The Perennial Importance of Creeds for Christian Faith – Part 2

An earlier article reviewed the importance of the creeds of the ancient Christian church, particularly in light of the Protestant and Reformed commitment to the Sola Scriptura doctrine, which was the focus of  the First Prince Georges Conference on Reformed Theology held late last month. Two further presentations at the conference reviewed the background and Christology of the Nicene creed, which was formulated at the Council of Nicaea and finalized at the First Council of Constantinople in the fourth century.

The Dilemma of Monotheism and Christology

Chris Spano, Pastor of Trinity Community Church in Bowie, Maryland who reviewed the background and decisions made by the Council of Nicaea (actually the First Council of Nicaea) began by saying that creeds are “faithful summaries of what God has revealed to us in Scripture.” This faith can then be passed to future generations. The first three creeds (Apostles Creed, and the first and second Nicene Creeds) are “ecumenical creeds because they … are affirmed by all Christians.”

Spano joked that “Santa Claus attended the Council of Nicaea.” In fact, St. Nicholas of Myra did attend the council, although he likely did not engage in an altercation with a heretical attendee, as legend has it. The council was convened by the Emperor Constantine, Rome’s first Christian emperor, a dramatic change from the past. Many of the council’s members “literally bore on their bodies the marks” of persecution. The council has been called “an assembled army of martyrs.” Thus, the council consisted of men who were willing to defend the Christian faith at any cost.

With respect to the council, Spano distinguished between “the good, the bad, and the ugly.” He said that “most of the church fathers up to this point in history did a good job of reiterating two Biblical truths … [that] the one true God is the only ruler of the universe. And two, the man Christ Jesus is divine.” Both doctrines were solidly rooted in the Bible and three centuries of the ante-Nicene past. These doctrines raised the question: “if God is one, then in what sense is the man Christ Jesus also God?” Easy solutions to this problem lean too much either to Jesus’ divinity or his humanity, while the orthodox insistence that both are true without one detracting from the other are difficult to comprehend.

Heretical Solutions

One attempt to make the Trinity and the Incarnation comprehensible that overemphasized divine unity was Sabellianism. This modelist doctrine of the Trinity held that God appears differently at different times, rather than being as three distinct persons. Consequently, Sabellius admitted that “Jesus didn’t really pray to the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane,” and that “God as God died on the cross.” Origen and Tertullian, however, refuted Sabellius from Scripture. The Gospel of John holds that Jesus is one with the Father, while he is also distinct from the Father.  Tertullian coined the term “Trinity,” and “first proposed that we should speak of God as one divine substance consisting of three distinct persons.” Origen advanced the doctrine of “eternal generation,” which proposed that God the Father begets God the Son in “an eternal, and ceaseless begetting, just as radiance is generated from light.”

Although both Origen and Tertullian believed that the Son eternally existed, they sometimes used language that suggested that he did not. Origen maintained that it was correct to say that the Son was “created” by the Father. Spano said that this was “exactly how” Arius, who propounded the heresy of Arianism, used these ante-Nicene statements.

If the acknowledgment of God’s unity and Jesus’ divinity was good, and the early proposals to make this comprehensible were bad, the ugly was the full blown Arian Christology, which ended in a thorough denial of Jesus’ divinity. Arius held that Jesus was only a creature – the highest and most exalted creature, but a creature nonetheless. Before the pre-incarnate Son of God was created, “he was not.” Further, it was held that God created the Son of God to be the creator of the material world. This is similar to Gnostic doctrine, which holds that the material world was created by an inferior being under the ultimate unity. Finally, of especial interest to Evangelicals, the Arian Christology alters the doctrine of salvation. Arius held that Jesus “is not God truly, but by participation in grace.” Spano said that “this implies that the Son of God did not come down from heaven” as a deity to save the world. Instead “we are people who must work our own way up to heaven.” Jesus can assist us in this task.  

Jesus is then “a semi-divine, perfect creature” who can help us achieve salvation. Spano said that Arius’ opponents understood the soteriological implications of his doctrine. It denies that “God is the one who saves us.” But it proved to be a popular doctrine. The Arian conflict has been called “the greatest theological controversy in church history.” Arius’ bishop, Alexander bishop of Alexandria in Egypt, was orthodox, and presented Arius with a confession of faith, which he refused to sign. Spano said that the Christological debate spread to all parts of the Roman Empire. This ultimately led to the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325.

The Council of Nicaea and the First Nicene Creed

On the political side of things, while historians debate the claims of visions and exceptional occurrences associated with Constantine’s military victory that led to the Christianization of the Roman Empire, or the sincerity of his conversion, Spano is willing to credit the basic claim that Constantine had an experience that he interpreted as a divine promise of victory, and sincerely became a Christian. By the A.D. 324 Constantine had become the sole ruler of the Empire, and he then convened the Council of Nicaea to resolve the Christological controversy.

Constantine declared his goals to be theological – to establish a uniform theology – and political – to overcome religious conflict in the Empire. Constantine invited bishops throughout the Empire to attend, offering to pay for their transportation. It is believed that between 230 and 318 bishops, largely from the East Roman Empire, were present at the council. While the Arians expected to win, the great majority of bishops turned out to be hostile to their Christology. Constantine was persuaded to support the anti-Arians, and they prevailed. A creed was formulated to unambiguously assert Jesus’ full deity.

There were several important aspects to the doctrine of the incarnation. The first is that the Son of God is “begotten of the Father,” the “only begotten, begotten, not created.” This affirmed “Origen’s doctrine of eternal generation as Biblically sound teaching.” Secondly, the Son is “eternal and uncreated,” eternally begotten by the Father. Third, “the Son is from the substance or essence of the Father.” This denies any doctrine holding that the Son “is a lot like the Father.” Rather, “the Son is exactly like the Father.” This doctrine is expressed in the statement that the Son is “true God of true God.” And fourth, the Incarnation is part of the plan of salvation.

Because Jesus is God, he can truly be a savior. “Our greatest need is always spiritual,” Spano said. It is the need for forgiveness of sins. But Jesus cannot save if Arius was correct, and Jesus is not fully divine. He can do no more than offer help in an impossible task of pleasing an infinitely holy and just God. Therefore the first Nicene creed declares “for us and for our salvation God in the flesh came down” from heaven and was made man. He then “came down even further, suffering the indignities of death on the cross.”

Then “he came up.” United to Christ, as his followers are, he takes them with him to heaven. This is “the true Biblical gospel.” Thus, Spano said, the first Nicene creed was “necessary in the life of the church,” because the creed defends the essential gospel of salvation by Jesus Christ. It “preserves the true gospel against the corrosive gospel of self-salvation” which is implied by Arianism.

Nevertheless, Spano said, the first Nicene creed was soon found to be “insufficient in the life of the church.” It did not produce unanimity. Arius was expelled from the church, and his followers split into factions. The creed also did not answer theological questions that remained open. “In what sense is the Holy Spirit divine?” How should intra-Trinitarian relations be described? “What is the relationship between divinity and humanity in this one person, Jesus Christ?”

The Doctrine of “One Substance” and Controversy after Nicaea

Craig Carter, Research Professor of Theology at Tyndale University in Toronto, Ontario, then discussed events leading to the second version of the Nicene Creed, proclaimed at the First Council of Constantinople in A.D. 381, and the final creedal formulas. He said that creeds are important “because they express, in a concise form, the true teaching of Scripture.” Creeds are indeed derivative of the true authority, which is Scripture. But the acceptance of the creeds by all three branches of Christianity – Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox – gives them, as summations of the teachings of Scripture “an authority far above that of any individual or theological school.” Carter believes that as such, “to the extent that the creeds teach in a dense and carefully worded way the central teachings of the Bible, they must be confessed … by all those who wish to be saved.”

Arius could appeal to monotheism and logic flowing from it, Carter said, but fell into heresy because he could not account for Scriptural statements regarding Jesus Christ. The error of heretics is commonly an effort to defend one Biblical doctrine at the expense of others, he said. Arianism identified “God the Father as the one true God,” while Jesus Christ it held to be only a creature.

Therefore, the simple confession of “Jesus Christ, our Lord” in the Apostles’ Creed “gets expanded into long paragraph” in the Nicene Creed. Of particular note, Carter said, is the doctrine that Jesus Christ is “one substance” with God the Father. He said that the orthodox partisans at the Council of Nicaea kept trying to find Biblical language that would confess the equality of the God the Son with God the Father, but Arians gave all of them a subordinationist interpretation. Therefore they settled on the Greek philosophical concept of “ousia” or substance to say how the Son is one with the Father. This was held to be the most effective way of protecting the doctrine of Jesus’ divinity, clearly asserted in Scripture.

The claim that terms not drawn directly from the Bible shouldn’t be used to define core Christian doctrine “is very popular today,” Carter said. But the council fathers used a Greek philosophical term “because they were convinced that this is what the Bible means when it says Christ is God.”  He gave Romans 9:5 as an example, although others could be used.

The Council of Nicaea did not end the Christological controversy, but it continued for much of the fourth century. With the death of Constantine in A.D. 337, controversy broke out again. The Roman Empire had no single emperor or theology. Between A.D. 340 and A.D. 350 “Athanasius became prominent.” He defined “Arianism” as any claim of a difference in being between God the Father and God the Son. But at the same time, more moderate forms of Arianism developed that proposed that rather than the Son of God being strictly a creature, he had a substance “like” or “similar” to the Father. These neo-Arians attempted to get as close as they could to holding God the Father and God the Son as one in being, while still insisting on a difference in being. Constantine’s son, Constantius II, sided with the Arians, and he became the sole emperor of the Roman Empire in A.D. 353. He summoned an empire-wide council in A.D. 359, which removed the term “ousia” from the Nicene Creed and proclaimed a form of Arianism that held that the Son is “like” the Father. Constantius died, however, in A.D. 361.

The Cappadocian Fathers and the Final Nicene/Constantinopolitan Creed

Both political and theological confusion followed this. A more radical Arianism asserted itself, insisting on the dissimilarity of Jesus to God the Father. Three theologians known to history as the Cappadocian Fathers advanced “key” ideas that secured Nicene orthodoxy at the (orthodox) First Council of Constantinople in A.D. 381. They proposed using the term “substance” for God’s unity and “hypostasis” for his trinity, where “hypostasis” is understood as each of the three persons of the Trinity.

Carter emphasized what the orthodox bishops and theologians of the patristic period maintained – that while God is beyond human comprehension, he can be known through the special revelation of Scripture, and it is from this that orthodox theology is derived. The Trinity is known by the relations of the persons in the Trinity; the Father eternally begets the Son, and the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father (and the Son, which is maintained by Western Christianity). “Substance” he said, does not mean a generic substance, such as all iron objects being made of iron. Rather, it is God’s very nature to be one being and three persons.

Even here the Nicene/Constantinopolitan creed needs to be qualified, Carter said, by saying that the three persons of the Trinity “are not … three distinct centers of consciousness.” Although the three persons are distinct in God, there is one God with one will, and there is no potential conflict between the will of the Father and the Son. It was Jesus in his human nature that had to submit to the will of the Father at Gethsemane, not in his divine nature. Carter noted that Pope Gregory the Great, through his orations, was to “solidify in the mind of the church some of these key theological concepts.”

It is the Nicene/Constantinopolitan creed which is recited in churches today. But immediately following its promulgation in A.D. 381, the question of the nature of Christ as both human and divine opened up, which was not to be resolved until the Council of Chalcedon, in A.D. 451. The Council of Chalcedon can be regarded as a kind of “appendix” to the Nicene Creed, Carter said. “Basically, it defines what we mean when we say, Jesus Christ, the God/man is one person.”

Protestant Christianity and the Significance of Creeds Today

Carter added that the Protestant Reformation accepted creedal formulas of the first five centuries. It accepted “the basic doctrines of Trinity and Christology” propounded in the creeds. Thus, there is a continuing need for Protestant Christians to understand them. He said that the creeds of the early centuries, and the patristic and medieval theologians “belong to all Christians, not to the Roman Church alone.”

It is important to distinguish, Carter maintained, between the immanent (or ontological) Trinity (“God in himself”), and the economic Trinity (“God as he reveals himself in history”). There is an ontological equality of persons, but a hierarchy of action as the actions of God the Son imitate God the Father, and God the Holy Spirit proceeds from God. The missions of the Son and the Spirit in the world are “fit” to the eternal relations of the persons of the Trinity.

Finally, the doctrine of inseparable operations in the Trinity holds that the persons of the Trinity act together in all that God does, even as those actions may be associated more with one member than the others. Jesus’ actions on earth, and the Holy Spirit’s action since the time of Christ, do not contradict the will of God the Father revealed in the Old Testament. Thus, Carter said, modern claims that the Holy Spirit is today revealing new truth about marriage, sex, and the family are false. God does not contradict his earlier revelation.

While the creed’s doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation may be complex and difficult to understand, they do justice to all the Scripture has to say about God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. “We grow deeper in our union with Christ through the grasping of these mysteries … the more you understand the deep things of God, the more holy you will be,” Carter said.

A subsequent lecture discussed the Chalcedonian formula of Jesus’ divine and human natures, and will be reviewed in a subsequent article.

It can be viewed here.