This year is the 1,700^th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, which met to settle the Arian controversy. These days, the Council itself seems to be best remembered for the probably apocryphal story of St. Nicholas of Myra slapping Arius, though the Nicene Creed that originated in the Council (with later modifications) is considered the standard for Orthodoxy in many denominations. I’ll be posting more on different aspects of the Council and the Creed, but it seems best to start with the basic question the Council met to address: how are we to understand who Jesus is?

Early Ideas

One of the challenges facing the early church was sorting out how to think about Jesus. Docetism, the view held by some Gnostics that he only appeared to be human but that he was actually a being of pure spirit, was dismissed out of hand by early Christians. Jesus was clearly human, but he was also clearly something more. The question was, what?

One early idea is that he was a human who was adopted by God and filled and infused with the eternal Logos at his baptism. Adoptionism, as this view is called, did not gain much traction. Most early Christians recognized Christ as God, though they did not always distinguish him carefully from the Father.

Monarchianism argued for a strongly monotheistic understanding of God, leading to Sabellianism or modalism, the idea that the Father and the Son are the same being and the distinction between them is simply a matter of different ways God presents himself to us. Tertullian, Hippolytus, and other church fathers strongly opposed this, but though they recognized Christ’s deity and the distinction between him and the Father, they did not work out the relationship between them in any systematic way.

Another early view saw Christ as an angel or archangel, specifically, the Angel of the Lord of the Old Testament. Since the Angel of the Lord was often identified with the Lord himself in the Old Testament texts, this approach could preserve Christ’s deity and his distinction from the Father much as many Christians today see the Angel of the Lord as an appearance of the pre-Incarnate Christ.

The Arian Controversy

By the third century, the church generally accepted the idea of Christ’s deity but understood him as being subordinate to the Father. The nature of that subordination became an issue in 318 or 319, when Arius (256-336), a priest in Alexandria, got into a controversy with Alexander I (d.326 or 328), the Alexandrine Pope, over whether Christ had a beginning.

Alexander argued that Christ was eternally begotten of the Father’s own substance and thus was equal to the Father. Arius replied, “If the Father begat the Son, then he who was begotten had a beginning in existence, and from this it follows there was a time when the Son was not.” Rather, Arius argued, the Son was not begotten of the Father but was made of nothing and so was not equal to the Father.

The Council of Nicaea

The quarrel between Arius and Alexander drew in other bishops and grew so heated that in 325, Emperor Constantine I called a church council to meet in Nicaea, just across the Bosporus from Constantinople, to settle the matter. After hearing the arguments on both sides, the council decided in favor of Alexander and wrote the first version of the Nicene Creed to summarize orthodox teaching on Christ’s nature.

A key point was how to describe Christ’s being or substance relative to the Father’s. The term originally proposed was homoiousios, of similar substance, but this was rejected because it could be used to support Arius’s position. Homoousios, of the same substance, was suggested next. There was some opposition since that term had been used by earlier Sabellians, but if properly balanced with the Son being begotten and so not the same as the Father, the word was accurate and effectively addressed the Arian problem.

And so the Creed described Christ as “begotten, not made, of one being (or of one substance) with the Father.” This became the accepted orthodox position, though Arianism (or, more properly Homoianism) continued to be an important force for the next few centuries before dying out in the sixth century.