The Council of Nicaea at 1700 Years: Why It Still Matters

During the podcast a new commemorative icon image is mentioned (around 4:47). We’ve included the image here for our interested viewers (click to view a larger version). Want to learn more? There’s a good article about it here, on the Prosopon School of Iconography website.

Interview Transcript

Shirley Paulson

I’m not sure that everybody knows this, but this year marks the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. That event has probably impacted the world in more ways than we can imagine. I’m delighted that our guest today is going to help us understand a bit more about what happened and what was at stake and maybe why all that matters.

I’m happy to introduce to you our guest, the Reverend Ben Wyatt. Ben is an Episcopal priest, in fact, the Priest-in-Charge at the Church of the Nativity in Indianapolis. He has also run two podcasts on ancient Christianity, “The Road to Nicaea” and “In Simeon’s Wake.” And just in time for Nicaea’s anniversary celebration, Ben has a book coming out this year titled Christ and the Council, published by Wipf and Stock.

Thanks so much, Ben, for coming to talk to us about this extremely important but complex topic on the Council of Nicaea. And it’s so appropriate to do so now as Christians are celebrating this 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Council this year. So, happy anniversary and welcome!

Ben Wyatt

Yes, thank you so much. I’m so glad you invited me on. I’m looking forward to the conversation.

Shirley

Great, thank you. So I think we ought to start with a quick description of what the Nicene Council was, for those who may not be familiar with it at all. Just give us a little preview here.

Ben

Yeah, so long-story-short, the controversy that gave rise to the Nicene Creed started around the end of 324 A.D. in the city of Alexandria in Egypt. There was a local dispute between a priest named Arius and his bishop named Alexander. Obviously, Arius of Alexandria was jealous of Alexander of Alexandria’s wonderful name. I mean, just the perfect name for a minister in that city. I kid, of course.

The disagreement was about the nature of Christ’s divinity. Alexander believed and preached that Jesus Christ was fully divine, as the Father was fully divine. And he used a fancy Greek word called homoousios to describe the relationship between the two. Homoousios means something like of the same being or of the same stuff, you know, of the same species, one might say.

Arius had a different view of the matter. Arius was quite happy to call Jesus God, but he thought Jesus was a lesser God than the Father.

You know, sometimes I use the example: if God the Father is dairy milk, sort of whole fat dairy milk, then the Son is like almond milk, and can be used in the same ways but is not the same thing. So Arius called his own bishop a heretic, which typically does not go very well for ministers when they do that to their authorities. Arius was immensely popular in the Roman Empire and  he had a number of other bishops who backed him. So this controversy became a huge problem in the Empire, and bishops everywhere were excommunicating each other and, you know, yelling angrily about this, which irritated the Emperor Constantine, who had just finished a 20-year-long project of reunifying the Roman Empire and was not about to see bishops break the Empire apart.

So Constantine wrote a letter to all the bishops, inviting them to the Council of Nicaea to hammer all this out. A number of bishops took him up on his invitation, and the document they came up with there is called the Nicene Creed, which states the sort of classical doctrine of the Trinity in support of Bishop Alexander against Arius. So that’s kind of the short version of it.

And I actually have a visual aid for this. Since this year is the 1700th anniversary, there was a new icon of the Council of Nicaea that was commissioned for it, and I’ve got it framed in my office here. So you can see, sort of, all the bishops gathered around here with Constantine in there as well and Jesus looking down over the whole thing. So something that’s even been kind of memorialized in iconography as well.

Shirley

Oh, that’s helpful to know. And for those of you who are listening only, maybe we can post a picture of that on our website. So, yeah, thanks.

Ben

Sure, I’ll be happy to send it, yeah. Thank you.

Shirley

Okay, so Ben, something I wondered about is why—after more than three centuries of legitimate open discussions and disagreements—did these Christian leaders suddenly think that they needed to enforce only one way of defining and doing things? Was that because of Constantine? Or why? Only one way of defining and doing things. Was that because of Constantine or what’s the deal there?

Ben

Yeah, it’s a great question and an important one. And I think there are a couple of answers to it.

I think the first answer is that since the beginning, some Christian leaders have had a sense that we need to be in agreement on certain things. And we can see this going all the way back to the letters of Paul, where he says, it’s not okay to force people to conform to the Jewish law in order to be Christian, right? And essentially says, there’s room for legitimate disagreement about all sorts of things. You can disagree on whether you eat food sacrificed to idols. You can disagree about whether you have sexual relationships within a marriage or not. But I think Paul said that saying that all Gentiles must follow Jewish law is a bridge too far. So I think there’s always been a certain sense of things and a certain sense that there are some things that are just so important that unity needs to be enforced.

Interestingly enough, the Nicene Creed was actually not the first time that the church had appealed to an emperor to get rid of somebody who was causing a problem. A few generations before, there was a guy named Paul of Samosata who caused a whole bunch of problems in the church for all kinds of reasons. And they appealed to the emperor to say, look, we know you’re not a Christian. We know you don’t really care, but this guy is causing so many problems for church and state. Will you please exile him? And the emperor said, yeah, sure, fine, whatever, and did so.

I think what really changes at Nicaea is two things. First is that all of a sudden there’s a reliable enforcement mechanism. Now that Constantine is the head of the church, at least in his own mind, they have someone they can appeal to who can actually enforce a sentence. In previous times, if one bishop said, you’re kicked out of my church, then you just went to a neighboring church that wasn’t under their jurisdiction and kept right on going. That all changes with the ascension of Constantine. So that’s part of it. And of course, Constantine’s the one who said, I don’t want you all arguing about this anymore because it’s causing too much of a ruckus. That’s one big part of it.

I think another part is that they had a sense that this controversy really got to the heart of what the faith meant. And I don’t think many of them could put that into words until decades of arguing had passed. I think it’s really difficult to understand the passion and the sense of how important it was for the church to be unified on this without understanding the persecution that had preceded it. One of the reasons why Constantine was so valorized by Christians of the time was not just because he was the first Christian emperor. It was because he ended something called the Great Persecution. For about 10 years, until about, I think it was 298 or 299 to 308. My dates might be a little bit off there. The emperors of Rome had decreed an empire-wide persecution against all Christians. It was sporadically enforced, but when it was enforced, it was quite severe. Many of the bishops who came to Nicaea to write that creed were missing digits or limbs or had scarring from the torture they’d endured.

And like any group of people who’ve endured something traumatic, one of the most important things that they had to do was figure out what was all that suffering for. And this put Christians in a bit of a bind, because on the one hand, Christians had suffered because they were monotheists. They believed that there was one God, that God was not the Roman pantheon, and so they refused to make the imperially mandated sacrifices to the Roman gods.

So Arius and his supporters said, now hold on a second. If you say that the Son is equal to the Father, you know, if Jesus Christ is fully divine like the Father, and they’re two separate individuals, we’re not monotheists anymore. And if we’re not monotheists, then all of these martyrs died for nothing. On the other hand, Alexander and his supporters would say, yeah, the martyrs, you know, did die, and that is important. And whose name was on their lips when they died? For many of them, it wasn’t God the Father, it was Jesus Christ. And to ascribe to him anything less than full divinity is to make a mockery of the martyrs and to blaspheme the very first martyr of the faith, who was Jesus—whose martyrdom won us our salvation.

So really, there’s this immense conflict going on because Christianity is a religion that people have died for. And I think, although they don’t put it in quite this way, I think in many ways what the church is saying, we have to be really, really clear on what we’re asking people to die for.

Shirley

I really appreciate your helping us understand the flesh and blood part of this story. This is not just an intellectual debate, but there are people’s lives at stake and people’s hearts and souls. I really appreciate that.

So, okay, a couple questions. I want to go back a little bit. You mentioned that Constantine was the head of the church. How did that happen? Didn’t you say that?

Ben

Yeah, and he at least believed himself to be the head of the church. So Constantine will write letters to bishops where he says things like, I see myself as the bishop of bishops. It’s your job to manage your flock, and it’s my job to manage all of you and to keep us all in unity. This is not something that all the later Roman emperors will agree with, but Constantine’s vision seems to be that just as I need my army to be unified so we can win our battles, so I need the church unified so that we’re all praising God the same way so that God will continue to bless my reign. He doesn’t seem to be, at least on my reading, he’s not a particularly theological guy. There’s kind of an urban legend that Constantine wrote the Nicene Creed, which is not true. There’s no good reason to think that’s true. But he does think it’s important for everybody to agree on these things.

And at the time that Constantine ascended to the imperial purple, the Roman emperor held the title of Pontifex Maximus, or High Priest, which is the same title that the Roman Pope holds today. Because the Roman emperor was assumed to be at the top of kind of the sacrificial system, and pagan Roman emperors would go to the temple a couple of times a year to perform the sacrifices the High Priest was supposed to. So when Constantine takes over, everybody assumes the emperor has a religious role. Constantine just sort of takes that out of paganism and plunks it into Christianity.

Shirley

Fascinating. Okay, I had not put that together yet. That’s very helpful.

And now I have a question that I think is hard for any devout Christian to really answer well, but I want to try it with you.

Ben

We’ll see what I can do.

Shirley

So we know that bishops didn’t really come to an agreement that everybody was happy with. What was the basic disagreement about, really? And before you answer, I want to point out to our listeners that this is so difficult because churches today still base their doctrinal beliefs on the outcome of Nicaea. And it’s hard for anybody to give an unbiased answer to the question, but let’s see what you have to say about that.

Ben

I think some of it goes back to that question of what the church is asking people to die for. There are a number of ways of characterizing the fundamental disagreement. But I would say what it really comes down to is what is our conception of God? For the anti-Nicene crowd, the idea is that the Father is in some way so great and glorious and transcendent that he really can’t have all that much to do with the material world himself. He needs a mediator. So the Father creates the Son as a kind of lesser God who is still great and glorious and divine, but not so much so that either the material world will contaminate him or he’ll make the whole world melt away if he incarnates in it. So there’s almost this idea that you need kind of a go-between layer in between God and creation in order for there to be any communication between the two.

The pro-Nicene faction says, essentially, the good news of Jesus Christ is Emmanuel, God with us. And if you start saying that Jesus, well, was kind of God, but not really, and wasn’t sort of as divine as the Father, then, all of a sudden that’s not such good news anymore. We don’t actually have any real access to the ultimate source of life and being and goodness and truth. And so for them, it’s for them, it’s Jesus has to be fully God because Jesus is who we know. And so if you kind of sever that link, then you sever our link to God.

Shirley

That’s very helpful to understand it in the context of our relationship to God, that we are close to God, according to which way you look at that.

Okay, so now, as you point out in your book, it seems that Christians who defend the perfection of the outcome of Nicaea so fiercely would go so far as to say that Arius then was even more evil than Judas’ betrayal of Jesus before his crucifixion. Right? Did Arius betray Christianity? Or why did the ultimate winners see Arius as so evil?

Ben

Yeah, I mean, and you know, I’m not an Arian in my own beliefs, but I do think poor Arius got a pretty rough treatment in all of this. It’s for a couple of reasons.

Part of it, Arius seems to have enjoyed controversy. So he was in the habit of…like, he would have done well on Twitter. He’s good at—or what I guess we’re supposed to call it X now, but it’ll always be Twitter to me—He has a habit of saying these kind of lightning rod proclamations. So his famous one is, he says essentially, “Look, everyone! If the Father begat the Son, then that means there was a time when the Son was not. There was a point in time when the Son didn’t exist,”—which just sends everybody, whether they liked the Nicene Creed or not into a tizzy. For them, it’s axiomatic that the Son is eternal, right? That the Father’s beginning takes place at a time.

And Arius basically just says, “No, that’s not the way it works. You know, if he was made, then there had to be a time before he was made. Deal with it.” You know, if he was around today, he might’ve even said, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” But that’s… so I think he kind of intends himself as this as this controversial figure.

I think the other side of it is that Arius is the person on his side with the least amount of power. So most of the key players in this story are bishops. Arius is not a bishop, he’s a priest. Because of that, he ends up becoming kind of an easy punching bag. So there’s actually a lot of times what you see happen just when humans fight, and certainly this is true of the Nicene controversy as well. People will sort of pick out extremes on either side and then say, well, we’re not doing either one of those. And, you know, by repudiating both of those extremes, then you sort of establish yourself as kind of a reasonable person in the debate, right? We see this happen all the time in contemporary politics. So that happens in the Nicene Creed too.

On the pro-Nicene side, there’s a guy named Marcellus of Ansira who is seen as just so out there in his theology that nobody wants to associate with him. And then on the anti-Nicene side, you have Arius. And because he’s not a bishop, he doesn’t really have much of a power base. And it’s really easy for folks to kind of kick him when he’s down. So I think that’s part of why he has gone down in history as the villain of this.

He was actually, I mean, he got the story kicked off, but in the 56 years of fighting afterwards, he’s a very minor character. He wasn’t even at the Council of Nicaea. But because he courted that kind of extreme polemic and because he didn’t have as much power as the others, I think he gets the brunt of the criticism.

To your original question, “Did he betray Christianity, my view is certainly not on his own, certainly not by his own understanding. I mean, he was probably in his 50s or 60s when this whole affair began. He had served the church faithfully for his entire life. As far as we know, there were no other complaints made about his character or his work. And after he got exiled, he really missed it.

To me, one of the tragedies of his story is at the end of his life, he says, I’m willing to sign on to the Nicene Creed just because he wants to die in communion with the church he spent his life serving. He winds up dying before he’s able to sign on and be readmitted. I think he was very sincere in his convictions. I think it is possible to be sincere in your convictions and yet teach a doctrine that betrays them in a kind of subtle way. And that’s sort of the majority report on what happened with Arius. But I think we need to make a really clear distinction between that kind of subtle thing that really you can only see with the benefit of history and saying this person was an evil viper who was attempting to poison the church from within.

Shirley

Okay, it’s so helpful to get some perspective when we just get these stories and we don’t really know. In fact, I even remember hearing that he was… I mean—you did mention that he was popular. Somebody liked him—

Ben

Very popular, yeah.

Shirley

Doesn’t he lead a bunch of songs that people like to sing?

Ben

Yeah, he was a musical composer. So he would take popular sea shanties or drinking songs and he would set his own theology to them so that dock workers would be humming his hymns. Apparently in his younger days, he was very good looking. So there’s apparently some fragment somewhere where other priests in Alexandria are complaining about how all the young women seem to go to Arius’ church whenever he’s preaching. So he’s a very charismatic fellow. One of his teachers was a martyr in the Great Persecution. So he came from a really important theological pedigree. So he had a lot of influence.

Shirley

Interesting. So the basic doctrinal conclusion of Nicaea is the defining of Jesus as fully human and fully divine. Those words can sound like an oxymoron to people who have not adopted it as doctrine for themselves. Can you explain like what it means and why people would believe that?

Ben

Yeah. Well, and there, you know, in some ways the fully human, fully divine doesn’t get fully fleshed out until a century later. Once they get the divinity part down there, sort of then they have to figure out, well, how does his humanity interact with that? And I think the biggest questions that come with this…I think nowadays we tend to think a lot about like his subjective experience, right? Like if he’s fully human and fully divine, like what did that mean? Did he know everything there was to know? Did he kind of forget about that?

And there are a couple of different theories as to how that works. So there’s a theory that the Son sort of forgets, like he knows it, but he kind of voluntarily forgets for a while in his human life. That’s why he says things like, look, I don’t know when the end of days is coming, only the Father knows that. I’ve heard someone compare it to method acting, like how a method actor can get so into their role that they really authentically believe that for a moment. So, I mean, there are kind of a bunch of ways to think about that.

The early church was, I think, less concerned about what was going on in Jesus’ head in that sense. For them, it was more about if Jesus is fully God and Jesus suffered, what does that say about God? And for them, I think kind of the bigger scandal was if we say the Son is fully divine, well, then that means God can be acted on in some ways. You can be fully God and be generated by another being, which was really scandalous to them. And, you know, none of them would say that God could suffer, right? That would sort of be like saying that the color blue can be round. Like it’s just a category error. That’s not the way it works.

But they would say that God could take up flesh and suffer according to human nature. And so there is, I think, kind of a widening in what it means to be God going on in this. And you see it in the texts at the time. Those who are opposed to the Nicene Creed will say, “Look, it’s ridiculous to believe the Son’s equal to the Father. The Son’s obviously lesser than the Father because fathers are greater than their sons. It’s better to generate than to be generated. It’s better to sort of be in control than to be controlled.”

And although I’m not sure they were fully aware of the implications of what they were saying, I think a lot of the pro-Nicenes were actually carving out a space to say, “There is actually more room for receptivity and passivity in the Godhead than we assumed before.”

Shirley

Well, that certainly leaves a billion more questions in our mind, I’m sure. So thank you for at least getting us started on that question. It’s one we’re still asking today. So I mean, it’s a 2,000-year-old question, so it’s okay we don’t answer everything right now, but you’ve got to start.

Okay, so you’ve said that the story doesn’t tell us that Christians were satisfied and lived happily ever after. So what did happen then after the Council was finished?

Ben

Everyone lost their minds.

Shirley

Okay, I get it.

Ben

Specifically, so everyone winds up kind of reversing themselves. You know, Constantine makes a big show of enforcing unity after the Council of Nicaea. Arius refuses to sign the Nicene Creed. There are a handful of bishops who also refuse to sign it, and Constantine exiles them all. And then within two to three years, he’s let all of them back into the empire. He doesn’t make them sign a creed. He doesn’t really make them do anything.

Arius sort of waltzes back in without having to sign a creed. The church won’t let him minister, but he’s released from his exile without having to sign on to the Nicene Creed or really even apologize. So Constantine ends up being kind of very inconsistent in his enforcement of this unity that he wants.

Meanwhile, many of the bishops have kind of a case of buyer’s remorse with the Nicene Creed. So the original version of it in 325 is not the version that most churches use today because most people agree there were some flaws with it. The Nicene Creed kind of has three paragraphs: one for the Father, one for the Son, and one for the Holy Spirit. Well, the original Nicene Creed had one sentence about the Holy Spirit. So you have this big long paragraph about the Son and how the Son is from the substance of the Father and is of one being with the Father. And then the final paragraph just says, “And we also believe in the Holy Spirit.” End of story. And so people came back and said, “Well, hey, maybe we need to talk a little bit more about the poor ignored Holy Spirit.” So that was one problem.

The other problem was with that tricky Greek word homoousios. Ousia is a very kind of materialistic word. It’s the stuff things are made of. And so there were a lot of people who thought that wasn’t the right word to use because it could connote that God had a material body. It almost could sound as though there was some block of divine Jell-O and you took like a Jell-O cutter and cut out free shapes and those were the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

So they didn’t like that word. There was a lot of impetus to try to find a better creed. And there’s this 56-year period where bishops are calling councils all over the place, trying to write a creed that will achieve empire-wide ascent. None of them can do it. Empire… imperial politics are going back and forth all the time. So you’ll have like one emperor who supports the Nicene Creed and then he’ll die. And then you’ll have another emperor who opposes it and then he’ll get killed in a war against the Persians. And then you’ll have another emperor who supports the Nicene Creed but he dies in a remodeling accident because he painted his home and then lit a fire at night and breathed in all the paint fumes and died. It’s like an HGTV level. HGTV meets Game of Thrones is kind of how the Roman Empire works.

So you have all of this chaos going on at the level of imperial politics, as bishops are desperately trying to figure all this out. And over the course of this very messy 56-year period, you got two things that happened that I think are really important:

1. You start to see kind of a condensation of terminology because, for the first couple of decades, the arguments are like ships passing in the night. They aren’t really able to answer each other’s objections. They aren’t even using the same words or meaning the same thing when they use the same words. That starts to coalesce around a couple of sound bites. And I’m not somebody who particularly likes sound bites, but they do have value in focusing a debate.And that word homoousios ends up becoming the sound bite that the whole debate sort of circles around. And for all of its warts, it becomes something that allows them to get some clarity around the issue. That’s the first important thing that happens.
2. The second important thing that happens is that there’s a change of generations. And so over the course of that 56 year period, you see that initial generation that started the controversy eventually passes on. And then there’s a new generation, both pro and anti-Nicaean, that have sort of grown up in the midst of this controversy and been formed by it. I think they were able to see things more clearly because they stand on the shoulders of those who have come before. I think sometimes we can underestimate the importance of generational change and that these controversies oftentimes require the judgment of history to work things out.

Shirley

That’s really helpful. So in a context of history like that, I would love to ask you a lot more questions, but I think we need to sort of wrap this up in a way that we can keep this in our mind. So what are the biggest lessons that you think Christians can learn today from studying the story of the Nicene Council? What can we learn from that for today?

Ben

Yeah. And sometimes you—at least my experience in writing this book was—you write the book, and then you realize what the book was about and you find the one liner you wanted to put in, but your publisher says, nope, you’ve already sent us your final copy. So the line I wish I’d put in the book was: “We can’t pretend that our past is less complicated than our present.” Because so often what happens is we idealize our past and people do this with the Council of Nicaea all the time, right? They forget about the conflict that followed. They forget about how unfinished it was in 325.

And then they look around at how rough and conflictual and unfinished everything seems today, and they say, why is it so much different now? Well, it’s not actually. People are very much the same whether they’re in 325 or 2025. But we can’t learn the lessons of the past if we don’t see that. So I think there’s actually a fair amount of consolation to be had in that realization. But we have to realize it first.

And I think as part of that, I think it’s really important for us to get as comfortable as we can with the mess. Nobody particularly likes conflict. I mean, maybe somebody does, but I think most of us who’ve been in it, particularly in a church setting, it’s not our favorite thing. We come to church because we want that sense of togetherness and harmony. But what usually happens when we aren’t patient with conflict is, we short circuit it. We impose a decision, and we say, this is what it is, get on board or get out. Or we say, well, we’re not talking about that here. And they tried both of those strategies and more over the course of those 56 years at Nicaea. And thank God it didn’t work for Nicaea, because what happens, then, is conflict just goes underground, and nothing really gets resolved. And I think the patience that it takes to resolve those conflicts is really, really hard to get. But it’s also the sort of thing that produces a lasting synthesis. And that’s something that I think we could all benefit from.

Shirley

I really do appreciate your patience with this because I think you’re doing exactly what you’re saying that we should be doing—which is take the time to think about it, listen to each other, understand that there are people’s lives at stake and people of God that matters and that we shouldn’t be afraid of the differences. We should be patient with them. And you’re modeling that for us in a really beautiful way. And I want to say thank you.

Ben

Thank you. I appreciate that.

Shirley

And can you tell us the name of your book and where we can find it?

Yes, the book is called Christ and the Council. It is available for purchase on Amazon and on wipfandstock.com. Wipf and Stock is my wonderful publisher. And it’s available on bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers around the globe.

Shirley

Wonderful. I really sincerely want to thank you so much for being with us today because I think you’re talking about a subject that, again, people don’t necessarily know how to get into that conversation. And this is so helpful. Thank you, Ben. So nice of you.

Ben

Oh, thank you so much, Shirley. This has been a pleasure. Thank you. Yeah.