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Still Confessing Jesus: Reflecting on our faith 1700 years after the first Council of Nicaea

by Richard A. Beinert

This year, we celebrate a milestone within Christian history: the 1700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea. I’m going to guess that many of you reading this will respond with a puzzled look and the question: “The First Council of what?” Some of you might pick up on the similarity between the name “Nicaea” and the Nicene Creed which bears its name—but beyond that, this event from the history of our Church is often not talked about as often as it should be.

This First Council of Nicaea, which met between May and August of the year 325 A.D., marked an important watershed in the history of both the Church and of Western civilization. In the centuries between the time of the New Testament and the early 300s, Christianity existed as a persecuted religious movement where martyrdom was not uncommon, since both Caesar and Synagogue would make Christians the common scapegoat for any social and cultural problems that arose. But when Constantine became Emperor in 306 A.D., he took steps to have Christianity declared a legal religious community throughout the Roman Empire with his Edict of Milan in 313. Having converted to Christianity himself, he convened a universal Council of the Church in the city of Nicaea (modern day Iznik in Turkey) in order to address structural and doctrinal issues that had arisen within the Christian world during the second and third centuries— some of which were threatening to tear the Christian community apart.

The Council saw somewhere between 250 and 318 bishops attend from across the Christian Church. The vast majority were bishops from the eastern parts of the Roman Empire (Turkey, Egypt, and Palestine), although there were also five that came from the West. One of them, Hosius of Cordoba (256-359), presided over the discussions; but beyond that, representation from the Roman part of the Church was largely absent as the bishops gathered to wade through the weighty doctrinal and practical issues that the Christian church was facing at the time.

First Council of Nicea
V.Surikov (1876)

One of the key issues that needed to be discussed was the oversight and supervision of the Christian Church throughout the Empire. Following ancient tradition, four key bishops were recognized as holding oversight over various regions of the Church. These included Jerusalem and Antioch (in Syria), ancient cities where Christianity had its beginnings. The other two were Rome and Alexandria (in Egypt), due to their status as the first and second Imperial capitals of the Ancient Roman world. Each was to be honoured in their respective regions as holding a position of oversight, both to avoid political (and doctrinal) clashes between bishops but also as a way to create order for the expanding mission of the Church into new territories. The bigger doctrinal issue that the Church needed to address was the manner in which the doctrine of the Trinity as well as the divinity of Christ was best confessed within a world where neither fit neatly into the philosophical worldviews of the day.

A prominent figure in all this was a fellow by the name of Arius (250-336 A.D.), a priest from Alexandria in Egypt who tried to grapple with the question: “Who is Jesus?” St. John of course says that Jesus is the Word (John 1:1). But what does that really mean? Relying on the Neo-Platonist philosophy of his day, Arius argued that the whole idea of Jesus being the “Word” must imply that He is somehow lesser than God the Father (because that’s how Plato’s conception of the ‘Word’ fit into his worldview). But Arius took it one step further, arguing that not only was Jesus lesser than the Father, He wasn’t God at all but just a creature—perhaps the first creation of God, but still a creation nonetheless.

All of this contradicts the Bible, of course, in which Jesus is called “Immanuel” (which means “God-with-us”) and where He is consistently identified as the Lord— Yahweh—in the flesh. This is clear from Old Testament prophecies pointing to Him, and even in Jesus’ own words where He says, “Before Abraham was, I Am” (John 8:58). Here Jesus takes the very name of Yahweh—“I Am”— from the burning bush (Exodus 3:14) into His mouth and claims it as His very own!

In contradiction to all this, Arius argued that Jesus was essentially ‘different’ from the Father. It was an idea that tore at the very fabric of biblical teaching and the way in which the Church had taught the saving work of Christ from its very beginning.

Enter St. Athanasius (296-373 A.D.), also an Egyptian and the bishop of Alexandria. Athanasius combed through the Scriptures and the writings of the earlier Fathers of the Church, demonstrating that Arius’ views were Scripturally inaccurate and that his views also presented a serious challenge to the way in which the Bible speaks about the saving activity of Jesus Christ. Jesus needed to be both fully human and fully divine in order to be both the acceptable offering that takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29) as well as the one who allows us to become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).

At the First Council of Nicaea, this issue was further clarified. The bishops introduced a new term—not used in the Scriptures but which captures the essence of biblical teaching—– that Jesus was (and is) homoousios (“of one substance”) with the Father in His divinity. That’s something we still confess in the Nicene Creed today.

The Nicene Creed was adapted from an earlier baptismal creed, which was used in areas of modern-day Palestine and which Eusebius of Caesarea (260-339 A.D.) had introduced to the Council of Nicaea. The Council expanded the second article of this baptismal creed in order to better anchor this confession of Jesus-as-Saviour as both fully human and divine— in opposition to Arius’ incomplete teachings.

As that “God-Man,” Jesus is the very bridge by which our Triune God’s eternal life enters into our world today, through His very humanity—His flesh and blood. . . .That same flesh and blood are offered to us in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar.

While the Creed that came out of the Council was not the full Nicene Creed as we know and use it today, it provided the foundation for the fuller expression and confession of the ancient biblical faith during a time when cultural pressures and philosophies threatened to unravel it. It took the second Ecumenical Council of the ancient Church (the First Council of Constantinople in 381 A.D.) to fill out the Nicene Creed—expanding especially the third article dealing with the Holy Spirit—to lay the foundation as the common confession of the Church that we still subscribe to today. The Nicene Creed that had its beginnings at the First Council of Nicaea 1700 years ago this year forms part of our public confession of faith. It is included in the Book of Concord, to which our pastors and congregations today still commit themselves as preachers and teachers and believers of the Gospel.

The Nicene Creed and the history which surrounded its origins still have much to teach us today. We still live in a world where culture and philosophy tease us to abandon or cheapen the richness of the biblical Gospel. We see this throughout the world—even here in Canada—as many denominations which historically held to strong Christian beliefs abandon them in favour of cultural ideologies and social movements, because—they say—“that’s where people are at today.” Instead, we need to take the time to slow down and tarry at the manger and the cross in order to really embrace the fullness of this Jesus whom we—together with the ancient Church—confess to be Saviour (in the fullness of all that means). We don’t do that by taking these key moments of history for granted.

As we celebrate this anniversary, it is an opportunity to pause and reflect upon our own lives of faith, and to ask ourselves: are we simply seeking the Jesus that we like, based on cultural fads? Or are we pursuing the Jesus of Scripture, who is in His very person the theanthropos (the “God-Man”)? As that “God-Man,” Jesus is the very bridge by which our Triune God’s eternal life enters into our world today, through His very humanity—His flesh and blood.

That same flesh and blood are offered to us in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar. So when we receive the Body and Blood of our Saviour in the Sacrament, we also receive the very Second Person of the Holy Trinity. We receive into ourselves the very Lord of Life, all for us and for our salvation (John 6:53-58), who is God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten not made—so that we can be fed with His very own Eternal Life as branches grafted (baptized) into Christ the Vine (John 15).

Anything less than that full confession of His full humanity and His full divinity misrepresents the faith that the Scriptures teach, and so jeopardizes our living within that wondrous Gift of Salvation.

I invite you all to ponder anew this Gift as we confess our faith using the words of the Nicene Creed, building upon that great cloud of witnesses who have gone before us (Hebrews 11), pursuing Jesus as the God-Man who invites us to enter into the very presence of God through the very means of the Sacrament of His Body and Blood (Hebrews 11:19-25)—building our lives upon Christ, our Saviour, the very Rock of our Salvation.

Rev. Dr. Richard A. Beinert is pastor of Saint James Lutheran Church in Winnipeg.
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