Nicaea: is the Son truly God?

A question from Alexandria

From the beginning Christians prayed to Jesus and sang his praise; around 112 the Roman governor Pliny reported that they sang hymns to Christ as to a god Pliny the Younger, Letters 10.96. But early in the fourth century the question of how the Son is related to the Father shook the whole church: is the Son God as the Father is God, or the first and highest of the things God has made?

Around 318 Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria, gave the second answer. What he meant to defend was the oneness of God. Only the Father is unbegotten and without beginning, God in the full sense; if the Son shared the Father's very being, Arius feared, there would be two Gods, or God's being would be divided like a material thing. So the Son was brought into being by the Father's will, out of nothing, before all ages: the one through whom God made everything else, glorious above every creature, yet with a beginning. Arius called him a perfect creature, but not like the other creatures, and his opponents summed up his teaching in a watchword, ‘there was when he was not’.

Arius found his teaching in Scripture. The church had long read the Wisdom of Proverbs 8 as Christ, and the Greek Old Testament of his day, like the BSB, has Wisdom say, "The LORD created me as His first course, before His works of old" (Proverbs 8:22); the Hebrew verb can also mean ‘acquired’ or ‘possessed’. Paul calls the Son "the firstborn over all creation" (Colossians 1:15), and Arius took prōtotokos (πρωτότοκος), ‘firstborn’, to mean the first thing God made. Jesus himself said, "the Father is greater than I" (John 14:28), and the Gospels show a Son who hungers and tires and prays to his Father. To Arius's party, this showed that the Son could not equal the Father.

Arius's teaching was neither careless nor without texts: it joined God's oneness and the Father's uniqueness to real passages of the Bible, and many found it persuasive. His bishop, Alexander, condemned him, but the dispute spread across the Eastern church.

The Council of Nicaea

In 325 the emperor Constantine, sole ruler of the Roman Empire since 324 and eager for a united church, summoned the bishops to Nicaea in Asia Minor (today İznik in Turkey). Tradition puts their number at 318; historians usually estimate 250 to 300, most from the East. The church counts it as the first ecumenical council.

As Athanasius later told it, the bishops first tried to confess the faith in Scripture's own words: the Son is from God, the image and power of the Father. But Arius's supporters accepted every such phrase and read it in their own sense. So the council reached for a word that is not in the Bible: the Son is homoousios with the Father, ‘of one being’ or ‘of one substance’. The word added nothing to Scripture; it fenced in what Scripture says, so that the Son's deity could not be read as something less.

The creed of 325 confessed the Son begotten from the very being of the Father, not made, and condemned those who said ‘there was when he was not’. On the Holy Spirit it said only, ‘And in the Holy Spirit.’ Not everyone was at ease. Arius had already rejected the word, as if it made the Son a piece of the Father, and many Eastern bishops feared it blurred Father and Son into one person.

Some stories about Nicaea have no good source. That Nicholas of Myra, the saint behind Santa Claus, struck Arius during the council is a legend from centuries later. Nor, despite a common claim, did it choose the books of the Bible; none of its decisions concerns the canon (see the doctrine course's lesson The canon).

Athanasius: only God can save

Nicaea's most steadfast defender was Athanasius (c. 296–373), who went to the council as a young deacon with his bishop, Alexander, and became bishop of Alexandria in 328. His conviction was rooted in salvation: only the Word who made humanity could remake it when sin had brought it to corruption and death. When a portrait has been spoiled, he wrote, the subject must come and sit again, and so the Son, the Father's true image, came himself Athanasius, On the Incarnation.

In his Orations against the Arians he pressed further. A creature cannot join another creature to God. But the one who is Son by nature became man and gives us his Spirit, so that we become sons and daughters by grace Athanasius, Orations against the Arians. As John says, "to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God" (John 1:12).

Athanasius kept returning to the opening of John's Gospel:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made, and without Him nothing was made that has been made.

John 1:1-3

John does not say that the Word came to be in the beginning, but that he was; and if nothing that was made came to be without him, he cannot be one of the things made. The answer to ‘there was when he was not’ is already in the Gospel's first sentence.

He read other passages the same way. Jesus said, "I and the Father are one" (John 10:30), and "Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father" (John 14:9). Hebrews calls the Son "the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His nature" (Hebrews 1:3), and Paul says he existed "in the form of God" (Philippians 2:6). Light is never without its radiance, Athanasius argued, so the Father was never without his Son.

Arius's followers read John 10:30 as a unity of will. Hilary of Poitiers, himself exiled for the Nicene faith, answered that Father and Son "are one, not by any economy merely, but by the nativity of the Son’s nature" Hilary.

The church also faced Arius's texts. ‘Firstborn’ can name rank and inheritance rather than origin: God says of David, "I will indeed appoint him as My firstborn" (Psalm 89:27), and the next verse of Colossians says, "For in Him all things were created" (Colossians 1:16). Athanasius read Proverbs 8:22 of the Son's becoming man, and many interpreters today read the chapter as a poem personifying God's wisdom. As for "the Father is greater than I" (John 14:28), several Fathers took it to mean that the Father is the source from whom the Son is begotten, and Augustine read it of Christ in the form of a servant Augustine.

In the end the church judged that Arius's account fell short of Scripture, which draws a clear line between Creator and creature and puts the Son on the Creator's side. The Father wills "that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father" (John 5:23), yet God says, "I will not yield My glory to another" (Isaiah 42:8); Arius's Son would be a creature receiving worship, a second, lesser god beside the one God. The account that set out to protect God's oneness ended by blurring it, and it unsettled the gospel too.

To 381, and to us

Nicaea did not end the controversy. Within a few years Constantine urged that Arius be received back; Athanasius refused, and in 335, after a string of accusations, he was exiled for the first time. Later emperors, Constantius II above all, pressed creeds on the church that avoided Nicaea's word, and Athanasius was exiled five times.

In 359 councils in East and West signed a creed calling the Son only ‘like’ the Father. Looking back, Jerome wrote words to the effect that the whole world groaned and was astonished to find itself Arian. Not all of Nicaea's opponents followed Arius himself, and ‘Arian’ was a label pinned on them, but for a time the Nicene faith was in retreat.

Meanwhile the Cappadocians found clearer words for what Nicaea meant: Basil, bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, his younger brother Gregory of Nyssa, and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus. In 325 ousia (‘being’) and hypostasis were used almost interchangeably, so ‘three hypostases’ could sound like three gods. The Cappadocians distinguished them: God is one in ousia, what God is, and three in hypostasis, who God is, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit (see the doctrine course's lesson The Trinity).

By then some who confessed the Son's deity denied the Spirit's. Basil answered in On the Holy Spirit that since we are baptized into the one name of Father, Son and Spirit, the Spirit is to be glorified together with the Father and the Son Basil, On the Holy Spirit. After Basil's death, in 381, the emperor Theodosius called a council at Constantinople, where about 150 bishops of the East reaffirmed the faith of Nicaea. The creed handed down as its own is the one we call Nicene, more precisely Niceno-Constantinopolitan. Its second article keeps the heart of Nicaea:

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.

The Nicene Creed, second article

Where 325 had said only ‘And in the Holy Spirit’, the creed of 381 confesses him as "the Lord and Giver of Life", "who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified" The Nicene Creed, fourth article. Without calling the Spirit ‘God’ in so many words, it gave him the name and worship that belong to God alone.

What this long story leaves us is worship. Before the risen Jesus, Thomas confessed, "My Lord and my God!" (John 20:28). The popular claim that the council made Jesus God by a vote gets the story backwards: the church had worshipped Christ from the start, and Nicaea, reading Scripture, guarded that worship.

Nicaea also shows that a word from outside the Bible may guard what the Bible says, so long as it stands under Scripture. Truth was not settled by an emperor or a majority; for decades the Nicene faith was the losing side. It is a sobering chapter too: emperors drove bishops of both parties into exile.

Today the Orthodox churches, the Catholic Church and most Protestant churches confess this creed or hold its faith. For more, see Is Jesus God? and What is the Trinity?; the Fathers' words here come from Thomas Aquinas's Catena Aurea.

Practice