29 - Origen, Constantine, and Nicaea

All right, we press on in our study of church history.

Starting to get so high in the numbers, I can't remember which one's which anymore. Somewhere around 29 or 28, 29, somewhere in that area.

Got a title? Yeah, church history. This would be 29.

This is 29? Okay. All right. So, we had spent a fair amount of time looking at the doctrine of God that gives us a background to understand the

Arian conflict, a conflict that technically is resolved in a matter of years but really hasn't been, even to this day.

We will discover in church history, for example, that when Alaric the Visigoth sacks

Rome in the 5th century, that he is an Arian, that the

Arians sent missionaries out beyond the borders of the

Roman Empire and hence many of the nations we would call the barbarians, which just simply means someone who didn't speak either

Greek or Latin, but the groups that would eventually cause the

Roman Empire to crumble in the West were primarily Arian in their orientation.

Arian has simply come to mean one who believes in subordination, one who denies the full deity of Christ.

There are obviously different ways of denying the full deity of Christ. You can do like Jehovah's Witnesses do and have him as the highest exalted creature, even an angelic creature,

Michael the Archangel specifically for Jehovah's Witnesses, or just a man.

This group that I'll be debating in a few weeks up in South Dakota, the

Iglesia Ni Cristo out of the Philippines, he's just a man, he's not an angelic creature, or at least that's what we gather.

They have a book they teach from but they won't let anybody see it. The sure sign of a cult when you've got the secret book but no one's allowed to actually read it except the ministers.

So there's different ways of subordinating him, different levels you can put him on, but the thing to always remember is there is a vast gulf between the uncreated and the created.

And no matter how exalted you are over on this side, you're on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, the uncreated is on the

North Rim of the Grand Canyon, and you can't jump between the two. And so that's always a test to use in your mind as to what someone believes.

Now we noted a number of weeks ago that, and this is one example, you'll have many in history, where someone will lay a theological egg that will not hatch for quite some time.

And you can learn something from seeing where someone may have, in some sense, compromised, and then how that compromise leads to problems later on, but you have to be very careful.

You can't judge someone for what someone does their teaching later on when they themselves didn't do that.

So Augustine, as we're going to see, is going to give in to pressure in allowing secular authority to be used in enforcing theological norms in North Africa against a group called the

Donatists. That is an incredibly important stepping stone in the eventual development of what becomes known to us as the

Spanish Inquisition, where you have people on racks being tortured until they profess the true faith.

Was that Augustine's intention? No. Was it a step toward that? It was.

How do you judge him on the basis of the use of his teaching at a later point in time?

Well here, remember, we have origin. Now there's plenty of reasons to condemn origin for his teachings.

We went through them. We didn't barely touch the surface, but he was, you'll never hear a

Roman Catholic referring to him as saint origin, because he's recognized as being unorthodox.

Of course, things are changing in Rome. Who knows who might be saint in the future?

But anyway, historically, there's recognition that he held all sorts of unorthodox views.

Well, you may recall that one of the things we noted about origin in passing is that when he would speak of God the

Father, he would speak of Ha Theos, God with the definite article, but when he'd speak of Jesus, he referred to him as God, but primarily just as Theos without a definite article.

Now, just so you know, there are many, many, many, many, many times in the

New Testament where God the Father is referred to as Theos without an article. So when

Jehovah's Witnesses come up to you and John 1, 1, God doesn't have the article and God the Father, if they, in their own

New World translation, when it comes to translating the word God without an article, 94 % of the time they translate it as God with capital

G because it wouldn't make any sense. Just a few verses later, there is a man sent from God whose name was

John. God there doesn't have an article. So if there was a rule that said if it has the article, it's the, and if it doesn't have it, it's a, then they should render that section,

John, there is a man sent from a God named John. They don't do that because it doesn't make any sense.

And the Greek article, which we would identify as the, or the indefinite article an or a, the

Greek article is probably the least like Latin or English in its utilization.

In fact, to be honest with you, there are some times in the New Testament where the article appears and we just, we don't know why.

There's references, for example, sometimes it will occur with a name, and then other times without a name.

And people who have spent thousands of hours studying articles, or the lack of articles,

Dan Wallace at Dallas Seminary, you know, a thousand hours studying the lack of the article, and then he did his doctoral dissertation on the presence of the article, so he's spent half his life studying articles, and still has to say, there are certain places where the

Joseph, the Mary, Joseph, Mary, we don't know.

And so when someone comes along and says, aha, see, see, it's a God. But, when someone normatively, as Origen, makes this distinction, they are trying to communicate something.

They are trying to put something forward, exactly what, it's hard to say. So Origen laid this egg, and remember, though, there are two major, ah, a little quiz here.

Let's see how many of you are awake at this time in the morning. 325

AD. Just threw it out there. I just threw it out there.

Well done. Well done. Okay, so evidently not. Right answer, wrong question.

You know, we get to the Reformation, you're still going to be saying 325 AD. We're 1 ,200 years past that now.

But I'm glad you remember that. You're going to, how many years in the future?

It's right there. Good, very good. Little quiz to see if you all are awake.

I did not emphasize this, so this would only be for the weirdos who take really good notes and then remember the notes that they took, which is strange.

But there were two major places where Origen ministered. And one of them is the one he's most famous for, and it's the most relevant here.

So where does he start? He's the head of what school? Alexander. Where do you go from there?

Caesarea. Exactly. Very good. Very good. The PhD in history. Figure that one out.

So, Alexander and Caesarea. For some reason, the Caesarea part just sort of gets lost to history.

But he's primarily associated with the Alexandrian school. And of course, he was also most influenced by the

Alexandrian school. And where does the Aryan controversy find its origin but Alexandria?

Well, with Arius. Arius is a presbyter. And of course, by this time, what you've had happen, and we talked about this before, by this time, well, it's interesting for those of you who attend the opening session in the other room before we get started.

I won't mention anybody who doesn't. But anyway, we just read a section in the

Baptist Confession of Faith about the offices of the church.

And we had bishops and deacons. And that's in the good one.

Maybe they got swapped. See how that green one works. We had...

Tom Fullery was in one. Bit of switcheroo. April Fool.

Somebody came back in that. That's what happened. Yeah, probably. So we had bishops.

And according to Confession of Faith, you have bishops and deacons. Bishops slash elders and deacons.

Well, by this point in church history, you've had a division of what was in the original situation, to where now you have bishops, archbishops, things like that, and then you have presbyters.

And eventually, presbyters are going to be split off, and this is going to become the origin of priests.

Now, the term has nothing to do with priests, as far as the New Testament is concerned at all. So what you have in Alexandria at this point is you have

Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, and one of...

So here's Alexander up here. And then one of his presbyters is a guy named Arius.

Okay? So, Arius was a...

was a good -looking fellow. He was physically attractive, he was popular with the people.

He was a good speaker, and he was a good singer. And would actually use music to help popularize his teachings.

Now, automatically, automatically you're sitting there thinking, well,

Alexander probably viewed him as a rival, an upstart at that point, and maybe that has everything to do with this.

Not really. May have been relevant, but that's not really what the issue was.

What happened is, Arius, in his teaching, utilized a particular phrase.

And the phrase was, there was a time when the sun was not.

There was a time when the sun was not. In other words, the sun is a created being.

Now, he doesn't deny the personality of the sun. He's willing to call him the

Os. He is an exalted creature, but he is a creature.

And there was a time when the father was not the father, because there was no son.

So there was a period in time when the sun, before the sun, was actually created.

So the sun is an exalted but created being. And so, this causes a controversy to erupt between Alexander and Arius.

Alexander responds by preaching a message on the eternal generation of the sun.

And that is that the relationship between father and son is an eternal relationship.

That the father, by nature, is always generating the sun.

That this did not take place in time. There was never a time when this relationship has not been.

It's a natural relationship that exists between father and the son. Some of you might be right now going, hmm, this is interesting, because there has been a controversy in our day.

Starting about a year ago now. Well, it's not when it started, but it became popular in culture, and in blogs, and on the internet, and so on and so forth.

A controversy over this very issue. Issues regarding to what does it mean when we confess the eternal generation of the sun?

And is the son eternally, functionally subordinate to the father?

We have a well -known theologian here in the Valley that teaches EFS at Phoenix Seminary.

And he and another were targeted by well -known other people.

Saying that this is, well, in terms of heresy and Aryanism and things like that started flying around, and it got a little crazy, and it's still a little crazy as far as that goes.

Anyway, so these are issues that aren't just for the fourth century.

So, Alexander preaches a sermon, and of course, this then results in a conflict and a division, and people start lining up on each side.

And it was said for, by some, that for many decades, in the streets of Alexandria or Caesarea, that if you walk down the streets buying bread or fish, the vast majority of the people were arguing over this very issue, that this was the issue of the day.

It wasn't just theologians. It was empire -wide, and it was throughout all of culture, especially, obviously, in places like Egypt and things like that.

So, the preaching of Alexander did not result in the non -preaching and teaching of Arius.

It just only made the division worse. So Alexander called a local council in 321

A .D., and had Arius condemned. And so Arius simply left and went to Palestine and Nicomedia.

He wrote a book called The Banquet, in which he promulgated his views, which is normally what you do when you get kicked out of one place, write a book.

Alexander wrote letters to fellow bishops warning them about the Exucontians.

Exucontians. What is Exucontians? Well, it goes back to a

Greek phrase meaning out of nothing. And it was the first term used of the

Arians saying the sun was made out of nothing. And so Alexander wrote letters to his fellow bishops warning them about this individual and representing his teachings to them.

And this just spread the controversy outside of Alexandria around the

Roman Empire. By 325 A .D., yes, we are there folks, by 325

A .D., the dispute becomes so serious that it comes to the attention, at least in 325

A .D., maybe before then, of Constantine. Constantine, of course, was the emperor of Rome.

And the story of Constantine is a fascinating one.

We mentioned it briefly at the end of our, well sort of toward the end of our discussion on persecution.

Specifically that Constantine, you may recall the

Roman Empire had been divided up between east and west. Eventually it was divided up into thirds. This was partly because of the diminishing power of the city of Rome itself.

And so it was easier to have local individuals ruling things.

It took a lot of time to communicate and stuff like that from a central location.

But of course all that ended up doing is meaning you'd end up with these sub -rulers, these co -emperors fighting with each other eventually.

And Constantine had centralized power in himself by invading

Rome. He had done something you weren't supposed to do and that was entering into Rome itself.

He attacked Rome. The legions are never supposed to go into Rome. But Constantine brought his armies against Rome.

His rival Maxentius, for some reason, and later generations would view this as the providence of God.

Maxentius was pretty safe in Rome. The Tiber River formed a natural barrier.

It was difficult to cross any of the bridges if you know how that works militarily.

A small force can keep off a much larger force. If you're being funneled into a small little area.

And for some reason, Maxentius decides to come out of Rome to fight

Constantine. This is disastrous. He loses. But the story and how much of this we can actually verify is muddled by the annals of history.

But the story is that the night before the battle, Constantine has a dream in which he has a vision of a cross.

And he is told, in this sign, conquer. And it is said that he had his soldiers paint crosses on their shields.

That's probably a later embellishment. But there was some kind of experience that Constantine has that causes him to interpret his victory as a sign of favor from the

Christian God. And so, though there is again controversy even over evidently,

Constantine is not baptized until his death bed. Because there was a popular form of belief that baptism forgave all previous sins.

But the rigorous believed that was it. There was no forgiveness of sins after that. So you tried to hold it off as long as you could.

So you had the best shot of coming to death in a sinless state.

Which is a little weird because he is attending services. He is involved in the church.

That would be sort of difficult to do if he weren't baptized. But anyways, especially with Constantine, because of what happens at the council in Nicaea and afterwards, it's really, really hard to separate the myth and the legend from the reality.

Tremendous amount of argumentation. Did he do this just simply for political means? Was this, you know, he does eventually, his sons become full blown

Aryans. He seemed to start leaning that direction himself. Was it all political expediency?

Was it sort of, you know, which way is the political wind blowing? Et cetera, et cetera. One of our primary sources for early church historical information is the first church history ever written by Eusebius.

There's a couple of Eusebi, I guess it's plural. There are a couple of Eusebiuses.

Eusebius Nicomedia and Eusebius Caesarea. Eusebius Caesarea is the one who writes this major church history.

Which is extremely valuable. Though, obviously you would not expect him to be utilizing the same standards of historical inquiry and sources that are utilized today.

And therefore, there are clearly myths and legends that Eusebius takes as gospel truth.

And a lot of modern church historical stuff is trying to sift through what has been accepted from Eusebius as just gospel truth for a long, long time.

And realize, might not really be gospel truth. And so, Eusebius tells us things about Constantine.

And given that there is this political back and forth after the Council of Nicaea. How much of it was trying to curry political favor and all the rest of that stuff.

It's difficult to say. But the point is that Constantine is the first Christian emperor.

And it's common for people to think that as a result, Rome converted to Christianity in 325 or 313 or something around that time period.

This is simply not true. Theodosius in 381 I believe was the year. 383 -381 is the first emperor to say the empire itself is

Christian. But once the emperor converts, and there are going to be pagan emperors after Constantine that are going to try to bring things back, go the other direction.

Julian the Apostate comes to mind. But once the emperor becomes

Christian, then persecution ends. And then there are people, obviously, if you want to be in favor with the emperor, then maybe you should be a

Christian too. And you and I both know this is not how Christianity is supposed to be spread.

Obviously, if you've been a part of a church that's been under persecution empire -wide for 50, 60 years, and all of a sudden the emperor becomes one of you, you're going to look at this as a really cool thing.

This is great. This is wonderful. It doesn't take too long for serious -minded people in the church to start looking around going, you know, this isn't necessarily working to our advantage.

They can start seeing fundamental changes in the church. And this really is a period of time, and we'll get into this more later on, where you really do have the origins of sacralism.

And that is the state church. And sacralism will be, well, certainly not something that the

Christians in the year 300 will worry about. But by 325, the

Council of Nicaea is a huge step this direction. It's a massive step.

That's one of the reasons you've got to have that date, because not only is it theologically significant in regards to the doctrine of the

Trinity and the deity of Christ and all the rest of that stuff, but there aren't too many other events in church history with as many ramifications down the road as that particular event.

And it is interesting to note, probably nobody who attended that council could have ever predicted what a lot of those ramifications would be.

But it is the biggest step. No one could see what it was going to result in.

No one could see how 700, 800 years later, the Holy Roman Emperor would be left shivering in the snow outside the gates of the papal palace, seeking the

Pope's approval and forgiveness for something. There's too many other things that had yet to develop to even be able to begin to see how that was going to work.

But, in hindsight, we can see just how important this was. And it gives rise to all the massive amount of discussion we're going to have in regards to sacralism all the way up through the

Reformation. The first generation and second generation reformers were, to a man, sacralists.

They couldn't even imagine what it would be to have a free church separate from the government.

And, of course, many people today would say they laid the egg that then hatched into secularism, which has now turned to eat

Christianity up. Et cetera, et cetera. So, all sorts of these discussions show how intertwined all the threads of history are and how politics and culture and everything else have a tremendous amount of relationship to one another.

So Constantine hears about this division and questions remain as to exactly what his relationship to the church was, the depth of his commitment, if there was one, the level of the knowledge that he had.

Certainly when people say that he's the one that came up with the solution and forced it upon the council, that is absurd.

Unfortunately, that's also what you'll see a lot on YouTube, especially, which is just a wonderful source of all things theological.

But it seems that what he saw and what he was concerned about is he has now brought about this consolidation of his power, but he sees

Christianity as a means of helping to hold things together. And if it starts to break apart, then that's going to have political ramifications as well.

And so he fears schism, and so he called a general council of bishops at Ankara in Turkey, modern -day

Turkey, and then changed location to Nicaea. And here's the important part.

He paid the way of the bishops to and from the council and paid for their lodging while attending the council in Nicaea.

So there had been councils before, but they had been councils called by the church, run by the church, focused solely upon church issues.

This is a huge change to have the emperor of the

Roman Empire not only calling a council, but then putting everybody up, paying for their travel to and from, and this was a massive change.

It's a paradigm shift. Huge shift, huge change taking place at this point in time.

Now, what's interesting is this is certainly not the largest council that had ever been held, or even would be held.

There are a number of councils that were held after Nicaea, in the decades after Nicaea, that condemned Nicaea. They had more bishops.

Tradition says there were 318 bishops at the council of Nicaea.

Do we know? No, we don't know, but that's what tradition says. There were 318 bishops in attendance, which would be about, we estimate, about one -sixth.

So one out of every six bishops in the world, that's a lot. However, what's interesting, what's really interesting, is this was an eastern council.

There were only six or seven representatives from the west. The vast majority came from the east.

So, history loves to change names. It's sort of like what we're looking at now with October 31st coming up, 1517.

Well, was that really the beginning of the Reformation? Well, we call it that, but was it really?

You can point to things earlier and later, and so on and so forth. The term ecumenical, of course in our day, for us anyways, has somewhat of a negative spin to it.

It's the idea of compromise, laying aside your principles just for the sake of getting along, blah, blah, blah.

Later generations, much later, centuries later, a theory would develop that identifies certain councils as ecumenical councils.

It literally means representing the world. And so an ecumenical council, by later definition, there wasn't anyone walking around the council and I see it going, this is wonderful, the first ecumenical council.

That again is anachronism. But later generations, much later, made it later centuries, would identify the

Council of Nicaea as the first ecumenical council. And most of the time, what you'll hear today, is that all branches of Christianity accept the first seven ecumenical councils.

Now that, every time I hear someone say that, I just sort of chuckle. Because, especially when

Protestants try to say, oh yeah, I accept the first seven ecumenical councils.

Second Nicaea, you really accept Second Nicaea, which argued for the appropriate use of images on the basis of some of the silliest, most inane biblical argumentation ever put into writing.

I really don't think you do. And even the Council of Nicaea produced a number, and this is where the tradition started.

Not only did they produce the Creed, which

I think the Nicene Creed is probably in the hymnal someplace, probably after the Apostles Creed maybe.

I don't think it's in this hymnal. Really? Oh, that's interesting. Produces the

Nicene Creed, and the version that you'll find in most resources today is actually from, it's called the

Nicene Constantinoplean Creed. It's from the Council of Constantinople in 381. So it's a little bit expanded from what came out in 325.

But normally when people are saying they accept the first seven ecumenical councils, they're saying we accept the creedal statements and creedal decisions made by them.

But each of these councils not only produced creeds, they also produced canons and decrees.

And the Council of Nicaea did this, or started the tradition.

And so, for example, the sixth canon of the Council of Nicaea talks about the major apostolic churches.

So Rome has authority in her area, Antioch in her area, Alexandria in her area,

Constantinople, et cetera, et cetera. And so it had to do with church offices and things like that.

And I don't know any Protestant anywhere that would accept everything that even the first ecumenical council said in its canons and decrees.

So when I hear people rather jauntily saying, yes, I accept the first seven,

I'm sort of like, have you read anything that they actually said? Because I really don't think you know what's going on there.

So, but this is historically the first ecumenical council.

And so from Rome's perspective today, ecumenical councils have binding authority.

However, in much, much later development, much later development, nobody at the

Council of Nicaea dreamed of this. Bishop of Rome didn't come to the Council of Nicaea. He sent two representatives.

He didn't come. In much later development, which has now become what you'll hear from your

Roman Catholic friends, any ecumenical council only has the authority that it has because the

Pope approves of its final statements. So from their perspective, an ecumenical council is extremely important, but it's still subservient to the ultimate authority of the papacy.

Again, no one at the Council of Nicaea dreamed of such a thing.

Absolutely not a shred of evidence that even the Roman legates, the Roman representatives that came from the bishop of Rome, had the idea that this whole council was dependent upon them and their approval.

No. That is a much later development, and it's read back. All you've got to do is tune to EWTN radio, and I'll bet you dollars and donuts, within 48 hours, if you listen, you'll find somebody saying exactly what

I'm saying right now. Well, those ecumenical councils, very important, but their ultimate authority is based upon approval by the

Pope, and so on and so forth. You'll hear it. It's just the way things are.

But as I said, no one at that council believed what modern Roman Catholicism teaches, not only on that subject, but on so many other subjects as well.

So you get 318. The bishop of Rome had nothing to do with calling the council.

He did not rule over the council. He didn't attend. He sent Victor and Vincentius.

Victor and Vincentius, those were his representatives. Well, maybe he self -identified.

Ah, never mind. In his place, and the council ran from the 14th of June to the 25th of July.

So about a month, a month and a third or so. Yeah, around there.

14th of June to the 20th of July of 325. Now you don't have to remember the exact dates other than the year.

But hey, if you want to be really cool, then you can really impress your friends by letting them know that you know.

And in fact, maybe on June 14th we can have a special Council of Nicaea steak fry or something.

A reenactment. Who gets to be Constantine? According to tradition, he showed up in a golden robe.

I got one. I was afraid you were going to say that.

Not a golden jersey for Captain Kirk. Ah, never mind. A full flowing, and if you have one of those, the elders need to speak to you after the service.

I think we already have to speak. I think there's about four or five things that we need to talk to you about because I follow you on Facebook.

In fact, it's probably good that Pastor Fry doesn't have Facebook because if he followed you on Facebook, it would be a pretty bad thing.

Yeah, it would be a bad thing. So, here's the next big step.

And that is, up to this point in time, when these councils would meet, you'd be in fear of the

Romans showing up. Now, the Emperor is going to be in attendance.

And of course, the big controversy is what role did he play?

Later, writers would record for us sort of a summary of his opening address to the bishops, which was basically, let's get this fixed.

There were certain people that he had relationships with amongst the bishops, more than others.

Some people do theorize that he was the source of the Final Solution, the use of the

Homo Iuzian Clause. That, to me, I find to be utterly absurd. There's no evidence whatsoever he had that level of theological sophistication.

But, the point is, putting those issues aside, here you have a gathering of one -sixth of the bishops of the

Church from around the world. They're there on government money being fed with government food.

And, one of the people attending is the

Emperor of the Empire who has a real interest in making sure that this

Council is successful in coming to a final conclusion. That's a watershed.

That is a watershed moment. There's no question about it. And, the parties and the various views, that's what we'll pick up next time.

What were their perspectives? What were their understandings? You know two of them, but there was a middle party, as there always are.

You get a bunch of people together, you always got the people who want to be in the middle. They don't want to be the extremists. And, so we'll look at what the parties were, what they said next time around.

Alright? Okay, let's close with a word of prayer. Father, once again, we thank you for the freedom that we've had to consider the history of your working with your people.

We ask that we would gain in our wisdom, in our understanding, our knowledge of where we are today. We would ask that you be with us as we go into worship now.