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Evangelical Christiantiy still struggles under the weight of the Enlightenment. We bought into the Modernist framework of what constitutes “truth” and still live under its lordship. In this model we have developed an understanding of doctrine that is dis-embodied and de-historicized. We must rage against an emaciated understanding of “belief” where “faith” merely refers to “mental assent” to a given truth. Modernity taught us to prioritize “Reason” and the mind and consequently we lost the church’s understanding of “belief” as something we do with our bodies, not simply restricted to thinking rightly. That is why I want to narrate the church’s understanding of the nature of Jesus Christ rooted in a life of discipleship.

When the Word became flesh and “tabernacled” among the lowly Jews in Bethlehem (Jn.1), those who believed Jesus to be the Messiah faced the careful task of communicating the identity of this One whom they worshiped as Lord. With the inbreaking of this promised One, followers of the “Way” had to explain why they equated this Palestinian man with the God of Israel. Essential to their discipleship was the proclamation of this good news—that God became human for our salvation. As they followed Jesus they developed short summaries of their faith for the instruction of new believers and to respond to false accounts of Jesus’ relationship to his Father (Francis Young has a very accesible work in which she tells this story: The Making of the Creeds). As Hauerwas and Sider note, “The early ‘Christologies’ developed in the New Testament were expressions required when followers of Jesus confronted the challenge of making their way of life, a way of life shaped by following Jesus’ teachings, intelligible in contexts that had no way of imagining how God could be found in this Galilean.” Thus, it is important to remember when we recite the Apostle’s or Nicene Creed that these are not abstracted truths for the sake of “getting it right” as an end in itself. Rather, these creeds are summaries of the faith that arise out of a life of discipleship. Therefore, in order to truly understand their weightiness we should delve into the lives of those who went before us and discover how these doctines were concieved in a life of devotion to God. In order to understand how the Nicene Creed may witness to Christ’s lordship in our contemporary situation, it is important to locate the event in its historical context and listen to the voices that shape the conversation.

Our window into the location of the Nicene Creed is the unevenness of the three articles—the wordiness of the second article on Jesus Christ in comparison to the articles on the Father and the Holy Spirit. The “anathema” at the end of the creed further centers the central concern of the creed on Christology (the doctrine of Christ). From a careful reading of the creed we can see that the divinity of Jesus Christ was at stake.

The Council of Nicea in A.D. 325 was called to dispel the views of Arius, an Alexandrian priest concerned to maintain the radical transcendence of God. Arius argued that only the Father is God, and “the Son is the first and greatest among creatures.” This perfectly created Son is necessary to mediate the wholly other Father to finite humanity. But the problem that arises for Arius’ formulation is that the Son is not divine, rather, he is simply a perfect creature. The bishops at Nicea refuted Arianism by indicating that the Son is “consubstantial” (in Greek, homoousian) with the Father and “begotten, not made.”

The church responded to Arius’ low Christology by making the divine nature of Christ explicitly clear as a normative teaching (or “dogma”) of the church. The creed decisively identifies Jesus with the Father and powerfully proclaims the lordship of Jesus Christ over the entire cosmos. It confesses, “We believe…in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, light of light, true God of true God, begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father, through whom all things were made, both in heaven and on earth.” This high Christology captures the thrust of the biblical witness where Christ is identified as the “image of God” through and for whom all things were created (2 Cor.4:4, Col.1:15f). Although the council ratified this creed in A.D. 325, much debate ensued that ultimately ended in the universally accepted Council of Constantinople in 381. With a univocal declaration the church formally “anathematizes” any remnants of Arianism and distances orthodoxy from any hints of Ebionism. (The Ebionites were a second-century Jewish group that acknowledged Jesus as the Messiah but denied his divinity in order to protect the Jewish concept of God as wholly other. In this understanding Jesus is only a genuine human being, informed by the Spirit).

It is naive to read the events of Nicea without an eye on the Empire. The political realist with ears attuned to the nature of Empire will point out that emperor Constantine, not the bishops, called the council. The teachings of the church did not concern Constantine. He never sought baptism into the church nor instruction (catechesis) from the church. Rather, Constantine understood that his Empire would be more powerful if it was united in its religion. He wanted to consolidate his power and realized that an empire divided over religious issues threatened the unity of his dominion. Although this fourth-century church laid the foundation for the continuing legacy of the church’s co-option by Empire, the bishops faithfully proclaimed that Christ is Lord, not the emperor. In response to Constantine’s quest for dominion without frontier, the church proclaims the all-encompassing Lordship of Jesus Christ who sits at the right hand of the Father, “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given” (Eph. 1:21).

After the bishops ratified the creed, the power politics of Empire prevented universal affirmation of the creed. The emperors of the Roman Empire knew that the high Christology of Nicea tempered its power. Therefore the imperium courted those in the church who maintained Arius’ low Christology. Those in power realized that his Christology better served their ends. Yoder writes, “For a full fifty years [after the Council of Nicea] the tug-of-war went back and forth. Arius had a lot on his side… He had political friends, especially in the imperial courts…because his theology fit the empire. If you lower your concept of Christ, then you can raise your vision of the emperor because the Logos was in both Jesus and the emperor [see Prov.8:12-24]. If Jesus is a little smaller, the king will be a little higher, and that is just what Constantine and his advisers wanted” (_Preface to Theology_, 199).

Although the central force of the creed was to uphold the divinity of Christ, we encounter yet another equally important layer to the formulation of the nature of Christ, namely, the humanity of Christ. The Nicene Creed affirms belief in Jesus, “who for us humans and for our salvation descended and became incarnate, becoming human.” This window into the historical landscape points to the Docetic heresy. This heresy—rooted in Gnosticism—comes at Jesus from the opposite angle of that of the Arians and Ebionites. The Docetists agreed that Jesus was divine, but they claimed that he only “appeared” to be human so as to guard the divinity of Jesus from corruption.

Now we can see what exactly was at stake in the formulation of that second article of the Nicene Creed. The creed had to walk the narrow road by upholding the divinity of Jesus against the Arians, and the humanity of Jesus Christ against the Docetists. By proclaiming that Jesus shared the same divine substance as the Father, the fourth-century church stayed faithful to the early church’s proclamation—that is, “Jesus Christ is Lord” (Rom.10:9, Philippians 2:11). The bishops at Nicea also proved loyal to the biblical witness by affirming that Jesus Christ is the truly human One, thus essential to the shape of our own lives. But, in order to know the power of Jesus’ humanity and divinity at work “for our salvation,” we must unfold this Christological article of the creed by learning from the one who did the profound theological work behind the creed: St. Athanasius. Thus the story of the church’s doctrine of Jesus Christ leads us to the life and teachings of Athanasius. The gospel of Christ unfolds as we witness how it is embodied in the faithful ones of the church. That is why we tell their stories—to shed new light on the truth of Jesus Christ. Athanasius’ story will reveal how the catechetical training of martyrdom and asceticism lie behind the brilliant theology of Athanasius’ On the Incarnation, the theological work that lies behind the Nicene Creed.

(to be continued…)