The Arian Controversy and the Nicene Response

Grace Reformation Bible Church

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So, this evening, we're looking at the Arian Controversy. This is the controversy that gives us the context for the

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Council of Nicaea. And from that, what we know in due time as the Nicene Creed.

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Now, you'll see this evening, we're going to distinguish between the Nicene Council that took place in 325 and the creed that that council produced, which we will call the

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Creed of Nicaea, because the form of that creed is a little bit different than what gets established as we move toward the

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Council of Constantinople in 381, where the version that we've been reciting at the end of each study, the version most familiar to us is called the

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Nicene Creed. So we make a distinction between the Creed of Nicaea, 325, and the

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Nicene Creed, 381. And anytime you've heard the Nicene Creed, you've actually heard the

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Creed of 381, even as we've recited that together. So that's just an important point. And we're going to get into a little bit of the story.

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Now, if you read, if you did any background reading in Needham, you'll see that I'm only going halfway through chapter 8.

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I don't go far beyond the Council of Nicaea. I introduce Athanasius, a very, very important figure, but I don't probably do justice to Athanasius even in Needham's account.

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And I don't at all go toward the Cappadocian fathers. And as we see, the fourth century is a burgeoning time for doctrine and creedal development, and the church is being organized in the things of the faith.

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And the Cappadocian fathers, Basil of Caesarea, there's a reading from him, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, absolutely vital figures to what becomes in 381 the

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Trinitarian doctrine most familiar and ever established both East and West ever since.

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But tonight, we look at the controversy that sparked the Council of Nicaea in 325, this of course being the 1700th anniversary of the

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Council of Nicaea. According to Needham, the Arian controversy was the greatest theological controversy in the history of Christianity.

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Now, that is saying something. He's a Reformed Baptist, he's a Protestant, and he's saying, yes, even more than the

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Protestant Reformation, the Arian controversy was the greatest theological controversy in the history of Christianity.

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It was centered on the most fundamental of all questions, who is Jesus Christ? Is He God in the flesh?

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Or is He just a created being like us? The church had inherited from Israel its passionate belief in one

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God. Now, where might that passionate belief be derived from if we inherited that from Israel?

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Where is it the most explicit statement in Israel's Scripture that the Lord thy

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God is one? Deuteronomy 6 .4, right? What's known as the Shema. This is the confession.

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The Lord thy God is one, so they inherit the oneness of God. Now, the church has to work out how that belief in the one

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God related to the adoring worship it offered to Jesus in its faith, prayers, hymns, and sacraments.

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We left off a few weeks ago with Constantine. At that point in time, he was the victor of the western part of the

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Roman Empire. Remember that that was broken into quadrants. First, it was in half between east and west, and then in quadrants.

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There was a junior emperor known as a Caesar and a senior emperor known as an Augustus. Constantine was actually brought in to be a junior emperor, but quickly came to power as the

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Augustus, and then eventually conquered even the opposing half of the empire.

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And so by 324, he was the undisputed ruler of the Roman Empire. And when he inherited the church in the east, he inherited a church divided by this fierce doctrinal dispute that had broken out some years earlier.

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In Alexandria, in times past, we saw how important the city of Alexandria was, a port city famed for its learning, famed for its library.

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And in Alexandria, perhaps second to Rome and Constantinople alone as the most important city in the ancient world, there was a presbyter, an elder named

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Arius. He was an elderly man toward the beginning of the fourth century, but he had begun to teach that the

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Father alone was God, and that the logos, meaning word or the

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Son, was not uncreated, but rather was a created being formed out of nothing, ex nihilo, formed out of nothing by the

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Father before anything else was made. And his belief was that everything was made through the

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Son. He was in line with Scripture on that, but that his claim, the Son also was made before anything else was made.

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So he's the first of all that's made, the greatest of all that's made, but the Son was made. In other words, there was a time when the

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Son was not, a time when the Son had not existed. According to Arius, the

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Son was the first and greatest of all that God had created. He was closer to God than all others, and the rest of creation related to God through the

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Son. For example, God had created everything else through Christ. But only the

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Father, in Arius' teaching, was truly God, infinite and eternal and uncreated.

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By teaching this, Arius thought he was defending the fundamental truth that there's only one God. A belief in the deity of Christ, he felt, would mean that the

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Father and Son were two separate gods, which contradicted the many statements of the Bible about God's oneness.

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So you see the issue. If Jesus is God, then there's two gods. Arius knows enough to say there's only one

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God. That must mean that in some way, the Son, the Logos, is not God in the way that the

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Father is God. Arius was strongly opposed by his bishop in Alexandria named

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Alexander. Here's a nice little picture of Alexander. Alexander rejected the popular view in the east of Origen, who had taught that the

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Logos or the Son was slightly less divine than the Father. Again, he spoke of degrees of divinity.

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And so if the Father was the source, the wellspring of all that is light, then by degrees, the light that radiated or emanated from that source was of somewhat a less purity or less degrees of divinity.

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That was what Origen taught, both divine and yet there's a hierarchy or an order within that divinity.

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Well, Alexander rejected this. Although it was very popular in the east, both before, during, and even after Nicaea, the bishop of Alexandria rejected it entirely.

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He also rejected the view of Arius, who was teaching that the Son was a created being. Alexander insisted that the

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Son is fully and truly God in an absolute and as absolute a sense as the

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Father is. As the Father is God, so the Son is God. The problem for Alexander was to show that this view did not lead to a belief in two gods as Arius maintained.

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So this is the issue in the church at Alexandria. Now, this is going back to chapter 5, but just by way of review, let's give a thumbs up to Origen where we can.

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According to Origen, the Logos, again, the Son or the Word, did not belong to creation. He was uncreated, eternal, divine, a distinct person from his father.

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This doctrine of the eternal generation of the Logos was very important for the development of the Catholic Church's understanding of the

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Trinity. And again, we use Catholic in that sense of a broad Christianity in the third century, right?

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Because Catholicos means universal. So this is just what the church, what the Orthodox have always believed.

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And so the Catholic Church's understanding of the Trinity is indebted to Origen because he taught that the

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Son is uncreated. The Son is eternal. The Son is infinite. Big thumbs up.

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That's huge. Here's the thumbs down. Alongside his teaching on the uncreated and divine nature of the

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Logos, Origen also maintained that the Logos was not God in the same absolute sense as the

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Father. Origen thought that the divine nature existed perfectly in his father, but that when the

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Father transmitted his nature to the Logos, it became a degree less than perfect, just as light loses its brightness by a degree after it shines forth from its source.

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Big thumbs down. And so we ask the question, is Origen a hero or a villain?

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Well, Origen's theology had a profound effect on the Eastern Church. In the great Arian controversy we're looking at tonight, all sides in the

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East appealed to the writings of Origen and claimed his authority. Despite this great reverence for Origen among the

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Eastern Church, few followed him in his more obviously unorthodox views. Richard Sulin said this,

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In spite of his inimitable devotion to Christ in his church, he was ultimately condemned by the church as a heretic.

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Epiphanius called Origen the father of Arius and the root of all other heresies. So I picture there

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Origen being the Darth Vader to Arius' Luke. Somehow that doesn't work very well, does it?

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Because there's no redeeming Arius in that scenario. The point is, Origen, bad guy in the end.

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Alexander assembled a council of Egyptian bishops in 320. And this council deposed

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Arius for heresy. So in Alexandria, with the council, Alexander punted Arius and his views.

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But Arius wanted to scrap for his views. And so he went to Palestine and sought support among bishops elsewhere in the

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East. Against some of the Eastern bishops, Alexander was challenging the earlier tradition of Origen, saying the son was not by degrees inferior to the father, but rather equal with the father, possessing the full divine nature of Godhead.

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So that's on the one hand, Alexander is coming to those Eastern bishops and saying, I reject Origen's view and I reject

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Arius. But Arius himself was teaching the son was a created being and Origen taught the son was uncreated, eternal, infinite.

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Which was certainly, you know, something that the Eastern bishops also had believed. So they didn't quite fit at home with Alexander, nor with Arius.

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And in this way, the Eastern church became increasingly confused and divided. Well, this divided, confused church needed to be rectified and Emperor Constantine felt it was his duty as a

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Christian emperor to restore unity to his empire's divided church. So he summoned the first ecumenical council.

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Ecumenical means that which is universal. So the idea of a household, the oikumene, this household, as it were, all being brought together, all, as it were, being

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Irenic. And the idea is an ecumenical council is not just one particular region or view of the church, but for the church at large, the

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Catholic church. And so we even as Protestants and our reformed confessions largely reflect what are known as the seven ecumenical councils of church history in those first several centuries of the church.

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Emperor Constantine, of course, summoned this council and he had bishops come from all over the Eastern empire.

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He did have some Western bishops present. And this was to settle the dispute in the Eastern region of the empire.

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They met at Nicaea, Northwest Asia Minor, modern day Turkey in 325.

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About 300 bishops were present, an even larger number of presbyters and deacons. You have many, especially in Eastern Orthodox tradition, you have many images and icons depicting this event, the first ecumenical synod.

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We should also be reminded of where we left off in the last study. Remember, we had been learning about the great persecution, the persecution under Diocletian.

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Many of these bishops that were invited and attended the council of Nicaea were attending with missing limbs, maybe a missing eye, maybe a cut out tongue.

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These were bishops that had survived the waves of persecution under Diocletian. So in the iconography, they all look very prim and proper and they have their golden halos.

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It probably would have looked more like a zombie scene at the actual council. It hadn't been that long that the church had known peace.

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Constantine took an active part in the debates and discussions of the council, virtually acting as its chairman.

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His court advisor on church matters, Hosius of Cordoba, was a Western bishop who, like almost all

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Western Christians, had a strong belief in Christ's full deity. And so his counselor, Hosius, convinced

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Constantine that the bishops should accept a statement of faith which clearly taught that the son was not a created being, but was eternal and divine.

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So the emperor backing this proposal, and after much dispute, drafting and redrafting of a doctrinal statement, a confession of faith finally emerged, which is known to us as the

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Creed of Nicaea. Now, Louis Ayers, who's an authority on all things Nicaean, he wrote probably the unsurpassed text on this whole controversy.

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He reminds us that we only have a hodgepodge of reports that even help us understand what was laid down at the

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Council of Nicaea. This was the first council, and they didn't think that they were publishing something that would become a foundation stone for later

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Trinitarian orthodoxy. Really, that is perhaps a little more cognizant at the Council of Constantinople.

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This was a little more ad hoc to put to rest a division that was taking place in the Eastern Church.

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In later imagery, you can see, of course, you have the bishops, not quite 300, with Constantine in the center.

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And here we have Arius curled into a ball under the weight of their condemnation of his views.

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Again, we distinguish between the Nicene Creed, 381, and what was established in 325, the

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Creed of Nicaea. Who would like to read for us this Creed of Nicaea and especially emphasize the bold, the words in bold?

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All right, Dan, nice and loud. We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, creator of all things, visible and invisible, and in one

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Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, only begotten, that is, from the essence of the

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Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not created, of the same essence as the

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Father, through whom all things were created, both in heaven and on the earth, who for us, human beings, and for our salvation came down and was incarnate, was made man, suffered and rose again on the third day, ascended into heaven, and is coming again to judge the living and the dead.

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And we believe in the Holy Spirit. So in the bold is everything that essentially rejects

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Arius or Arianism. And you can see here what they're keen to establish, from the essence of the

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Father. And we're going to come back to the technical language contained within that. God from God, light from light, true

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God from true God, begotten, not created, of the same essence, that's the absolute key, of the same essence as the

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Father. We have that as two English words, one word in Greek, and that word is the pivotal word of the

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Nicene Creed, the word that causes a lot of other controversy for decades to come on the road toward 381.

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But you can see, early on in this creedal statement, what they're doing is rejecting

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Arius, the idea of the Son somehow being other than God or underneath God, created by God.

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They say, no, the language is begotten, but not created. Begotten as an eternal relation to the

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Father, eternally begotten of the Father, that is the Son. You see that they don't have a lot to say about the

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Holy Spirit, by the way. That's going to get fleshed out in 381 as well, after some controversy in the 4th century about the

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Holy Spirit. But they simply say, we believe in the Holy Spirit. They don't actually get into exactly the dynamics of the

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Holy Spirit in relation to the Father and the Son. But this is the Creed of Nicaea. Here again, you have another image in the

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Greek at the top, you have the first holy synod of Nicaea.

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And there you have Constantine again, surrounded by bishops, presbyters. The Creed states that the

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Son is true God, right? He's not a created being, he's not the first fruits, he's not the greatest of all that God has made, but he is

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God, he's true God. Not created out of nothing, but begotten of the very essence of the

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Father. The most important word, as I said, two words in English, one word in Greek, is the

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Greek word homoousios. Homoousios, a homo meaning same or of the same, oousios meaning essence or substance or being.

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So you have homoousios, of the same essence, of the same being as the

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Father. The Creed was clearly affirming that the Son had the same nature, the same being as God the

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Father. Therefore, if the Father was divine, eternal, unchangeable, uncreated, so was the

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Son. This was in total contradiction to the doctrine of Arius and his views.

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The Council of Nicaea pronounced the following anathemas against Arians. They had several anathemas, some of them unrelated to the

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Arian controversy. They had met to deal with issues in the Eastern Church, but here, there was an anathema specifically addressed to any claims that the

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Arians had been making up to that point in time. As for those who say there was a time when he, that's the

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Logos, or the Son was not, and he was not before he was created, and he was created out of nothing or out of another essence or thing, and the

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Son of God is created or changeable or can alter, the holy Catholic and Apostolic Church anathematizes those who say such things.

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So this is the result of the Council of Nicaea. All but two, think of out of 300 bishops as well as many other deacons and presbyters, all but two of Arius' supporters,

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Secundus and Theonis, and Secundus of Ptolemaeus and Theonis of Marmarica.

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I kind of like that. It's like America. I picture Theonis being like, I'm with you, Arius. He gave in and signed the

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Creed of Nicaea. So everyone but three, including Arius, gave in and signed the Creed of Nicaea.

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Arius refused, and so he was condemned, and Constantine sent Arius and these two followers into exile.

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Now, something else about the Council of Nicaea that I find just charming is a legend that emerged claiming that during the

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Council of Nicaea, a leader named Saint Nicholas became so enraged by Arius' teachings about the nature of Christ that he slapped him across the face.

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And, you know, Google has a great collection of memes about this event, which I quite enjoy.

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One of them I didn't put on here, but it's a picture of Arius and Santa Claus holding his hand out and saying, is

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Santa going to have to slap a heretic? That's my favorite. I think that one takes the cake.

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But you see, these were matters of really life and death. I mean, you think of like mob politics.

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That's what it was like with the power structures of the Episcopate. And so you had all -out brawls.

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How dare you blaspheme the Son of God, my Savior, in this way? He's the Lord God. And so there was sort of that Will Smith, Chris Rock slap heard around the world.

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The Council of Nicaea seemed to have settled the Arian controversy and restored unity and peace to the early church.

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The appearance, however, was deceptive. The church, especially in the East, was going to be torn apart for another 50 years by the

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Arian dispute. So if you're reading Needham, essentially the outflow of the Nicene Council divides the

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Eastern church into three groups. The Western church was almost exclusively what became known as the

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Nicenes, those that were in line with the Nicene Council, the Creed of Nicaea.

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Sometimes this is called in literature the pro -Nicene party or pro -Nicene theologians. But you also still had a smattering of Arians, perhaps small at first, but they came to great power in the middle of the 4th century.

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They had influence even over several of the leading bishops in major cities as well as of the emperors, at least in the

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East. Then you had the Origenists. And this was a group that was, again, comfortable in a way with rejecting aspects of Arianism, the idea that the son was created, but continued to see the absolute priority of the father and, as it were, a degree of difference between the son and the father in terms of divinity or divine priority.

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And so the Nicenes, the Origenists, the Arians. This is essentially the rest of the 4th century up to the 380s.

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The Origenist party formed the majority in the East. They were unhappy with the word homoousios, that's the decisive word, of the same essence, of the same substance as the father.

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They had accepted it at the Council of Nicaea largely because of the presence of Constantine intimidating them.

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Afterwards, however, they had serious doubts about what they had done. Most did not like it because they feared it would open the door to the hated heresy of Sabellianism, in other words, modalism, that the father is the son, just in a different mode or in a different approach.

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And so they felt that this homoousios, this idea of the same substance, opened the door to Sabellianism, that modalist heresy.

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After the Council of Nicaea, there was a widespread reaction in the East against the creed. Only one section of the

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Eastern Church stood firmly behind the creed, and that was Alexandria. Again, the very place where Alexander had deposed

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Arius in the early part of the 4th century. So enter Athanasius.

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In 8328, Alexandria acquired a new bishop, Athanasius. He became the outstanding champion of Nicene theology in the

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East. How many of you in this room, by show of hands, have heard the phrase,

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Athanasius contramundum, okay? Your mileage may vary.

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Athanasius against the world. As the famed saying was, he was in the East, and he was very much a black sheep in the midst of Arians and Origenists.

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And he had come to the conclusion, as a stalwart bishop of Alexandria, in the same wake of Alexander, that previous bishop, he had come to the position, if it's the whole world against the truth, then

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I am against the world. Athanasius contramundum, right? This is what is clear to me from Scripture.

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It doesn't matter who disagrees with me. I'm going to have this like a pit bull has something in his jaws.

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So he was the great champion of Nicene theology in the East, and arguably, as Needham says, one of the greatest and most influential thinkers in the history of the

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Christian church. That's a huge claim. Little is known of his early life.

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All we can be sure of is that before becoming Bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius was the senior deacon and secretary of Bishop Alexander.

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He took part in the Council of Nicaea. He distinguished himself by his eloquent arguments for Christ's deity.

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And it was on the recommendation of the dying Alexander that the Alexandrian church elected Athanasius as its successor.

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In the Eastern reaction against the Creed of Nicaea, the Arians were able to build up their strength. Their leader was

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Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia in Asia Minor. He died toward the middle of the 4th century.

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A clever politician who had spun a vast web of influence in Constantine's court. Eusebius, and by the way, there's another very famous Eusebius who's very important as a primary source for the

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Council of Nicaea. That's Eusebius of Caesarea. And Needham urges us not to mistake the

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Eusebius that we're talking about. This Eusebius is an entirely different man, and he's an Arian.

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Eusebius of Caesarea was an originist, an Eastern figure, but he writes a very important history of the early church.

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And a lot of what we know about the Council of Nicaea and even aspects of Constantine's rule come through Eusebius of Caesarea.

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Eusebius of Nicomedia in Asia Minor managed to get Arius recalled from exile.

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And then he began a campaign to have supporters of the Creed of Nicaea deposed and exiled.

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And in 335, he had persuaded Constantine to banish Athanasius for political reasons.

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And so Constantine, the one who was defending Nicene orthodoxy at the council in 325, within a decade, is now exiling

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Athanasius, who's the champion of Nicene orthodoxy. Eusebius accused

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Athanasius falsely of threatening to organize a dock strike in Alexandria, which would have cut off the grain supply to Constantinople.

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Egypt had long been the breadbasket of Rome and many of the other major port cities in parts of Europe required on the constant flow of grain in and out of the port city of Alexandria.

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So the idea is he crafted this lie that Athanasius wanted to use that leverage, his power over the region of Alexandria, to starve out the

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Arians in other regions and use that as leverage to get support against Arianism. This was the first time

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Athanasius was sent into exile for his commitment to Nicene theology, but he would be banished another five times altogether.

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And out of his rather short life, he spent 17 of his 45 years as Bishop of Alexandria in exile.

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That's a long time to be away from home. When you read, as I've, in years past, read different works by Athanasius, you have to remember that you're reading someone who at various times in his life is writing while he's on the run, or writing while he's in exile and has almost no access to resources.

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And yet, almost every sentence contains something of scripture within it. If you thought Bunyan was good at weaving scripture into narrative or into text, you should see what

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Athanasius can do. I remember reading On the Incarnation, which is perhaps one of his most famous works, and I thought

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I was reading a 17th century Puritan in the way that he was dealing with Christology and even dealing with the garden and what it means for Christ to take on flesh.

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And he's doing this while he's in exile. He's doing this on the run. He's doing this from the scripture that he has memorized. It's mind -bending what these ancient fathers were capable of producing, and it was really of the

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Lord. Athanasius' whole theology was centered on the doctrine of salvation.

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In common with Eastern Christians generally, Athanasius understood salvation to mean deification.

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We have to be careful how we explain this. Christ, the Savior, makes human beings divine, or as 2

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Peter 1, 4 says, partakers of the divine nature, however that's understood across the

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Eastern and Western divide theologically. This did not mean that Christ actually changed the believer's human nature into God's nature, but that human nature was lifted up by grace through Christ to share in the glory and immortality of God.

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So this is sort of bedrock in Eastern theology, even in the 4th century, and Athanasius is working out the implications of this soteriology, or doctrine of salvation, and what that therefore means about the

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Son. How, Athanasius asked, could Christ make human nature divine if He Himself was less than God?

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Salvation means union with God's life, human nature sharing in the glory of God's nature.

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Therefore, if Christ is humankind's Savior, He must be God and man and one person in Christ, the

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God -man. Humanity has been lifted up into the very life of God. So that's essentially his argument, and you can see why he comes out on the

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Nicene side of the debate. Athanasius also argued from the fact that Christians worship

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Christ. How can we worship Him, Athanasius asked, unless He is God? If we are worshiping a created being, we are committing idolatry.

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There is one God who alone is to be worshiped. Who would like to read for us some

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Athanasius? This is straight from the tab. This is one of the included readings in Needham on the divine equality of the

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Son to the Father. Who wants to play the

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Bishop of Alexandria? I can do it.

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All right, Greg. Oh, okay. Is it hard to see? Yeah, okay.

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Okay. Well, Greg, do you want to? You had your hand up first. All right. Go ahead,

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Joshua. Okay. Unbelief is coming in through these men, the Arians. Anyone who holds these opinions can no longer be called a

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Christian, for they are completely contrary to the scriptures. John, for example, says, the word existed in the beginning,

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John 1. But these men say He did not exist before He was begotten.

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And again, John has written, we are in Him who is true, even in His Son, Jesus Christ.

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This is the true God of eternal life, 1 John 5. But these men, as if to contradict this, claim that Christ is not the true

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God, but that scripture only calls Him God, as it also gives this title to other created beings, on account of His participation as a created being in the divine nature.

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The Apostle Paul condemns the Gentiles for worshipping created beings, saying, they worship the creature more than God the

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Creator, Romans 1 .25. But if these men say that the Lord Jesus is a created being and worship

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Him as a created being, how do they differ from the Gentiles? If they hold this opinion, is this passage not against them?

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And does the blessed Paul not write a condemnation of them? The Lord also says,

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I am the father of one, John 10 .30. And he that has seen me has seen the

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Father, John 14 .9. And the Apostle Paul, whom Christ sent forth to preach, says of Him, He is the brightness of God's glory and the exact image of His person,

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Peters 1 .3. But these men dare separate the Son from the Father, claiming that the

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Son is alien to the Father's essence in eternity. In an ungodly way, they represent

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Him as changeable, not seeing that by speaking thus, they make the Son to be not one with the

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Father, but one who created things. But who does not see that you cannot separate the brightness from the light?

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Brightness belongs by nature to light and exists along with it and does not come into existence after it.

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Yeah, amen. If you've ever interacted with Jehovah's Witnesses, they essentially are variations on Arianism.

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And it would do you well to read some Athanasius or read some of the

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Cappadocian Fathers if you want to go slap a heretic, in rhetoric at least, if not physically.

31:34

No, yeah, if you want to go Santa on them, but not physically. Not physically, of course. Nicenes and Origenists rallied together around the

31:45

Cappadocian formula. So again, skipping the last half of the chapter, but where the Cappadocian Fathers land at is a formula that takes some of the most contentious words, technical words that were being used in the debates about how the

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Father and the Son are related in terms of Godhead. And those two words were a hypostasis, that's essentially person.

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Sadly, it has a more literal connotation of face, of a persona in Latin. But the hypostasis is what we would translate as person, the distinction between the

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Father and the Son as persons of the Godhead. And then, ousia, again, being, substance, essence.

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And so the Cappadocian Fathers, interacting with these Trinitarian debates, and all that's being developed before, during, and after the

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Creed of Nicaea. The Cappadocians have this formula of three hypostases, in other words, three persons in one ousia, in one being, in one essence.

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Now, this is essentially, in seed form, all that Trinitarian truth will ever amount to, right?

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Three persons, one being, right? The person of the Father, the person of the

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Son, the person of the Holy Spirit, sharing in the very essence, in the very being of God.

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Not three gods, not each contributing one -third to godness, but all equal as God, and yet distinct as persons within the

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Godhead, right? This is essentially the Cappadocian formula in a nutshell. And we're going to come back to that toward the end in maybe a more helpful way.

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The originists, at this point in time, we're heading toward the 380s now, just by way of summary, the originists gave up saying that the

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Son was inferior to the Father in His divine nature. That was a very important shift. As a result of these

33:38

Fathers in the East, you finally have a recognition that the Father and the Son are equal in terms of their divinity, in terms of their

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Godhead. The Nicenes also distanced themselves conclusively from the Sibelian heresy.

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So at last, they were unified against the Arians. Emperor Theodosius gave

33:57

Arianism its death blow by issuing an edict in 380, which recognized Nicene believers as the only ones legally entitled to use the name

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Catholic, again, universal, Catholicos, which gave the Nicenes legal possession of all church buildings.

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So in 381, Theodosius summoned an ecumenical council at Constantinople. The Council of Constantinople produced a new revised form of the

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Creed of Nicaea, and that's what's known as the Nicene Creed. That's what we recite, not from 325, but from 381.

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And this reaffirmed and extended the teaching of the Council of Nicaea in 325. Here you have, of course, a picture of Constantinople where this meeting took place.

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So the Nicene Creed, as we know it, confirmed the doctrines of the Council of Nicaea, including that word homoousios, of the same essence, of the same substance, same being.

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It also extended Nicaea's belief in the deity of the sun to include the Holy Spirit as well. There's a lot more to say now about the

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Holy Spirit, that He, too, is a distinct person within the Godhead. Calling Him the

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Lord and the life -giver, and stating that He is, together with the

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Father and Son, worshipped and glorified. So this is Trinitarian bedrock.

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This is the Nicene Creed. East, west, whatever is orthodox on matters of Father, Son, and Spirit is in line with the

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Nicene Creed. The Nicene Creed became so highly prized over the next 100 years that by the end of the 5th century,

35:35

Eastern churches had started reciting it in their worship as a public declaration of their faith. You have to keep in mind that, as we've seen in weeks past, a lot of creedal statements didn't begin as something that councils would meet over, or necessarily things that were being pressured or pressed by heresy.

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It really began as baptismal formula. So the earliest creedal statements, what we know is the

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Apostles' Creed, what becomes the rule of faith. These are simply those things that were catechized and then affirmed in baptism.

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And so it's these baptismal formula that now take a place, not only in connection with baptism, but actually take their place as a confession or a creed that's even used in worship as a way, again, of promoting what is biblical, of what is true, but also of aligning oneself with these things that were made clear from Scripture.

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So Nicene Creed became a part of worship, a public declaration of faith by the 5th century.

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Western churches began using the creed in worship towards the end of the 6th century. The Council of Constantinople brought an end to Arianism within the

36:42

Catholic Church, whose belief was, from now on, to be a strong and solid faith in the Trinity, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, one

36:50

God in three persons. This is a little excerpt, and we're coming towards the end of our time here, but this is a little excerpt from Philip Carey.

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Now, maybe you're sitting here tonight, and you're like, oh, I was going to go to the

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Bolton Conference until tonight. Now, all of a sudden, my

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Friday and Saturday got really busy, as I feel like I can't keep up with the first slide of talking about all of these things.

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And I'm sympathetic with that. Trinitarian doctrine, sometimes you don't even know what question to ask because you're afraid of sounding like Arius or worse.

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And so how can anyone become Orthodox in Trinitarianism without trying to hold together all the complexities of theological debate in history?

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Well, here's a really great place to start. Here's a really good encouragement for you. Philip Carey has a nice little book on the

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Nicene Creed. Towards the very end of that book, he has a few pages on understanding the

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Trinity, and he says this, the bare bones of the logic of the Trinity can be set down in seven statements, which

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I learned from Augustine. You start with a trio of affirmations about who is

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God. So number one, the Father is God. All sides up to including

38:13

Arius agreed with this. But number two, the Son is God. Now we're distancing ourselves from Arius, and rightly understood, we're also distancing ourselves from Origen, saying that he's something less than.

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And then thirdly, the Holy Spirit is God. Now we're even going beyond 325 toward 381.

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So again, the first three statements, the Father is God, the

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Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God. These are the three affirmations that you begin with.

38:47

And then you add to that three negations. To distinguish each from the other, to remember how it goes, move forward from the first person to the second, and from the second to the third, and then come back to the first person.

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So it looks like this. The Father is not the Son. The Son is not the

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Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not the Father. The Father is not the

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Son, and so forth. So you have the Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is

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God, but the Father is not the Son, and the Son is not the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is not the

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Father. And then for the clincher, you add monotheism. There's only one

39:25

God. If you hold those seven statements together, to whatever degree you're understanding the contours of the debate, to whatever degree you're understanding the issues at contention in Nicaea of the same substance, uncreated,

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God of very God, light of true light, to the degree that you understand that, these seven statements will make you an

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Orthodox Trinitarian, all right? The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is

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God. Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is not the Father, and there's only one God.

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So we avoid tritheism, there's only one God. We avoid modalism, the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the

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Holy Spirit, and we affirm the Trinity, the deity of both Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, okay?

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So there you go. You didn't know that in two minutes, you'd come away Orthodox Trinitarian this evening, but you have.

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You would have done better than most bishops at Nicaea if you just memorized those seven statements. Think about that.

40:25

That's pretty good. That's a good day's work. Well, let's continue and we'll close with this.

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This is Philip Carey on understanding the Trinity. He says, of course, there's a lot more to say about the

40:37

Trinity than just these seven statements. This is just a logical bare bones. To put flesh on these bones, you need to do things like teach the creed, and preach the gospel, and tell the story of God as Scripture tells it.

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Still, there is a lot packed into the bare bones logic, which can be brought out by indicating where the technical terms come in.

40:55

Suppose you were to ask a question about a statement wondering whether Jesus, the Son, is really

41:00

God just the same way the Father is. The homoousios, the same essence, same being, is there in the creed to give a clear answer to that question.

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Yes, the Son is God in exactly the same sense as the Father, having the same divine being or essence as the

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Father. Or suppose you have someone wondering if Jesus is part of God.

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You could point out that according to the second statement, He is not part of God, He is God. And likewise, the

41:29

Holy Spirit is not part of God or an aspect of God, He is God. Each person of the

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Trinity is a complete individual being, a hupostasis. The technical terms here clearly matters by ruling out certain misunderstandings.

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If you're not prone to such misunderstandings, however, the seven simple statements are clear enough. You don't need a lot of technical vocabulary or fancy wording to get the bare bones of it.

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The important terms are the words God, One, and most important of all, the threefold name in which we are baptized,

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Father, Son, Holy Spirit. And with a little help from the creed, you can then see how the doctrine of the

42:06

Trinity includes slight variations on the threefold name that are found throughout the Bible and Christian worship.

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For example, when we come to the end of a time of teaching, confession, and praise, as we are doing now, we may conclude with these words of blessing such as 2

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Corinthians 13, 14, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the

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Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen? So with that, let's have some time of discussion before we recite the

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Nicene Creed of 381 and then sing the Gloria Pontry.

42:45

So we have more time than we've normally had for questions, answers, and discussions. This is by, you know, far from an exhaustive treatment because for those of us going to the

42:56

Bolton Conference, you're going to have six sessions devoted to these things that we're just skating across tonight.

43:02

I'm reaching back my memory a bit here, but I can't help but notice that the form of the creed that you have us recite, the plural, we, versus what

43:24

I've commonly seen with the singular, I, I, we, I've heard in the past,

43:30

I think it was Russian, they've said that the we tends to be the eastern formulation of the

43:35

I, the west, conventionally used in the west. Have you heard of that before and is there a reason why you chose we?

43:43

I have heard that, I don't know the reason. So in Latin, Yaroslav Pelikan, who's a church history professor, he has a tremendous book on the history of creedalism, and it's called

43:52

Credo, which is Latin for I believe, and that's the very first word in Latin of the creed.

43:58

So I believe, and we see that in the Apostles' Creed. Most likely, that's because in the

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Latin church, there's a thread of development. I'd say for the eastern church as well, but especially in the

44:10

Latin church, there's a thread of continuity between the Apostles' Creed, some of the baptismal formula, the

44:17

Athanasian Creed, of course, all these creeds kind of keep moving toward 381.

44:22

But in the western church, you get the idea that this really was a baptismal formula. So it was given to the catechumen in that first -person singular sense,

44:31

I believe, and they would recite it as that individual. And so I think somehow, that way it was recited just remains singular because that's how it was used a century or two prior as a baptismal formula.

44:42

Whereas in the eastern church, they're sort of beginning with Athanasian Creed, and that was made as an ecumenical statement, we.

44:49

So it probably has something to do with that. But in the Greek, it's a third person, whereas in the

44:55

Latin, it's a first person. Yeah?

45:01

Of the difference, this model that is almost the east and west, where in the west, there has, maybe for other reasons as well, long been a greater emphasis on the individual's affirmation, description to these things.

45:16

Where in the east, you have a little bit more of a sense of just a collective, okay, the church affirms this.

45:23

I'm there with the church on Sunday. I affirm that as part of the church, but less of an emphasis on I as an individual affirms.

45:31

And both have strengths and weaknesses, for sure, but you can see the effect on the two branches, for sure.

45:38

Yeah, it reminds me of one of the early church history studies we had. Someone asked, I think it was Mateo asked the question of the difference between profession and confession.

45:49

And I think we have something within that. What are the things that we profess as individual believers, a profession of my faith in baptism, versus the things that we confess together.

46:01

The prefix con being something corporate or communal. Something we do with, yeah.

46:07

Yeah. That observation for the impact on how western species play out in the west.

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Whether Roman Catholic or Protestant, we tend to want to solve all our doctrinal and understanding.

46:23

How does this relate to this? We want to answer questions just keep going further and further out. But in the east, they don't really do that.

46:29

They're more of just perceived theology from the liturgy. Right.

46:50

And the sort of negative side of that, I think maybe it's because of that, that very strength that egalitarianism has been able to attack the west in a unique way.

47:02

Yeah. Yeah, the roots of individualism are fascinating. And I would probably pin them to the advent of modernism in the 16th century.

47:10

But to be honest, you make a strong case that they may go back all the way to Eden. But at the very least, they're probably a lot earlier in the shadows of western autonomy than we might realize.

47:23

I think it's important that we hold both aspects together. It's the old one and the many, right?

47:29

Yeah. We need to not just choose the one or choose the many, but actually the doctrine of the

47:36

Trinity is where that old conundrum is truly resolved.

47:41

And as Trinitarians, we should hold both of those together. Yeah. Amen. Amen. Beth. Yeah, I know that this is an oversimplified question.

47:50

But back in that day, and with all of this argumentation going on about the Trinity and are they

47:56

God and individualism, did it affect their prayer life? Like, you know, many people will ask, well, are we supposed to pray to the

48:03

Father? Are we supposed to pray to the - are we supposed to pray to - should most of our prayers go to the Father? And, you know,

48:09

I wonder, back then, that would have been huge. We're not thinking Jesus was God. Yeah. You certainly didn't even pray to Jesus.

48:16

So I'm just interested historically. And then in today's world, how do we -

48:22

I guess it's two questions. How do you instruct a believer, or an older one, you know, in prayer life?

48:29

How do we direct our prayers? Should it mostly be to the Father? Yeah, two great questions.

48:37

And I would say, I won't pretend to be an expert on the sort of reception history of some of these doctrines into the devotional or even experiential, you know, aspects of the early, you know,

48:49

Christians. But I would say there was certainly leading up to, during, and well beyond a sort of flourishing of Trinitarianism in the liturgy, in the prayers, in devotional, you know, aspects, art, song, so forth.

49:08

A lot of that art is wretched. It's almost impossible to depict the

49:13

Trinity in terms of created form without being susceptible to some heresy, modalism, tritheism.

49:18

And they just persisted to do that. It's like, yikes, guys. We don't want to liken the, you know, the

49:25

Godhead to anything that is created in that way. And, you know, shots fired on Sunday school teachers that use ice steam water or eggshell yolk, egg white.

49:35

Bad news. Don't do that. That's modalism. That's tritheism. The point is that anything can give you a handle, but that handle quickly then brings you into a heresy.

49:45

And so it's far better to actually express what must be expressed. And the temptation you might feel this evening is go, this is just what a bunch of weird looking bearded theologians came up with in the 300s.

49:56

I'm a Bible guy. Show me Trinity in my Bible. You know, I don't see the word Trinity in my Bible. I'd encourage you to go to the

50:04

Bolton Conference because we're going to spend a lot of time in the scriptures. And for those coming to the Tuesday night, the last deeper insight study group, we'll look at a few pieces of an essay by Kevin Rose, a

50:15

New Testament scholar, on the biblical pressure of the text toward Trinitarian doctrine. And the idea is once you start grappling with scriptures in the way that Athanasius and others are grappling with scripture, you have to come to certain conclusions.

50:27

And it looks a lot like the seven statements that we looked at at the end. And so I think the idea there is there was a certain pressure and an orientation toward the doctrine of the

50:37

Trinity. To answer your second question in line with that, we in some ways have taken a large step away from that.

50:50

As a result of modernism, there's been a sort of retreat from Trinitarianism in the corporate dimensions of our faith.

50:59

It's really a fascinating thing. When you go back to our Second London Baptist Confession, it was a few decades later that what we would call

51:07

Unitarianism began to make its way into the evangelical churches in England.

51:13

And you had Salters Hall Synod where basically they were trying to put this to rest, the

51:19

Congregationalists and the Presbyterians and the Baptists. They had shared theological training institutes.

51:25

And some of the professors were being imbibed with ancient heresies related to Arius or even

51:33

Sibelius. And they were moving their way toward the idea of a

51:39

Unitarianism of one God, denying in some ways the inspiration of the scripture along with the divinity of the

51:47

Son. And so this is all taking place in the 1700s. And of course, if we think of the Enlightenment, if we can't rationalize it, it can't be true.

51:55

We probably don't realize how much the Enlightenment and Enlightenment modes of rationality have affected us as Christians.

52:00

It's just the water that we swim in. And, you know, the proof of this, as Robert Lethem, who's one of the

52:07

Bolton speakers, laments in his book on the Holy Trinity, he says, it's pathetic how few hymns there are that are explicitly

52:14

Trinitarian. Most of the hymns that we know and love best are rather deistic hymns toward God, generically, or at best, binatarian hymns that will speak of God and Jesus.

52:27

But very rarely do you get hymns about the Trinity. And I know that that's true because at the last

52:33

NERF meeting I was at, Steve Wiley, who always leads the music at the Bolton conference, was looking through the hymnal for something

52:39

Trinitarian to sing. And he goes, where's all the Trinitarian hymns? We probably don't realize how much we've lost in the heritage of the faith just in the past three centuries.

52:51

And so, in some ways, it's why we're so deeply uneducated about the Trinity. And that's why this year, the study, it's a great opportunity to get back into understanding these things.

53:00

Understanding the history, understanding the points of doctrine derived from Scripture, and then, to the point of your second question, applying that in our walks.

53:11

I always forget who it is, but I think it was Gregory of Nazianzus, and maybe even Nita mentions this.

53:17

He says, I can't actually think of the one person of the

53:23

God without being brought to the three. And I can't think of the three without being brought to any one.

53:29

So the idea is the oneness of God brings us to the triunity of God. The triunity brings us to the oneness.

53:35

And there's an idea that that should be reflected in the way that we sing, in the way that Scripture is preached.

53:42

I tried to emphasize that a little bit today in the sermon, of talking about those who are adopted and become sons and daughters of God the

53:49

Father through Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. We need to do things like that. Don't just say

53:54

God and stop short. God is triune, and every activity of God is a

54:00

Trinitarian act. And so the Father does not work apart from the Son and the Spirit. And so the more we hold these things together, it should shape our prayer in this way.

54:09

It's not illegitimate to pray to the Son or to the Spirit, but we could say it's perhaps not normative.

54:16

And that the normative pattern for prayer is to pray to the Father through the Son by the Spirit. The Spirit is what theologians like to call a sort of self -effacing in the way that He actually desires to amplify and magnify the

54:28

Son. And the Son's desire is that He would bring us and present us to the Father. And so Scripture presents a rather uniform testimony that the

54:36

Spirit is going to, as it were, produce and cultivate and even help articulate the things that we offer to the

54:45

Father through the Son. Somehow that should take hold of the way that we pray. But of course, there's a few examples where the

54:52

Spirit is addressed in prayer or the Son is addressed in prayer. But we're up against the clock.

55:07

Is there one last comment, last question? Before we recite, Ryan? Very important point, right?

55:41

If you have interacted with Jehovah's Witnesses, they're not coming with blank notes, right? They have

55:47

Bible verses that they're using, aren't they? This is how it was in the 4th century. Everyone's looking at the

55:52

Bible. But there's some that are balancing what Scripture has to say about the God far better than there are others.

56:00

And these are the things that are being worked out as the Spirit leads the church into all truth. And the things that are produced as a result of this are the things that the church has held to ever since and must ever hold to, right?

56:12

This is a biblical articulation of God as Trinity. So with that, in light of our time, why don't we recite together?

56:22

And I hope this has whet your appetite and not scared you away from the Bolton Conference. The Bolton Conference will be more sermons, maybe some teaching, a lot of Scripture.

56:31

But this was just meant to be a burst, a preview, and maybe a very fast -paced introduction to the way to Nicaea.

56:40

And so I'm glad we had that opportunity to do it together. But let's close with the Nicene Creed and then we'll sing the

56:45

Gloria Patria. We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible, and in one

56:57

Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only begotten, begotten of the

57:03

Father before all ages, light of light, very God of very

57:08

God, begotten, not made, of one essence with the Father, by whom all things were made, who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate of the

57:23

Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and was made man and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate and suffered and was buried and the third day he rose again, according to the

57:37

Scriptures and ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of the Father and he shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead whose kingdom shall have no end and we believe in the

57:52

Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life who proceeds from the Father and the

57:58

Son who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified who spoke by the prophets and we believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church.

58:11

We acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come.