This month marks the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. From May to August 325 AD, Christian bishops were convened by the yet-unbaptized emperor Constantine to settle the controversy between Arius and Alexander of Alexandria. They attempted to do so in the creed and anathemas that they propounded:
We believe in one God, Father Almighty, Maker of all things, seen and unseen;
and in one Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God, begotten as only begotten of the Father, that is, of the being of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father, through whom all things came into existence, both things in heaven and things in earth; who for us men and for our salvation came down and was incarnate and became man, suffered and rose again the third day, ascended into the heavens, and is coming to judge the living and the dead.
And in the Holy Spirit.
But those who say ‘there was a time when he did not exist,’ and ‘before being begotten he did not exist,’ and that he came into being from non-existence, or who allege that the Son of God is from another hypostasis or ousia, or is alterable or changeable, these the Catholic and Apostolic church anathematizes.
The 1700th anniversary of the council and its creed is an opportune moment for current and future church and ministry leaders to re-visit the council again, both to teach through a creed that is (or ought to be) confessed weekly in their churches, and to familiarize oneself anew with the philosophical and theological concepts upon which the debate was decided (and, if it fits your budget and schedule, participating in an organized trip to the places where the Council took place).
In the second century, Irenaeus argued against the Gnostics that Christian maturity is not a matter of moving from belief in a public, popular teaching to belief in a secret, elite teaching that was in conflict with the popular teaching. Training in Christianity is not being baptized into esotericism. Christian maturity comes instead from inquiring more deeply into the meanings of what is taught at the most elementary levels to Christians everywhere. In this sense, the Nicene Creed is both a brief summation of Christian belief, suitable for children in Sunday Schools, and the touchstone of lifelong study.
Despite the importance of the council and its creed, misconceptions and oversimplifications abound about what took place there. It is commonly believed, for example, that Arius denied the divinity of Christ, when in fact he explicitly attributed divinity to Christ. In his Epistle to Eusebius of Nicomedia (~318), Arius writes:
What is it that we say, and think, and have taught, and teach? That the Son is not unbegotten, nor a part of the unbegotten in any way, nor [formed out] of any substratum, but that he has his being by [God’s] will and counsel, before times and before ages, full of grace and truth, divine, unique, unchangeable. And before he was unbegotten or created or ordained or founded, he was not. For he was not unbegotten.
It requires a more-than-typical familiarity with the philosophical distinctions of early Christian Christological controversies to see where in such a confession Arius departs from the Pro-Nicenes. Pro-Nicenes then and now likewise deny that the Son is unbegotten (the Nicene Creed explicitly attributes begottenness to the Son) and that he is a part of God (since God has no parts). They likewise affirm that he existed before times and before ages, and that he is divine, unique, unchangeable. The anathemas appended to the Nicene Creed suggest that the objectionable claim Arius made is that “there was a time when he did not exist.”
Yet the confession of Arius places the origin of the Son “before times and before ages,” suggesting that there is no chronologically-prior time when the Son was not. But this seems just what is demanded by Proverbs, in which Christ speaks through the voice of Wisdom: "The Lord created me at the beginning of his work.” If, as virtually everyone in the ancient church agreed, it was in fact Christ speaking in this passage, Arius seems correct to echo Proverbs by claiming that the Son is created, albeit not created like other creatures. So what is the offending passage that makes Arius the heresiarch he is in the Christian imagination today?
I am not interested in rehabilitating Arius here. His teaching was wrong and justifiably condemned. But seeing why his teaching was rightly anathematized requires us to say something more insightful, more sophisticated, more nuanced than that he was unbiblical (he loved quoting the Bible in favor of his views), or that he denied the divinity of the Son (he didn’t). Matters are altogether a bit more complex than that, and I present Arius charitably here as an invitation for readers to take the 1700th anniversary of Nicaea as a kind of opportunity to give renewed renewed attention to the philosophical theology that did finally settle the Christological question against the anti-Nicenes.
If the philosophical theology at issue here is more complicated than is often thought, so is the history. By the end of the Council, the Arians were defeated but not eliminated or demoralized. In the decades after the Council, those dubious of the settlement reached at Nicaea occasionally regained political power and used it against the pro-Nicene faction that had used that same power against them. Arians and Eunomians spread to the outer edges of the empire, so that when the Visigoths sacked Rome almost a century later in 410, many of them were wearing crosses around their necks after having been evangelized by Arian missionaries. As one of my professors of church history was fond of saying: “Things are never as complicated as they seem. They are always much more so.”
So the 1700th anniversary of Nicaea is an opportunity to learn with more depth and nuance one of the most influential chapters of church history about which oversimplifications abound. For those interested in doing so, the following is a list of resources that allow deeper study of the council and its creed. The resources suggested here vary in sophistication from elementary to expert, which means ministry leaders will find here resources for group study in churches this summer, while seminarians will find occasion to sharpen their own theological sophistication in conversation with the theologians of the 4th century. The most entry-level sources are listed first.
The literature on Nicaea and the 4th century Christological controversies is far too enormous to permit a comprehensive list here. This selective list of ten sources is designed to introduce non-specialists into the debates of the period, perhaps in preparation for a teaching series or personal study of the Council and its Creed on this anniversary of it. The bibliographies of each of these will introduce readers to longer lists of secondary and primary sources. I include no primary sources in this list, but each of these secondary sources will make very clear what are the most important texts from antiquity that the Arian controversies produced.
Passages: Nicaea podcast, by Mere Orthodoxy
In 2021, Mere Orthodoxy contributors Joshua Heavin and Caleb Wait wrote and produced this 13-part podcast series on the Nicene Creed, its origins, and its significance. It is an invaluable starting point for new students of the council and its creed. At 13 chapters, its length makes it ideal length for a quarter-long teaching sequence through the creed in a Sunday School class, especially in conjunction with the next source.
Philip Cary, The Nicene Creed: An Introduction (Lexham Press, 2023)
The most introductory entry on this list, this brief work is a phrase-by-phrase commentary on the Nicene Creed. The length of the commentary on each phrase varies according to how complex the issues addressed in that phrase are. It provides this careful philosophical elaboration undistracted by polemics about the place of creeds in churches today and devoid of grandiose promises about the effect that recovering the recitation and understanding of the creed might play in the social position of the churches today.
McDonald Agape Nicaea Project, St Mellitus College
To mark the 1700th anniversary of Nicaea, St. Mellitus College has launched a four-year project including lectures, conferences, symposia, and publications related to the conference themes.
The lecture recordings on YouTube are a particularly attractive resource for the most recent scholarships on the themes and influence of Nicaea.
Luke Timothy Johnson, The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why It Matters (Image, 2003)
This book is another popular-level source, written by a Roman Catholic theologian at a time when the New Atheists were more ascendent than they are today, with the effect that some of the introductory material feels dated in its polemics and overly defensive about the position of religion under the conditions of Modernity. Nevertheless, for those whose familiarity with the creed being recited weekly might have inured them to the fact that most of the world find such a confession unpalatable and nonsensical, the polemic here might have the effect of jarring the complacent from their comforts.
Not content to trace the origin of the Creed back to the 4th century, Johnson instead traces the practice of confessing creeds back to the Shema of Deuteronomy 6, to Paul’s compact kerygma of 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, and to the traces of pre-Nicea creedal practices of the intervening centuries between Christ and the Council in order to show that Nicea’s creed exists in a continuity of development with creeds before and after it. The commentary on individual phrases of the creed is likewise much longer and takes the opportunity from the creed to engage in polemics with process theologians, liberation theologians, and many others.
Christopher Beeley, The Unity of Christ: Continuity and Conflict in Patristic Tradition (Yale, 2012)
This book includes one long chapter on Nicaea and Athanasius on the way toward developing its main theme: the theological inheritance of Origen and its development into the single-subject Christology that reached its apotheosis in Cyril of Alexandria. Beeley dispels common myths around the Council on the way to a more contextualized understanding of what happened there and what its participants thought they were doing:
Despite the longstanding impression that the council at Nicaea was a great watershed in the development of Christian doctrine, the bishops assembled there did not return to their sees with the sense that a great work of positive doctrinal definition had just been accomplished; in fact, the council was largely ignored for many years. It was more than twenty years later, almost solely through the determination of Athanasius, that Nicaea came to be seen as a great conciliar standard (124).
One particular strength of this treatment is its attention to careful theological speculation, insofar as the sources allow, to the precise places where Arius’s theology differed from that of the Pro-Nicenes. For example, as I noted above (full disclosure: I learned this from Beeley), “Arius does not, therefore, assert the temporal priority of God over the Son, as he is routinely accused of doing” (110). But Arius does assert “that the father is unknown, ineffable, and invisible to the Son” (112). This characterization of Arius’s views allows us to shift what our understanding of what his central concern was: “The determining factor in Arius’s theology, however, is not the identity of the Son at all, but the nature of God the Father…” (109). The theological care on display in this text makes clear the importance of careful philosophical theology for those who would follow Nicaea’s legacy with fidelity. As we have already seen, Arius did not deny Christ’s divinity. He did deny the Father’s eternal generation of the Son.
It is a particular puzzle for adherents of a simplistic form of sola scriptura that so very much of the debate hangs on the homoousias, a term which never appears in scripture. To the degree that some modern evangelical scholars are tempted to follow Arius in denying the eternal generation of the Son, one might see the limits of a naive Biblicism.
John Henry Newman, The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833)
This classic study of Arianism marks the beginning of modern scholarly treatment of the subject. Though dated in its scholarship, it is nevertheless still a lively, sweeping, and detailed history of the movement Nicaea came to oppose. The tone is more polemical against Arius and his followers than more sympathetic, though still dissenting, scholarship has treated him in the intervening years.
As we have already noted, Arius did not, as the popular misconception has it, deny the divinity of Christ. Instead he maintained the half-pagan notion that divinity came in degrees and was a more complex category than radical monotheists might allow. Therefore it was possible for Jesus to be a quasi-created divinity and a quasi-temporal God. It was this idea that there might be quasi-created divinities, and that the Son might be one of them, that called forth the Creed’s claim that the Son is “true God from true God.”
In this textured history known to few non-specialists with any degree of detail, the Council of Nicaea receives treatment in just under two dozen vivid pages. The brevity of this treatment contributes to the (accurate) historical sense that, despite the location of Nicaea in the popular imagination as a decisive movement that ended the Arian controversy, in fact the anti-Nicene movement continued for centuries after the Council formally ruled against it. Of particular note is the attention Newman gives to the events following the death of Constantine, the great imperial convener of the Council and subsequent enforcer of its teaching. Despite the reputation of the Council in the popular imagination as having decisively put to rest the Arian question, the truth is that even decades after the council, a significant minority, if not the majority, of self-professed Christians in the Roman empire and on its outskirts were anti-Nicene.
John Behr, The Nicene Faith, Part One: True God of True God (St. Vladimir’s, 2004).
This second volume of John Behr’s The Formation of Christian Theology is devoted to the controversies surrounding the Council and the subsequent defense of its teachings by the three Cappadocian Fathers, Sts. Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus. Behr says “the significance of this era cannot be overstated: the central elements of Christian theology articulated during the fourth century have been, until very recently, the common inheritance of all Christians, of whatever tradition” (xv). The introduction to the second volume of the trilogy is particularly attentive to the ways interpretations of Nicaea function as proxies for the adjudication of contemporary theological disputes. The first volume in the trilogy focused on the first three centuries of Christian replies to Jesus’ question: “who do you say I am” (Matthew 15:16)?
Like Beeley’s study of the long influence of Origen in the Christological debates of the subsequent centuries, this volume makes clear that the debates at Nicaea pick up a story already centuries in development. Behr is particularly attentive to the way that the conflicts were about those who believed in revealed Scripture and those who didn’t, but among different methods of Biblical exegesis. Alexander of Alexandria, against whom Arius wrote his own doctrine, “regarded the dispute as being basically exegetical” (125).
Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition (Eerdmans, 1987, 2001)
Rowan Williams’s survey of Arian scholarship between Newman and the end of the twentieth century is an illuminating study of how critiques of Arianism have functioned as critiques of whatever a given scholar of Arianism wanted to reject in his own day. He notes the malleability of Arius in the historiography of Nicea, in which Arius the heresiarch comes to stand in as a proxy for whatever ecclesiastical dispute is at issue in the lives and agendas of the historians who write about them. Williams’s own target is the notion that Arius was some “Other” outside of Christianity. By contrast, Williams argues, the boundaries between the heresiarch and the Pro-Nicenes were not terribly vivid:
We need to give full weight to the fact that ‘Arians’ and ‘Catholics’ were conducting a debate within a largely common language, acknowledging the same kind of rules and authorities. We need to see how ‘Arian’ and ‘Catholic’ were coeval as Christians engaged in the definition of the very idea of normative faith, and to see how diffuse this struggle was and (often) how unclear its boundaries” (24).
Undoubtedly this is an unsettling suggestion, but if it were not true — if Arius’s teaching were so obviously beyond the bounds of orthodoxy even for the non-expert — then why do polemicists need to mangle and simplify Arius’s own teaching in order to present him as a pure teacher of evil? If his teaching is so obviously misguided, why does it need so often to be mischaracterized in order to demonstrate how wrongheaded it is?
The emphasis of this text is upon trinitarianism, particularly the significance of that doctrine at moments when it seems quaintly irrelevant or outright nonsensical. In the Foreword, Brian Daley recounts the story of a scholar of early Christianity who returns from a conference to church only to hear the preacher say: “Today we celebrate our belief that God is one in nature, subsisting eternally in the three Persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We don’t know how to explain this, or even to say exactly what it means — so let us, instead, try to love one another!” Anatolius straddles the boundaries between historical and systematic theology, between ancient and modern theologians. It is, as the title suggests, a project of retrieval. Of particular interest for this anniversary of Nicaea is the first chapter, on 4th century trinitarian theology, in a brief summary of the major events from Nicaea to Constantinople (381 AD). Like other sources surveyed here, Anatolios is interested in clarifying common misperceptions around Nicaea:
The Christian imagination has tended to portray the Nicene council as ushering in the victory of Athanasian ‘orthodoxy’ over ‘the Arian heresy’ with the inspired confession of the homoousios. However, the reception of Nicaea was a far more convoluted process than such a rendering suggests. In point of fact, the Council of Nicaea resulted in more confusion than resolution, at least in the short term, and neither Arius nor Athanasius was a primary figure in the immediate aftermath of the council (18).
Niceae appears early in this study, which discusses Christology only as it bears upon questions of Trinitarianism that are subsequent in Christian theology. Here again the plea is for appreciation of the complexity of Nicaea’s legacy, without recourse to polemics:
It is virtually impossible to identify a school of thought dependent on Arius’ specific theology, and certainly impossible to show that even a bare majority of Arians had any extensive knowledge of Arius’ writing. Arius was part of a wider theological trajectory; many of his ideas were opposed by others in this trajectory: he neither originated the trajectory nor uniquely exemplified it (2).
If Arianism was no single movement, and there were multiple ways of going wrong when discussing the Christological and Trinitarian controversies of the 4th century, then contemporary theologians and ministry leaders will need a more robust set of philosophical and theological concepts than is commonly provided by evangelical theological education today to avoid falling astray as did so many in the 4th century. The 1700th anniversary of Nicaea is a splendid occasion to acquire, or sharpen, those tools.