Self-salvation is rampant among religious circles today. The idea that you can reach up and obtain the pinnacle of religious bliss is found in the eight-fold path of Buddhists and the five pillars of Islam. Even the so-called Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints shrouds a semblance of grace with an effort to save oneself when it claims, “For we labor diligently to write, to persuade our children, and also our brethren, to believe in Christ, and to be reconciled to God; for we know that it is by grace we are saved, after all we can do (emphasis mine).”[1] While our current cultural context in North America has its opponents to the gospel, the air around the early church saw a more dangerous situation. Self-salvation was a real threat, and action was time-critical. Christians responded by gathering from around the known world to produce the earliest creeds. These creeds headed off attempts to undermine and subvert the gospel in the church’s vulnerable infancy. In this article, I’ll give the background to these early creeds and show how they countered self-salvation.
1. Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi 2:23.
The Challenge of Greek Philosophy
A proper investigation into the church’s earliest creeds must start before the time of Christ with Alexander the Great. Shortly after the end of the Old Testament (~ 400 BC), Alexander the Great (b. 356 BC) rose to power and conquered the Persian, Egyptian, Hellenic and Macedonian empires—all before his twenty-seventh birthday! History records praise for Alexander as a military genius, but less people know that he was a student of Aristotle. Alexander’s dream was not just dominion over geography, but culture. Before his death in 323 BC, he set in motion a plan to deeply ingrain Greek education, writing, politics, and thought into the farthest reaches of his empire. While Alexander would not live to see his plan come to fruition, it was resoundingly successful. The Hellenization of most of the known world lasted for centuries (and in some ways even to the present day). A powerful testament to this is the fact that even though Rome was the dominant power at the time of our Lord, the New Testament was written in the common language of the day—Greek, and not the Latin preferred by Roman elites. Greek was king, and with it all its theological and intellectual doctrine.
The Aristotelian thought of the empire was downstream of Socrates and most importantly his student Plato. Plato had begun ideas of deity that saw traditional Greek polytheistic worship fade away. Platonic thought introduced concepts like that of a “One” or “highest god” that was superior to helping deities such as the “Word (logos)” and “World Spirit.”[2] Salvation was a work of the self by education in having the “Word and World Spirit” help you up to the “One.”[3]
2. Donald Fairburn and Ryan M. Reeves, The Story of Creeds and Confessions: Tracing the Development of the Christian Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2019), 52.
3. Norman Geisler, Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1999), 594.
Early in the third century AD, Platonism began to infiltrate the church and produce a particular philosophy in what is known as Christian Platonism. Theology from Christian Platonists like Origen (185–253 AD) led to ideas that the Father only is the “One”, or highest being, and the Son and Spirit simply help humans work their way up to the Father. This backdrop, resulting from the fallout of Greek thought and culture, was what the early Patristics were up against in confronting the heretical ideas of their day.
The Nicene Creed
Fast forward half-a-century to a charismatic theologian named Arius. Arius took the baton from the Christian Platonists and furthered the idea that true salvation is caused by the Son initiating and aiding an upward ascent to the Father. The Son, he argued, was created. For Arius, God would never make the humiliating descent to mankind. Instead, God would provide a way up to himself. The result was a sharp division of theology in and among Christian churches. This division prompted the first Christian emperor Constantine to summon all 1,800 bishops to Nicaea in the year 325 AD. Although only around 300 bishops attended, the product of the council was what became known as the Creed of Nicaea. This creed took a more solid form after Constantinople in 381 AD and was finalized after the Synod of Toledo in 589 AD.
The Nicene Creed accomplished two goals in combatting the heresy of Arianism. First, it claimed the Father, Son, and Spirit possessed the exact same “essence” or “substance” (homoousios) not simply a similar “essence” or “substance” (homoiousios). This led to the second goal in claiming that as the eternal God of the universe, the Son “came down.” It is no coincidence this phrase is central both doctrinally and spatially in the creed.[4] The fathers at Nicaea wanted to cement the doctrine that the Son was God and that he came down to save humans because humans could never come up to him and save themselves.
4. Fairburn and Reeves, The Story of Creeds, 83-90.
The Chalcedonian Definition
The church never enjoyed full unity in the aftermath of Nicaea. In fact, other heresies such as that of Sabellianism (mid–third century) found new life in claiming the Son was homoousios with the Father. Sabellius’s theology became what is known as Modalism, which erases personhood within the Trinity altogether. Nicaea was a step in the direction of rooting out self-salvation, yet the battle continued as the church found new fronts.
The next closest front after Nicaea came in the teachings of Apollinaris (d. 390 AD) and Nestorius (d. 450 AD). Apollinaris taught that Christ had a human body, but not a human mind. The Nestorians perpetuated the idea that Christ was a divinely indwelt man who could lead humans up to God. While each would say they affirmed the confessions coming out of Nicaea, Christ became essentially two distinct persons with two distinct natures. Nestorius thus walked down the same heretical road as Arius: Christ was a creature, a graced man. Therefore, salvation rested in one who was not fully God, and by extension humans needed to be led up to God.[5] Cyril of Alexandria became a stalwart against this teaching and his Formula of Reunion sought to establish the hypostatic union in claiming Christ was one person with two natures. While his work bore some fruit, it wouldn’t be until several years later at Chalcedon that the church staked its claim in Cyril’s doctrine. In a council that lasted about a month, the body produced a creed that contained one central paragraph concerning the incarnate Son. This paragraph became known as the Chalcedonian Definition and cleared up any ambiguity left over from Nicaea pertaining to the person and nature of Christ. Christ was one person with two natures who came down to save humans. Once again, the church reaffirmed a staunch defense against man’s ability to save himself.
5. Ibid.
The Apostles’ Creed
The attention thus far has been on the two creeds resulting from the first and fourth ecumenical church councils at Nicaea and Chalcedon. However, in the background of these councils was a pivotal formulation in what would eventually be known as the Apostles’ Creed. The earliest form of this creed was found in the 5th century, but many believe its roots lie in what was known as the Old Roman Creed used in baptismal confessions.[6] Scholars can trace mentions of the creed’s 12 components in the works of men like Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Origen dating back to 140 AD[7] with the first recording of the final form showing up in the Swiss Alps between 710-724 AD.[8] The history of the creed’s development is somewhat ambiguous, but it was probably written to educate the Christian populace. In the Apostles’ Creed, the church sought a simple and memorable creed that people could recite. In the east this was against the backdrop of Arianism in the fifth century, but in the west, the Frankish monarch Charlemagne solidified the Apostles’ Creed’s for educational needs. Between 811–813 AD, Charlemagne was successful in convincing Rome to adopt the Frankish kingdom’s creed. This became the Apostles’ Creed in the form we know it today—a universal work to summarize the gospel. The centrality of Christ, his person and work, along with explicit language concerning “the remission of sins” provided the church with another weapon to combat the perpetual desire for humans to save themselves. The universal and easily adoptable nature of the Apostles’ Creed saw Christianity slowly became not only the dominant religion of the ancient world, but the dominant thought concerning human anthropology and soteriology.[9]
6. Fairburn and Reeves, The Story of Creeds, 109.
7. Justin Holcomb, Know the Creeds and Councils (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2014), 26.
8. Fairburn and Reeves, The Story of Creeds, 112.
9. Ibid., 114-115.
Conclusion
The reach of Alexander’s influence was a powerful and formidable enemy of the gospel as it cemented itself in the minds of the elites and common folk in the early church’s context. Greek policy and thought had significant literary tailwinds, and overcoming them would require much of the same weaponry. The early creeds provided this essential documentation and confession as to what the Scriptural witness so clearly stated. Human pride is as old as man himself. It seeks to puff up and conquer in all aspects of human endeavors, including that of salvation. In these pivotal early creeds, the person and work of Christ was the central and crucial testament leaving the confessor only two choices: 1) reject and elevate yourself or 2) accept and cry out that we like sheep have gone astray and only the person and work of Christ can save us. Calvin opens his Institutes with, “We cannot aspire to him in earnest until we have begun to be displeased with ourselves.”[10] Let us echo Calvin’s posture and praise God that he opened the church’s early confession and literature by arguing with the world that man cannot save himself but must himself be saved through the person and work of the Son.
