers will find themselves addressed as guests, not targets.

A few notes belong in the ledger. The volume’s otherwise scrupulous habit of flagging contested texts—it marks the exegetical disputes over Proverbs 8:22 and 2 Corinthians 3:17 and concedes there is “no exact scriptural basis” for “the life of the world to come” (205n50)—goes quiet in two notes where Augustine’s dictum on the authority of the church (29) and Irenaeus’s famous sentence on Roman principalitas (189) are presented without any signal that each has been a storm center of interpretation for centuries. The book is entitled to its Catholic reading of both; a sentence acknowledging the debate would serve the very readers its ecumenical practice elsewhere so clearly has in view.

This reviewer proposes two suggestions for expansion, both of which would strengthen an already strong volume. First, chapter 2’s primary text on providence and suffering is the book’s thinnest passage. Yet, the materials for a far richer answer sit in chapter 6, where the resurrection sections recover the body-soul unity of the human person and Athenagoras’s argument that justice requires the redemption of the whole person (201–4). A cross-reference of the kind the authors deploy elsewhere (202n44 ties the eschatology back to creatio ex nihilo) would let their own best theology bear that pastoral weight. Second, a volume this attentive to the church’s relation to the Christian East is strangely quiet about her relation to Israel. The authors’ mention of Augustine’s Jacob-and-Esau figure (174) and the swift movement from Deuteronomy 7:6 to “this people becomes the Church” (182) pass without the comment that Nostra Aetate and the post-conciliar magisterium—the very sources this book handles so deftly on other questions—would supply. Nothing here is hostile; these authors simply never ask the question, though they are unusually well equipped to ask it. A short conclusion would also be welcome: the volume ends, a touch abruptly, in its final devotional section, though the closing meditation on the creed’s “Amen” as the mirror of its “I believe” accomplishes some of what a formal conclusion would (208).

These are the notes one writes in the margin of a book one intends to keep. The 1700th anniversary of Nicaea has occasioned a shelf of commemorative volumes; most rehash the story. This one does something more difficult: it lets readers stand where the bishops stood, feel the live alternatives, and understand the creed as an achievement rather than an heirloom. In an era when confessional communities increasingly struggle to say what they believe and why it should bind anyone, that is no small public service. Ortiz and Keating have produced a fine single volume through which preachers, teachers, students, and thoughtful Christians, especially confessional Catholics, can learn what the Nicene Creed says, why it says it that way, and what it cost.

Ryan M. Reeves
Mirror Labs