By Wissam Nasrallah

As an Arab evangelical Christian, I grew up knowing what I was not and, by extension, what we were not as a community of faith. We are not ritualistic, or so we say, even though we have our own rituals and traditions.

In a region where religion has too often been weaponized or reduced to mere social or tribal identity, we’ve learned to prize a lean, Bible-only identity. And there is something beautiful about this instinct, a holy jealousy for Scripture’s supremacy in our lives.

But here’s the irony: if we define ourselves chiefly by what we reject, particularly in matters of ritual and tradition, we slide into a negative identity and risk losing our grip on the truths of Scripture. We’ve become quick to say what we’re against and slow to say what we’re for. I don’t claim to speak for all evangelicals, but this describes many churches in Lebanon.

Furthermore, in an era when self-proclaimed evangelical churches are proliferating (think Oneness congregations and prosperity gospel churches, etc.), and when some disciple-making movements prize rapid multiplication above depth, the evangelical church in Lebanon and across the region needs to recover something our heritage long treasured but has recently neglected: the church’s ecumenical creeds and confessions.

One reason we may have lost that heritage is that the churches evangelicals often call “traditional,” especially the Catholic and Orthodox Churches from which most evangelicals have come, have retained the ecumenical creeds and regularly use them in their liturgies. To evangelical ears, this can sound ritualistic, which can keep us from noticing how deeply biblical these ancient creeds are.

Carl Trueman, in his book The Creedal Imperative, makes an interesting point: rejecting creeds in the name of “Bible only” often means rejecting the Bible’s own pattern of “sound words” (2 Timothy 1:13). The historic principle of sola Scriptura, Scripture as our supreme authority, never meant “me and my Bible in isolation.” It means Scripture rules, and therefore the church humbly receives and summarizes what Scripture teaches for clarity and unity. Theologically speaking, creeds have ministerial authority rather than a magisterial one. In other words, confessions are the church’s way of saying together, “this is what we believe the Bible teaches.” They are therefore not competitors or additions to Scripture, but its faithful servants. Scripture, as Luther described it, is norma normans non normata, the norm of norms that cannot be normed, while creeds are norma normata, a norm that is normed.

Creeds are Scripture faithfully summarized, articulated and confessed into doctrinal statements. This is not supposed to restrict critical thinking but provide a foundation that sustains it: Christ the cornerstone and Scripture, the sure bedrock, give the church stability in the storm. This is why, far from stifling the Spirit, clear doctrine unites us and frees us to worship, witness, and even suffer with confidence and joy.

The early church understood this. Faced with questions about the nature of Jesus, they didn’t shrug and say, “just read your Bible.” They wrestled together with Scripture and the Apostles’ teaching and emerged with clear confessions such as we find in the Nicene Creed. My good friend Dr. Rami Halaseh has recently published A Biblical Reading of The Nicene Creed, a scholarly Arabic study on precisely this point.

Furthermore, we need to acknowledge a deeper issue: evangelical amnesia about church history. Many of us suffer from what missiologist Ralph D. Winter calls the “Blink Off, Blink On” (BOBO) phenomenon in his article “The Kingdom Strikes Back”. The idea is that we blink off somewhere around Acts 28 and blink back on around the year 1517 with Luther’s Reformation, as if nothing significant happened to the church for fifteen centuries.

The BOBO phenomenon also breeds what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery”, the assumption that newer is automatically better, that every generation must reinvent Christianity from scratch. But, as Lewis observed, the only way to avoid the errors of our own age is to know church history, where creeds and confessions connect us to the long conversation of faith that didn’t begin with us and won’t end with us.

Therefore, creeds and confessions can help the church and believers in at least three crucial ways:

First, they give us a shared and clear grammar. Earlier Christians have bequeathed us the gift of precise and common grammar that is essential for “catholicity,” to use a term we find in the Nicene creed, across denominations and repeatable for catechesis. As R.C. Sproul puts it, creeds “are brief statements of what we historically have called ‘systematic theology’”. For example, the doctrine of the Trinity is the church’s way of saying that the God who saves is love in his very being: One essence, three persons. Not three gods (tritheism). Not three masks (modalism). Not three levels of divinity (subordinationism). The grammar of the Trinity safeguards the gospel itself.

Second, they protect against old heresies with new names. Here’s what many pastors discover sooner or later: theological errors are remarkably unoriginal. Indeed, our historical myopia leaves us vulnerable to repeating ancient errors under the assumption that we’re encountering them for the first time. Arianism becomes “Jesus as the highest created being.” Adoptionism becomes “the Spirit made him the Son at baptism.” Modalism becomes “one God wearing different hats.” Or when you don’t know that Pelagius taught salvation by works in the fifth century, you’re less equipped to spot it dressed up in contemporary clothing.

The creeds function like doctrinal guardrails, helping each generation avoid the ditches that swallowed churches before us.

Third, they connect us to the faith once delivered. In our age of expressive individualism, confessions remind us that Christianity is not a “choose your own adventure” spirituality. It’s a faith once delivered, received, and passed down. Unfortunately, we’ve forgotten giants like Athanasius, Augustine, and even Saint Patrick, who devoted their lives to defending the gospel we still preach. Many of these early defenders of orthodoxy are from our region. Their theological labor is part of our spiritual inheritance. In other words, this is not dead tradition, it’s a living connection to the communion of saints. Consider this: when Paul tells Timothy to “follow the pattern of the sound words that you have heard from me” (2 Timothy 1:13), he’s not advocating for doctrinal minimalism but for retaining, protecting and transmitting a clear body of teachings. When Jude urges us to “contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3), he assumes there’s a recognizable shape to that faith, something concrete enough to defend.

This year marks seventeen centuries since Nicaea, seventeen hundred years since the church confessed that Jesus is “true God from true God.” In a time of political upheaval not unlike our own, the church insisted that salvation depends on who Jesus is, not just what he did or how he lived. If the Son is not truly God, we are not truly saved.

The Nicene creed and other creeds and confessions from church history will not save us. But they will help us faithfully proclaim the Savior who does. Through them we remember who Christ is, who we are in him, and what unites us beyond ethnic, cultural, and denominational lines. They anchor us in the unchanging gospel and teach the church to speak with clarity and one clear voice amid doctrinal confusion. In a region marked by shifting realities, we need that clarity more than ever.

Wissam Nasrallah is the newly elected president of ABTS.

This blog post benefited from online research, help from an AI assistant through an iterative conversation, and feedback from several colleagues as part of ABTS’ peer-review process. All arguments, interpretations, editorial choices, and conclusions are mine, and I take full responsibility for the sources and any errors.