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 mispronounce 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 realise 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 Nicaea, which was situated in the modern Turkish

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

Ares. 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 Arius, the Son, whom God made before anything else.

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