I have been blogging about the Roman Catholic Church’s Pope Leo XIV being in Iznik, Turkey, this weekend celebrating the 1,700th anniversary of the Nicene Council and its Nicene Creed. The Church has regard this council as the First Ecumenical Council, the first of seven, and its one-page document the Nicene Creed as the greatest of all the Catholic Church’s documents were produced. As a preparation for what follows herein, see yesterday’s post entitled: “The Nicene Council Occurred 1,700 Years Ago and Here’s Why.” Here is the excerpt entitled “The Nicene Creed” in my book, The Restitution: Biblical Proof Jesus Is Not God, but without the footnote references:
The Nicene Creed
The Nicene Council drafted a dogmatic statement about one page in length called the Nicene Creed. A creed is a statement of belief that often serves as a test of orthodoxy, meaning “right opinion.” The Nicene Creed declared that the Son of God was “begotten not made.” This language was intended as an ontological statement affirming eternal generation. But this creed’s most important christological proposition was that it declared that Jesus Christ was “very God of very God,” meaning “fully God of fully God” or “truly God of truly God.” This language was inserted to oppose the Arian teaching of the inferiority of the Son, which Arians supported mostly by citing Jn 14.28. R.P.C. Hanson informs that the Nicene Creed “was constructed as a deliberately anti-Arian document.”
Such language seems strange to us moderns. But for those ancients, the words “very God” (Gr. alethinon theon) referred to a popular Hellenistic concept which had predated Christianity. Centuries earlier, Greeks employed alethinon theon to distinguish a primary god from lesser gods. Origen had even employed this word in his commentary on the Gospel of John to explain that the Father is exclusively “Very God” in distinction from Christ, whom we have already seen he regarded as essentially a lesser God/god. Thus, the Nicene fathers departed from Origen’s teaching, as well as that of their apologist predecessors, in styling Christ as “very God.”
This Nicene debate therefore was largely a semantical disagreement. The creed’s framers originally had intended to be guided by a principle followed previously in the Apostles’ Creed. It was that any binding credal formula must not include unscriptural language. The reason given was that unscriptural words suggest that they are based upon unscriptural concepts. But traditionalist and patristic authority J.N.D. Kelly observes concerning this principle, that it “was only abandoned when it was seen that every conceivable text or biblical turn of phrase could be ingeniously distorted by the Arians to look like evidence in support of their speculations.”
Debate ensued primarily because the word homoousios was introduced into the creed. By applying it to Jesus, it rendered Him as being of the “same substance” (Gr. homo=same; ousia=substance) with the Father. But at that time, ousia was capable of a variety of meanings, e.g., “being,” “essence,” or “reality,” which were discussed. What the creed’s framers meant by homoousios was “consubstantiality,” i.e., that Jesus and the Father are united in a common substance or nature. R.P.C. Hanson alleges,
considerable confusion existed about the use of the terms hypostasis and ousia at the period when the Arian Controversy broke out…. The search for the Christian doctrine of God in the fourth century was in fact complicated and exasperated by semantic confusion, so that people holding different views were using the same words as those who opposed them, but unawares, giving them different meanings from those applied to them by those opponents…. the word hypostasis and the word ousia had pretty well the same meaning. They did not mean, and should not be translated, ‘person’ and ‘substance,’ as they were used when at last the confusion was cleared up and these two distinct meanings were permanently attached to these words in theology which dealt with the doctrine of God.
Nowadays, the doctrine of the Trinity is generally defined succinctly in English as three Persons in one essence or substance. Hanson says this does not reflect the Nicene Creed’s wording even though it is so claimed. He informs concerning the Greek word for person, “The word prosopon does not figure prominently in the Arian Controversy…. To denote that which God is as Three in distinction to what he is as One, the word might have been helpful in avoiding misunderstandings.” But he explains it was also used to mean “appearance,” which could suggest Sabellianism, so it had to be avoided. And he claims that in the West, the Latin word for person, persona, was similarly inadequate.
A middle party also formed that was led by Eusebius, the famed church historian and Bishop of Caesarea in Palestine. This group of bishops was unjustly labeled the “semi-Arian” party when, in fact, its intended purpose was to serve as a mediating influence in the controversy. These bishops did, however, side with the Arians in objecting to unscriptural language in the creed. Both this middle party and the Arians assented to designating Jesus as homoiousios, meaning “similar” or “like substance” with the Father.
Thus, this disagreement at Nicaea centered mostly on the words homoousios and homoiousios, a difference of only the letter “i.” Modern historian Edward Gibbon, in his highly-acclaimed seven-volume history of the Roman Empire, ridiculed this greatest of church controversies for hinging on only one letter in the Greek alphabet. He famously alleged, “the profane of every age have derided the furious contests which the difference of a single diphthong excited between the Homoousians and the Homoiousians.”
The problematic word ousia was also included in the Nicene Creed and applied to Jesus. But afterwards, the conflicting parties generally, but not officially, replaced it with the more precise word hypostasis, which means “subsistence,” i.e., that which underlies an object or person. For example, while the Arians rejected homoousios, arguing that it suggested Sabellianism, they approved of hypostasis as referring to two different modes of subsistence of the one indivisible whole, i.e., the two separate Persons, viz., God the Father and Jesus Christ, being the one indivisible Godhead.
The majority of the bishops at Nicea did not at first readily acquiesce to this strange terminology. Many worried about such Pauline, pastoral admonitions as to be “nourished on the words of the faith” and “retain the standard of sound words” (1 Tim 4.6; 2 Tim 1.13; cf. 2 Pt 2.3). They felt further discomfort by Paul’s warnings “not to wrangle about words, which is useless,” and anyone who “does not agree with sound words, those of our Lord Jesus Christ,… is conceited and understands nothing; but he has a morbid interest in controversial questions and disputes about words, out of which arise envy, strife” (2 Tim 2.14; 1 Tim 6.3-4). J.N.D. Kelly relates, “Only a comparatively small group,… welcomed the language of the creed…. [the majority] had no desire to saddled with an un-Scriptural term.”
At first, Emperor Constantine remained neutral in this dispute, often associating with the middle party. But seeing the obstinacy of the anti-Arian party to yield any ground whatsoever, and for the sake of ecclesiastical well-being and political expediency, he shifted his allegiance to them. The emperor then sought to assuage the fears of the dissenting bishops by redefining and minimizing the importance of homoousios and pressuring them to sign the creed. Actually, the crafty emperor approved of homoousios because its ambiguity enabled the creed’s wider endorsement. So much for politics!
Traditionalists have widely ignored Emperor Constantine’s political coercion at the Nicene Council. Instead, they have touted the Council’s unanimity, citing that all of its bishops, except Arius and his two bishop friends from Libya, signed the creed. Indeed they did, but under threat of imperial banishment! The emperor promptly expelled Arius and his two friends from the empire for refusing to sign the creed. Then he made it a capital crime, punishable by death, to possess any of Arius’ books. Officials afterwards collected all they could and burned them. Francis Young thus cautions, “The course of doctrinal development should never be studied in isolation from the historical context of the debates.” Indeed, that is the main reason for this lengthy chapter in this book.
To make matters worse, after dismissing the council the emperor sent a succession of edicts through his empire which served as imperial decrees establishing the validity of the Nicene Creed. In these edicts, the emperor states that the Nicene Creed is
a signal benefit from the divine providence, in that, being freed from all error, we acknowledge one and the same faith. Henceforth it will not be in the power of the devil to do any thing agains us; for all his insidious machinations are utterly removed…. Arius alone, who first sowed this evil among you,… was found to be overcome by diabolical are and influence. Let us receive, therefore, that doctrine [the creed] which was delivered by the Almighty. Let us return to our beloved brethren, from whom this shameless minister of sata has separated us…. this man, who is evidently an enemy of the truth,… For what was approved by three hundred bishops can only be considered as the pleasure of God…. For whatever is transacted in the holy councils of the bishops, is to be referred to the divine will…. [and] the cruelty of the devil is taken away by divine power through my instrumentality.
Many church congregations still regularly recite the Nicene Creed, but in an abbreviated form. The latter third of it—which heaps anathemas (a list of condemnations) on Arius and his followers as having no part in the Catholic (Universal) Church and thus deemed estranged from God and His salvation and condemned to hell—is not recited and thus remains unknown to most such church folk.
Interestingly, the Nicene Creed portrays only a Binitarian faith.99 The subject of the Holy Spirit was not even discussed by the Council. Throughout the 2nd and 3rd centuries, there existed no consensus of opinion among church fathers on the nature of the Holy Spirit. Some thought the Holy Spirit (Spirit of God) was merely an impersonal power or attribute of God. Others ascribed personality to the Holy Spirit. A few refused to speculate about the matter, refusing to go beyond the express declarations of Scripture. P. Schaff explains, “the doctrine of the Holy Spirit was far less developed, and until the middle of the fourth century was never a subject of special controversy.”100 At the time of the Nicene Council, the Church clearly had not developed what later became the doctrine of the Trinity. (See Appendix B: The Nature of the Holy Spirit.)
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