Against the world, still

After 6,000 miles of flying, I made it to the very end of Europe, where I would cross into Asia and visit the site that brought the church the Nicene Creed. Istanbul is built on the Bosporus—a strait that has always been about more than geography. Constantine saw the economic value of this passage and made it his capital to anchor an empire. Not long after, he called church bishops to nearby Nicea, present-day Iznik, to settle the question that would shape the Christian faith: Who is Jesus Christ?

I had the privilege of traveling with a group that came to mark that council’s 1,700th anniversary—to remember not the empire, but the creed. As colleagues and I walked Istanbul’s modern streets, humming with traffic and trade, where the Islamic call to prayer issues out five times a day, I was reminded that the questions remain the same. What do we confess? And will we hold to it when the world demands we let go?

At the Nicea Conference, the speakers traced how orthodoxy holds when everything around it thins. Albert Mohler warned that the church’s greatest danger is not hostility but hollowness—thin Christianity disappears but thick survives. The creeds, he said, are how the church keeps its faith dense with truth, impossible to dilute.

Ligon Duncan reminded us that the bishops of Nicea bore the scars of persecution and defended the gospel not from ivory towers but from prison cells. And Kevin DeYoung drew the line from that gathering to our own divided age: The creed still binds believers in one confession, giving the church a center of gravity no culture can erase. When we confess one Lord Jesus Christ, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, we stand with Athanasius—the young deacon at Nicea who would later, as bishop, refuse to bend when emperors pressed him to yield. Athanasius contra mundum—Athanasius against the world. Yet he prevailed, not by force but by the stubborn strength of truth.

Every age brings temptations for the church to compromise. In the fourth century, the pressure was imperial. In ours, it is cultural—political conflict, moral confusion, and, to borrow from Carl Trueman, the rise and triumph of the modern self. But the creed still draws the same bright line: that Christ is begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.

We don’t face torture or exile. But we do face a world that insists reality is what we make of it and truth is negotiable. The challenge for us is not persecution but persuasion. There is a slow erosion of confidence that what the church confesses is really, eternally true. The early church fought heresy that threatened to make Jesus less than God. We face heresies that make truth less than real. Either way, the remedy is the same: a faith thick enough to resist thinning.

It struck me, hearing these messages, that every economic or political system fails when it trades substance for appearance. Erdoğan’s Turkey—where the lira has been devalued again and again—has illustrated the point: a lesson in what happens when promises outrun reserves. Inflation is heresy in financial form. When the church prints moral slogans without doctrinal reserves, it devalues its witness. Nicea’s answer was to anchor the church’s currency in the eternal: Christ of one substance with the Father.

The setting itself underscored that point. Modern Istanbul thrives on the same geography that once enriched Byzantium. The Bosporus still funnels ships between the Black Sea and the rest of the world. Every Russian and Ukrainian vessel that seeks the open sea must pass beneath its bridges. Yet, empires come and go. Each is convinced it has found the formula for stability. But the creed endures.

The conference didn’t pretend that the early church’s struggles were greater than ours—just different. In fact, it reminded us that orthodoxy is always a contested word. Nicea had Constantine’s protection, but later, many would die under his successors. Doctrinal conviction always comes with conflict. But the alternative is worse. A church that avoids conflict by avoiding clarity eventually loses both truth and peace.

Outside the conference, the adhan—the Muslim call to prayer—echoed from the minarets. Inside, we recited what no empire can overturn: “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-­begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds.”

A millennium and seven centuries later, those words remain the church’s true wealth—faith’s hardest currency.