Daniel C. Peterson and Stephen D. Ricks on the Nicene Creed

“ Among them, the Nicene Creed is almost certainly the most famous and the most important. Yet its very innovativeness makes it a most questionable basis for banishing the Latter-day Saints from Christendom. "It is impossible for any one," declared [the non-LDS scholar] Edwin Hatch in his classic 1888 Hibbert Lectures, "whether he be a student of history or no, to fail to notice a difference of both form and content between the Sermon on the Mount and the Nicene Creed. The Sermon on the Mount is the promulgation of a new law of conduct; it assumes beliefs rather than formulates them; the theological conceptions which underlie it belong to the ethical rather than the speculative side of theology; metaphysics are wholly absent. The Nicene Creed is a statement partly of historical facts and partly of dogmatic inferences; the metaphysical terms which it contains would probably have been unintelligible to the first disciples; ethics have no place in it. The one belongs to a world of Jewish peasants, the other to a world of Greek philosophers. The contrast," Hatch continues, "is patent. If any one thinks that it is sufficiently explained by saying that the one is a sermon and the other a creed, it must be pointed out in reply that the question why an ethical sermon stood in the forefront of the teaching of Jesus Christ, and a metaphysical creed in the forefront of the Christianity of the fourth century, is a problem which claims investigation." [Edwin Hatch, The Influence of Greek Ideas on Christianity, Gloucester, MA: Smith, 1970, p. 1.]” (Daniel C. Peterson, Stephen D. Ricks, Offenders for a Word: How Anti-Mormons Play Word Games to Attack the Latter-day Saints [Salt Lake City: Aspen Books, 1992], pp. 45-48)