From John’s Gospel To Nicaea: How Christians Confessed One God In Three Persons (WCF 2)

The fastest way to misunderstand Christianity is to treat the Trinity like a math puzzle or a dusty debate from the fourth century. We pick up Westminster Confession of Faith chapter two and follow the doctrine of the Trinity where it actually comes from: the Bible’s own speech about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, with the Gospel of John front and center. Drew Brackbill helps us connect Scripture, church history, and the real-world stakes of orthodox Christian doctrine.

From the apostle John’s insistence on the Word’s full divinity to the Anti-Nicene Fathers like Ignatius, we trace how Trinitarian theology shows up early and clearly before any ecumenical council meets. Then we explain why the word “Trinity” appears later than the belief, how terms like “one substance” (consubstantiality) help the church speak precisely, and why that precision is meant to protect biblical faith rather than replace it.

We also walk through the major Trinitarian controversies that shaped the early church: modalism (Sabelianism) and Arianism, why they sounded persuasive, and why the Council of Nicaea and Athanasius mattered. Finally, we bring it into the present with modern examples and the ongoing question of creeds, confessions, and “no creed but the Bible.” If you care about the atonement, salvation, and faithful worship, this conversation lands close to home.

Transcript

Welcome And The Big Question

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Welcome back to Catechism Conversations, where we explore the historic confessions of the church and the doctrines of the Christian faith and why they matter for the church today. In this episode, we're continuing on chapter two of the Westminster Confession of Faith, which is labeled Of God and the Holy Trinity. And as we continue to talk about this important doctrine, we're also going to step into the history behind it. I'm joined today by Drew Brackville as we tackle these majestic confessions, particularly Westminster Confession of Faith. And we're looking at again at chapter two on who God is and the Trinity. And today we're going to continue that conversation that was started in the previous podcast with a focus on church history and how church tradition will serve as a valuable benefit to us as we think through this. So, Drew, welcome. Thank you, Cisco. And I know this is right down your path of, in a sense, expertise, we could say, and love of church history and the importance of it.

SPEAKER_03 1:39

Fascination.

SPEAKER_00 1:40

Well, but it's important fascination.

John’s Gospel Grounds The Trinity

Early Church Fathers Echo The Apostles

SPEAKER_03 1:42

Yeah, no, I I I think uh if it's not already apparent, I really enjoy church history, particularly the history of the early church. And so so I think I want to structure it this way, right? Just to give a a brief, and by brief I of course mean 45-minute long overview of how this doctrine of the Trinity came to came to be widely accepted as the Orthodox position. And I think as I we talked about this last time, but that the ultimate basis for the Trinity is is in the references to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that we see in the Gospels, right? So, but I particularly want to talk about John, right? Because the Apostle John states his purpose in John 20, 31. He says, These are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name, right? His evangelistic purpose is to lay out evidence for Jesus' divinity. And so John especially is the basis for our idea of the co-eternality of the Trinity, right? In the beginning was the Word, the coequality of the Trinity, the Word was with God, as well as the consubstantiality of the Trinity, the Word was God. So this is such an important idea to Johannin theology that John makes it the opening statement of his gospel. He puts it first, the first thing he says, and I think by inference the most central point of his apologia. And so we know that John, who was the longest lived of the apostles, was still writing and teaching into the late 90s A.D. He probably passed away sometime in the middle 90s, 95 A.D. And so from John, we come to the what are what we call the Anti Nicene Fathers, which means the people writing before the Council of Nicaea, Christians writing before the Council of Nicaea. So some of the earliest Christians who were writing theological treatises after the passing on of the apostles into glory. And we see particularly in the writings of Ignatius of Antioch. Antioch is a it was one of the first cities that became Christian. So Ignatius is writing in the late 90s and very early 100s, so pretty much right after John had passed away, he expresses a Trinitarian theology which recognizes the triune nature of the Godhead, and he even explicitly says, he explicitly mentions in one of his letters that there's one unbegotten being, God, even the Father, and one only begotten Son, God, the Word and Man, Jesus, right, and one comforter, the Spirit of Truth. So that right there is like a clear transmission from the Apostle John to uh to Ignatius, and that is the Trinitarian, that is the Nicene formulation right there.

SPEAKER_00 4:56

Yes, I'm gonna just stop you there because it's of utmost importance what you're saying. I I pointed out our last episode, Ephesians 1, and what Paul said about the Trinity, which is beautiful. But it could be argued, and you're referring to this, that John's gospel provides perhaps the most comprehensive scriptural foundation for understanding the Trinity.

Why The Word Trinity Appears Later

Why Trinity Protects The Atonement

SPEAKER_03 5:19

Yeah, I think so. But also Paul explicitly mentions it too. So so the the apostles are all clearly on the same page. It's not one of these things where like later textual critics will come in and say, Well, it looks like James and Paul might even have separate theology. You know, like no, there's none of that when it comes to the Trinity. There, all of the the apostles are are on the same page. Matthew, John, you know, Paul, they all agree there's God is is is Father, Son, and Spirit. But the first one to use the term Trinity, and this is where I think some confusion comes in. The first one to use the term Trinity was a guy named Tertullian. He was sort of the first theologian who wrote in Latin. He lived in the late 100s AD, so about a hundred years after after the apostles had all had all died. And so Trinity is just a Latin word that means like triad, like group of three things. It comes from trinus, or threefold, which is the Latin, the Latin root. And it's clear that Tertullian is simply carrying through the thinking of the generation that came before him who were writing in Greek. And that generation got their ideas directly from the apostles. So I and I I want to take care to state for any theology nerds that are maybe listening in here and thinking to themselves, well, you know, Tertullian didn't necessarily have an Icean understanding of the Trinity. And that might be true, but it's inarguable that he had a doctrine of the Trinity. And so I you sometimes see this argument made that the Trinity was an idea that was invented, you know, two or three hundred years after after Christ, and it's not it's nowhere in the Bible. And I think that that's just like completely foolish argument. We only gave several verses that we could. Yeah, it's mentioned like 15 or 20 times. And not not least of all because, right? It that's silly because the doctrine is so clearly present in the scripture. And and yeah, it's fair that the term the term, the word Trinity doesn't start showing up until the 200s, but that's because the Bibles we read are translations of a Greek gospel, they're translations of Greek letters. And the term that we use to describe the Greek concept that I butchered the pronunciation of last time, Homo eucian, is a Latin term, trinity, right? So of course we're not seeing a Latin word translated into English in our Bibles. How could we? They're translations, faithful translations from the Greek. There's no Latin words used in the Bible. And so the term Trinity is just a theological term that we use to describe a concept, much like the term God itself, right? God is just an English word that we use in place of the Hebrew names for God. Typically, when we see God in the Bible, it's it's a translation of Elohim, sometimes Adonai. But you never hear people saying, I'm actually in the proto-Germanic word geta, and it never appears in the Bible. It's not the concept of God, it must have been invented 200 years after. Like, that's ridiculous, you know. So I think it's just a failure. And I think people are arguing from bad motives. You see like Unitarians making this argument pretty frequently that like the Trinity was invented after the fact at the Council of Nicaea. And I think that people that make those arguments don't apply that logic to other things, like for example, the names for God. And I I I'm sorry to say, I think they're either arguing in bad faith or they're just like willfully misunderstanding the evidence that the Bible clearly presents. So if the really early church, the the generation of guys right after John and right after Paul had a doctrine of the Trinity that appears to be, at least from like Ignatius and some of the other heavy hitters like Polycarp, to be basically identical to the eventual the eventual formula that they agreed on at Nicaea, then where did the error slip in? Right? Where did the where did all these wrong ideas about the Godhead come from?

SPEAKER_00 9:39

And and and again, just to remind the listener and ourselves why this is of utmost importance and and people who would call into question the biblical accuracy of the tr concept of the trinity, to deny the trinity uh would force us to redefine the persons of the Godhead. Make Christ a lesser deity, or the spirit inferior to the Father and the Son. And so then you have a tremendous problems theologically and doctrinally, and uh with the most important being of the atonement and what Christ accomplished for us on the cross. So we're not talking about something just merely academic or theoretical or philosophical.

SPEAKER_03 10:17

Yeah, if the trinity is central, like the economic trinity, like we talked about last time, is essential to how we are saved, then when you're knocking out that that uh foundational cornerstone of our theology, Christian theology, then it knocks out the everything else, too, right? And and you do see many of the groups, and we'll get into this too, many of the groups that have, I'll just perhaps uncharitably say squirrely views of the Trinity, also have squirrely views of things like redemption and salvation and justification and the atonement, right? And I think that that's it's not a coincidence that bad Trinitarian theology leads you to bad theologies of salvation.

SPEAKER_00 11:08

So but Tertillian's is he drawing upon his legal background as he's introducing these concepts of person and substance. Again, he's not inventing anything, but he is helping the church think through these in a in a pivotal way. True.

SPEAKER_03 11:23

And there is an argument that's made, and I think this is a fair thing to consider, right? Whether particularly this Greek concept of homoussian you know, this idea of the same essence. What do we mean by essence, right? Of ousios? Is that a a thing? There's an accusation, or not maybe I don't know, it's just there's a there's a debate, right? Is this idea of essence that Jesus and and the Father had this and the Spirit have the same essence? Is that a thing that we pulled from Greek, like Neoplatonistic philosophy, or is that a thing that's obvious from the Bible itself? And I think that there is perhaps a fair argument to be made that the early church fathers were writing in a in a culture in which they were all very familiar with this idea of things having this Aristotelian or Platonic idea of things having uh essential traits, essences. But I also think that that's uh clearly something that the the Hebrews in the Old Testament had as well, right? The idea that that two different things can have the same substance is not a uniquely Greek idea. And even if it is an idea that the early church fathers got from Greek philosophy, does that mean that it's wrong, right? Like one of the things that, for example, uh Justin Martyr is another early church father, he writes a lot about how, well, if general revelation is true and God reveals himself, the logos, God, the word, Christ, working throughout history reveals himself uh in truth. Justin Martyr was preoccupied with this question of like, well, was Plato a proto-Christian? So, yeah, there are early church fathers who think that Greek philosophers had a lot of had a had a correct understanding of how the world works or they had reasoned rightly.

SPEAKER_00 13:30

And just to catch the listener up, what we're walking through and what we're digging into here is is what we confess, if you're you're a part of a church that confesses the Nicene Creed, every Lord's Day when we say that the Son of God is begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made. We're thinking through why we confess that.

Modalism And Sabelianism Defined

SPEAKER_03 13:58

I also I also think that like even if you presuppose that the consubstantiality is a gr is a greeky, it's too greeky, it's a greeky idea. I don't think that that means that it's not what the Bible says. The Bible, as we talked about last time, the Bible says in in John 1, the word was God, right? So there are the apostles had this idea as well. It's not like Justin Martyr and and Ignatius and Tertullian all came up with this idea from you know having read ancient Greek philosophers and and then they were trying to cross sort of cross-apply those teachings to their to what their you know spiritual fathers from a generation before had thought. It's like, no, that's what John thought. So yeah, anyway, I one of the major controversies, this idea that that the father, the son, and the spirit were one essential person. One of the major controversies was from a guy called Sibelius. So it's Sabelianism, which is also called modalism, is the idea that yes, the father and the son and the spirit are one essential person, but they are operating in different like faces or roles or modes, right? It's one God. He's not in three separate persons, he's a single God, he just appears at different times, at different places, in different ways to different people.

SPEAKER_00 15:37

So we're looking now at how these errors slipped in in the church.

SPEAKER_03 15:41

And that's modalism, right? And that's an idea that persists today in certain like oneness Pentecostals, which is a growing movement both in America and and in the developing world. This idea that there's only one God. But you know, he shows up throughout history in different guises, wearing different faces, right? And that the the the people who were in the early church looked at this idea of consubstantiality as being potentially too much like modalism. So so there was some controversy at Nicaea. That, well, if you say that that Jesus and the Father and the Spirit share the same essence, isn't that kind of modalism? And the critical distinction there is that, well, they share the same essence, but they are three distinct persons.

SPEAKER_00 16:36

Right. And that's exactly what modalism is not saying. Modalism is teaching that God is not three distinct persons, but one who appears in different modes, just that thus the word modalism. So it's so you have, and you mentioned the oneness Pentecostals, but so they would say that the Father in the Old Testament, he's the Father in the Old Testament, then he appears as the Son in Jesus' ministry, and then the Spirit after Pentecost. So different modes, different shapes.

Arianism Then And Now

SPEAKER_03 17:05

How they explain the Spirit descending onto him at his baptism, I don't know. My guess would be that they don't. Or, you know, they have they have some some explanation that makes sense within their worldview. But yeah. And then so so so but modalism was kind of the first major anti-Trinitarian heresy, and that came into the picture in the 220s, so like a hundred years after the apostles. And but then the second big one was Arianism, and that came into the picture around like 290 AD, so about 200 years after the death of John, John the Apostle. And so Arianism was almost like the the reverse of modalism, which said that Jesus had to have been a created being because by virtue of his being begotten, the fact that he was a son, right, there must have been a time when Jesus didn't exist. And Arius, the guy that was expounding this heresy was named Arius, and he was actually very persuasive. We know he's a presbyter, now he he was able to convince, like by the late 200s AD, Arianism had become the majority faith of the Germanic tribes that were at that time menacing the Roman Empire. And even several Roman emperors espoused this view. So remembering, of course, even I don't have a I don't I don't want to digress too much about Roman history, but the history of the church is tied up with the history of the Roman Empire for good or for ill. And the church was coming into its into its coming was spreading as the Roman Empire was declining, basically. So there were a bunch of German tribes, they they were menacing the Roman Empire, and a bunch of them were Arians. And so this was a profoundly serious challenge to orthodoxy in the early church.

SPEAKER_00 19:21

And not to maybe I'm jumping too uh too far ahead, so you can rewind if you want to, but how does Arianism persist today?

SPEAKER_03 19:28

Mormons. Yeah, so so but there are several, and Jehovah's Witnesses as well, there are several modern sects that have this idea that Jesus was a created being. And if you the Mormons will kind of say they don't really believe this, which of course they would, but if you really press them on it, they'll say, well, you know, Jesus was the first angel. So, you know, they believe he was not eternally begotten of the Father, but that at some point God brought him into being. And and and in fact, they believe that, if I'm remembering correctly, that God had like physical sexual union with the divine mother to bring Jesus into existence, which is like so far from orthodoxy, it's I'm not even sure you can describe that as Arianism. That's like super Arianism. Um Arius would have looked at that and been like, nah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:34

But we're looking at these heresies that have persisted throughout Christian history, and they are all alternatives to the Trinitarian dogma of the church, of the Trinity.

Constantine And The Council Of Nicaea

Athanasius Defends One Substance

SPEAKER_03 20:44

Yeah. And it's noteworthy that neither one of them was ever fully done away with. Although I think you can m make an argument that inasmuch as Mormons are are espousing a form of Arianism, it's one that they came to on their own. You know, it's not like they were like, ah, that guy Arius had some great ideas. It's like Joseph Smith just came up with a bunch of new stuff and and it happens to look like Arianism. But so the problem of Arianism in the ancient church necessitated a serious response, right? Because it was sort of tearing the church apart. Arius had very serious qualm with the bishop of Alex Bishop of Alexandria, whose name I think was Alexander, which is funny. I think Alexander, Bishop of Alexandria. And so Constantine, the Roman Emperor, Constantine the First. Constantine the Great, his influence on the church is tremendous. That could be the subject of its own episode or two or three, right? A very, very important figure in the early church. Still to some degree a controversial figure. But Constantine. Saw a serious division and infighting in the church of his day. He identified it as a problem. And he decided to gather the predominant leaders of Christendom together to hash out an official solution. So he called a council in the city of Nicaea or Nicaea in what is today Western Turkey. And he said, All right, guys, we're going to get everybody, we're going to get a a representative sample of everybody from the whole Christian church. And we're going to get you all here in this room and you're going to hash this out. And interestingly, this was the first what was called ecumenical council. So it was the first time the quote-unquote full church came together to decide on something. And it's interesting that Constantine himself probably didn't care what the outcome of the council was. In fact, he probably there's some evidence that he might have actually been more sympathetic to the Aryan side at the start. But he was he did care a lot about the unity of the church because it was a dangerous time for the Romans, and he wanted the Roman church to be you know on the same page. And he wanted this contra controversy put to bed. So the Council of Nicaea met from like May to July of 325. And at Nicaea, one of the most ardent voices was that of St. Athanasius, so I think maybe we mentioned in a previous episode. And he he came as the secretary. He came as the secretary of of the Bishop of Alexandria. And although he wasn't the primary author of the Nicene Creed, Athanasius was probably the key defender of this idea of consubstantiality, the homousian, the idea that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit share the same essence. And so he asserted the full divinity of Christ against Arius. And as a result of this months-long process at Nicaea, they the the members of the council established the Orthodox formula of the Trinity, right? That God is one, one God in three persons, Father, Son, and Spirit. And you know, this didn't put the issue fully to bed even at the time. There was still they had to actually have another later church council. The Council of Constantinople was later, I think, in 381 to hammer it home even further. And even that did not totally put the issue to bed, right? There are still Arians and modalists running around today. But it did lay the groundwork for the Orthodox understanding of God's divine nature, which all of the major Christian sects still look back on today.

SPEAKER_00 25:07

Yeah. So thank God for Athanasius and the Michael Jordan of fighting against Arian. But he emerged as, as you said, the theological leader in this fourth century opposing Arians. And isn't it something how a lot of times these heretics are brilliant men? I mean, these were not dumb men.

SPEAKER_03 25:27

Trevor Burrus, Jr. No, and and Arius particularly had recruited a lot of people to his team and influential people. And it was one of his supporters probably who first brought this issue to Constantine. So and he had he had swayed, you know, bearded barbarian warlords and perfumed Roman emperors, right? Great, powerful men of his day with this doctrine that you know Jesus was was a created being. But ultimately, when the bishops looked at what the Bible said, right, and Athanasius pointed to the scriptures, right, and and ardently proclaimed what the what the apostles laid down for them, they they agreed, right? Well, yeah, okay. It's it John says they're the same substance. And so that means that Jesus existed. If Jesus, if this if Jesus the Son is the Word, as John says, he is the Logos, then he existed co eternally, and he's coequal and he is consubstantial.

SPEAKER_00 26:39

And we could still read uh Athanasius today, is particularly his book on the incarnation. Yes. Where he works a lot of this out of Christ's full deity, which made his saving work effective.

SPEAKER_03 26:52

Yes. Any mention of On the Incarnation, I have a friend who I'm sure will find this podcast. Yeah, that's a great book.

Bad Trinity Illustrations Still Mislead

SPEAKER_00 27:01

So so how do these errors concerning the Trinity, non-Trinitarian understandings, how do they still pop up today? And where do we see them predominantly?

SPEAKER_03 27:14

Yeah, well, so I so I I have this sneaking suspicion that modalism is kind of the default understanding of people who don't like haven't given a ton of thought to the Trinity. It's like because it's simpler, right? The the idea of God having three distinct persons in one in one God is challenging, hard to explain. We've just spent two hours trying to explain it and why it matters. And so I think a tendency to sneak into uh a tendency to lapse into modalism, particularly because so many sermon illustrations of the Trinity are really bad. Really bad, and yeah, the things you heard in youth group or children's church. Yeah. Yeah, like imagine it God is like a shamrock, you know. Or an egg or an egg, the yoke, and yeah, terrible illustrations. Yeah. And and so we talked about this.

SPEAKER_00 28:18

It's best when speaking of the Trinity, and and you've been working through the history and and working through where the church has come from in this and how it's grown and established its faith in the Trinity. But it's best to stick with the Word of God, say what the Word of God says about Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and say what these creeds that have been tried and tested say. That's the safest thing to do.

SPEAKER_03 28:44

Yes. And I so I know I already mentioned oneness Pentecostalism, but this is something that I think kind of really worries me, right? There's like 30 million oneness Pentecostals. That's a lot of people. A lot of people that are laboring in in error, you know, and and it's just modalism, right? The idea that God is a singular divine spirit, that he's undivided, without distinct persons, he just appears to be distinct people when he reveals himself in various ways. There's 30 million people that believe that. That's that's worrying to me and growing every day. And a lot of the rising, as Catholicism sort of loses some of its motive force in Latin America, a lot of what is replacing it in the Christianity of Latin America is versions of health and wealth gospel and oneness Pentecostalism, which is really bad. Out of the frying pan and into the fire would be how I would describe that.

Modern Movements And Confessional Boundaries

SPEAKER_00 29:50

Yeah, the the wealth and health the wealth and health, whatever it is. Health and wealth gospel really dabbles in that idea of Jesus being a man and he became what he was because of the power of the Holy Spirit. And you too can become like that. You have enough faith and you seek and you give us enough of a money, yeah, you will become this anointed superman. Yeah. And it's it's a terrible it it not only is devastating practically to people, but it's rooted in these ancient heresies, isn't it?

SPEAKER_03 30:22

Yeah, I think so, certainly. You know, pray your prayer of acceptance and and you too can can become to some degree omniscient, omnipotent. Very, yeah, very troubling. And then it so there's certain Adventist groups, as I understand it, that teach that Christ wasn't co-equal or co-eternal. I don't want to paint all Adventists with the with a broad brush because I think it's just kind of an offshoot that believes this. But on the other side, on the flip side, the the Aryan side, Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons teach that Christ was a created being. And the Mormons, I didn't get into this when I was talking about it before, but they teach that he was Satan's brother. Like there's 17 million Mormons in the world today. Yeah. Much like in the time of Athanasius, right? The church today is beset by heretics who would place our Lord in the role of a mere creature, a being not begotten, but made.

SPEAKER_00 31:17

Yeah, it's just 30 million oneness Pentecostals with 17 million Mormons.

SPEAKER_03 31:23

We're feeling very outnumbered as reformed.

SPEAKER_00 31:26

And evangelicals wanting to act like uh, well, there's they're Christian like us.

SPEAKER_03 31:30

Yeah. Yeah. This this and I've used the term ecumenism, right? The the idea that we should be focusing more on what we have in common with other denominations and and trying to open the big tent to Mormonism. I do see that a lot. Like and The Chosen, for example, is a collaborative effort between Mormon guy and Pentecostal guy. And that's hugely popular, even among rock-ribbed conservative Christians, you know. Not me. I'm not watching the chosen, not to not to get on my soapbox about the chosen. But that is indisputably an attempt to open the tent to people who believe that Jesus Christ was the brother of Satan. For me, that is too big of a tent. And I think most of the most of the Christians throughout history probably would have agreed.

SPEAKER_00 32:29

Yeah, we we have to be desiring to be useful to the Lord in in our day. And we speak of Athanasius and these heroes of the faith that hammered out these truths, again, not drilling into mere tradition, but the word of God. What did the Gospel of John say about Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? What did the Apostle Paul say? And then they stood and they were warriors for the truth in their generation. And so these are not irrelevant topics we're talking about. And someone has to take a stand for the sake of proper understanding of the gospel.

SPEAKER_03 33:02

Yeah, amen. And even so, another thing that I wanted to talk about too. We're probably running close to time, and I don't want to, I don't want to be too mean about this one. But recently the Southern Baptist Conference had this whole controversy over whether or not they would affirm the Nicene Creed. And I think they ended up saying, no, you know, we're not gonna we're not gonna mandate that the Nicene Creed be included in our worship services. And I think that's I hope that that's probably more due to a distaste over the part of the creed that talks about there being one baptism for the remission of sins, because that's out of step with the Baptist sacramentology. But it's still, to me, it's still troubling that any sect, a sect of like like solid Bible-believing Christians. I've known many Southern Baptists. I've I've thought very highly of most of them that I've known. They are faithful Christians and like I'll say rock-ribbed again, serious, serious about the Bible. And they they present themselves as Bible-believing and within the mainstream of orthodoxy, but they can't bring themselves to confidently and full-throatedly assent to what the church has taught about the Trinity for 2,000 years.

SPEAKER_00 34:21

Yeah, and a lot of this comes out of that the you know slogan, no creed but the Bible, and an anti-confessional stance, which I'd refer to Carl Truman's book, Confessions, really attacks that well and helps us to understand the importance of the confessions.

SPEAKER_03 34:37

And as we've demonstrated, it's it's not as though this creed is pulling from anything but the Bible.

SPEAKER_00 34:45

That's what that's of utmost importance. Right. Trevor Burrus, Jr. But we need we it it we need those boundary markers and we need those borders theologically and doctrinally so that we don't have this quasi-Christianity, which is no Christianity at all, that denies the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and a proper understanding of Christ and the Spirit and the Father and salvation. We need that stuff out. We don't need that coming into the church.

Final Exhortation And Farewell

SPEAKER_03 35:13

Yeah. Or we need to present a united front against it at the very least. And for, you know, 1700 years, right? It's the Nicene Creed set up in 325. So what what is that? Last year was 1700 years. We've we've agreed. This is the benchmark, right? You know, if you're Orthodox, you you agree that with the Nicene Creed. Sure. So I I do think it's it's a it's a just another reason why this is something we still have to talk about today. And I hope that we've managed to just explain to people why it mattered at the time of the apostles, why it mattered in the Old Testament, why it mattered for Athanasius, why it matters for us today, because this is the the centerpiece of God's redemptive work is is in the Trinity.

SPEAKER_00 36:12

Glory to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Amen. We're glad that you joined us for catechizing conversations. Drew, thank you for being with us today. Thank you, Cisco. We hope you join us again. The Lord bless you, and we trust you have a wonderful day in the Lord.