Reading: The Council of Nicea 325

Christian History, Issue 28

The Council Of Nicea 325

By Bruce L. Shelley

At stake in the church’s first general council was the simplest, yet most profound, question: Who is Jesus Christ?

JULY 4, 325, WAS A MEMORABLE DAY. About 300 Christian bishops and deacons from the eastern half of the Roman Empire had come to Nicea, a little town near the Bosporus Straits flowing between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.

In the conference hall where they waited was a table. On it lay an open copy of the Gospels. The emperor, Constantine the Great, entered the hall in his imperial, jewel-encrusted, multicolored brocades, but out of respect for the Christian leaders, without his customary train of soldiers. Constantine spoke only briefly. He told the churchmen they had to come to some agreement on the crucial questions dividing them. “Division in the church,” he said, “is worse than war.”

A New Day

The bishops and deacons were deeply impressed. After three centuries of periodic persecutions instigated by some Roman emperor, were they actually gathered before one not as enemies but as allies? Some of them carried scars of the imperial lash. One pastor from Egypt was missing an eye; another was crippled in both hands as a result of red-hot irons.

But Constantine had dropped the sword of persecution in order to take up the cross. Just before a decisive battle in 312, he had converted to Christianity.

Nicea symbolized a new day for Christianity. The persecuted followers of the Savior dressed in linen had become the respected advisers of emperors robed in purple. The once-despised religion was on its way to becoming the state religion, the spiritual cement of a single society in which public and private life were united under the control of Christian doctrine.

If Christianity were to serve as the cement of the Empire, however, it had to hold one faith. So the emperors called for church councils like Nicea, paid the way for bishops to attend, and pressed church leaders for doctrinal unity. The age of Christian emperors was an age of creeds; and creeds were the instruments of conformity.

A Troubling Question

We can see this imperial pressure at work at Nicea, the first general council of the church. The problem that Constantine expected the bishops to solve was the dispute over Arianism.

Arius, pastor of the influential Baucalis Church in Alexandria, Egypt, taught that Christ was more than human but something less than God. He said that God originally lived alone and had no Son. Then he created the Son, who in turn created everything else. The idea persists in some cults today.

Arius made faith in Christ understandable, especially when he put his teaching in witty rhymes set to catchy tunes. Even the dockhands on the wharves at Alexandria could hum the ditties while unloading fish.

Arius’s teaching held a special appeal for many recent converts to Christianity. It was like the pagan religions of their childhood: the one supreme God, who dwells alone, makes a number of lesser gods who do God’s work, passing back and forth from heaven to earth. These former pagans found it hard to understand the Christian belief that Christ, the Divine Word, existed from all eternity, and that he is equal to the Almighty Father. So Arianism spread, creating Constantine’s concern.

The Council of Nicea was summoned by Emperor Constantine and held in the imperial palace under his auspices. Constantine viewed the Arian teachings—that Jesus was a created being subordinate to God— as an “insignificant” theological matter. But he wanted peace in the Empire he had just united through force. When diplomatic letters failed to solve the dispute, he convened around 220 bishops, who met for two months to hammer out a universally acceptable definition of Jesus Christ.

Once the Council of Nicea convened, many of the bishops were ready to compromise. One young deacon from Alexandria, however, was not. Athanasius, with the support of his bishop, Alexander, insisted that Arius’s doctrine left Christianity without a divine Savior. He called for a creed that made clear Jesus Christ’s full deity.

In the course of the debate, the most learned bishop present, the church historian Eusebius of Caesarea (a friend and admirer of the emperor and a half-hearted supporter of Arius), put forward his own creed— perhaps as evidence of his questioned orthodoxy.

Most of the pastors, however, recognized that something more specific was needed to exclude the possibility of Arian teaching. For this purpose they produced another creed, probably from Palestine. Into it they inserted an extremely important series of phrases: “True God of true God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father. . . . “

The expression homo ousion, “one substance,” was probably introduced by Bishop Hosius of Cordova (in today’s Spain). Since he had great influence with Constantine, the imperial weight was thrown to that side of the scales.

After extended debate, all but two bishops at the council agreed upon a creed that confessed faith “in one Lord Jesus Christ, . . . true God of true God.” Constantine was pleased, thinking the issue was settled.

An Unsettled Issue

As it turned out, however, Nicea alone settled little. For the next century the Nicene and the Arian views of Christ battled for supremacy. First Constantine and then his successors stepped in again and again to banish this churchman or exile that one. Control of church offices too often depended on control of the emperor’s favor.

The lengthy struggle over imperial power and theological language culminated in the mid-fifth century at the Council at Chalcedon in Asia Minor (today’s Turkey). There the church fathers concluded that Jesus was completely and fully God. And finally, the council confessed that this total man and this total God was one completely normal person. In other words, Jesus combined two natures, human and divine, in one person.

This classical, orthodox affirmation from Chalcedon made it possible to tell the story of Jesus as good news. Since Jesus was a normal human being, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, he could fulfill every demand of God’s moral law, and he could suffer and die a real death. Since he was truly God, his death was capable of satisfying divine justice. God himself had provided the sacrifice.

The Council of Nicea, then, laid the cornerstone for the orthodox understanding of Jesus Christ. That foundation has stood ever since.

Bruce L. Shelley is professor of church history at Denver Seminary and a member of the advisory board of Christian History.

How Arianism Almost Won
by Christopher A. Hall

After Nicaea, the real fight began.

AT THE COUNCIL of Nicaea, Arius and his ideas lost. But for decades after the council, it appeared that an Arian perspective on the person of Christ would carry the day and the conclusions of Nicaea would disappear in a theological and ecclesial dustbin. Why? The Roman emperors were an important influence. A series of emperors (beginning with Constantine) understood their role to include the right to intervene in the affairs of the church, particularly when division within the church threatened the unity of the Roman Empire itself. Thus, if a Roman emperor was disposed favorably toward Arian ideas—as Constantius and Valens were-bishops supporting the creed formulated at Nicaea could be severely punished, most often by being deposed and exiled. If an emperor favoring Nicaea was in power, Arian believers would suffer.

Yes, the bishops of the church continued to play the major role in interpreting Scripture and constructing theology based on biblical exegesis. Yet behind the bishops and presbyters during and after the Council of Nicaea stood a series of Christian Roman emperors more than willing to intervene in the church’s affairs and doctrine. When a series of pro-Arian emperors arrived on the scene, Arianism spread like wildfire.

Take the case of Constantine himself. Concerned over the growing rift within the church over Arius’s ideas, Constantine both convened and intervened in the Council of Nicaea. Rowan Williams observes that when Constantine viewed Arius as a schismatic, the emperor penned a letter to Arius “and his supporters which is extraordinary in its venom and abusiveness, dubbing Arius an ‘Ares,’ a god of war, who seeks to create strife and violence.”

Constantine was not averse to taking harsh legal steps to bring wayward theologians back in line. Williams notes that the emperor’s acid reply to Arius grouped Arius and his supporters with Porphyry, “the great pagan critic of the church.” Constantine ordered “that Arius’s works be treated like those of Porphyry: they are to be burnt, and anyone who does not surrender copies in his possession is to be executed.”

Within ten years of the Council of Nicaea, though, Constantine became convinced that Arius’s ideas fell within the pale of orthodoxy, though the exact details of Arius’s position—at least as represented to the emperor in the years following Nicaea—remain somewhat murky. What is clear, though, is that neither Constantine nor later sons such as Constans and Constantius were skilled biblical interpreters or theologians. These Roman emperors were more concemed to preserve the unity of the church than to engage in prolonged debates over what to them often seemed theological nitpicking. Manlio Simonetti, for instance, comments that Constantine was “convinced that religious peace could be assured only by a broad concentration of moderate elements” and “was as averse to some of Arius’s more radical opponents as he had been to the radicalism of the Anans.” Both Arius and Athanasius experienced Constantine’s displeasure. It was Constantine who in A.D. 335 ordered the first of Athanasius’s five exiles—the same year Arius regained the favor of the Roman emperor.

Over the 56 years separating the Council of Nicaea and the Council of Constantinople, Roman emperors frequently deposed and exiled bishops and presbyters they deemed schismatic and heretical. These actions created a long-lasting atmosphere of suspicion, intrigue, division, and hatred within the church. Eastern bishops who supported Nicaea suffered severely during the reign of Constantius. After the murder of Constantius’s brother Constans in 350, the empire was consolidated under the rule of Constantius. It appeared that the entire Christian world had fallen into Arian hands. Though Constantius died in 361, successors were more concerned with maintaining the unity of the empire than with pursuing theological clarity. When Valens took command in the East in 364, Simonetti says, he behaved “ferociously” against bishops who questioned the Arian position.

Rational, but wrong

In addition to the help they got from the emperors, Arius’s ideas were deeply attractive because they offered a rationally satisfying model of the relationship between the Father and the Son. Arius began with the fundamental presupposition that the divine essence is an indivisible unity, not a substance that can be divided or distributed like helpings of mashed potatoes. If this was true, how could one argue coherently that God could be divided into persons? It was impossible for God to “beget” a divine Son, for such a begetting or generation would involve di vidin the inherently indivisible.

Thus, the Son must be created rather than uncreated. If we were to draw a line between the uncreated divinity and all creatures—however exalted those creatures may be— the Son would necessarily be included with all other creatures. Though Arius did not question the Son’s exalted status over all creation, he could not be eternal in the same sense as the Father. “There was a time when he was not,” Arius said.

Nicaea’s response to Arius was that the Son was of the same substance (homoousios) with the Father, a statement vigorously debated throughout the fourth century. The church needed these years to sort through and clarify what the creed meant by homoousios. Some Christians criticized the homoousios clause because they believed it led to the disturbing conclusion that there is no genuine distinction between the Father and the Son. That is, the Nicene Creed simply served as a disguise for Sabellianism (also called Modalism).

Some believers who firmly affirmed the deity of the Son advocated the idea that the Father and the Son share a similar nature, not the same nature. This formula seemed to avoid the confusion caused by homoousios, but it raised questions of its own. If the Son’s essence is only similar to that of the Father’s, in what way is it different?

Aggressive intelligence

The theological pressure cooker of the years between Nicaea and Constantinople revealed the hidden fault-lines in the Arian model. Nicene advocates such as Athanasius continued to think through the implications and underpinnings of the creed formulated at Nicaea. In Athanasius we perceive the power of personality in history. His bright mind was linked to an aggressive, contentious personality that drove his opponents crazy but strengthened him through years of conflict and exile. Perhaps only a person such as Athanasius possessed the intelligence, industriousness, and persistence to weather the theological warfare that dominated the fourth century. Robert Payne observes that “in the history of the early Church no one was ever so implacable, so urgent in his demands upon himself or so derisive of his enemies. There was something in him of the temper of the modern dogmatic revolutionary: nothing stopped him.”

Athanasius saw that if the Arian belief in Christ as an exalted creature won the day, the gospel itself would be lost. Two of Athanasius’s central points bear repeating:

1. Only God can save. A mere creature can save no one. While Arius worked hard to preserve an exalted status for the Son, picturing him as elevated above all other creatures, his understanding of Christ faltered at this strategic juncture. The Arian Christ, Athanasius insisted, was not a Savior, as an adolescent) No creature possessed the ability or prerogative to save from sin. Salvation was the prerogative, privilege, and potential act of God alone. “The maker must be greater than what he makes… and the giver has to bestow what is in his possession.”

2. Christ was worshiped in Christian churches, including churches that followed the teaching of Arius. Athanasius asked how a church could worship Christ if Christ were not God. To worship a creature is to commit blasphemy. In fact, Athanasius contended, Arius and his followers committed blasphemy on two counts: they worshiped a creature as God and called God incamate a mere creature. Athanasius insisted that when we worship the Son we are rightfully worshiping one whose deity finds its source or fount in the deity of the Father. As the “offspring” of the Father, Athanasius wrote, the Son is indeed distinct. But we must not allow this fundamental distinction to blur “the identity of the one godhead.” “For the radiance also is light, not a second light besides the sun, nor a different light, not a light by participation in the sun, but a whole proper offspring of it. No one would say that there are two lights, but that the sun and its radiance are two, while the light from the sun, which illuminates things everywhere, is one. In the same way the godhead of the Son is the Father’s.”

Like Father, like Son

The essential oneness of the Father and Son indicates, Athanasius argued, that whatever is predicated of the Father must be predicated of the Son, “except the title of ‘Father.” In short, if the Father is Lord, the Son is Lord. If the Father is light, the Son is light.

For many years in the fourth century the Arian cause appeared to have won the day. Arius’s ideas offered a sensible rational approach to the relationship between the Father and the Son, while the Nicene Creed seemed confusing, nonbiblical, and provocative. In the end, however, the Nicene teaching won out.

Theodosius, the first emperor for many years to strongly oppose Arianism, affirmed the legitimacy and orthodoxy of bishops and priests who supported the Nicene Creed. Under his leadership and imperial authority the Council of Constantinople (381) reaffirmed and developed the statements made by the Nicene bishops some 56 years earlier.

It truly seemed for a time that it was Athanasius contra mundum. C. S. Lewis wrote:

"We are proud that our own country has more than once stood against the world. Athanasius did the same. He stood for the Tninitarian doctrine, ‘whole and undefiled,’ when it looked as if all the civilized world was slipping back from Christianity into the religion of Arius— into one of those ‘sensible’ synthetic religions which are so strongly recommended today and which, then as now, included among their devotees many highly cultivated clergymen. It is his glory that he did not move with the times; it is his reward that he now remains when those times, as all times do, have moved away.”

Christopher A. Hall is dean of the Templeton Honors College at Eastern University and author of Learning Theology with the Church Fathers (InterVarsity Press, 2002).

Athanasius: Pugnacious Defender of Orthodoxy

A MODERN BIOGRAPHER of Athanasius of Alexandria speaks of “the predominantly polemical nature of most of his dogmatic works” and “the lack of serenity in his argumentation.” Understandably so! In all of Christian history, it is safe to say, few churchmen have been so entirely embroiled in doctrinal and ecclesiastical disputes as Athanasius. In one comparison with him, one ventures that even so controversial a figure as Martin Luther lived out a relatively quiet and uneventful life.

Born into a Christian Family in Alexandria in 295, Athanasius was an infant during the persecution of Diocletian and barely more than a boy when the Edict of Milan legalized the church in 313. He was ordained a deacon five years later at age 23. The most indubitable claim we can make for Athanasius is that his entire life was absorbed in the service of the church.

The event that most marked the destiny of this ardent churchman was, of course, the council of Nicaea in 325. Although there is perhaps no other name more closely identified with Nicaea than Athanasius, this close identification had more to do with the aftermath of the council than with the event itself. Three facts conspired to make this so.

First, the fathers at Nicaea had formalized in the church a ranking patriarchal structure, according to which the bishops of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch would exercise general oversight of the other churches in their respective regions. Thus, when Athanasius was made Bishop of Alexandria in 328, just three years after Nicaea, he suddenly found himself in one of the most influential and prestigious positions in the whole church.

Second, Nicaea had also determined that the church at Alexandria, because of the superior records and resources of astronomy available in that city, would be charged with establishing the proper date of Easter each year, and so informing the rest of the church by an annual notice. This arrangement afforded Athanasius an official opportunity to send an annual letter to all of the other major ecclesiastical centers, and until his death in 373 he used these “Paschal Letters” as opportunities to teach and admonish Christians far beyond the borders of Alexandria. Because many successors of Athanasius followed his example in this respect, the bishopric of Alexandria became one of the most influential teaching authorities in the whole church, second only to Rome.

Third, because Nicaea had implicitly granted the Roman emperors an authority over the affairs of the church that they had never done before, the next several decades (even centuries) would see many instances of direct imperial interference with the church’s teaching ministry itself, including the office of bishop. As various emperors exercised this interference, Athanasius was forced into exile from Alexandria no fewer than five times.

Athanasius spent these extended periods of banishment chiefly doing two things. First, he traveled extensively to far-off places, where he conferred with churchmen regarding the Arian heresy and other ecclesiastical matters, including imperial interference. These consultations greatly extended the reputation of Athanasius as a universal Christian teacher. Second, these periods of exile afforded him ample time to write the lengthy theological treatises that caused him to be ranked, even today, among the greatest exponents of Christian doctrine.

Which Creed is Which?

D.H. Williams

In one of the quirks of church history, the “Nicene Creed” used in church hymnals and liturgies is a different creed from the one accepted at Nicaea.

In 381, the council of Constantinople affirmed the Nicene Creed and condemned heresies that had since arisen against Nicaea. But from later records (preserved at the Council of Chalcedon, 70 years later) we know that another creed was also used, now known as the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. This creed is more strictly Trinitarian than the Nicene, describing each member of the Trinity in relation to the other members. The creed of 325 says less about the Father and only mentions the Holy Spirit with no description at all, since the council’s attention was fixed on how the Son is no less divine than the Father.

The version below is the one used in the Western church; the Eastern version does not include the phrases in brackets. In particular, the statement that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father “and the Son” is still contested by the Eastern Orthodox Church as an unwarranted addition to Nicene theology. 


The Original Nicene Creed

We believe in one God, the Father, almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible;

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the son of God, begotten from the Father, only—begotten, that is, from the substance of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one substance from the Father, through Whom all things came into being, things in heaven and things on earth, who because of us men and because of our salvation came down and became incarnate, becoming man, suffered and rose again on the third day, ascended to the heavens, will come to judge the living and the dead;

And in the Holy Spirit.

But as for those who say, there was when he was not, and, before being born he was not, and he came into existence out of nothing, or who assert that the son of God is a different hypostasis or substance, or is subject to change or alteration ‐ these the Catholic and Apostolic Church anathematizes.

The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed 
(The “Nicene Creed” used in worship)

I 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; [God of God], Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.

Who for us men for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried; and the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again, with glory, to judge the living and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end.

And I believe in the Holy Ghost, thee Lord and Giver of Life; who proceeds from the Father [and Son]; who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spoke by the prophets.

And I believe one holy catholic and apostolic Church. I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; and I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.