Dear Sisters, dear brethren, on Trinity Sunday three weeks ago we looked at the teaching of the First Council of Nicaea which was held exactly 1700 years ago in 325 A.D. to resolve disputes among the bishops of the Church principally concerning the relation between Christ and His Father. A priest called Arius had been teaching that Christ was not God, but was a creature, albeit the greatest of all God’s creatures and most like Him. This was not, of course, what the Church had always taught. But many of the bishops, especially in the Christian east, were beginning to doubt what they had learned to believe in their youth.
A little background will help. Only a little more than ten years earlier than 325, a new Emperor named Constantine had arisen. He was, like so many Roman Emperors before him, a military leader, and was acclaimed Emperor by his troops (incidentally this acclamation took place in Eboracum – or as we call it today, York, in 306 A.D.) but at first he had to defeat several rivals and it was not until the year 324 that he finally became the sole ruler of the Roman Empire. Just before one of the most important battles he fought for supremacy over Rome itself in 312 A.D., he had a vision, often described as a cross in the sky, together with the words ‘in this sign you shall conquer’. The image was not what we usually think of as a cross, but rather a Chi-Rho, being the first two Greek letters of the word Christos. They look to us like the capital letters X and P joined together. Constantine ordered this to be put on all his army’s banners. Anyway, the vision proved true. Constantine was victorious and although he did not yet become a Christian, he at least gave freedom to Christians from all persecution henceforth. Eventually, too, he would actually become a Christian by accepting baptism shortly before his death some 25 years later in 337.
But just as Christianity was freed by Constantine from the most bitter of all the persecutions that had taken place in the reign of the Emperor Diocletian, a bitter internal dispute rose about the person and nature of Jesus in relation to God the Father. Now the Church believes in One God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible. If, then, the Father is the One God, how can Jesus, who is the Son of God, be God as well? Surely, some said, Jesus cannot be another God, but nor can He be the same God as His Father, so He cannot be God at all. This is where Arius came in, arguing that Jesus simply cannot be God, because only the Father could be the one God. Arius therefore proposed that Jesus was created as God’s first and greatest creature. In this way, however great and powerful and holy He undoubtedly was, Jesus was most definitely not God at all.
And then there were some others who had proposed another way of holding that the Father and Jesus were both really and truly God, and both uncreated. A priest called Sabellius suggested that the Father and Jesus were really just different names of one and the same person seen at different times or in different ways. He suggested that the One God presented Himself to mankind as the Father in the Old Testament; as the Son in Jesus; and as the Spirit from Pentecost onwards – but all three were not only one God, but actually one person.
But of course, this idea, ingenious though it seemed to some, was impossible too. For one thing was certain: in the Gospels, Jesus spoke to His Father as to another person. Whatever else, Jesus and the Father could not be the same person because that would make nonsense of the entire Gospel, not to mention the rest of the New Testament, including the teachings of St Paul, St John and St Peter. This was where the relation of Jesus to the Father was crucial. Jesus spoke about Himself as the Son; and He called God ‘Father’ in a way that was unique. When Jesus called God His ‘Father’, and especially using the intimate and familiar form of address ‘Abba’, which no human person would ever dare to use towards God, then He was clearly speaking from an intensely close personal relationship unlike that which any human person had with God.
So how could Jesus be truly God while not being the Father? Could it be true that the One God could be Father and Son and Spirit united as One God, yet in some way distinct from each other? - without meaning that there were three gods? - without meaning that these ‘persons’ were really one and the same person seen in different disguises at different times?
The Emperor Constantine, although not yet baptized himself, didn’t understand all this. But he was concerned that the Christian Church was not sufficiently clear and united in its faith. There was something else too. Not only were bishops arguing about God the Father and the Son and their relation to each other, but Constantine also found that Christians didn’t all agree on the right day to celebrate the most important feast of the year, Easter. This meant that while some people were feasting at Easter, at the very same time, and sometimes in the same place, others were still fasting during Lent. Couldn’t something be done to bring unity to the celebration of the most important Christian feast? Constantine sought advice from a bishop whom he knew and admired, Bishop Hosius of Cordoba in Spain. Hosius suggested that it would be a good idea that as many bishops of the Catholic world should be brought together in one place and there discuss and resolve solutions to these questions that all the Church should then accept as authoritative.
Between them, Constantine and Bishop Hosius effectively invented the idea of the Ecumenical Council: a meeting of bishops from all over the inhabited world (which is what ‘ecumenical’ means) to resolve certain matters of great importance to the faith and practice of the universal Church. So it was far more than a merely local or even a national council. It would be a meeting of as many of the bishops, the successors of the Apostles, so that with their united apostolic authority they could make decisions concerning what the Church believed in disputed matters.
The Council of Nicaea in 325 was the first of twenty such councils so far – the latest being the Second Vatican Council. The bishops there assembled came to several important conclusions which still stand at the heart of our faith and practice today. These are the words of the creed they solemnly declared: ‘We believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible; And in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten from the Father, only-begotten, that is, from the substance of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, consubstantial (i.e. of one substance) with the Father, through Whom all things came into being, things in heaven and things on earth, Who because of us men and because of our salvation came down, and became incarnate and became man, and suffered, and rose again on the third day, and ascended to the heavens, and will come to judge the living and dead, And in the Holy Spirit. But as for those who say, There was when He was not, and, Before being born He was not, and that He came into existence out of nothing, or who assert that the Son of God is of a different hypostasis or substance, or created, or is subject to alteration or change – these the Catholic and apostolic Church anathematizes.’
Now these are not exactly the words we are used to saying in the Creed at Mass. That is because the creed of Nicaea was adapted nearly sixty years later at another Ecumenical Council in Constantinople to include much more about the divinity of the Holy Spirit: ‘the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and Son is adored and glorified.’ This is why the Creed we are about to profess is properly called the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, the full statement of our faith in One God, in whom are three co-equal divine Persons each of whom possesses fully the One, divine nature, and to whom be all glory and worship for ever and ever.
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