An idiot’s guide to the Council of Nicea’s big posh creed of compromise

Every year at Christmas, the carol ‘Oh come all ye faithful’ takes me by surprise. It starts well, all joyful and triumphant and with everyone agreeing to “come ye to Bethlehem”. So far, so Christmassy. But then we hit verse two, and suddenly we seem to be singing the terms and conditions: “God of God, Light of Light / Lo, he abhors not the virgin’s womb / Very God, begotten not created / Oh come let us adore him” (and repeat until exhausted).

What on earth is this? What does it mean? And what has it got to do with Christmas? 

To answer those questions, we must go back 1,700 years. Because those lyrics (apart from the weird ‘womb-abhorring’ bit) derive from a Church council that was held in AD 325, a discussion about how Jesus was both human and divine. And today, every week, millions of Christians still recite these words as part of their liturgy. 

So, all you faithful, I invite you to come ye, oh come ye to…Nicaea.

The order of birth

We start in Alexandria, Egypt in AD 318. A Thursday. Possibly. Anyway, a priest called Arius has had a thought: if Jesus is the Son of God then, logically, he has to be younger than the Father. That, after all, is the key thing about sons: they tend to be a lot younger than their dads. And didn’t Paul describe Jesus as “the firstborn over all creation” (Colossians 1:15)? If that is true, Arius reasoned, there must have been a time before Jesus was born. 

A highly effective communicator, Arius began to spread his ideas, not only through preaching but simple songs. According to his opponents, he even coined a slogan: “there was, when he was not” (ie there was a time before Jesus). 

Nicaea shows us that you cannot change belief just by issuing statements

Arius was not suggesting Jesus wasn’t God; just, perhaps, that he wasn’t quite as ‘goddy’ as God was. And while many welcomed his ideas, many more found them alarming. If Arius was right, then would it not imply that the Son was inferior – or subordinate – to the Father? What does that do to the Trinity? John’s Gospel said that Jesus was the Word, eternally present with the Father, through whom all things were created (1:1-3), but Arius’ theories struck at the very heart of Jesus’ divinity. 

The argument flared into a bitter, factional dispute. Arius was condemned and dismissed from his post. But other parts of the Eastern Church supported him. The anger grew so bad that, eventually, emperor Constantine I intervened. In AD 325, he announced that he would call the first-ever ecumenical – ie ‘worldwide’ – Council of Bishops. It would meet towards the end of May, in the city of Nicaea (modern Iznik in Turkey). Together, the bishops would come up with a logical, clear, universally acceptable definition of Jesus Christ. 

Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy, as they say in imperial circles. 

The largest gathering ever

The council of Nicaea was big: between 250 and 300 bishops in attendance, as well as around 2,000 supporting priests and deacons. And it was posh: convened in the imperial palace and opened by Constantine, robed in splendour, but out of respect for the clergy, without his usual armed guard. 

But it was not ‘worldwide’. Only five bishops from the western half of the empire showed up and even the bishop of Rome, Sylvester I, sent his apologies. (He claimed he was too old for the journey but sent two priests as observers.)

However, despite virtually all the attendees coming from the Eastern Church, it was still the single largest gathering of bishops there had ever been. The sessions were most likely chaired by Constantine’s representative, Ossius, the Bishop of Cordova in Spain. We don’t have the agenda, but we do know that they discussed more than the controversy surrounding Arius. Among the other decisions were: a common date for Easter, a ban on moneylending among the clergy and the prohibition of fast-track promotion from recent convert to clerical posts. The council also clarified that overzealous Christians who had voluntarily castrated themselves could not be ordained as clergy. I’m betting that doesn’t come up at most ordination panels these days. But the key task was sorting out the vexed question concerning the status of Jesus. And that would certainly require, as the Bishop of Cordova might say, cojones. 

Recreating the events of the council is tricky. The signatory lists are incomplete and the various eyewitness accounts are rather selective in their memory. There was clearly argument and counter-argument. Various bishops read out their own creeds, some of which, according to one account, were literally torn to pieces in front of the assembly. In the end, however, Arius (who was not in attendance) and his ideas were condemned. And just to make things absolutely clear, the council issued an officially approved statement of faith. 

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Nicene Creed.

The substance of belief

Anyway, today, in churches around the world, Christians recite what is commonly called the Nicene Creed. But the original one agreed at Nicea has significant differences from our modern version. It’s a lot shorter. The Holy Spirit barely gets a mention. There is nothing about baptism, the resurrection of the dead, Mary, the crucifixion, or the prophets. And, most noticeably of all, it concludes with a load of threats. 

This is it: 

The original is in Greek. And, in fact, the original wasn’t entirely original. It uses off-the-shelf phrases from other creeds, possibly from Syria or Jerusalem. To this they added a) the end paragraph specifically outlawing Arius’ ideas and b) a lot of rather repetitive phrases about the relationship between Jesus and the Father. Clearly, the idea was to make sure absolutely everybody got the point. And what was the point? Well, it was this: “True God of true God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father.”

This was the key innovation at Nicea. The Son, according to the creed, is “of one substance” (the Greek is homoousion) with the Father. That doesn’t mean a physical substance, like milk or potatoes; it means something more like ‘being’ or ‘nature’. Jesus is both distinct from the Father, but also the same. He is equal in the Trinity, true God from true God. (That’s what ‘very’ means in the Christmas carol: it means true, as in ‘veritable’.) Begotten, yes, but not made. Not created. 

The theological ideas behind this are detailed, subtle and, frankly, eye-wateringly complicated. But this statement affirmed both Jesus’ divinity and his humanity, and from now on – in orthodox Christianity at least – the divinity of Jesus was non-negotiable. 

So that was that. The issue was decided. Job done. Sorted.

Easy-peasy, lemon…err…hang on a minute.

The director’s cut

Of course it wasn’t sorted. The creed was a compromise: something which most bishops could put up with. Since no single interpretation was imposed, it allowed everyone a lot of wriggle room. Some disagreed outright: two bishops refused to sign the statement and were sent into exile. Others assented to the main body but not the anathemas, arguing that Arius had been misrepresented.

Arius himself was exiled, but within a few years he had been pardoned and the Church would play whack-a-mole with Arianism for the next century. Some of Constantine’s successors even supported his ideas. (Remarkably, the Goths and Vandals, the ‘barbarian’ tribes who conquered Rome in the mid-fifth century were Arian Christians.) 

In the end, the main wording survived and became accepted, but only as part of a later, expanded version. Our creed is basically the director’s cut, created out of the Nicene version but with added material from the councils of Constantinople in 381 and Chalcedon in 451. At best, our version is the Niceo-Constanti-Chalcedonian Creed. So, while we don’t recite the original Nicene Creed, at least we are spared from cursing any Arians lurking in the congregation. 

Lessons from Nicaea

What are we then to make of all this? Well, frankly, my brain is aching from what you might call theological substance abuse. But maybe the lessons from Nicaea are less about theology and more about, well, people. 

Nicaea, for all its faults, set a precedent for the way in which the Church is governed and disputes are resolved. The Church was to be a conciliar body, that is, governed by councils. And, for all their problems, synods, councils and general meetings still seem to be the least-worst way of doing things. 

Nicaea is also about power. Oversimplified versions of Christian history claim everything went wrong when Constantine arrived. But there were splits and arguments in the Church way before. In any case, Constantine discovered that he couldn’t just snap his fingers and sort the problem. He thought it was sorted, but people carried on preaching what they believed to be divine truth. It’s all very well being an emperor, but you can’t outrank God. 

The lessons from Nicaea are less about theology and more about people

What Nicaea shows us is that you cannot change belief just by issuing statements. Creeds give us something to gather around, to bind us together. But maybe they too easily become a kind of theological crowd control. Arianism didn’t disappear just because a council issued a creed. All authorities and systems can sometimes make this mistake. Real change takes time, and real theology emerges from consensus. Our beliefs, actions – and even our scripture – are the product of consensus and tradition. In the end, it’s only through talking and sharing that the fabric of faith is fashioned. 

So, it’s important for all of us to think through what we say (and what we sing) each week. But maybe, in the end, some things are beyond our grasp. Ultimately, what Nicaea did was restate the truth: Jesus is God. We follow a Trinitarian faith: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That’s amazing, but also, if I’m honest, mystifying. But there you go. That’s faith for you: sometimes you just have to embrace the mystery. Perhaps the best the creed can do for us is to make sure that we are all mystified in more or less the same way. 

I’d like to end with my favourite story from Nicaea. And it brings us nicely back to Christmas. The story goes that Bishop – later Saint – Nicholas was so enraged at the arguments of the Arians that he slapped Arius across the face. Outraged, the emperor and bishops stripped Nicholas of his vestments and threw him into jail. But when the jailer checked on him the following morning, he found that miraculously the chains were loose on the floor, Nicholas was robed in full bishop’s attire and reading a copy of the Gospels. This was seen as proof of the righteousness of his actions, so he was immediately reinstated. 

It’s a fascinating story – marred only by the tiny detail that neither Nicholas nor, indeed, Arius were at the council. 

Still, I suppose we could always write a carol about it.