The 1700th Anniversary of Nicaea and its Relevance Today

The significance of the eventual triumph of the Nicene Council continues, not simply because of the basic Creed it formulated and its ongoing regular use in church liturgies, but because of its wider ecumenical protection against error in the global church. The clear affirmation of the Creed is that Christ is co-essential with the Father, the true God-man, and therefore Arianism is not genuine Christianity. Historian, Phillip Schaff thus rightly called the Council of Nicaea:

…the most important event of the fourth century, and its bloodless intellectual victory over a dangerous error is of far greater consequence to the progress of true civilization, than all the bloody victories of Constantine and his successors.¹

The preservation and advancement of a uniquely biblical perspective on reality, salvation, and culture would have been very difficult to envision without this great Council, and heretical views could have taken much deeper root. When thinking about heresy, we often limit the concept’s import to narrowly religious beliefs about God and questions of personal salvation within the life of the church institution. But the fact is, what we believe about Christ impacts every sphere of life and thought. Both the Eastern bishops at Nicaea (though Rome was represented) and the emperor showed an awareness that what we hold to be true about Christ has ramifications beyond the ecclesiastical sphere. The doctrinal disputes of the West have indeed shaped the course of civilisation for that very reason.

A number of important lessons from this period are immediately apparent for Christians today. The first is the ever-present danger of turning Christianity into a human philosophical system. The powerful influence of Greek philosophy upon many Jews in the time of Christ, on various early pseudo-Christian sects and even on diverse scholars defending Christianity, is undeniable.[1] The Council of Nicaea helped to break the philosophic pretensions of both Gnosticism and Arianism – movements which had deep roots in the Hellenistic thought of men like Philo of Alexandria and various forms of Platonism. Both these early heresies, shaped as they were by Greek concepts of the material world and the nature of the divine being, denied that Jesus Christ was the eternal Son of God, truly made flesh. Instead, Christ was a creature, a demiurge or superior angel, less than God, bringing man wisdom, knowledge and a moral example to emulate – in short, Jesus was a divinized philosopher-teacher. Though the Greek language proved helpful in clarifying biblical orthodoxy, the primary thought forms of the classical world remained a threat to a faith based on revelation, not philosophic speculation. By the grace of God, the Council preserved Scripture’s teaching about the mystery of the Godhead manifest in Christ and hindered the progress of these dangerous movements.

Although the councils of Nicaea and Constantinople greatly weakened the influence of Greek philosophy on Christian life and doctrine, they certainly did not crush it. Again and again, the West has faced distortions of biblical truth because of attempts to synthesize biblical Christianity with the thinking of the pagan Greeks. The influence of Neo-Platonism on Christianity in the early Middle Ages was profound, even in Saint Augustine. Despite the blessing of the monasteries in spreading Christianity, it led to a world-denying ascetism in parts of the church that rejected many clear teachings of scripture, including the goodness of creation and the blessing of marriage and human sexuality.

The second lesson of Nicaea for today concerns the ongoing threat to the doctrine of salvation when a biblical Christology is in any way compromised. Without the clarification of Nicaea, Arianism implies that the Christ of scripture simply morphs into another pagan mythological demigod. According to Arianism, the Logos, not being truly God, had to choose to be good and seek to maintain that goodness, despite his changeable nature. Supposedly, God the Father foreknew that Christ would resist temptation and remain good, and so was able to give him a name and glory in advance of his attaining goodness by his own virtuous living.  Pelikan explains the consequences for the biblical truths of salvation:

The Logos became the “pioneer of salvation” by first enduring in his own name and then enabling those who followed him to do likewise. By his “care and self-discipline” he had triumphed over his mutable nature. His “moral progress” had won for him the title Son of God…The ultimate outcome of the Arian system…God was interpreted deistically, man moralistically, and Christ mythologically.[2]

This is nothing more than humanism preaching salvation by works. Christ merely points the way by modelling moral progress and goodness as the first of the creatures. We, too, can triumph over our materially mutable nature by following his example. The outcome is pure moralism that is very much like modern liberal Christianity and every other world religion that believes man saves himself by good deeds. This means that Christ does not affect our salvation as both God and man, redeeming us from just wrath against sin; he simply models how we also might become a son of God by self-discipline. Once again, man becomes a god by his own efforts and saves himself.

A third lesson of Nicaea for our era is found in deepening our understanding and ability to address the various cults that have arisen in the course of time. It is remarkable how many of them have an essentially Arian foundation.  We can even include Mohammedanism (Islam) among the late Arian cults in this regard. Mohammed was concerned about denoucing the eternal Sonship of Christ as polytheistic (which was the charge of Arius against the orthodox). In fact, the Christian theologian St John of Damascus, who lived in the eighth century, regarded Islam as a late pseudo-Christian heresy.  Griffith tells us of John of Damascus, “[H]e speaks of Muhammed as having been one who, ‘having happened upon the Old and New Testaments, likewise having probably been in conversation with an Arian monk, contrived his own heresy.”[3]

Similarly, both the Mormon and the Jehovah’s Witness cults are Arian to the core and cannot be understood outside of their anti-Nicene inheritance. For the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jesus was the first son brought forth by Jehovah – a kind of god, but not the eternal Son of God. Openly rejecting the Council of Nicaea, Christ is reduced to the status of a creature. According to Mormonism (the so-called Church of the Latter-Day Saints), which has both Gnostic and Arian overtones, Jesus was the firstborn of many spirit children of a heavenly father (and possibly mother), and becomes a god, inheriting the powers of godhood. This paves the way for the divinization of his siblings – that is, all people, being sons and daughters of the divine, can become gods!

Finally, a fourth lesson for our time is the implicit resistance of Nicaea to statism and the claim that man can stand-in for God. The concern of Arius, likely a distant relative of the emperor, was to return to a pagan emphasis on unity and the Greek conception of the divine as a absolute oneness. This facilitated the idea of the unity of the empire and the special place of the emperor. The Council of Nicaea, by contrast, affirmed one God in three persons and therefore their equal ultimacy as both one and many. This meant that the man Jesus Christ was also ‘Very God,’ and so total divine authority belonged to him! No other man could claim to be a living God, only the Lord Jesus Christ. It is no surprise then that pagan statism preferred Arianism. The emperors invariably favoured the Arians, and Arius himself quickly convinced Constantine to reinstate him after the Council. In fact, when Constantine took the Last Rites, it was from an Arian Bishop.

Because Arianism was humanism, it was also statism. Rushdoony’s conclusion is telling:

[Arianism] was a popular faith with rulers, in that it made possible the continuation of the pagan exaltation of the state as the divine-human order and politics as the way of salvation. The emperor, Constantine the Great, with his essentially Roman concern for religion, turned soon to Arianism for support…For the empire, the door was open to Jesus as the great creature of God, but also open to many other divine creatures, all serving to unify the Roman Empire as the divine-human order. The Arian bishops were thus inescapably statist in their orientation and faith. For them, the empire was God’s true order, and the emperor God’s present manifestation and power on earth.[4]

In the West, as we have turned again to humanism and statism, we have succumbed once more to the temptation to ‘be as god’ (Gen. 3:5). The state as man-enlarged once again plays God in an effort to ‘stand in’ for Christ as the source of truth, law and meaning. The unity, good and salvation of society are sought in the political life of the state. Jesus is acceptable as a good man, a great teacher and quite possibly the greatest of all God’s creatures, pointing the way to the truly moral life, but he is not Lord, God and King. As a result of our apostasy, just as Rome collapsed, we see our society’s hopeless decay. Far from unity under the humanistic state, we have inherited disorder, disunity and decay. Unity in diversity through Christ being denied, the statist order becomes authoritarian, desperate to hold itself together, but in so doing only furthers its demise. As such, the biblical truths of Nicaea must be retained, treasured and reasserted against all Gnosticism and Arianism in our age. What Young says of the implication of Gnosticism is equally true of Arianism:

Without the elimination of Gnosticism, Christianity would have become a mystical escapism…There would have been no Christendom, no Christian civilization.[5]

The Nicene Creed is thus as relevant as ever. If we are to see a recovery of Christian faith, culture and civilization, we must return to the Christ of that great Council. For, as Hebden Taylor faithfully pointed out, the Christ of scripture, of the apostles and the church fathers, is the risen and ascended Christ, the one,

…entrusted by God the Father with the great task of transforming not only individual lives but all cultural, legal, political, scientific and economic life. As the Lord of history and of time and space, Jesus Christ can be satisfied with nothing less than a Christian organisation of human society as a whole…[6]

 

Footnotes

[1] See Herman Dooyeweerd, Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy: Collected Works, Series A, Vol. 6, trans. Magnus Verbrugge (Grand Rapids: Paideia Press, 2013), 68-78)

[2] Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, 198

[3] Sidney H. Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 42

[4] Rushdoony, Foundation of Social Order, 13

[5] Young, The Making of the Creeds, 32

[6] E. L. Hebden Taylor, The Christian Philosophy of Law, Politics and the State (New Jersey: The Craig Press, 1966), 24