Nicea at 1700
The teaching of Scripture is the primary authority for what Christians know and believe; but under Scripture, Anglicans (and many other Christians) receive the three Creeds that have come down from the ancient catholic church, as reliable touchstones of Scripture’s teaching, and the ancient rule of faith. The creed recited at Holy Communion is usually called the Nicene Creed in reference to its origins at the great council of the Church convened by the first Christian emperor Constantine in the city of Nicea (near modern day Istanbul) in 325 AD (exactly 1700 years ago, which is the occasion of this essay). The wording of the creed we use today was largely finalized in the year 381, at the second council, of Constantinople (the city refounded by and named after Constantine, now Istanbul)– but the faith that it expresses is that of Nicea, so we can call it Nicene, instead of “Nicene-Constantinopolitan”!
Constantine had won control of the Roman empire in 324, and had given favored public status to the Christian church his pagan predecessors had persecuted. But the church to which he looked for the spiritual leadership in the empire was itself being torn apart by a controversy over the doctrine of Christ. To resolve this crisis, Constantine convened the first ecumenical council of bishops from the entire Christian world (at that point, more or less coterminous with the Roman empire). Constantine just wanted the restore the peace and unity of the Church. But there was no way of getting there, without addressing questions of truth, and specifically the contested question of Christ’s divinity.
That Christ was divine had been was an integral element of the Christian tradition from its inception – as the New Testament writings testify. Yet Christians confessing faith in the Father and the Son (and also the Holy Ghost) also confessed that God is one. How was this to be understood? An Egyptian presbyter named Arius had answered this question, by teaching that Jesus was not God in the same way that the Father was God: though pre-eminent over all creatures, the Son was not equal to the Father, but subordinate to him, a kind of godlike supercreature, but not the Creator. There was nothing wrong with Arius’ attempt to use reason to understand Scripture – Christians had been doing that all along; the problem was that he applied a logic that was inadequate to Scripture’s content, one that undermined the gospel. As the critics of Arius pointed out, if Jesus was not himself both God and man, he could not be what Scripture said he was, the only mediator of God and men (1 Timothy 2:5). If Jesus was not himself God, then he could not share the life of God with men, by the gift of himself – but this is just what the Gospel says he does (John 20:31). How can Jesus make us “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4), if he himself is not divine?
At Nicea, therefore, under the leadership of Athanasius – another priest (and later, bishop) of Alexandria – the assembly endorsed a Creed whose wording was designed to exclude the subordinationist teaching of Arius. It affirms that the relation of Christ to God is that of Son to the Father, not creature to Creator: “Begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of very God; Begotten, not made”. As such he is “homoousios” –“of one substance with the Father”. Whatever is true of the Father’s Godhead, is also true of the Son’s. And therefore far from being “made”, the Son is the one “by whom all things are made”, the co-equal, consubstantial agent of the Creator.
In affirming the full deity of Christ the council did not ignore his humanity. Though the fullest teaching about Christ’s humanity came at the third and fourth councils (Ephesus 431 and Chalcedon 451), the Nicene Creed already indicated the direction they would go, and tied his advent in the flesh to his work of redemption: “who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, And was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, And was made man”. The true Son of God becomes true Son of man – that in his humanity he may suffer and rise again in our place – for only thus can the sons of men become the sons of God.
The Arian controversy rumbled on for another sixty years after Nicea, but in 381 at the second ecumenical council the Nicene Creed was reaffirmed, and the opportunity was taken tacitly to affirm the full divinity of the Holy Ghost as well: “who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified” – viz., as true God. Only if the Holy Ghost is himself God can he be the means by which the Son of God reveals and imparts the life of God to believers. As Jesus says: “All things that the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that he shall take of mine, and shall show it unto you” (John 16:15).
After 381 the Trinitarian teaching of Nicea was accepted as the standard of orthodoxy in the Christian Roman world, and eventually also, by the barbarian tribes who settled in the former western empire. In the late 5th century, the Creed came into use in the liturgy, and its retention in the Prayer Book is a sign of our own deep continuity with the faith and worship of the ancient church, and in its Christ-centered understanding of God, and of life with God.