Most of us will not be called to physically die for Christ. Even so, in light of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, let us lay down our lives for him. Let’s be living martyrs, constantly dying in order that we might find our life.

Martyr stories have always encouraged me. It might seem morbid to think that a story of someone losing their life can be beautiful, but these stories expose that there are some things that are more valuable than life. God often uses these stories of courage and commitment to bring in lost souls, to build the church, and to encourage the saints to live a life of greater service to God. As a young Christian, I used to say confidently, “I would die for Christ,” but as I get older, I am realizing more and more that dying for Christ might be the easier thing.
What do I mean? Dying for Christ takes a moment of extreme courage and resolve from the hand of God, but living for Christ requires a sustained courage that beats back the devil and the flesh daily. It’s a constant dying. Jesus tells us that if we are to find our life, we must lose it (Matt 10:39). He says, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matt 16:24). The Christian is a living sacrifice (Romans 12:1), a constant offering on the altar of God.
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It speaks to us as members of Christ’s body in local congregations. It’s not about how I as an individual can have my own pastoral care ministry as a lone ranger helping our most deeply troubled people, but about how whole church fellowships can work together. This is real love in action in true community in a way that nothing else matches. Anywhere.

There are at least three reasons it’s worth reading this new book on helping people with mental health struggles.
1. Mental Health and Your Church is written for ‘ordinary church members.’ It contextualises the intensely practical doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. It takes seriously the biblical teaching on mutual care for each other in all sorts of challenging life circumstances, applying it wisely to the complexities of 21st century churches. These complexities include an apparent increase in mental health disorders and the relatively recent rise of a growing, predominately secular, mental health system that operates in areas that overlap the traditional concerns of Christian growth and ministry. And there are historical weaknesses in training pastors to equip themselves and their people in all that biblical pastoral care entails. We do need to know how to do more than listening, prayer, and referral—as important as those things are![1]
2. Authors Helen Thorne and Steve Midgley write from a UK context. It seems to me that Brits and Aussies have some things in common that we don’t always share with the various American sub-cultures that influence our pastoral care models. So, it’s just nice to see some different ways to do things that resonate with my feel for what church life is like in Australia—or what it could be.
3. Before going into pastoral ministry, ending up as rector of Christ Church, Midgley was a Cambridge-educated medical doctor who trained in psychiatry. He clearly retains a good appreciation of the value of his former profession—along with some of its limitations. This ‘insiders’ view is so important. As such, this is not a book aiming to take over or replace psychiatry. It is positively written to help equip our churches do all they can do to help in addition to what professional mental health services can offer.
What’s in it?
It’s a small book of around 180 pages divided roughly equally into three main sections:
Section 1 on understanding mental illness carefully explains what mental illnesses are. It considers mental health issues, talking therapies, and medications from a Christian worldview perspective that I found, as a Christian counsellor and medical practitioner, to be balanced.
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Protestants have historically believed that the Reformers were recovering a fundamentally biblical insight: sinners are declared righteous by God (the one who justifies), on the basis of Christ’s finished work (the ground of justification), and through the instrument of faith alone (the means of justification). The Reformers simultaneously (1) recovered a biblical insight and (2) sharpened a key biblical insight in the midst of conflict and debate. 

The Reality of Confessions, Statements, and Creeds
Christians throughout their history have determined that it is necessary to articulate the faith. Whether we call these articulations “creeds,” or “confessions,” or “statements” is somewhat beside the point—as every effort of this sort shares a basic family resemblance: the desire to articulate something important or essential or pressing about what we as Christians believe. I, as a Baptist, was taught that we have “no creed but the Bible.” This has a kind of bravado and swagger about it, but is it really true? Is it the case that Baptists—if we are consistent—have “no creed but the Bible”? I have come to reject this understanding. Indeed, even the Anabaptist Schleitheim Confession (1527 A.D.) is, well, a confession (and yes, I know it is a big debate to trace the relationship, or lack of a relationship, between the Anabaptists and contemporary Baptists). It is a summary of Christian belief—whether we call it a confession, a statement, or a creed.
The purpose of this article is to ask a basic question: Is Nicaea enough? Or more importantly: Is the Nicene Creed (381 A.D.) adequate as a summary of Christian belief, confession, fellowship, and shared ministry? The more one reflects on this question (as I see it) the more complex one sees that such a question is. If one is asking whether all Christians should affirm the Nicene Creed, the answer should be a hearty “yes” (though Calvin’s reservations about the exact way to understand the source of the Son’s deity is a legitimate reservation with which I have sympathy). But if one comes from a different angle and asks if the Nicene Creed is optimal or sufficient for meaningful Christian belief, confession, fellowship, and shared ministry, then a different answer might emerge. In short, if one asks the latter kind of question, it may very well be the case that the Nicene Creed in fact is not enough.
So perhaps there are two questions one should think through:

Is the Nicene Creed adequate as a summary of Christian belief, confession, fellowship, and shared ministry?
Should all Christians be able to affirm the Nicene Creed?

I will suggest that we answer “no” to the first question and “yes” to the second question. I take it as a matter of course that all Christians should answer “yes” to the second question—we will not linger much more on that question here. But we will linger on the first question in this article.
Why the Draw to the Nicene Creed as Enough?
On the first question, we might ask why would one be inclined to think that Nicaea might be enough for Christian belief, confession, fellowship, and shared ministry? One might be the understandable impulse or desire for unity. There is a right and proper yearning, on my view, for Christian unity. Most of like to be liked, and would not—generally—seek to live a life of tension, friction, disharmony, and disagreement. If we are honest, most of us probably think along the following lines: “It would be nice to live a life where we get along with all or most persons, and where our lives are not marked by combat, fighting, debating, and constant disagreement.” We know from Scripture that a day is coming where there will be a blessed and joyous unity. Indeed, we know that in the future the wolf will lie down with lamb (Isa. 11:6). But we also know that it is a mark of unfaithfulness and unbelief to say, “peace, peace” when there is no peace.
But it is a mistake—a serious one—to yearn in the wrong way, or to yearn for unity without grasping where one is in history. Political commentator and theorist Eric Voegelin warned against “immanentizing the eschaton.”[1] Voegelin meant by this terminology that it is a perennial temptation to try and force the blessed future eschatological state into the present by the use of force (Voegelin was particularly concerned with what develops, and had developed in the 20th century, of using centralized political power to “usher” in the eschaton). Perhaps, analogically, it is also mistaken to so wish for peace and unity that one fails to have the courage to live in our age of antithesis, where there is an animus which exists between the things of the evil one and the things of God (e.g., Gen. 3:15). That is, we live in the period of the already-not yet, where the future state of unity and peace has not arrived. It is not wise, prudent, or faithful to fail to know our place in God’s economy. Thus, we should both (1) seek unity where we can, but we should also (2) know that we shall not find perfect unity in the present time.
It is perhaps also the case that to think that the Nicene Creed is enough is perhaps rooted in a desire to return to an age where the universal Church seemed—at least in broad outline—to be a united church with a common theology. But this is only somewhat the case. In the fourth century, Nicene trinitarianism “won” in 325 A.D. at Nicaea (and again in 381 A.D. at Constantinople). But Athanasius, the leading proponent of Nicene Trinitarianism in the fourth century, was forced out (banished) from his teaching/bishop position some five times over seventeen total years in the course of his ministry. In short: the church was only “united” to a certain degree.
Or perhaps the desire to think that the Nicene Creed is enough is rooted in the conviction that once one has got the Trinity and the deity of the Son and Spirit figured out, that is enough. That is, cannot the Christian church simply rally around a simple confession that there is one God, and that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are each fully divine persons? Certainly, a Christian should confess no less than this, but is there any good reason to think that such a confession is enough?
John Henry Newman and James Orr
Perhaps we might find help in the 1901 work, The Progress of Dogma, by Scottish divine James Orr. But to understand James Orr’s work we must briefly recall the work of John Henry Newman. Orr wrote his volume just over ten years after the death of John Henry Newman (1801–1890).
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