Hi everyone,
On CF and in RL, I've met many mainline Christian folks whom define a "Christian", first and foremost, as someone who believes in the Nicene-outlaid Trinity.
Why is this? Why not define "Christian" as "a Christ-follower", or "Someone whom believes in Christ as their savior?"
(Note: I'm honestly here trying to understand to different perspectives, and totally not interested in arguing)
The Niceno-Constantinoplian Creed has been the defining confession of faith for the Christian Church in its rejection of the errors of Sabellianism, Arianism, and Macedonianism.
The point is to declare, with firmness, what is
true faith (orthodoxy) against what is something else, that is,
another faith (heterodoxy).
Without some measure of Christological confession there's really no belief at all.
By the loosest standard one who is a "Jesus follower" can extend to Muslims and Baha'is just as easily as to Christians.
There's something far more central to the Christian confession then simply acknowledging that there was a Jesus, that His teachings are valuable, or that He was a person of divine significance in some way.
That central issue of Christological confession is what was largely the place of theological debate and controversy for most of the first thousand years of Church history. With Docetists and Ebionites on the early end of the first millennium, and Iconoclasts at the late end of the first millennium. With Marcionism, Valentianism, other schools of Gnosticism, the Sabellians, the Adoptionists, Arianism, Apollonarianism, Macedonianism, Nestorianism, Eutychianism, Monothelitism, all in the middle.
We are compelled by faith to say
something. That something is, fundamentally, the Niceno-Constantinoplian Creed; that Jesus the Christ is indeed true God of true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father. Through whom all things were made, and was made man in the womb of the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit.
-CryptoLutheran