Happy 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea!
Perhaps this day, when the bishops assembled May 20, 325 AD, is the most important of all in the history of Christianity. Throughout this council, the bishops under the direction of a secular ruler, the Emperor Constantine, laid the groundwork for what would later become the Trinity.
Nicaea was the first of the ecumenical church councils that would articulate more clearly over time the nature of the Trinity. This is important because it allowed Christianity to assert the divinity of Jesus while seemingly escaping accusations of polytheism.
With a little bit of scripture from what we call the New Testament, and a lot of Greek philosophy, the councils miraculously made the nonsensical sensical.
Would you like some New Testament with that Greek philosophy?
Jesus as God
Nicaea didn’t terminate the mishmash of theological opinions throughout the first three centuries of Christianity. There were many views on the nature of Christ. But three more ecumenical councils would follow that would highly influence Christendom for centuries, even the mainline Protestants that followed.
(Ecumenical Councils 5-7 hold greater weight with the western and eastern traditions preceding Protestantism.)
It’s not a problem for many Christians today to express Jesus not only as “son of God”, but God himself, the second person of the Trinity.
Of course, here in the United States where we have all sorts of “biblical” Christians, there is some reluctance to refer to Jesus as God simply because the New Testament isn’t entirely clear on this topic. The Gospel according to John and various references throughout the epistles are the closest references we have to the divinity of Jesus even though his divinity may not have been equated with God, or the Father. The ancient world was well aware of various levels of divinity.
Today, as should be expected, the fundamentalist Protestants play it safe by eliminating any trinitarian ideas not “biblically-based.” You will often hear them refer to the Trinity as the Godhead (Col. 2:9).
Forgotten, but not really
But the importance of this day cannot be denied even though it remains forgotten by many fundamentalists. For all they know, the New Testament tells us who Jesus is. And in many ways, the founders of their various sects knowingly erased from their minds much of Nicaea.
Without Nicaea and the following church councils, however, Christian teaching eventually congealed. A basic form of Christian unity would flower from this. It was a unity the state would brutally protect to preserve.
We didn’t inherit a Christianity in which Jesus was merely a “good teacher” or a “really good guy” or whatever. At the least, we inherited an “incarnate (Latin for in the flesh) God”, or a “son of God” whom we should follow. We inherited a sinless human who truly suffered to atone for sins so that his father wouldn’t forever torture us — well, at least a few of us.
If Constantine had not rounded up as many bishops as he could and say, “Hey, y’all need to get it together,” then this longtime, state-protected religion — you know, the one the Holy Spirit preserved — may not have survived up to the present century.
What would we see today?