Today Moore College celebrates the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, a landmark event in the history of the Christian church that reaffirmed the perfect equality in being, honour, and power, of God the Father and God the Son. Though the Father and the Son are distinct persons in asymmetrical and non-reciprocal relationship (the Father is always the Father and the Son is always the Son, so they are not interchangeable), they are entirely and absolutely one in being. This great truth has always been taught and held unequivocally at Moore College. There is only one true and living God, and the Son is as much God as the Father is (something that is true of the Holy Spirit as well). The creed formulated by the Council of Nicaea used one little Greek word to express this truth, homoousion (ὁμοούσιον), which in English becomes the phrase “of one being with” or “of the same being as”. It also insisted repeatedly that the Son was “begotten not made”.
We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father; God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God; begotten not made, of one being with the Father.
A later creed, known through history as the Athanasian Creed, spelt this out more fully:
the divinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is one, their glory equal, their majesty co-eternal … nothing in this trinity is before or after, nothing is greater or smaller; in their entirety the three persons are coeternal and coequal with each other. So in everything, as was said earlier, we must worship their trinity in their unity and their unity in their trinity.
A full and proper unity and equality, together with a real distinction in asymmetric relation, is the bedrock of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, which theologians have long understood to be the ground and grammar of all truly Christian theology. Father, Son and Holy Spirit — this is the God who created all things with just a word. This is the God who bore the cost of our salvation himself and who brings us all to the end he has appointed. Without the truth this one little word conveys, we are lost and God’s plan for all things unravels. The Council of Nicaea is a very big deal indeed.
Yet at one level, none of this was new. The New Testament speaks of Jesus’ oneness with the Father, a oneness that goes beyond a common will to a common being. “I and the Father are one”, Jesus said (John 10:30), and “whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). He spoke of the glory he had shared with the Father “before the world existed” (John 17:5). He insisted that “whoever does not honour the Son does not honour the Father who sent him”. The apostle John began his Gospel by saying “the Word was with God and the Word was God” (John 1:1). What was affirmed at Nicaea is the consistent testimony of the New Testament, even if in order to protect that testimony from distortion a non-biblical word had to be used.
That this unity in being of the Father and the Son does not indicate an amorphous undifferentiated divinity is equally the consistent testimony of the New Testament. Jesus’ prayers are at each point a genuine address of his Father (John 11:41–42; 17:1–26; Luke 22:39–48; 23:46). The Father and the Spirit testify to the Son at his baptism (Matt. 3:16–17). We do not collapse the persons of the Trinity into one. The Father is eternally the Father and the Son is eternally the Son, and that relation of fatherhood and sonship is eternal too. There is an eternal distinction of persons and the eternal relation of the persons has a certain definite character. The Son is eternally begotten of the Father (John 1:18; 3:16; Heb.1:3–5); the Father is never begotten of the Son.
What Nicaea was tasked to do was to come up with a form of words that spoke succinctly of these truths without distorting or ignoring the various elements of the biblical witness to Jesus. How do we speak of the one true and living God, while insisting that Jesus is as much God as the Father is, and without falling into the trap of saying Jesus is the Father? This had become an urgent matter because of a growing dispute among the churches in Egypt, and especially Alexandria.
In AD 321 the Bishop of Alexandria, Alexander I, had convened a synod of Egyptian bishops that condemned the priest of Baucalis (a “suburb” of Alexandria) who had caused all the trouble, a man named Arius. Arius, apparently an eloquent preacher who had quickly gathered a group of followers, had been advocating for about three years by this time his view that “the Son was ‘created’ before time and subordinate to the Father”. (Arius’ view has often been described as “subordinationism” or, more precisely, “ontological subordinationism”.) Arius felt this understanding of Jesus’ sonship (not “natural” and not “eternal”) was necessary if his adopted sonship was to be a model for the adopted sonship of believers. He refused to sign the “confession of orthodoxy” that was submitted to him by this local synod, which is why he was excommunicated and sent into exile. From there he sent out a myriad of letters, attempting to garner the support of bishops right across the empire and the issue began to snowball. In 324 Emperor Constantine sent Bishop Hosius of Córdoba to Alexandria on a mission to broker a resolution to the problem. Hosius convened an Egyptian synod in Alexandria and then another in Antioch, both of which condemned Arius’ teaching. But this did not silence Arius. It was then that a general council of the church was called to meet at Ancyra in Bithynia (modern day north western Turkey). At the emperor’s request the venue was changed to Nicaea, a city just thirty kilometres from the then eastern capital of the empire, Nicomedia (Constantinople was not made the capital until 5 years later).
So, on 20 May AD 325, 318 bishops gathered in response to the emperor’s summons. Constantine understood that this theological dispute in Egypt had massive consequences. It had the potential to divide the empire and so he wanted to force a resolution before it got completely out of hand. The concerns at Nicaea were to defend the unity of the Godhead, the equal divinity of the Son, and the uniqueness of his Sonship. As we have seen, the chief means of doing that, the Council concluded, was the employment of the word homoousion and the insistence he was “begotten not made”. The Son is of the same being as the Father. He is God in the same way as the Father, equal in being, honour and glory. His sonship is not simply a gift or a reward. It is, rather, who he is. We become God’s sons by adoption (Rom. 8:15). He is God’s Son by nature. That is why he is able to save us.
We sometimes speak of not being able to “unsee” something. Once we’ve seen it, there is no going back. The decision at Nicaea is a little like that. Once the unity and equality of the Father and the Son has been articulated in this way, there is no going back. As one modern theologian put the now unavoidable question, “Did the Son of God himself come into being through an act of the will of God or was he eternally in the being of God as Son of the Father?” (Torrance, 7). John 1 and Philippians 2 require us to answer “eternally of one being with the Father”. This means that there cannot be the slightest hint of inequality between the Father and the Son and so whatever we might need to say about their particular eternally ordered relation on the basis of other biblical texts, it must not be construed in any way to compromise this.
The monumental significance of the Council of Nicaea is very clear from our vantage point, but at the time it was fiercely contested. The next sixty years saw intense debate about the conclusions of the Council and especially the use of the term homoousion. The great champion of the Council, Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria (Alexander’s successor), was exiled five times! Yet in the end, when another gathering of bishops from all over the known world was held in Constantinople in May AD 381, the Nicene Creed was reaffirmed (albeit with some extra material about the Holy Spirit). It had become clear that there was no going back if we are to uphold the Bible’s teaching about the Father and the Son.
We are thankful for all who, through the ages, have been willing to stand up and be counted for biblical truth. Today especially we celebrate the long-lasting legacy of the Council of Nicaea and those, like Athanasius, who championed its teaching. Most of all, we are happy to affirm our own commitment to orthodox teaching on the Trinity and the person of Christ, drawn from and consistent with the teaching of Scripture. All glory be to Christ.
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For further reading on the Council and the controversy which provoked it, you might like to consult:
L. Ayres, Nicaea and its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
J. Behr, The Nicene faith. 2 vols. New York; St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004.
T. F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1993.
R. Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition. 2nd edn. London: SCM,2001.
