In 325 the bishops of the world gathered at Nicaea to defend the faith. But first came the crisis that made the council necessary — a quarrel over the most important question of all: who is Jesus Christ?
By the early fourth century the age of the martyrs was ending. Emperor Constantine had granted the Church her freedom, and Christians could finally worship in peace. But almost at once a new danger arose — not from outside the Church, but from within. A single question threatened to tear the Church apart: was Jesus Christ truly God, or only the greatest of God's creatures?
Around the year 319, a priest of Alexandria named Arius began to teach that the Son of God had a beginning. Scripture calls the Son "begotten of the Father," Arius reasoned — and surely whatever is begotten must come after the one who begets it. The Son, then, must be a creature: exalted above all others, but still made, still less than the Father. His slogan was simple and unforgettable.
"There was a time when the Son was not."
His bishop, Alexander of Alexandria, together with the young deacon Athanasius, saw the danger at once. To be God is to be eternal — to exist outside of time altogether. The Son is not made by the Father but begotten of Him, sharing the very same divine nature, just as a human son shares the nature of his father. Scripture itself, they answered, proclaims it: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1); Thomas falls before the risen Christ crying "My Lord and my God!" (John 20:28); Christ is the eternal Creator (Hebrews 1:10) who shared the Father's glory "before the world was" (John 17:5).
This was no quarrel over words. If Christ is only a creature, then everything unravels. The waters of Baptism could not unite us to God. The Eucharist would be no true communion with the divine. The Resurrection would be merely one man's triumph, not the conquest of death by God Himself. The Christian faith stands or falls on this: that in Jesus Christ, God truly became man so that man might be united to God.
Arius was a gifted promoter. He set his teaching to catchy songs and had them sung by sailors, travelers, and workmen across the Eastern Empire — knowing that a tune repeated often enough will lodge in people's hearts whether or not it is true. It is a lesson that still rings familiar in our own age of slogans and advertising: repetition can pass for truth. Before long, Arianism had spread through much of the East, and the Church was in turmoil.
Constantine, newly Christian and longing for unity in his empire, was alarmed. In 325 he summoned the bishops of the whole Church to the city of Nicaea, in Asia Minor — the first time the Church had ever gathered in council on such a scale. Roughly 318 bishops came. Many still bore the marks of the persecutions only recently ended: missing eyes, maimed hands, bodies broken for the name of Christ. Alongside learned theologians sat simple ascetics and hermits. They had survived the sword; now they would defend the faith with words.
It is worth pausing on what made Arius a heretic. As Fr. Thomas Hopko put it, heresy is not merely holding a mistaken opinion — saints and great teachers have erred too. Heresy is refusing to be corrected: insisting that one's own interpretation stands above the Tradition of the Church, even after the Church has spoken. The Fathers who gathered at Nicaea did not invent a new teaching; they confessed and guarded what the Church had always believed.
What happened when those 318 bishops met — and the Creed they gave us — belongs to the next part of the story.
Written for Saint Nina Orthodox Mission. Adapted from, and with thanks to, Fr. Bill Olnhausen's series on the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council (Part One) on Fr. Bill's Orthodox Blog.
The Creed confessed at Nicaea is sung at every Liturgy at Saint Nina Orthodox Mission. Come and pray it with us.
← History of Orthodoxy Become Orthodox →