Mistakes have a way of repeating themselves. Based on my research, it turns out that I'm not the

first teenager to have ruined a car by pouring water in the hole where the oil is supposed to go.

Or maybe it was oil where the water was supposed to go, I'm not sure. Either way,

the car did not appreciate it and neither did my parents. Nor am I the first person to forget to

back up my wedding photos, accidentally set fire to my hair due to an excess of hair product,

or mispronounced the word alibi as alibi. Mistakes can happen easily in the theological realm too,

and chances are, they are mistakes that have already been made well before we ever think of making

them. Wouldn't it be good if our ancestors could forewarn us about these theological pitfalls and

wrong turns? Well, this is one of the reasons why creeds and confessions are so valuable.

The historical Christian creeds and confessions were usually written to address the theological

mistakes of their time, mistakes that we can very easily slip into today. Like my unhappy interaction

with the engine of a Volkswagen, many of these mistakes don't even seem like mistakes when we make

them. It's only when we are a little way down the road that we start to see the damaging

consequences, and so creeds and confessions can protect us in ways that we may not even realize

we need protecting. I'd like to focus on one creed in particular, the Nicene creed. It was

formulated in the year 325 in the Greek city of Nicia, which was situated in the modern Turkish city

of Iznik. A controversy had arisen about the nature of Christ. In the red corner, there was

Areas. Understanding quite rightly that there is only one God, he reasoned quite wrongly,

that God the Father alone is eternal and uncreated. Everything other than the Father is created,

including, said Areas, the Son whom God made before anything else. Areas was keen to affirm that

Christ was a perfect creature, but nevertheless he must be a creature, even though he was

the creature through whom the Father created everything else. Areas grew quite the following,

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