Gary DeMar cannot be trusted with the creeds and confessions of the church. More than three years ago, on a program answering a public letter that asked him to clarify his eschatology, DeMar and his co-host Eric Rauch discussed the Nicene Creed. After DeMar read the first sentence and made a few comments, Rauch immediately chimed in to say that the Nicene Creed is “imprecise” and “not Biblically accurate,” because the first sentence does not state that Jesus Christ created all things, only that God, the Father Almighty, is the maker of heaven and earth.
Small problem. If you read on, the Nicene Creed states the very thing Rauch says it doesn’t:
We 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 (æons), Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; by whom all things were made....
Did DeMar correct Rauch? No. Apparently DeMar didn’t know either. I documented the exchange at the time in “Does American Vision Know the Nicene Creed?”
DeMar’s new book with Kim Burgess gives a fresh example. Early in The Resurrection of the Dead, Burgess and DeMar make a claim about church history that many readers will accept without checking. It comes in a short exchange about the creeds. DeMar begins by naming the creed and the date he has in mind:
GARY: It would have been nice if those at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, when they sent that creed around, had said, “Wait a minute, where are the proof texts for all of this?” Now, some of the statements in the Nicene Creed are obviously correct.... They are texts taken right out of Scripture, for example, that Christ was “incarnate of the virgin Mary” or was “crucified under Pontius Pilate,” but then you have to turn around and ask about, “is seated at the right hand of the Father, [and] He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”1
Burgess picks up the same creed and the same date, asking whether “the men at Nicaea in AD 325” judged the second coming correctly (13). Then he turns to the resurrection:
KIM: While you are mentioning the Nicene Creed, I think it is interesting to add something regarding the eschatology presented there. I think the Nicene Creed may have seen some of these problems and made a nice and needed correction at some point at least. If you go back to the Apostles’ Creed, there is no firm date and authorship for it as there is for the Nicene Creed, what does it say about the resurrection per se? It says, “I believe in the resurrection of the body,” whereas the Nicene Creed, in order to get in line with Scripture’s own language, corrected this to say, “I look forward to the resurrection of the dead,” which language ... is clearly Biblical per the explicit language that Paul used in 1 Corinthians 15.
GARY: Right. That is the proper language to use.
KIM: I think this was a good improvement by Nicaea, and I think they were onto something good and right when they made this change, but it was never spelled out.
GARY: I think that some creedal statements, because they were in Latin, talk about “the resurrection of the flesh.”
KIM: Yes, well, that way of thinking ... “of the flesh” ... is a contradiction in terms. (13-14)
So here is the history as they tell it. The Nicene Creed is the creed of the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, with a “firm date and authorship.” The Apostles’ Creed came before it and confessed “the resurrection of the body.” Nicaea then “corrected” that wording to “the resurrection of the dead,” and the Latin “resurrection of the flesh” is a mistake.
And this matters to them because they do not believe that the body laid in the grave will be raised. Burgess calls the traditional language of the “self-same body” its “cardinal mistake” and says plainly, “it is not the self-same body” (36). If he can show that the early church moved away from “the resurrection of the body” toward “the resurrection of the dead,” he can claim the church itself was drifting in his direction.
Almost every part of that history is wrong. To see why, we need to know which creed is which and when each one was written.
Three Creeds, Not Two
Many Christians know two creeds by name: the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed. But what we call “the Nicene Creed” is not the creed written at Nicaea, and “the Apostles’ Creed” in the form we recite it is not the oldest of the three. Here they are in order.
The Creed of Nicaea (AD 325). In AD 325, bishops from across the Roman Empire met at Nicaea, in what is now Turkey, to answer the teaching of Arius, who denied that the Son is fully God. The creed it wrote is short, and almost all of it is about the Father and the Son. Its middle section says that Christ “came down and was incarnate and was made man; he suffered, and the third day he rose again, ascended into heaven; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” Then it says simply, “And in the Holy Ghost,” and ends with a set of condemnations of Arius’s teaching.2 There is no line about the resurrection of the dead at all. The Creed of Nicaea does not address it.
The Creed of Constantinople (AD 381). Fifty-six years later a second council met at Constantinople. The creed associated with it took the Nicene faith about the Son, expanded the section on the Holy Spirit, and added a closing section on the church, baptism, and the life to come. This is the creed most churches today call “the Nicene Creed.” It is the first of these creeds to say “the resurrection of the dead”: “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.”
The Apostles’ Creed. This creed grew out of the baptismal creed of the church at Rome, which scholars call the Old Roman Creed. That older creed was already in use in the 300s. Marcellus of Ancyra quotes it in Greek around AD 340, and Rufinus of Aquileia writes a commentary on it around AD 404. The Apostles’ Creed reached the received form we recite today by the early 700s. It was not written by the apostles, and its final wording is later than both councils.
Now look at what each says about the resurrection:
Old Roman Creed (in use by c. 340): carnis resurrectionem, “the resurrection of the flesh”
Creed of Nicaea (325): nothing
Creed of Constantinople, today’s “Nicene Creed” (381): “the resurrection of the dead”
Apostles’ Creed, received form (early 700s): carnis resurrectionem, “the resurrection of the flesh”
One more detail explains the wording people know. The Latin of the Apostles’ Creed has never said “the resurrection of the body.” It says carnis resurrectionem, “the resurrection of the flesh.” “Body” comes from English translations, most famously the Book of Common Prayer.
Why the “Correction” Never Happened
With the dates in front of us, the claim fails at four points.
First, Nicaea changed nothing about the resurrection, because the Creed of Nicaea does not mention it. The line Burgess credits to Nicaea comes from the creed of 381. So do the lines DeMar credited to Nicaea in AD 325: “incarnate of the virgin Mary,” “crucified under Pontius Pilate,” and “is seated at the right hand of the Father.” None of those phrases is in the creed of 325. All of them are in the creed of 381.
Second, there is no evidence that the creed of 381 corrected the Apostles’ Creed. Scholars debate where the creed of 381 came from. Some trace it to Eastern baptismal creeds, while others think it drew on an earlier Western creed that restated the Old Roman Creed.3 But whatever its sources, nothing in the record shows that the bishops thought “the resurrection of the flesh” was wrong or meant “the resurrection of the dead” to replace it. J. N. D. Kelly, the standard historian of the early creeds, treats the resurrection clause as ordinary wording in Eastern baptismal creeds and locates the council’s distinctive contribution in its teaching on the Holy Spirit.4 Nor did the older wording disappear. The Roman creed kept saying “the resurrection of the flesh,” Augustine was still using it in the fifth century to prepare new believers for baptism,5 and the Apostles’ Creed kept that wording when it reached its received form three centuries later. Burgess has mistaken a difference in expression for a correction in doctrine.
Third, the early church did not set “the dead” against “the flesh.” It used the two phrases for one article of faith. Cyril of Jerusalem taught new believers the creed of his church around AD 350, and its article read “the resurrection of the flesh.” That was not only a Western way of speaking. The First Creed of Antioch, from AD 341, also ends with “the resurrection of the flesh and life everlasting.” Yet Cyril’s lecture on the article of his own creed opens, “Faith therefore in the Resurrection of the dead, is a great commandment and doctrine” (18.1). It closes its argument with “Thus much in proof of the Resurrection of the dead” (18.21), and then says plainly that “my present remarks concerning the resurrection of the dead have been made with reference to the Article ‘In the resurrection of the flesh’” (18.22). Cyril leaves no doubt about what rises: “this body shall be raised, not remaining weak as now; but raised the very same body” (18.18). Some thirty years later, Cyril was among the bishops at Constantinople in 381.6 We have no record of what he contributed to the creed’s wording. But a bishop who had taught that the two phrases name one doctrine took part in the very council Burgess credits with correcting one by the other. More than a century before Cyril, Tertullian took up the phrase “the resurrection of the dead” and asked what it means. His answer was that “it is the rising again of men’s bodies that is meant,” and he pointed to Abraham, who asked for a place to “bury my dead” (Gen. 23:4), meaning Sarah’s body.7 The distinction Burgess draws between the two phrases finds no support in these early witnesses.
Fourth, both phrases come from Scripture, and Paul joins them. Burgess is right that “the resurrection of the dead” is Paul’s language in 1 Corinthians 15 (15:12, 21, 42). But when Paul turns to explain it, he asks, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” (15:35).8 His answer is about the body: “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body” (15:44). Elsewhere he says that God “will also give life to your mortal bodies” (Rom. 8:11), that we wait for “the redemption of our bodies” (8:23), and that Christ “will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body” (Phil. 3:21). “The dead” tells us who is raised. “The body” and “the flesh” tell us what is raised. Paul moves from one to the other without treating either as a correction of the other. The creeds use both kinds of language because Scripture does.
There is a further irony. Kelly argues that the Roman creed’s choice of “flesh” was influenced, at least in part, by controversy with people who denied the physical resurrection. They reinterpreted it, he says, by “identifying it either with the effects of baptism or with the spiritual awakening” that came with accepting their teaching. “The resurrection of the dead” was the New Testament’s usual phrase, but it could be bent to fit such views, so the orthodox insisted on “flesh” and used the word “with all its realistic associations.”9 The wording Burgess calls a contradiction in terms was the church’s safeguard against a resurrection that is not the raising of the body.
So the creeds do not support Burgess. The early church used both phrases to confess the resurrection of the same body that died, and the Westminster Confession states that doctrine plainly: “all the dead shall be raised up, with the selfsame bodies, and none other, although with different qualities” (WCF 32.2). What Burgess calls a contradiction in terms, the church confessed as an article of faith.
None of this is obscure. The difference between the creed of 325 and the creed of 381 is covered in any introduction to the creeds, and the Latin of the Apostles’ Creed is a single line. Yet in two pages these men credit Nicaea with words it never wrote, give the Apostles’ Creed a reading its Latin never had, and invent a correction no council ever made. Men who cannot get the basic facts right are not reliable guides to the church’s history.
Nor are these mistakes harmless. They serve a purpose. They allow Burgess and DeMar to present a denial of the resurrection of the body as though it were a recovery of the church’s own language, as if the creeds had been drifting their way all along. The creeds say the opposite. What Burgess and DeMar reject is not a phrase but a doctrine that the church has confessed from the beginning, and dressing that denial in creedal language does not make it anything other than what it is: heresy.
Kim Burgess with Gary DeMar, The Resurrection of the Dead: The Mortal Swallowed Up by Life (Powder Springs, GA: American Vision, 2026), 12. Subsequent references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text.
The English texts of the creeds of 325 and 381 follow Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 2. Both texts are also given, from the critical edition, in Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 1.
Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea, chap. 1, in the discussion of the Council of Constantinople. Anatolios follows Luise Abramowski in proposing a Western source. For the history of the creed and its Eastern background, see J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 3rd ed. (London: Longman, 1972), 296-331.
Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, chap. 11, sec. 2 (beginning at 338). A creed closely related to that of 381 appears in Epiphanius, Ancoratus 118, dated to AD 374, seven years before the council, though its exact relation to the creed of 381 is debated; see Kelly, chap. 10, sec. 3 (beginning at 305).
Daniel A. Keating and Jared Ortiz, The Nicene Creed: A Scriptural, Historical, and Theological Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2024), 9. They also note that the creed of 381 is what “we now call (somewhat confusingly) ‘the Nicene Creed.’”
Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 18.1, 18, 21-22, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 7. On the First Creed of Antioch, see Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 265-66. On Cyril’s presence at Constantinople in 381, see Kelly, chap. 10, sec. 3 (beginning at 305), and the introduction to Cyril’s works in the same NPNF volume.
Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Flesh 18, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3.
Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV).
Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 163-66.