This year, the Nicene Creed is 1700 years old, and here we are still paying attention to it. By any measure, that is an impressive achievement. The number of historical and cultural artifacts to which we still pay attention and which we still recite in church from that long ago, apart from Scripture itself, is few. The Nicene Creed is far from a mere artifact of a bygone age. It is the living confession of the holy catholic church, i.e., the church of all times and places. It is confessed in the East and the West. It was confessed then and it is now believed in the heart and confessed with the mouth, with, as we say in the Belgic Confession.1 The Nicene Creed is listed along with the Apostles’ and the Athanasian as ecumenical, i.e., universal creeds of the church.2Background How did the Nicene Creed come about? It was stimulated by a problematic presbyter named Arius. He appears on our historical radar in the late third century (c. AD 260–80). Not much is known about his life. He may have been from Libya. He was a pupil of Lucian of Antioch (d. AD 312), a presbyter, theologian, and martyr, who taught that the Son was subordinate to the Father from all eternity.3 His teaching was influenced by Arius and Eusebius of Nicomedia (d. AD 342), who would become the leader of the Arian party after Arius.4Arius was ordained to the diaconate by Alexander (d. AD 328), the Bishop of Alexandria, but when Arius supported Melitius, the former Bishop of Lycopolis (Egypt), whom Alexander had opposed, Alexander also sought Arius’ excommunication in a council in AD 321. About AD 306, Melitius had opposed the readmission to the church of those who had lapsed under persecution, i.e., who had denied Christ instead of being martyred. For decades in the East and West, there had been rigorist movements demanding that the church refuse to re-admit those who had lapsed. As far back as Cyprian, however, in the mid-third century, the church had determined to re-admit those who had fallen under persecution on the condition that they were penitent. Dissatisfied with the decision, Melitius led a schism and caused disturbances in the church. So, Arius not only had heretical doctrinal leanings, but he also sided with the rigorists. Tragically, Alexander himself was martyred for the gospel, and after that, Arius was restored to office and then elevated to the office of bishop and given a parish in Alexandria. By 319, Alexander was openly preaching the subordinationist theology of Lucian. In 328, Athanasius (c. 296–373) was succeeded by Alexander and would lead the orthodox and seek the reconciliation of the heretics to Christ’s church for forty-five turbulent years. Arius’ preaching of the doctrine of the eternal subordination of the Son was controversial in Alexandria. His views began to spread, and he had the help of Eusebius of Nicomedia, which was an imperial capital in Asia Minor (Central Turkey). A synod in Alexandria excommunicated Arius for his heterodoxy. The crisis intensified as people influenced by Arius’ teaching began to shout in the streets of Alexandria, “There was when the Son was not!” The Emperor Constantine tried and failed to mediate a settlement, and thus he called a Council to meet beginning June 19, AD 325. Arius’ Theology Arius was a rationalist, by which I mean that Arius would not believe anything that he could not understand comprehensively. By definition, God is incomprehensible. Given his starting point, heresy was almost inevitable. He was convinced that the Word God could not be applied to the Father and the Son at the same time, in the same sense. He was also convinced that if the Son was begotten—the church taught that the Son was eternally begotten—then he must have had a beginning of being. If he had a beginning, then he was a creature, hence the slogan, “there was when the Son was not.” He was also charged with saying that “the Son neither knows the Father nor himself perfectly” and that “God was not always Father,” which is a necessary inference from his conviction that the Son had a beginning. Arius not only put his intellect above God’s Word as confessed by the church, but he was also what has come to be called a biblicist, i.e., he wanted to read the Bible in isolation from the church. He pretended to be following Scripture, but, in fact, he was really following his own autonomous intellect. The Orthodox Response At Nicea, the church’s 318 bishops (pastors) struggled to form a response. At first, they considered the biblicist approach by adopting a creed that simply repeated biblical phrases but that ducked the question before them: what does Scripture teach? Does it teach that “there was when the Son was not,” i.e., that the Son is different in substance from the Father (and implicitly, the Holy Spirit—that question would be addressed at Constantinople in AD 381)? Synod would reject that approach in favor of using the word homoousios (consubstantial) to refute the Arians and to uphold the teaching of God’s Word that the Father and the Son are not of like substances but of the same substance. Before the Council could get to homoousios, they had to stipulate what they meant by the word God. The first article of the Nicene creed says, “We confess one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible.”[5] Were the church to give in to Arius, she would have become a polytheist, like the pagans who were persecuting them. The Scriptures, however, are not polytheistic. The fundamental biblical confession is, after all, “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deut 6:4; Mark 12:29; Rom 3:30; James 2:19). Paul had made clear to the Corinthians, “For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”— yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist’ (1 Cor 8:5–6; ESV). The apostolic church was surrounded by polytheistic pagans, and so was the church of the early fourth century. Indeed, in order to pacify the pagans, when Constantine made Christianity a legal religion in AD 311, he explicitly promised toleration for the polytheists. The polytheists were willing to absorb Jesus into their pantheon, but they were offended them the Christian claim that Jesus is the way to heaven. Arius was offering a sort of mediating way, which was tempting. When the Council declared that we believe in one God, it was preserving the apostolic “rule of faith” (regula fidei) that had been articulated and confessed by Ignatius, Polycarp, and Justin in the second century, and by Tertullian and many others in the third century. In other words, the Council of Nicea was not inventing a faith but preserving the holy catholic faith, the received Christian understanding of holy Scripture.6 God is one, in three persons. He is not one person and he is not three beings. He is one, in three persons. The Word was with God and the Word was God and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:1–3, 14). Further, against the pagans, the church declared that God is not made (not even the Son or the Spirit) but maker. Again, we are not polytheists. There are no co-eternal beings alongside the one triune God. Matter is not eternal but God is. He is maker of all things; the beginning did not spontaneously happen by itself (making matter into a god). Arius raised a dagger over the Christian faith while it was in its cradle but Alexander and later Athanasius and other orthodox heroes stood up to defend the truth, even if it meant trouble or even death. We might say that orthodoxy turned by a iota.7 Someone surely said, “Look at all these pagans out there. Why are we arguing over minutia?” Thank God that the orthodox entered the nursery and disarmed the assailant with the sword of God’s Word. NotesBelgic Confession, art. 1. Belgic Confession, art. 9. The Definition of Chalcedon is probably included in the clause, “as well as what the ancient fathers decided in agreement with them.” F. L. Cross and Elizabeth A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford University Press, 2005), s.v., Lucian of Antioch, St. This Eusebius should not be confused with Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 260–c.340), the famous historian of the ancient church, who, though he initially supported Arius, ultimately signed the Nicene Creed and yet continued to trouble and oppose Athanasius. Some English translations use the 1st person singular, “I believe,” but the original texts of the Nicene Creed use the first person plural, “We believe.” See e.g., Irenaeus, Adv. Haer., 1.10.1. One proposal at Nicea was to say that the Son is like the Father. The difference between that word and orthodoxy is the letter iota. This article is part of our faculty series on the Nicene Creed. You can find all of the articles and videos in this series here.
