A thorough examination of the history of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, its professions, and its implications. It took me a while to get into the book, but Luke Timothy Johnson presented the creed in a way that is easy to understand, yet full of depth and thought-provoking statements.

As someone who is part of a church that uses the creed consistently and places a great deal of importance upon it, this examination served to strengthen my feelings towards the creed, and give me a richer understanding of it. Johnson has pretty specific ideas about how a church should treat its basic tenets and how Christians should behave theologically and intellectually, with which I agreed almost entirely. I would expect this book to be frustrating and/or confusing for Evangelicals, atheists, people of other faiths, or anyone who is not part of (or at the very least familiar with) an older Christian tradition.

This is a little nitpicky, but I would have preferred that the numerous Scripture references be placed in footnotes rather than directly in the text. There was no way that I was going to stop and read each passage, and it was cumbersome to try and keep the flow of the text while skimming past these references. I also wish that the last two pages of the book had been placed somewhere a few sections earlier- they made the conclusion a little bland, and pulled away from a beautiful description that Johnson had just given only pages before. Like I said, a little nitpicky.

I really enjoyed this read and I learned so much from it.