Did Jesus Become God in A. D. 325?

or, What really happened at the Council of Nicea?

Part Three:

The Council of Nicea Decoded

Soon after Arius was banned from Alexandria the controversy was flaring widely and fiercely enough to attract the attention of the emperor.  Constantine’s political situation was as dependent on a unified Christianity as the peace of the churches was dependent upon him.  Not surprisingly he perceived the controversy as a political one, and considered the theological debate to be an insignificant sideshow and an unworthy war of words that had gotten out of hand. 

As kings and emperors are wont to do, he decided that governmental intervention was called for, but as a good politician he chose to use measured steps.  He first sent a letter to Alexander and Arius urging (i.e., commanding) them to put aside their belligerence, agree to disagree, and embrace one another in the name of unity.  “Had the dispute been really trifling,” observes Gwatkin, “such a letter might have had a chance of quieting it.”[1]

 Though its significance was beyond Constantine’s understanding, the issue was not trifling and his letter did not soothe the conflict.  Instead it raised the stakes.  The debate continued to intensify.

At last Constantine summoned the bishops to a synod in Nicea, hoping to see them agree on a common settlement of the Arian issue, along with several minor perplexities added to the agenda—perhaps in the hope that the little disputes would dilute the acidity and diminish the energy of the main controversy.

Synods, essentially conferences of bishops, were nothing new.  Nicea, however, was the first to gather church leaders from all over the empire in an ecumenical council, and significantly it was not summoned at the behest of a leading bishop, not even the bishop of Rome, but of the emperor himself.  The council convened on May 20, 325, Constantine the Emperor of Rome (and a yet-to-be-baptized catechumen of the church) presiding.  The vast majority of those in attendance were from the eastern churches.[2]  There were several issues on the agenda, but the one that dominated its attention and made its decisions pivotal in Christian history was the Arian Controversy.

It should be mentioned at this point that the Council of Nicea of 325 was not held behind closed doors.  It was a public event that attracted enormous attention, and was heavily documented by contemporaries on all sides.  If writers of fiction want to foster notions of surreptitious deliberations and conspiracies, they really should pick another foil.  The Council had its share of intrigue, but to seriously argue that it was a railroad job with a predetermined outcome is deliberately ignorant and irresponsible.

The main point of discussion at Nicea could be considered a refinement of the words of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew: “What think ye of Christ? Whose son is he?”  But the question was not whether Jesus is the Son of God (as certain novelists have proposed), but what kind of Son is he, or what does it mean to call Christ the Son of God.  The position of Bishop Alexander was that Jesus Christ possesses a truly divine nature, not as a second deity, but as one with the Father and equal to the Father.  The Arians did not deny the sonship or even the divinity of Jesus; but they asserted that Christ’s sonship means not equality but subordination, not merely of role but of substance.  Jesus is indeed the Son of God and of a divine nature, they averred, but not on the same level with the Father.  Essentially they were asserting that Christ is a lesser deity.

Between these two factions and their well-defined, highly articulated positions, there was the larger body of bishops representing the larger mass of Christians who did not quite understand all that was at stake, who were mostly interested in preserving the status quo and the still new Pax Romana between church and state, and just wished the whole quarrel would go away.

Eusebius of Nicomedia, Arius’s closest ally, kicked off the debate by laying on the table a copy of the confession used in his own church, which was a clear statement of the Arian doctrine.  Perhaps surprisingly, it was decisively, vociferously rejected by the convocation—and literally torn to shreds!  Clearly the churches were not willing to equivocate on the divinity of the Lord.  It appeared that Arianism was defeated as an accepted movement in the church on the first vote.

At this point Eusebius of Caesarea, perhaps wanting now to distance himself from Arius, then came forward with his own creed—probably the baptismal confession of the church of Caesarea, a simple statement composed of biblically rooted phrases and none of technicalities that had caused all the trouble.  Nobody from either side objected to this creed, and it provided a template for the creed that would emerge from the council.

Still it missed the point of the gathering, which was to compose a creed that would resolve the questions raised by the Arians.  The problem as the Alexandrians saw it was not that the Arians did not use scripture, but that they twisted the meaning of the scriptures according to their own novel definitions.  The task, then, would be to arrive at a clarification of terms that would still affirm what the churches had (at least tacitly) believed for three centuries.

Agonizing discussion ensued, and various terms and definitions were weighed.  None of them were coined or invented by the council.  All were contemporary, in circulation, and current to the debate.  The modern reader may become frustrated with the unfamiliar, abstract language and wonder what the fuss was all about.  The post-modern reader will regard it all as merely a vehicle for political maneuvering.

The serious Christian of today, however, will grapple with these issues along with the Council of Nicea.  Words were not just constructs for them.  Words were the conveyance of truth—or falsehood. 

Decoding the Nicene Creed

The creed that was finally adopted, the original Nicene Creed, could descriptively be called the Anti-Arian Creed.  The focus of the confession is Christ, who is called:

The Son of God, begotten of the Father, an only-begotten one—that is, from the essence [Gk, ousia; Lat. substantia] of the Father—God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one essence [homoousios; consubstantialem] with the Father, by whom all things were made…who for us men and for our salvation came down and was made flesh, was made man, suffered, and rose again the third day….[3]

It is no wonder why novelists would prefer to fabricate a conspiracy than to delve into issues like this.  A novelist like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky may be able to write of them in a way to make dramatic sense, but few others would even dare try—let alone have the talent. 

Yet what is at stake here is momentous beyond calculation.  Christianity cannot be defined as a set of principles.  It is uniquely about one person, Jesus Christ.  To define his person is to define Christianity.  The leaders and thinkers of the church were reverently reluctant until now to engage that project, and they were pushed to it only by a crisis that threatened to explode the unity of the churches more than any controversy that had come before.  Moreover, it took a long time for them to become comfortable with such theological precision, as we shall see later.

For now, however, let’s examine the creed and see what kind of hedge the Nicenes had to build in order to prevent the Arians from overturning the result.

The term “only-begotten” [Gk, monogenes] is derived from the Gospel of John, and was claimed by both the orthodox and the Arians.  One way to interpret the creed to see it providing an authoritative interpretation of this biblical word.

One significant term (also from the Gospel of John) that is missing from the creed is Logos (Word).  That is a surprise because it was the principal term in the Caesarean creed presented by Eusebius.  It is possible that by this omission the bishops were consciously moving away from the older Logos theology, perhaps thinking the word had been too-greatly corrupted by the Arians.  It is possible on the other hand that they simply regarded inclusion of the term Logos as non-germane to the matter at hand. We have no specific indication of any discussion of the issue one way or the other.

  The key words and phrases in the creed composed at Nicea are those that exclude Arian interpretations of doctrine.  “True God from true God” is a phrase that goes against the grain of Arianism, but it did not really enter much into the debate.  Athanasius noted that Arians were willing to rationalize it since in some sense the Son can be said to be truly divine.[4]

The first controversial item defines the “begottenness” of the Son as “from the essence (or substance) of the Father” (toutestin ek tes ousias tou patros).  This clause excludes the Arian interpretation of the begetting of the Son by the Father.  The Son is not created out of nothing, nor is his Sonship a matter either of creation or adoption, because Fatherhood and Sonship are intrinsic to the nature and essence, the ousia of God.[5]

Ousia is not a scriptural term.  It is rather a word with rich philosophical background and is inadequately translated by the traditional “substance” (from the Latin substantia, which holds a much more materialistic connotation in our usage than it did for 4th century clerics).  “Essence” is, I think, better (and etymologically closer), but still more vague in current usage than those who applied ousia to the Father and Son intended it to be.  Or not.  Gwatkin gives as clear an explanation as possible of its meaning:

Now the essence of a thing is that by which it is what we suppose it to be.  We look at it from various points of view, and ascribe to it first one quality and then another.  Its essence from any one of these successive points of view is that by which it possesses the corresponding quality.  About this unknown something we make no assertion, so that we are committed to no theory whatever.  Thus the essence of the Father as God ... is that unknown and incommunicable something by which He is God.[6]

The implication, then, is that the Son shares “the divine essence to the full.”[7]  In other words, whatever the essential nature of God the Father is, that is the essential nature of the Son also.

Further eliminating the Arian definitions is the qualifier, “begotten, not made.”  The Arians had equated the two ideas in regard to the Son: if he is begotten, then he was made or created.  The Arians did not deny that Jesus was the only-begotten Son of God, nor even that he was pre-existing before his birth in this world. “Begotten” did not refer to his physical conception, but rather presupposed a time before his incarnation.  But they defined begetting as a mode of creation. The Arians had accused the Alexandrians of blurring the distinction between the Son and the Father.  The Nicene formulation took care to make that distinction plain, for it specifies that the Son has his origin in and somehow derives his being from the Father.  Yet it also distinguished the Son’s relation to the Father from the creature’s relation to the Creator.

The true rock of offense in the new creed, however, was the phrase “one essence (or “one substance,” the crucial word homoousios) with the Father.”  This clause, says Kelly, “completely traversed the Arian position by asserting the full deity of the Son.”[8] 

Just to make sure, however, that every Arian expression is circumscribed, the creed anathematizes (curses) those who use certain slogans that had been coined by Arius and were in common currency among his tribe.  “There was once when he was not” is a recurring refrain in the Arian writings,[9] as well as “before he was begotten he was not” and “he was made of things that were not.”[10]

Rejected was the doctrine that the Son is hetero-ousios, i.e. he is of a different hypostasis or essence from the Father.  Likewise banned is the doctrine that the nature of the Son is either mutable (capable of growth or decline) or peccable (able to sin), making the creed a total and decisive repudiation of Arianism at its most fundamental level.

All this may give the impression that the Alexandrian forces just steamrolled the Council.  Such is not the case.  The debate was vigorous and numerous issues settled before the new creed was accepted.  Unquestionably the emperor showed his favor to the anti-Arian side in order to see the controversy come to a quick conclusion, but that also undoubtedly meant imperial pressure on the favored group to get to a conclusion regardless of what compromises had to be made.  It was a pressure they apparently resisted, because the record shows they were able to succeed with arguments rather than political pressure.

The Battle for Homoousios

One word was more controversial than the entire rest of the creed.  The anti-Arian/Alexandrian party was absolutely convinced that the word homoousios  was indispensible and non-negotiable.  Others were either leery or downright opposed to using it.  The Alexandrians had to overcome three major objections in order to get the definitive language they thought necessary into the creed.[11]

1.  Homoousios was a tainted word.  In A.D. 269 the Council of Antioch condemned the doctrines of the heretic Paul of Samosata.  Among the banned words was homoousios.  The Arian faction appealed to precedent, and on its face the argument seemed strong.

The Paulinists (followers of Paul of Samosata) had used homoousios in a fashion that smacked of materialism and denied the spirituality of the Deity.  Compounding the problem for the Western church was that the Greek ousia was commonly translated substantia, a word with definite materialistic connotations.   

The Alexandrians won the point with their argument that the issues were entirely different and that the meaning of the word had changed.  No one accused Alexander and his church of teaching that God the Father had a physical nature.  The Alexandrians persuaded Nicea that ousia had to do only with the “Godness” of the God who is Spirit, with no extraneous material connotation or any implication that God had a physical nature.

2.  Many feared homoousios was a slippery slope toward Sabellianism—the merging of the Persons of the Trinity into mere modes of being in the one God.  This doctrine destroys the distinctiveness of Jesus Christ in his incarnation as the Son of God, not to mention obliterating his humanity.  It was not an unfounded fear.  It’s not a great step from saying the Son is the “same essence” as the Father to saying that he is the same as the Father.  Marcellus of Ancyra was a prominent preacher who did move in that direction. 

This was a blind spot for the Alexandrian party, who saw in homoousios the best (if not the only) word whose use would directly repudiate Arianism.  It needed a balance, and as the conference proceeded the creed acquired the crucial phrase “begotten…from the essence of the Father” (ek ten ousias tou Patros).  The preposition ek means “out from,” indicating procession from a source—thus a distinction between Father and Son.  It’s a subtle point, but the whole debate hinged on grand interpretations of such subtleties. 

3.  Homoousios is an unscriptural word.   Creeds had been used to encapsulate doctrines and help Christians express their common faith for generations, but always they had used the language of the New Testament.  For the first time it was being proposed to incorporate non-scriptural language into a common confession.  It’s one thing to do that in theological debate, but it’s another thing to bring it into the liturgy.  Many, perhaps most of the conservative bishops who had no abstract problem with ousia and homoousios, were reluctant to put them into a creed.  It was an innovation they were not ready for. 

In response, the Alexandrian group pointed out that every simple scriptural statement was being given a novel spin by the Arians.  No amount of scripture quoting would do.  The creed would have to put forth a true interpretation of scripture.  Athanasius, who would become the champion of the Nicene theology, denied that the non-scriptural language in the creed made it un-scriptural, i.e., opposed to the Scriptures.  The words themselves might not be from the Bible, the doctrines and ideas they expressed certainly were, and were in fact necessary to preserve the plain meaning of the New Testament.[12]

In the end all but a few die-hard pro-Arian bishops signed the creed, but it is hardly the case that all were equally enthusiastic.  Eusebius of Caesarea was particularly reluctant to affix his signature until after several questions were answered which clarified—and possibly diluted—the creed.[13]

The Council of Nicea was a watershed in the history of theology.  It signaled more than merely the first rejection of Arianism (which would be completed at Constantinople after more than half a century of wrangling).  What took place was nothing less than “a profound intellectual revolution.”  J. N. D. Kelly—the acknowledged dean of Patristic studies, writes,

Prior to Nicea the accepted Christian doctrine of God was an Origenistic[14] one of a holy Triad, of an ineffable Godhead with two subordinate and, in the last resort, disparate hypostases; but after Nicea the pressure group which pushed through the introduction of the homoousion dragged, if you will forgive the crude metaphor, these two inferior hypostases within the divine essence.  During the four or five decades following Nicea, the predominant view in the church continued to be Origenistic, pluralistic….  But once the creed of Constantinople both reaffirmed and supplemented the Nicene creed proper, there could be no future for such pluralism.[15]

Is it really so, then, that Jesus was elected to Deity by the Council of Nicea?  No serious analysis could conclude that.  To say so is either ignorant or dishonest.  It is true that Christian theology and worship was dramatically affected, but the effect was not so much a change as a course correction.  The question was never whether Jesus is God or man.  The Council did not affirm his deity at the expense of his humanity.  To the contrary, the phrase “was made man” was also included in the creed.

The question was rather whether Christ’s divinity as the Son of God was equal to that of the Father.  The unity of the divine nature was affirmed, along with the distinctiveness of the Persons of the Trinity.  What was averted was a possible slide into a two- or three-level polytheism.

What was not averted was a controversy that would roil the churches of the late Roman Empire for another hundred years.

To be continued….

NOTES

[1] Gwatkin, Arian Controversy, 19.

[2] The following discussion of the Council of Nicea is drawn from a number of sources, including Athanasius, De decretis, in Schaff and Wace, v. 4; Socrates I.8-9; Sozomen I.17-21; Eusebius of Ceasarea, Letter, in Hardy, 335-340; The First Ecumenical Council: The First Council of Nicea, A.D. 325, in Schalff and Wace, v. 14; The Seven Ecumenical Councils, Henry R. Percival, ed. 1956; T. Herbert Bindley, ed. The Oecumenical Documents of the Faith, 4th ed., rev. by F. W. Green (London: Methuen & Co., London):11-49; Gwatkin, Arian Controversy, 16-40; Gwatkin, Studies, 16-55; J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds (NY: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1950), 235-242. 

[3] This is a composite translation.  The Greek version is in Bindley, 26.  See also First Ecumenical Council, 3, and Gwatkin, Arian Controversy, 29-30.  Although some who read this are familiar with Greek and may be annoyed by the transliteration into our alphabet—which is not really compatible—I am including this for non-scholars in Greek to help them connect to the linguistic issues involved.  This is crucial, because an entire century of controversy boiled down to a choice of words.

[4] Kelly, Creeds, 238.

[5] Ibid, 235.

[6] Gwatkin, Arian Controversy, 30-31.  Emphasis is mine.

[7] Kelly, op.cit.

[8] Ibid, 238.

[9] See ibid, 239 n. 3 for a partial listing of passages in which this slogan is found.

[10] A generation later this banned phrase, in Greek

[11] Gwatkin, Studies, 46-49; Arian Controversy, 32-35.

[12] De decretis 21, cited in Kelly, 239.

[13] Eusebius, Letter.

[14] Refers to Origen of Alexandria, who had a profound influence on early orthodox and catholic theology—despite the fact that he was declared a heretic for some of his more radical theories.

[15] Kelly, “The Nicene Creed: A Turning Point,” Scottish Journal of Theology 36 (1983): 38.  It should not be overlooked, as Maurice Wiles points out (Journal of Theological Studies 16, 1965:455f) that the homoousios formula “was not merely given formal ratification; rather it was there for the first time effectively introduced into the language of orthodox theology at all.”  The key word is “orthodox.”  A term which had always before been shunned as heretical was now embraced, albeit reluctantly, because there was not a better one to combat a more pernicious heresy.