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November 28, 2025

Was Winston Churchill a Warmonger?? (And Other Lunacy in the “New Media”)

By Clarke Morledge

From the Christianity Along the Rhine blog series…

Lunatic conspiracy-like theories tend to run amuck at the most confusing times in the oddest places. You can spot these typically in the hands of self-promoting journalists and other thought leaders in the age of the “new media,” who have a misguided or otherwise inadequate grasp on human history.

Take for example statements made by popular conservative news commentator Candace Owens about the early Christian movement:

“And those Jews became Christians. Full stop. There is no hyphenated faith. You are either a Christian or you are a Jew. Christ fulfilled the law.”

Candace Owen apparently believes that the earliest Christ followers left their Judaism behind to follow Jesus. Such statements have given rise to a kind of “replacement theology,” which has infected Christian thinking in various quarters for centuries. Now, “replacement theology” can mean different things to different people, which does get confusing. But in this context, it suggests that God has somehow forgotten the Jews, and “replaced” the Jews with Christianity.

Has Ms. Owens never met a “messianic Jew?” A “messianic Jew” is a Jewish person who has become a Christian, believing that having faith in Jesus fulfills what Judaism is all about. The growth of messianic Judaism, particularly in the last generation or so, where thousands of Jews have come to know Jesus as their true Messiah, is one of the most remarkable stories of Christian missions in our day. In other words, contrary to what Ms. Owens thinks, you can be both a Jew and a Christian, and the trend is growing.

So, where do people get such bizarre ideas? Apparently, Ms. Owens has never learned that nearly all of Jesus’ earliest disciples were Jewish, and they never forsook their Jewish heritage. Even after the Apostle Paul became a Christian, he still acknowledged that he was both “a Hebrew of Hebrews“ (Philippians 3:4-5) and “I am a Jewish man” (Acts 21:39). If you read the text carefully, you will notice that Paul is speaking in the present tense, and not the past tense. Do we need a reminder that Jesus himself was Jewish?

Back in September, 2024, another popular conservative news commentator took a step in a similar direction. Tucker Carlson has been a television journalist, who after leaving the Fox television network, became perhaps the first Western journalist to score an in-person interview with Russian President Vladmir Putin, after the Ukraine-Russian war began in February, 2022. Since then, Mr. Carlson has been on an interesting journey, essentially re-discovering Christianity, as evidenced by several interviews he has given, which is very encouraging. Carlson’s interview with campus evangelist Cliff Knectle stands out as a positive example of engaging journalism, allowing a Christian evangelist to discuss the Gospel at length without being misconstrued.

That being said, Mr. Carlson crossed a line when he interviewed an American historian, Darryl Cooper, a man who Carlson describes as “may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” In that interview, Cooper makes the claim that during World War 2 era, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was a “warmonger” who was itching for a fight with Adolph Hitler, suggesting that Churchill became the “chief villain” of World War 2, making the war into something more than just the invasion of Poland. Sadly, Carlson did very little to challenge Cooper’s claims.

NOTE: This was all a year before THAT interview Tucker Carlson had with Nick Fuentes in October, 2025….. (And I need not go down the road of more recent conspiracy theories propagated by Ms. Owens, well documented by others …. which gets more and more bizarre by the day, wild claims which possess no evidence)…. But Tucker Carlson’s promotion of revisionist history by Darryl Cooper is the most troubling to me, partly because of the popular reach Tucker Carlson has, particularly among evangelical Christians.

It is troubling as Christians are often blamed for a good amount of antisemitism, needless antipathy towards ethnic Jews, which I have argued stems from a failure to interpret Scripture responsibly. So, when public figures who consider themselves as Christians, play into certain anti-Judaic falsehoods, whether intentionally or not, it nevertheless harms Christian witness.

Where do people get such nonsense?

Why do such voices get so many clicks on social media platforms?

Well, I decided to find out for myself.

One of the most highly respected biographies of Winston Churchill is by British historian Andrew Roberts, who responded to the Darryl Cooper interview by Tucker Carlson. Roberts’ articulate and evidence-based response from 2024 has been so stinging (and a follow-up piece just a year later, criticizing even the Heritage Foundation), that I knew I had to get a copy of Churchill: Walking With Destiny.  On Audible, the audiobook is a whopping 50 hours long. But in my estimation, it was worth it!

Churchill: Walking With Destiny, by the highly respected British historian, Andrew Roberts, dispels the false narratives being propagated in some supposedly Christian circles in our day. Read Roberts’ book to get the real truth about Winston Churchill.

 

Winston Churchill: Villain or Hero of the Second World War?

This past fall, in October, 2025, my wife and I were in Europe. After taking a cruise down the Rhine River, we visited the Luxembourg American Cemetery, where about 5,000 American war dead are buried, many of them who died in the Battle of the Bulge, in the ferociously cold winter of 1944-1945.  As I walked around the cemetery, and spotted the grave of General George Patton, the U.S. Army leader who relieved the tired and surrounded troops of Bastogne, during that terrible battle, I wondered why so many young American men lost their lives in an effort to defeat Nazi Germany.

According to Darryl Cooper, Tucker Carlson’s most highly revered historian, much of the American involvement in the war was prompted by the “warmonger” rhetoric of Winston Churchill.  This “warmonger” description of Churchill suggests that perhaps Adolph Hitler was not quite as bad as commonly believed, and that Churchill had become rather unhinged in his opposition to the Nazis. Is this claim really true? For if Darryl Cooper is correct about Winston Churchill, then it casts a lot of doubt regarding the moral reasoning which led to the deaths of so many Americans buried in Luxembourg.

Winston Churchill was a most complex and interesting figure, the son of another famous British politician. Winston Churchill idolized his father, though his parents often placed their own ambitions above spending time with their son. When his father, Randolph, died an early death, Winston Churchill knew that he was filled with ambition to exceed the political aspirations of his father. He even expected that he would become prime minister of the United Kingdom, some time in the future.

Churchill believed that his path of national leadership would be through a combination of military service and journalism. In some cases, he was able to serve in the military without pay, while receiving pay as a journalist. He served as a war correspondent in Cuba. He also served in the army in one of the last British cavalry clashes in Sudan. In South Africa, he was captured and imprisoned, but somehow managed to escape confinement. His imprisonment and escape from prison made Churchill a war hero.

Churchill’s military and journalism career took him far across the global British empire. While in the British army in India, Churchill began to read widely, influenced greatly by the writings of Edward Gibbon and Charles Darwin. Particularly due to Gibbon’s skeptical influence, Churchill, who had been raised a nominal Anglican, expressed doubts about the truth claims of Christianity. But as Roberts portrays him, Churchill was an agnostic, who embraced a kind of “cultural Christianity,” acknowledging the virtues of Christianity’s influence in British culture without believing the metaphysical truth-claims associated with the faith.

He finally made his way into Parliament in 1901, and eventually became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, overseeing the British Navy. It was during the “Great War” that Winston Churchill’s reputation suffered the most, when he was blamed for much of the failure of the Gallipoli campaign, an attempt by allied forces to try to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war. Churchill sought to revive his reputation after that by saying that the campaign was mismanaged by other military leaders, when he advocated for a Naval attack on the Dardanelles, with insufficient Army support to back up Churchill’s efforts, thus leading to the quagmire, and ultimate failure of the campaign.

Churchill continued on in the military, and served in the trenches on the continent during the Great War, after Gallipoli, avoiding death on several occasions. Even after the war, Churchill continued to serve in public office, but was eventually forced out of office in 1929. Many historians called this period, where Churchill was in many ways a government outsider, his “wilderness years.” In the run up to World War 2, Churchill became a voice sounding the alarm about Hitler, but now largely as a journalist and popular historian.

Sir Winston Churchill. Fiery debater. He had a reputation for respecting his opponent. Yet he never gave up on his belief that Nazi Germany was bent on perpetuating evil. In the end, history proved Churchill to be right. Is it possible for the evangelical apologist to have Churchill’s fortitude AND respectfulness when it comes to defending the Christian faith?

 

The Churchill “Warmonger” Thesis Challenged

As with any conspiracy or conspiracy-like theory, there is a grain of truth about Darryl Cooper’s fantastic claim that Churchill was a “warmonger.” The British Isles had suffered greatly during the “Great War,” and afterwards the economy was extremely sluggish. There was not much stomach for military conflict at the time, but Churchill did advocate for an accelerated development of the Royal Air Force, predicting that Hitler would eventually become a menace to Europe. Historian Andrew Roberts notes that many during the 1930’s considered Churchill to be a “warmonger,” stirring up trouble where none existed. Simply put, very few people considered Hitler to be the type of evil person, who in our day and age is now considered to be the very personification of evil.

Churchill opposed the appeasement policy of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who proclaimed “peace in our time.’ When Chamberlain helped to broker a peace deal with Hilter with the 1938 Munich Agreement, allowing Hilter to occupy the Sudetenland, part of Czechoslovakia, with no consultation with the Czechs, Churchill was appalled. For Hilter merely broke the agreement and occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia in less than a year later.

It is true that Hilter called Churchill a “warmonger,” in view of Churchill’s reaction to Nazi German aggression. But it is completely false to claim that Churchill was somehow itching for a fight with Hitler, as though Churchill was the instigator, a point which Andrew Roberts makes clear in his biography of Churchill. 

As war grew closer, so did Churchill’s popularity increase. Churchill’s predictions about Hitler’s aggression proved true over and over again. Churchill’s urging for beefing up the military was in reaction to Hitler’s provocations, not the other way around. As Hitler’s army invaded Belgium and made its way towards France, Churchill was selected to be Prime Minister, believing that the whole of his life thus far was preparation for this dire moment in Britain’s history.

Many still distrusted Churchill, recalling the failure of the Gallipoli campaign during the “Great War” a few decades earlier. As war with Germany became inevitable, before Churchill became prime minister, he made some major mistakes in trying to coordinate efforts to stop the Nazi takeover of Norway. But as Andrew Roberts describes the next few years, Churchill learned from his mistakes. Churchill’s skill as a an orator helped to unite the British people to resist the Nazi movement, as the island of Great Britain eventually became subject to withering attack by Hitler’s Luftwaffe.

As Andrew Roberts reveals in an interview, Cooper’s thesis that Churchill was the “chief villain” of World War 2 is simply “reheated, old David Irving stuff from twenty years ago.” David Irving has been known as a holocaust denier voice in the U.K., publicly claiming that the gas chambers at Auschwitz never existed. This need not imply Cooper as being a holocaust denier himself, but it does not better his case. Cooper’s thesis that Churchill was the “chief villain” falls flat when one realizes that Hilter’s blitzkrieg against the West happened before Churchill was selected as prime minister of Great Britain. Do journalists like Tucker Carlson need to be platforming such views as merely offering a different perspective having equal footing with many others?

Though admittedly not an historic orthodox Christian, Winston Churchill was nevertheless a lonely voice who saw the anti-Christian motivations behind Hitler, and who called out the evil nature of the Nazi regime. Churchill had his quirks, and like many of his day, uttered some frankly racist statements. He opposed national sovereignty for India, which has left him with many critics still today in India. He was slow to support the effort giving women the right to vote, only being persuaded to accept the cause after marrying Clementine, who fully supported female suffrage. Churchill made many mistakes, even somewhat silly ones, at one point suggesting that a curtain supported by balloons might be launched above the border of England, carrying explosives, as a deterrent against Hitler’s luftwaffe.

Churchill: Walking With Destiny is not hagiographic. Roberts does not shy away from telling about Churchill’s shortcomings. In many ways, Churchill had a lot of the same negative qualities that people despise so much about the U.S. President Donald Trump. Yet Churchill was also a great communicator, very witty, and brilliant, with an ability to connect with the British people during a time of great national and world crisis, which ultimately helped to stem the tide against Hitler’s aggressions.

One of my favorite lines from Churchill is this: “Stop interrupting me while I’m interrupting you.”

Churchill was a British patriot, who at times was blinded by his own nationalism, xenophobia, and other faults. Nevertheless, he spoke out against Hitler for years, when relatively few in Britain in the early and mid-1930s would do so. Churchill’s study of history convinced him that Adolph Hitler was up to no good and could not be trusted. Years before the Nazi implementation of “The Final Solution,” Churchill knew that Hitler’s antisemitism was a serious problem. Thankfully, people began to eventually listen to Churchill, and Hitler was finally challenged and his Nazi regime was stopped. As the British prime minister, Churchill took an active role in countering the anti-Jewish objectives of the Nazis. Churchill was perhaps the most influential person on the planet to persuade the Americans take the fight against Hitler. Winston Churchill was the right man for the right job at the right time.

One standout irony of Churchill’s life was in how self-prophetic it was.  At age 16 or 17, Winston Churchill came to believe that one day, “I shall save London and England from disaster.”  Many decades later, that prophecy would come true.

Unlike so many voices from the “new media” of YouTube and TikTok, studied and reputable historians, like Andrew Roberts, can help to dispel the nonsense. Grab a copy of Churchill: Walking With Destiny, and learn for yourself, just like I did.

We live in an age when credible authorities for discerning the truth are being distrusted by social media algorithms. As a Christian, we should be wary of these unfortunate trends, and look instead towards God’s standard for truth: beginning with the Holy Scriptures, under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

Walking along the many rows in the Luxembourg American Cemetery was an incredibly sobering experience, realizing just how many American soldiers died for the cause of freedom and the defeat of the Nazi regime. My photo taken in October, 2025.

 

George S. Patton’s grave at the Luxembourg American Cemetery. My photo taken in October, 2025.

 

Be Careful What You Click!

I go back to the lunatic storylines promoted by figures like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson. With the demise of the monopolies of traditional news organizations has come the “new media” of podcasts, which claim to get at the “real truth” being obscured or hidden by “mainstream media.” Much of this democratization of the newer media driven by advances in information technology has been fruitful. The stranglehold which legacy news organizations have had over the flow of information has been broken by the “new media.” Yet while trying to hold “mainstream media” accountable, these new forms of news media have their own accountability problems.

As Konstantin Kisin, co-host of the Trigonometry podcast, says in the following video, “what you reward with your clicks is what you create more of in the world. That is not a responsibility to be taken lightly.” Our consumption of media does not simply try to tell us the truth about our world, it also reveals a lot about ourselves. This is a good measure of wisdom to think through before you flip on the television or turn on your favorite YouTube channel:

As a double-bonus, the folks at the Trigonometry podcast have a two-hour interview with Andrew Roberts, about the book Churchill: Walking With Destiny . Following that, the historian dynamic duo of Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook on The Rest is History Podcast tackle the kind of rubbish revisionism being pedaled in certain corners of the “new media,” with another installment of their history of Nazism series, this time focused on Britain’s and France’s entry into the war against Germany, following Hitter’s invasion of Poland. Both are well worth the time. Enjoy!!

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October 24, 2025

Christianity Along the Rhine: A Travel Blog Series

By Clarke Morledge

My wife and I just got back last week from a 12-day trip to Europe, and I am excited to blog about it.

The main focus of the trip was a week-long Viking river cruise along the Rhine and Moselle Rivers, starting in Basel, Switzerland and ending up in Trier, Germany. The river cruise was bookended with a two-night stay in Zurich, Switzerland on the leading end, with a two-night stay in Paris, France on the final end. For a church history enthusiast like myself, it was an amazing experience.

Veracity blogger above the Rhine River, in Basel, Switzerland.  October, 2025.

 

Over the next few months, and into the New Year, I will be periodically releasing blog installments covering different elements from our tour along the Rhine River, with highlights both before and after (SEE INDEX OF INDIVIDUAL BLOG POSTS BELOW!).  As usual, I got some book reading done before and during the trip, and I will be narrating those book reviews as I share some photos of the experience.  The land we traveled through during our trip is incredibly rich with church history (and history in general).

This is not the first time I have put together a travel blog series on Veracity. I got inspired to do this from some of the trips our Veracity blog founder, John Paine, took several times to Canada (in Toronto) and England (to see Codex Sinaiticus at the British Museum in London) a few years ago.  Thanks, John.  I am blaming you for all of these blog posts!!  😉

The newly restored Notre Dame Cathedral, in Paris, France. The fire in 2019 did a lot of damage, but the structure of building remained sound.  The restoration effort was impressive, as the inside of Notre Dame is much brighter than before. Centuries of candle smoke had darkened the Cathedral, but now it is a most glorious sight!!

 

Back in 2018, my wife and I spent 2 1/2 weeks in Rome, Italy, which still stands out to me as the best trip of all. I could have spent a whole month there and not seen everything. We had saved up for years to make this trip, and it was fantastic. It was a lot of fun to meet up in Rome for a full day with our friends Marie Knapp, and her (now) late husband Troy Knapp.

In October 2022, we took another river cruise, but this time down the Danube River, from Regensburg, Germany to Budapest, Hungary.  This was part of a full three-week tour of six European countries, to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary. We were able to spend a few days earlier in Munich, and then after the Danube, a few extra days in Prague, followed by a few other days in Italy/Sicily.

For Christmas 2023, we were invited by our friends, Shannon and Andrew Bodine, to visit in Brussels, Belgium. After seeing the Christmas markets and Waterloo battlefield, we got on a train to cross the English Channel to make our way to Cambridge, England, where we met up with other friends, Jon and Meredith Thompson, who just happened to be in Cambridge for a few weeks while we were in the area. Pretty cool!

This recent trip along the Rhine River was special, and particularly enjoyable, as during the last two prior trips I got sick, which was not terribly fun. But this time, no Covid and no flu!! Yeah! …. The only downside to this recent trip was that there was constant activity, and not a lot of downtime. I need a vacation from my vacation!

Marksburg Castle, above the Rhine River, in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. The castle first dates back to the early 12th century, but had been damaged some over the years, most recently by American artillery during World War II.

 

I have to say that Viking has figured out how to do river cruises. They have had ads all over the PBS television network for decades, and we got to see for ourselves the famous section along the Rhine where all of the castles are featured in those ads.

The food was fantastic. We had excellent tour guides, even though the walking element on all of those cobblestone streets was very challenging for my wife. Going through the river locks appealed to my nerdy engineering side. I highly recommend doing something like this if you have the chance.

The first couple of blog posts in this series will be about the 16th-century Protestant Reformer, Huldrych Zwingli, of Zurich, Switzerland, who has become largely forgotten among Christians today, despite his enormous impact on Christian theology. I will keep a running tab and index of blog posts updated here at the bottom of this post, as reference.

Enjoy!

 

A cable car ride over the Rhine River, with our Viking longship below. Koblenz, Germany.

 

Heidelberg, Germany. Looking up towards the castle.

 

The town of Cochem, Germany, along the Moselle River.

Here is a reference list to previous travel blog post series, along with a list of posts to the current series…..

First, from Rome…………

 

Next, from Christianity along the Danube, with some time in southern Germany, along the Alps, and over to Prague, as well…….

 

Before our recent trip down the Rhine River, over Christmas of 2023, we went to Belgium and Cambridge, England….

Coming soon….. Christianity Along the Rhine…..

…. more posts to come!!

 

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September 20, 2025

Will the Rapture Happen on September 23-24, 2025?

By Clarke Morledge

Will the “rapture” happen on September 23-24, 2025? I have a quick answer for this one: “NO.”

Over the past thirteen years when I have been writing on the Veracity blog, there have been several attempts at “date setting” event predictions connected to the Second Coming of Jesus. Speculation about “blood moons,” eclipses, etc. surface from time to time, and go viral on various news feeds, and this year is no exception. Videos of people having personal dreams about the “rapture” show up on YouTube and TikTok.

I would normally ignore stuff like this, as it keeps happening over and over again. All of the hundreds of attempts over the centuries to try to calculate the exact timing of the Second Coming of Jesus, or related events, have a 100% failure record…. which is pretty terrible. But what struck me this time is how “date setters” have managed to find a way around the New Testament warning AGAINST date setting.

Back in 2017, a prediction associated with the Second Coming of Jesus was made by date setters connected to the constellation Virgo. Foreboding a fulfillment of the Book of Revelation? Nope.  Nothing happened like that in 2017….. The same will prove true for the September 23-24 prediction in 2025.

 

The standard response any informed Christian should give to “date setting” speculations can be found in texts like Matthew 24:36, where Jesus himself says:

“But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.“

In other words, Jesus as the Son does not even know the time of the Second Coming. For if Jesus does not even know, why would we think that anyone else living on planet earth would be able know any better?

You would think that should settle the matter. But apparently, some have come up with a very clever response to get around these words of Jesus.

The September 23-24, 2025 current speculation for the “rapture” has a certain twist to it. Rosh Hashanah is the time of the Jewish New Year, which will occur sometime during this period, for 2025, over these couple of days. Rosh Hashanah is also known as the Feast of Trumpets, the timing of which is determined by the sighting of the first sliver of the New Moon.

But what if certain atmospheric or other conditions interfere with an accurate sighting of the New Moon? For example, what if the evening is cloudy? Here is where the latest escape hatch for justifying “date setting” comes into play.

The claim is made that when Jesus says that the “day and hour no one knows,” this is a reference to the fact that it is not always clear as to when the New Moon could be actually sighted.  Could it be September 23rd?  September 24rd? At what hour? We are not sure, but it should be somewhere within this time frame.

If you scour Internet websites where this claim is made, the suggestion is made that Jesus is simply using a Hebrew idiom associated with the Feast of Trumpets to describe the timing of an event like the “rapture.”

The problem here is that there is no evidence which indicates that the “day and hour no one knows” is indeed such a common Hebrew idiom. You would think that if there was indeed such a Hebrew idiom, that a source can be cited to demonstrate this.

Hebrew idioms like this do exist. For example, when Jesus in the Gospels cites the sign of Jonah regarding “the three days and three nights” associated with his coming death, there is indeed an existing Hebrew idiom found among rabbinic Jewish writings, which serves as evidence to support the claim.

Unfortunately, for purveyors of the “day and hour no one knows” Hebrew idiom claim, there is no such evidence. But since the idea appears to fit, advocates for this hypothesis are not bothered by the lack of evidence.

In other words, for the date-setters, it is apparently okay for someone to claim something is true without evidence to support it, simply because you want it to be true: It is okay to simply make things up in order to justify your interpretation of the Bible.

This is really a bad way to try to interpret the Bible.1

I am no prophet, but I am willing the make a firm prediction here: While it is true that Jesus could indeed return at any time, September 23-24, 2025 will come and go and nothing will happen. As this has happened time and time again, purveyors of this type of thinking will go back and rethink their date setting, and some may suggest a new date, based on more supposedly accurate data to work with. Or they will find some other sophisticated way to wiggle out of their original predictions. If someone is foolish enough to buy into the prediction and sell their house and all of their belongings before September 23-24, they will probably be severely disappointed.

But worst of all, such another repeated failed prophecy prediction will invite more skepticism against the integrity of the Christian faith.

Folks, we can do better than this.

Notes:

1. As apologist Mike Winger shows from his videos regarding the September 2025 rapture speculations, there are other ways of mistreating the Bible which are also bad. For example, 1 Thessalonians 5 is the famous passage on the “rapture,” as verse 2 lays out what Paul is writing to his readers: “For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.” Paul is indeed warning the Thessalonians of the first century that the return of Jesus will come at any time. That Jesus is returning is sure, but the timing is unexpected. But at least one popular purveyor of the September 2025 rapture hype claims that in 1 Thess 5:4 , Paul shifts his audience to address people living much, much later (like September 2025???): “But you are not in darkness, brothers, for that day to surprise you like a thief“.  In other words, Christians today will not be surprised as to when Jesus comes back, as they will no longer be in darkness about the timing of the “rapture.” Not surprisingly (pun intended), this popular purveyor of the September 2025 prediction gives no supporting evidence for the claim that the “you” of verse 2 shifts to a different “you” in verse 4, the later “you” being Christians living 2,000 years later. This is just making stuff up to make the Bible say what you want it to say. What is missing is the intervening verse 3: “While people are saying, ‘There is peace and security,’ then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.”  Verse 3 here explains the meaning of verse 4, in that there will be some in Thessalonika who will be completely surprised at the coming of the Lord, when/if it comes in that day.  But the coming of the Lord will not be a surprise for the Christian believers who understand the truth that the Lord will indeed return. In other words, while the coming of the Lord Jesus will not be a “surprise” for those who expect it, we still will not know when it will come; that is, the exact timing of his coming, NOT the fact that Jesus is coming.  Since what Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, regarding the Second Coming, did not happen in his lifetime, there is nevertheless still a message for us living today. If only such prophecy “teachers” could read the Bible in context, and stop reading things into the text which simply are not there!! ↩

 

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September 12, 2025

The 1700th Anniversary! … The Nicene Creed, by Jared Ortiz and Daniel A. Keating. A Review.

By Clarke Morledge

In 2025, Christians can celebrate 1700 years of the most influential and famous summary of Christian belief, the Nicene Creed. I grew up in a church where we recited the Nicene Creed once a month during worship services. Sadly, a lot of evangelical churches today rarely, if ever, recite the Nicene Creed in public worship, despite the fact that for hundreds of years Christians have historically recited the Nicene Creed (or a shortened version of it, the Apostles Creed) on a regular basis, to remind them of basic Christian truths.

The Nicene Creed has served as a summary of what Christians connected to historically orthodox Christianity have believed and confessed through much of the long history of the Christian movement. It really strikes me as odd that so many conservative evangelical churches, who claim to be concerned with upholding centuries-long-held truths, tend to downplay the creed. Thankfully, with the 1700th anniversary of the first version of the creed, there are a bunch of good books available now that go into detail about the history behind the creed, and what it means for us today.1

I decided to pick up a copy of a book written by a pair of Roman Catholic scholars, who write for an ecumenical audience, from a C.S. Lewis-type “Mere Christianity” perspective. Jared Ortiz and Daniel A. Keating, the authors of The Nicene Creed: A Scriptural, Historical & Theological Commentary, have written a relatively accessible introduction to the creed, making an argument for its importance. Ortiz even teaches at a Protestant evangelical Christian college, Hope College, in Michigan. As Ortiz and Keating put it:

Because we live in an age that doubts the very reality of truth, and because we are trained to go our own way and encouraged to craft our “own truth,” we need more than ever an anchor of Truth—given, tested, and secure—not just as individuals but together as the Church. To our culture, the creeds implicitly say, “These things are true and real. Here is the genuine narrative of our world. And this is true for everyone.” (Ortiz & Keating, The Nicene Creed, Introduction)

 

The Nicene Creed: A Scriptural, Historical, and Theological Commentary, by Jared Ortiz and Daniel Keating, a great introduction into the most influential Christian creed, celebrating the 1700th anniversary of its first draft.

 

Urban Legends of Nicaea

There is a lot of misinformation out there regarding the history and purpose of the Nicene Creed. One of the most popular misinformed stories is that the Emperor Constantine essentially bullied a group of Christian bishops, to get together and declare Jesus to be God, as part of a political tactic to exert his control as emperor over the Christian church.

That makes for a tantalizing conspiratorial tale of intrigue, but it is not good history. If anything, Constantine himself was eventually became more partial to the ideas of Arius, the arch-heretic associated with the Council of Nicaea. In reality, the story is more complex: Constantine at first accepted the decision of the bishops at Nicaea, opposing Arius.  Nevertheless, within ten years after the council met, Constantine’s posture towards Arius changed.  In becoming more sympathetic towards Arius, Constantine even ordered that one of Arius’ chief antagonists, bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, be exiled because of his enthusiastic support for the Nicene resolution against Arius.

A second popular misinformed story also makes Constantine into being the “bad guy,” by suggesting that he helped to pressure these bishops to come up with a list of books which would make up the New Testament, accepting books that he and certain bishops liked, and throwing out the rest. In other words, Constantine is “blamed” for trying to put all of the bishops together in a headlock, and forcing them to “fix” the New Testament. This second story is wildly wrong, in that the topic of the canon of the New Testament never once made it into any discussion at Nicaea. It would be several decades before a final list of books of the New Testament would be recognized, and the process was more organic and less autocratic, as purveyors of this story want to believe.

The rumor linking the formation of the New Testament canon with Council of Nicaea probably originated based on a comment made by Jerome, the late 4th and early 5th century translator of the Bible into Latin, the Vulgate, who stated that it was at Nicaea when someone acknowledged that the Book of Judith was an accepted part of Scripture. Jerome had his own doubts about the inclusion of the Book of Judith within the record of Scripture. There is not much more detail about Jerome’s comment, and furthermore, the Book of Judith belonged to the Old Testament Apocrypha, and was never a candidate to be accepted into the New Testament anyway.

Then there is the medieval legend that Saint Nicholas, whose cultural memory over the centuries gave us Santa Claus, stood up and punched Arius in the face for all of his heresies. That probably did not happen, but it is still a fun story to think about, old St. Nick throwing a right hook against a reviled heretic across the cheek. Ha! Ha!

Nevertheless, all of this misinformation about Nicaea does leave the question: What was the Nicene Creed really all about, anyway?

 

An Overview of The Council of Nicaea

The Nicene Creed in 325 initially addressed the controversy over the deity of Christ, describing the precise relationship between the Father and the Son. But the Creed was expanded at the 381 Council of Constantinople in order to flesh out the doctrine of the Trinity, to include more detail about the role of the Holy Spirit, within the divine Godhead. In other words, most Christians, who even know about the Nicene Creed, do not realize that what was agreed upon in 325 is not the exact creed many Christians recite today. It really took about 55 years for the exact formulation of the Nicene Creed to reach its fullest form, common to both the Western and Eastern churches.

However, the acceptance of the Nicene Creed in the church was not immediate. It took some time before the recitation of the Nicene Creed became a normalized part of Christian worship. Scholars say Paul’s letters in the New Testament included a variety of ancient creeds which preceded the Nicene Creed.

Contrary to what I had always thought, the Apostles Creed did not date back to the earliest apostles. Instead, it was derived from the Old Roman Creed, which Augustine used as late as the early 5th century to prepare catechumens for baptism. It was not until the seventh century (the 600s) when the Nicene Creed became a standard part of a Christian worship service.

Ortiz and Keating say with Saint Augustine that there are three basic concepts which undergird the Trinitarian theology of the Nicene Creed: (Ortiz & Keating, Introduction)

  1. There is only one God.
  2. The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God.
  3. The Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Father, and the Holy Spirit is neither the Father nor the Son

Ortiz and Keating go through the major parts of the Nicene Creed, namely about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, giving a Scriptural exposition regarding where each of these components of the Nicene Creed come from the Bible. Along the way, the authors have helpful sidebars with digressions that fill out the bigger story behind the Nicene Creed, such as various witnesses to the tradition, like Irenaeus and Augustine, and contemporary issues touching on the Nicene Creed, such as “Why is God called ‘Father’ and Not ‘Mother’.” An appendix displays a comparison between the original 325 creed at Nicaea, the finalized Nicene Creed ratified at the Council of Constantinople in 381, and the 7th century Apostles Creed, an abbreviated version of the longer Nicene Creed. A glossary helps the reader to navigate terms essential to the Nicaea debate, such as homoousios (“one in being”) and homoiousios (“like in being”).

 

Addressing The Arian Heresy

The primary issue at stake with the Nicene Creed was the controversy over the teachings of Arius, a presbyter from Alexandria in Egypt, probably the second largest city in the Roman Empire with one of the most vibrant Christian communities in the ancient world. While Christians worshiped Jesus as the Son of God, by the early 4th century, they had not clearly worked out how the Son of God related to the Father. Arius was not the first one with a commitment to monotheism, who suggested that while Jesus was divine in some sense, the Father was uniquely divine in a different way than the Son.

What stirred up controversy that precipitated the Council of Nicaea was Arius’ particular teaching that Jesus as the Son of God was a creature, whereas the Father was not. Or to put it succinctly, there was a time when the Son was not, according to Arius.

Arius appealed to bible passages like Proverbs 8:25, where divine Wisdom, by which God created the world, speaks and says, “Before the mountains were established, and before all the hills, he begot me.” Because Paul describes Jesus Christ as “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor.1:24), Arius like many others saw Jesus as the Son of God described as the Wisdom of God in Proverbs 8, in that Christ was “begotten” by God. However, in that same passage, Wisdom is described in the Greek Septuagint translation as being “created” by God (Proverbs 8:22). As Ortiz and Keating put it, a great “exegetical contest” took place in the 4th century church to resolve the question: Is the divine Wisdom created by God or begotten from God? (Ortiz and Keating, p. 98).

There were some who were at least initially sympathetic towards Arius in saying that while the Father is “truly God,” the Son is also divine, but in a derived and subordinate way. The Fathers who championed Nicaea pushed back on this idea by insisting that the Son is “begotten, not made,” appealing to verses like Jude 25, that the Son existed before every and any age. They also crafted the language that the Son is indeed “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God,” to emphasize the full divinity of the Son. An appeal was made from texts like “the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1), Thomas’ confession of Jesus as “My Lord and My God” (John 20:28), Hebrews 1:3, Hebrews 1:8, Revelation 5:12–14, along with others.2

 

Using a Non-Biblical Word to Express a Biblical Concept

If Arius was indeed wrong, as the Council of Nicaea concluded, how then should Christians think of the relationship between the Father and the Son? The debate preoccupied the church for about 55 years, until the Council of Constantinople, where the Nicene Creed was reaffirmed and expanded to resolve ongoing disputes. For example, the 325 version of the creed said that the Son is “consubstantial with the Father.” But what does “consubstantial” actually mean here, which the Book of Common Prayer traditionally renders this as “being of one substance with the Father?”

It all came down to a single Greek word: homoousios.

The 325 version used the Greek word homoousios to mean “same substance” or “same essence,” though the word homoousios itself was not found in the Bible. Two Greek words make up the compound word: “homo” for “same,” and “ousia” for “substance” or “essence.” However, some critics argued that the concept of “same substance” did not adequately recognize a real distinction between the Father and the Son, a feature of modalism, the heretical notion the Son’s identity is not permanent, that at some point in the future the Son will “merge back into the Father.” (Ortiz & Keating, p. 107).

These critics, commonly called the “Homoeans,” proposed another word, homoiousios, meaning “like substance,” to reinforce the distinction between the Father and the Son. Nevertheless, those like Athanasius, the most vocal bishop and advocate for the original Nicene formulation, insisted on keeping the language of homoousios. Athanasius was concerned that homoiousios would pave the way back towards the heresy of Arius. The 380 version of the creed kept the word homoousios, as a result. The one letter, a little “i”, made all the difference.

How then should the distinction between the Father and the Son be made (along with the Holy Spirit)? The Greek word hypostasis was selected by some to designate the different persons of the Godhead: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Along with the Greek word ousia, meaning “essence” or “being,” the church at the time of the Council of Constantinople in 380/381 adopted the language of “one ousia and three hypostases” to describe the Triune Godhead (Ortiz & Keating, pp.110-111).

However, this brought some confusion as some considered the word hypostasis to be synonymous with the concept of “substance,” which emphasized the oneness of God. The concern was that it made the Christian Godhead into a union of three separate Gods, which was entirely misleading. Another word, prosōpon, was introduced instead, which is best rendered in English as “person.” However, the Greek prosōpon actually meant “face,” which to others seemed not to adequately signal the distinction between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It was not until the Council of Chalcedon in 451 that the common language to describe the Trinity as “one God in three persons” was finally settled as the most suitable way to speak of the Godhead, the language most Christians use today (Ortiz & Keating, pp.110-111).

Despite the efforts at Nicaea to deal with the heresy of Arius, subsequent controversies led to more material being inserted into the creed at the second ecumenical council at Constantinople in 380/381. Marcellus of Ancyra, one of the bishops who attended the Nicene council and opposed Arius, was ultimately condemned at Constantinople for his own teachings. While Marcellus agreed that Son was divine and yet not created, as Arius claimed, Marcellus also championed an idiosyncratic interpretation of Paul’s writings in 1 Corinthians 15:24–28.

When Paul writes that at “the end , when he [the Son] delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power,” Marcellus believed that this indicated that the distinction between the Son and the Father should only be understood as a temporary condition. For Marcellus, Paul was teaching that at the end of the age, after the return of Christ, the Son will merge back into the Father. In other words, the Triune nature of God ceases to exist once Christ’s work is complete. At least this is how Marcellus interpreted Paul: “When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all.”

At Constantinople, a phrase at the end of the second stanza regarding the doctrine of the Son was added: “and his kingdom will have no end.” I had always thought this was a throwaway line added into the creed without much of a reason. Now I know that was because the fathers at Constantinople were condemning the heresy of Marcellus by including this insertion, thus affirming the eternal distinct identity of the Son from the Father (Ortiz and Keating, p. 140).

 

The Holy Spirit at the Second Ecumenical Council in Constantinople

At the 325 council meeting at Nicaea, only one line in the creed mentioned anything about the Holy Spirit: “We believe in the Holy Spirit.” However, in the years immediately prior to the council meeting at Constantinople, some of those who affirmed the full divinity of the Son, standing against Arius, were saying that the Holy Spirit was but a creature, and not fully divine in the same sense as the Son and the Father.

This group, known as the “Macedonians,”named after a former bishop of Constantinople, Macedonius, brought thirty bishops to the 380 council. They believed that the Holy Spirit was a kind of created “super-angel,” serving the purposes of the Father and the Son. But when Gregory of Nazianzus, a well-known orthodox bishop, preached in favor of the full divinity of the Holy Spirit, the Macedonian group left the council meeting. In their absence, the council of Constantinople drafted what would become the stanza that Christians recite today, including such statements affirming that the Holy Spirit is “the Lord, the giver of life” (Ortiz and Keating, p. 165-167).

No exposition of the Nicene Creed would be complete without commenting on the controversy that arose long after the final draft of the creed in 380/381, the so-called filioque controversy, whereby “filioque” is Latin for the phrase “and the Son.” Around the 6th century, various Latin churches altered the Nicene Creed, which describes the Holy Spirit as one “who proceeds from the Father [and the Son],” where the final phrase was added. Notably, it is commonly accepted that the 589 Third Council of Toledo codified the insertion of “and the Son” into the Nicene Creed, in an effort to try to stamp out another variation of the Arian heresy, which had persisted in some areas of the Christian West.

The practice in the Latin churches soon became uniform, but the alteration was made without any consultation with the Eastern church. The addition of the filioque eventually was cited as one of the major reasons for the split between the Eastern and Western churches during the Great Schism in 1054, when Greek-speaking and Latin-speaking Christians officially began anathematizing one another. The original phrasing found in the Nicene-Constantinople version of the creed was drawn from one of the few texts which discuss the origin of the Holy Spirit, John 15:26.

Ortiz and Keating explain the controversy this way: While the final draft of the creed was written at Constantinople in 380/381, it was not broadly known in the West until the Council of Chalcedon in 451, some 70 years later. By that time, the West was developing an understanding of the Holy Spirit’s procession being from both the Father and the Son (or through the Son). It was only a matter of time before the Latin Christians of the West would formally incorporate that theology into the Nicene Creed.

In addition, Ortiz and Keating contend that certain well-respected Eastern church leaders, namely Cyril of Alexandria, Maximus the Confessor, and John of Damascus, had written in favor of the Holy Spirit’s procession from both the Father and the Son (Ortiz and Keating, pp. 174ff). I am not aware of how Eastern Orthodox theologians would respond to these historical claims.3

 

Other Takeaways From The Nicene Creed

There are a number of other nugget-sized takeaways from The Nicene Creed that are worth noting:

– Saint Augustine is sometimes thought of in negative terms as emphasizing the wrath of God. Those who reject the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement point to this as a flaw in Augustine’s thought, depicting God as an uncontrollable, angry deity, bent on punishing his human creatures. But Augustine has a rationale for why we see anthropomorphic language about God in the Bible:

“so those men through whom the Holy Spirit has spoken have not hesitated to employ in those books, as the occasion best demands, names of even those passions which our soul experiences and which the man who knows better already understands to be completely foreign to God. For example, because it is very difficult for a man to avenge something without experiencing anger, the authors of Scripture have decided to use the name wrath for God’s vengeance, although God’s vengeance is exercised with absolutely no such emotion.”4

– While the main controversy at Nicaea was over Arius’ failure to affirm the full divinity of the uncreated Son, there were those who failed to affirm the full humanity of the Son Incarnate as Jesus, such as Apollinaris of Laodicea, an eager opponent of Arius, but who unfortunately upheld the divinity of Jesus at the expense of the full humanity of Jesus, a doctrine which Gregory of Nazianzus strenuously opposed:

“For Apollinaris, the Christ we meet in the pages of the Gospels is a kind of ‘product’ of two parts: he is part Word (who runs things from the center) and part human (with the intellectual soul removed). As Gregory of Nazianzus famously stated in rejecting this model, ‘The unassumed is the unhealed.’If Christ did not assume a full human nature, including a human soul, then we have not been saved” (Ortiz and Keating, p. 131).5

 

Offering Some Pushback

Granted, both Ortiz and Keating are Roman Catholic scholars, a feature that will probably bother some readers. Various Roman Catholic distinctive doctrines are mentioned, including purgatory. At the very least, this might cause some confusion.

For example, take the word “catholic” from the creed. In the final version approved at the Council of Constantinople (380 CE), the Nicene Creed says that Christians believe “In one holy catholic and apostolic Church.” That word “catholic” has often been taken out of its historical context.

In the early church era there was only one church, the “catholic” church, as “catholic” simply meant the universal, one and only Christian church. The authors generally use the term “catholic” as an alternative to the Gnostics and other groups deemed heretical and out of step with the main body of historically orthodox Christians. Only occasionally do the authors conflate the term “Catholic” with the Roman Catholic tradition specifically (with an uppercase “C”). But since Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and evangelical Protestants all accept the Nicene Creed as biblically grounded and theologically true, the focus on the Nicene Creed itself will prove beneficial to anyone who wants to learn more about it.

There is at least one spot where Ortiz and Keating make a controversial claim that should be challenged, regarding how the doctrine of creation out of nothing developed in run-up to Nicaea. On page 79, the authors write:

“By the time of the Nicene Creed, “maker of heaven and earth” was firmly understood to mean that God created all things, without exception, from nothing. But, surprising to many of us, creatio ex nihilo was not a doctrine held by the earliest Christians nor by the Jews who preceded them. Indeed, along with many of their pagan neighbors, they held that God created all things from preexistent matter. The question of the origin of matter—and its implications for God’s being and power—did not arise in a clear way until the second century.”

This startling claim, while having some substance, is ultimately misleading. Admittedly, the authors go on and affirm the Nicene Creed’s teaching concerning God’s creation out of nothing; i.e. creation ex nihilo. However, to say that creation ex nihilo was not held by the earliest Christians and the Jews before them is not wholly accurate.

It is better to say that there was a diversity of views concerning creation ex nihilo in the first century among Christians and Jews. Some Scriptural passages suggested a creation ex nihilo interpretation, whereas others were more ambiguous, lending themselves towards other interpretations. Like concerns about the deity of Christ, and what that actually meant, the early church had to wrestle with what creation actually meant regarding the eternal existence of matter. By the time of the Nicaea era, the issue was resolved in that historical orthodox Christians accepted the idea that the material world had a specific beginning, where the existence of God came prior to that of the material world.6

Even the controversy regarding creation ex nihilo recognizes the need for accurate bible interpretation, in that simply having possession of the Scriptures does not necessarily guarantee that the Scriptures will be interpreted properly. Any controversial ambiguity within the biblical text concerning important doctrines needs to have creeds, such as the Nicene Creed, to act as guardrails, to prevent readers from taking certain passages of Scripture and going in the wrong direction with them.

Thankfully, even with some of the pushback offered, Jared Ortiz and Daniel Keating’s The Nicene Creed gives a high quality introduction to the creed, emphasizing its importance, and presenting the concepts articulated in the creed which remains accessible to the novice reader. Christians should take the opportunity of the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed to study this formative summary of Christian belief.

So, why is it that so many Bible-believing, evangelical Christians tend to either ignore or downplay the Nicene Creed? Now, that is an intriguing question. Perhaps it is due to the uniquely American tradition of “No Creed But the Bible,” a slogan popularized during the Second Great Awakening of the 19th century. Frankly, the tragic lack of emphasis on the great creeds of the Christian church, as with the Nicene Creed, within many evangelical circles is something that those Protestants, who know little about the creeds, could learn a thing or two from our friends in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions. At least, I hope so. The 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed may spark some interest!

For more on the Nicene Creed, honoring the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, see this earlier blog post reviewing theologian’s Matthew Barrett’s book on the topic, offering an overview of the classic doctrine of the Trinity. For a helpful walk-thru of each word in the Nicene Creed, set aside an hour-and-a-half to watch this video by apologist Gavin Ortlund:

 

Notes:

1. Dr. Philip Cary wrote The Nicene Creed: An Introduction, in 2023, which offers a fairly easy read, explaining the creed line by line. Cary, a teacher in philosophy at Eastern University in Philadelphia, is an excellent teacher, someone I actually met and had dinner with at a wedding reception a few years ago, and that I have read and followed for years, so I would highly recommend him. From a Reformed Protestant perspective, Kevin DeYoung, a pastor and popular contributor at The Gospel Coalition, recently wrote The Nicene Creed: What You Need to Know about the Most Important Creed Ever Written. I heard an interview with DeYoung giving an overview of the book, and that sounds very promising. Those are just a couple of recommendations, from a list of several available. Later in the year, I will offer a review of a great academic book, The Cambridge Companion to the Council of Nicea, edited by Young Richard Kim, which takes a deep dive into the story of Nicea, with essays by several historians, covering a wide variety of topics, focused more on the history behind the council. The Ortiz and Keating book, being reviewed in this blog post, is more of a general introduction to the theology of the Nicene Creed, looking at each phrase of the creed to see how the church worked through the controversies to arrive at the most important theological statement and summary of Christian belief. In summary, if you are Protestant and would prefer not to wade through some of the finer points of Roman Catholic theology, stick with either the Philip Cary or Kevin DeYoung book on the Nicene Creed. Linked below are some lectures/interviews with Cary and DeYoung that might spur your interest in their books. But if you want a quick introduction, watch the first video below produced by Gospel Simplicity.↩

2. The concept of the eternal subordination of the Son, which stirred up tremendous online controversy in the middle of the second decade of the 21st century (about 10 years ago), harkens back to certain elements of the 4th century debate surrounding the Council of Nicaea. See earlier Veracity blog post regarding the doctrine of the Trinity from an author who vigorously opposes the idea of the eternal subordination of the Son. Defenders of the eternal subordination of the Son say that the Son is functionally subordinate to the Father, in eternity, while still being ontologically equal to the Father. I find the doctrine of the eternal subordination of the Son to be wholly unconvincing, though one critic who commented claims that I misrepresents his view. For another conservative critique of the “eternal subordination of the Son” doctrine, see this First Things article by Craig Carter. Readers should do their own research and draw their own conclusions. A helpful overview of the “eternal subordination of the the Son” controversy, and its relationship to the Nicene Creed, is covered by the following discussion on the White Horse Inn “Sola Media” podcast below. This is my biggest beef with Wayne Grudem’s theology affirming the “eternal subordination of the Son” . ↩

3. While these are helpful counterarguments which explain why the filioque was inserted into the creed by the West, this does not excuse the West for making a unilateral change to the creed without first consulting the Eastern church through an ecumenical council. But to the credit of the authors, perhaps there is a middle way forward that might lead to reconciliation. It might be possible for both the Western and Eastern churches to agree that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son.  Interestingly, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America recently decided to remove the offending filioque phrase from their liturgy. One wonders if the ELCA will backtrack on their revisionist statements regarding human sexuality, and return to a more historic orthodox view on that subject .↩

4. Augustine, Eighty-Three Different Questions, no. 52, trans. David L. Mosher, FOTC 70 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1982), 88–89., found in Ortiz and Keating, chapter. 2. See Veracity blog posts on the atonement for more (Michael Heiser on Leviticus, Stephen De Young on the atonement.↩

5. For a technical history but excellent theological reflection on the doctrine of the Trinity, see the work of the late Scottish theologian, Thomas Torrance. I read Torrance when I was in seminary in the 1990s. He goes pretty deep, but the reading investment is very rewarding. You can start with The Trinitarian Faith, but then go for his masterpiece, Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons.↩

6. Ortiz and Keating cite Gerhard May’s Creatio Ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of “Creation out of Nothing” in Early Christian Thought, trans.A.S. Worrall (London: T&T Clark, 2004) as evidence for their claim. Even some progressive Christian scholars, like Nazarene scholar Thomas Jay Oord, argue that the Bible does not teach creation ex nihilo. However, William Lane Craig and Paul Copan’s Creation out of nothing : a biblical, philosophical, and scientific exploration (Michigan: Baker Academic, 2004) refutes May’s argument that no one accepted the doctrine of creation ex nihilo until the second century. Copan has an online essay which summarizes the themes of his book.↩

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August 29, 2025

“No Creed But the Bible” ….. A Visit to Cane Ridge, Kentucky

By Clarke Morledge

As the summer of 2025 has been drawing to a close, I ran across some old photos of a summer trip to the Midwest, about twelve years ago, that I would like to share. My wife’s family is from Evansville, Indiana, which is not far from Interstate 64, taking one highway west from where we live in Williamsburg, Virginia to get there. Just a little over halfway to Indiana, about an hour northeast of Lexington, Kentucky, is a little spot off the road called “Cane Ridge,” not too far from the small town of Paris, Kentucky, in horse country.

Most people have never heard of Cane Ridge, Kentucky. The ridge was named by the explorer Daniel Boone, during the early decades of the American republic. But if you are a student of American church history, you should probably know about it, because Cane Ridge, Kentucky was the site of one of the most remarkable events of Christian history.

Sinners gathering on the “anxious bench,” during the American Second Great Awakening, in the early 19th century. The “anxious bench” was the forerunner to the modern “altar call.”  This portrait envisions what the camp meeting at the Cane Ridge Revival might have looked like.

 

The Woodstock of the 19th Century

In 1801, a group of ministers were hoping to host a camp revival meeting in what was then the frontier of the young nation of the United States. The two most prominent figures in the movement were originally a Presbyterian minister, Barton Stone, and later on, a Scottish minister, Alexander Campbell. During the heat of the summer, there was not that much to do while your crops were growing on the frontier before the fall harvest, so the idea of traveling to a camp meeting was a great way to accomplish spiritual and social goals for folks spread out in sparsely populated areas of the Midwest.

What was unique about the Cane Ridge Revival was the sheer size of the event, for that moment in history, out on the American frontier. Stone and his fellow ministers behind the revival had advertisements for the camp meeting posted in numerous newspapers across the country. Historians estimate that in August, 1801, somewhere between 10,000 to 20,000 people descended upon Cane Ridge. It was the 19th century cultural equivalent of the 1969 music festival, Woodstock, held in New York state, a defining moment for the counterculture movement of the 1960s.

So many people came to the camp meeting that the house used by the little Presbyterian church, which hosted the event, could not be used. Makeshift platforms were made across the various fields surrounding the church building, where singers sang, and most importantly, preachers preached. In front of some of these platforms there was an “anxious bench,” where various sinners could sit when the message being preached pricked their hearts, urging them on to repentance. The “anxious bench” was the forerunner to the “altar calls” held by 20th century preachers, like Billy Graham.

When I met up with the local historian who was on-site, he told me that there were reported manifestations of healings, speaking in tongues, and being “slain in the spirit.” He even told me that some additional, really bizarre stuff was reported, too, like people barking like dogs.

Barton Stone, who led the little Presbyterian church at Cane Ridge, reported on the meeting like this: “Many, very many fell down, as men slain in battle, and continued for hours together in an apparently breathless and motionless state — sometimes for a few moments reviving, and exhibiting symptoms of life by a deep groan, or piercing shriek, or by a prayer for mercy most fervently uttered.” Eventually, their condition would change, giving way first to smiles of hope and then of joy, they would finally rise “shouting deliverance” and would address the surrounding crowd “in language truly eloquent and impressive.” “With astonishment,” Stone exclaimed, “did I hear men, women and children declaring the wonderful works of God, and the glorious mysteries of the gospel.”

 

The original Cane Ridge meeting house, the Presbyterian church which hosted the 1801 revival. This photo was taken sometime in the early 20th century.  I saw it as part of the Cane Ridge museum exhibit.

 

Not Presbyterian, Not Baptist, Not Methodist….. Just “Christian”

Cane Ridge was a remarkably interdenominational event, where Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists all joined together, for the cause of calling people to give their lives to Jesus. At the end of the week-long or so meeting, those remaining at the camp all shared in the Lord’s Supper together. It was a potent experience of Christian unity and spiritual energy. In many ways, the Cane Ridge Revival ended up spinning off numerous other camp meetings across the Eastern United States for decades, prior to the advent of the American Civil War.

Barton Stone and subsequently Alexander Campbell became the leaders synonymous with the movement, which often is called by historians as the “Restoration” movement. The idea was that Stone and Campbell believed that these various camp meetings, starting with Cane Ridge, were about restoring the Christian church to its original New Testament foundations.

During the early 19th century, groups like the Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists were all defined by their various creeds and confessions. Visionaries like Stone and Campbell believed that these creeds and confessions just got in the way of sticking with what “the Bible says,” and calling people to faith and repentance, and following Jesus.

This Restoration movement was often associated with the popular slogan: “No Creed But the Bible.”

However, despite its “non-denominational,” or perhaps “inter-denominational” focus, the Stone-Campbell Restoration movement ended up spawning several prominent American denominations:

  • Churches of Christ
  • Disciples of Christ
  • The Christian Church
  • … and several others

As the original Cane Ridge church building was starting to fall in disrepair, an effort was made to preserve the wooden structure, by building another stone structure around it, in 1930. If you can imagine that inside the stone building behind me, stands the preserved wooden church building (see prior photo) safe from the elements, then that is what you would see if you visit Cane Ridge, Kentucky. The wooden building inside is one of the oldest structures standing in Kentucky.

 

After Cane Ridge

Barton Stone himself left the Presbyterian church, there at Cane Ridge, just a few years after the Cane Ridge Revival meeting. Stone was not content to sign off on the Westminster Confession of Faith championed by the Presbyterians any more. Instead, Stone merely called his group “Christians.” Alexander Campbell’s father, Thomas, was originally a minister enthusiastic about the Restoration movement, during that period of the Cane Ridge Revival. But it was the son, Alexander Campbell, who became a prominent minister himself among the “Disciples of Christ,” in the decades following the Cane Ridge Revival.

Several features were common to all of these groups. They all acknowledged the importance of water baptism for believing adults and celebrating the Lord’s Supper on a weekly basis.

However, there were notable differences, too, among these various groups, fault lines spreading out in various directions. For example, some groups emphasized that baptism was not simply a sign of one’s profession of faith, but it was also essential to one’s salvation. Some in the Churches of Christ refused to have musical instruments in their worship services.

I asked the on-site historian about what was behind the dispute about musical instruments. At first he told me that different Stone-Campbell groups would cite their own Scripture passages, for and against musical instruments in church. But he then conceded that the primary issue was economical. Most of these small churches, mostly scattered across the Midwest, were poor. By the time a church grew large enough to afford something like a piano or an organ, the community was often faced with a crisis: Do you spend your limited church funds on something like an expensive piano or organ, or do you increase the pay of your minister, or even better yet, fund some missionaries to go out and start some new churches?

While idealistic in many ways, the Restoration movement pioneered by ministers like Barton W. Stone and Alexander Campbell got involved in various controversies.  Stone, for one, became outspoken in his opposition to slavery. Stone sought publicly to free several slaves that his wife had inherited from her parents. Kentucky law prohibited Stone from doing that in that state, as the slaves were legally connected to an estate. So, Stone moved his family to Illinois, where it was legal to free slaves connected to an estate.

However, at the same time, Stone became convinced that the classic doctrine of the Trinity was not biblical. Interestingly, he did not claim to be a unitarian, though he accepted a kind of subordinationism with respect to Jesus as the Son being subject to the Father.

Alexander Campbell was perhaps the more intellectually inclined of the two, emphasizing that Christian ministers should be college educated. Campbell founded the first institution of higher learning, Bethany College, in what is now West Virginia. In his earlier years, Campbell would engage in various debates, particularly in opposition to infant baptism. Yet he also engaged in a debate once where he defended the institution of slavery as being biblical (contra Stone).

Campbell’s relationship with the Mormons was complicated, as a number of Stone-Campbell movement adherents left the movement to become Mormons. Campbell wrote a critical review of the Book of Mormon, saying that the Mormons had added extra supposed Scripture to the Bible without warrant.

Today, the descendants of the Stone-Campbell are a very diverse lot. There are still conservative elements of those groups that still uphold many of the ideals that came out of the Cane Ridge Revival. However, the largest denomination, the United Churches of Christ (UCC), grew out of several Restorationist and other churches to form what has become one of the most prominent liberal mainline Protestant church bodies. The UCC at the denominational leadership level has been known for its support for abortion rights as well as support for same-sex marriage.

 

A Reflection on the Stone-Campbell Movement

Today’s adherents to the original principles of the Stone-Campbell Restoration movement often have a mixed view of creeds and confessions. On the one hand, the revivalist heritage of the Cane Ridge Revival put a rightful focus on the importance of conversion and having a personal encounter with Jesus Christ.

Nevertheless, while the famous adage “No Creed But the Bible“ may sound great at first, it belies a problem that has surfaced throughout the history of the Restoration movement, and other similar attempts to transcend denominational differences. In an effort to get rid of the objectionable creeds, many Restoration groups ended up re-engaging the same debates that led to the historical creeds in the first place.

The fact that an effort to promote a “non-denominational” form of Christianity ended up spawning a whole host of denominations, anyway, should tell you something. Particularly in areas of the American Midwest, just about in any town, you are within a stone’s throw of hitting a “Christian Church, “Disciples of Christ Church,” or a “Church of Christ.” Furthermore, in a number of cases, particularly in the post World War 2 era, the “No Creed But the Bible” mantra has become a cloak for hiding a tendency towards embracing “progressive Christianity.”

While there are many the positive elements that sprang from the Cane Ridge Revival, and the subsequent Stone-Campbell Restoration movement, having an aversion to creeds does not bode well for the future of the church. True, some creeds and confessions can get really deep into the weeds, making too many demands on the conscience of the believer. But in the world of Protestant evangelicalism which I have immersed myself now for decades, the lack of any creed, or downplaying such a creed, can be a recipe for theological crisis, ironically leading to more church splits, and not less.

The base level creed for classic Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox churches is the Nicene Creed. In 2025, we celebrate 1700 years since the Council of Nicaea met to hammer out the first draft of this creed that unites all of Christendom.  If anything, the Nicene Creed should be something that all of us as Christians can start with.

The fact is “No Creed But the Bible” is a creed, in and of itself. Unfortunately, it is not a very good one.

 

Barton Stone Memorial obelisk, marking Stone’s grave at Cane Ridge, Kentucky. Though Stone died in 1844, his remains were interred at Cane Ridge in 1847.  My wife and I stopped by and visited Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in August, 2013, the same time of year the Cane Ridge Revival was held in the summer of 1801.

 

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