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It's Been 1700 Years since the Council of Nicaea: Why is that Event so Important? · Centrally Speaking

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: Centrally speaking, is the central strength of the church's podcast.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: It speaks about issues that would be of interest to our society.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: In particular, it addresses how a Christian worldview intersects with Western secular culture.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: In the spirit of the church's founder, we take the perspective of the middle way, which is in agreement with the historic Christian Church.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_04: I'm Dr.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_04: Drake Williams, Minister of Mission and Theology at the Church.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_04: Our website is www.cscfamily.org.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_05: We're talking today about the 17th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, and particularly why is that event so important?
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_05: And we're very fortunate to have Dr.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_05: Donald Fairbairn here with us today.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_05: Dr.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_05: Fairbairn and his family are passionate about the Trinity, the global mission of the church, cultures, and languages.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_05: And he is the Robert E.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_05: Cooley Professor of Early Christianity at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, and is also a professor of historical and systematic theology at Union School of Theology in Wales.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_05: He holds a bachelor's from Princeton, a Master of Divinity from Denver, and a PhD from the University of Cambridge in England, and has served as a missionary in France, Soviet Georgia, and also in Ukraine, in the Donetsk region.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_05: He has taught throughout Europe and North America, is the author of 12 books that are also being translated into about 20 different languages, including a book about the Trinity, the Global Church, meaning the global church, the first eight centuries, and then the story of creeds and confessions and the life in the Trinity.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_05: So, Don, we're very fortunate to have you here today to talk about this important event, the Council of Nicaea.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_05: Welcome to the show.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you very much.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_03: It's a pleasure to be with you.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_05: Start the conversation today about just a council in general.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_05: What is a church council?
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_05: What's an ancient uh church council?
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_05: Can you explain what one of these uh is to our listeners?
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, well, there's nothing particularly magical or mysterious about a church council.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_03: It was very common in the ancient church for councils to be held.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_03: Some of these were very small councils, some were much larger councils.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_03: In many cities of the ancient Christian world, they would have what they called standing councils, where a council would meet every year, and various bishops and Christian leaders in the area around that city would come together at a state of time and they would talk about whatever they needed to talk about.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_03: Some of that might be doctrinal issues, some of it might be issues of church discipline, some of it might be issues of organization.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_03: So you had small councils quite often.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_03: And then from time to time there would be larger called councils in order to decide bigger issues, like a major doctrinal issue related to uh Christian heresy or something like that.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_03: So councils were very common in the ancient church.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_05: Is the council of Nicaea, would you consider that the first council, or was there something that was previous uh to that?
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_03: The council of Nicaea is what we now call the first ecumenical council, but there were many councils before that.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_03: In fact, the basic idea of church councils goes back to about the year 48 or 49, as described in Acts chapter 15, when the church leaders gathered together to deal with the very important question of whether a person had to become a Jew first in order to become a Christian.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_03: So all subsequent councils were based on that very first church council, what we call the ecumenical councils.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_03: Typically we speak of there having been seven of them from the fourth through the eighth century.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_03: The ecumenical councils were councils that included all of the churches in the Roman Empire.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_03: There were also Christians outside the Roman Empire, and they had their own councils.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_03: For example, the Persian Church had a number of its own ecumenical councils, but the ones that we call ecumenical are the ones that were for the churches in the Roman Empire, which was most of the Christian world at that time.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_05: So this then is the first of the ecumenical councils, although there are others like uh the Jerusalem Council uh that uh would be considered previous, but not an ecumenical council.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_05: Yes, correct?
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, that's correct.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_03: There were smaller councils, many, many smaller councils prior to the council of Nicaea.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_03: And I think it's worth mentioning that nobody knew in the year 325 that the council of Nicaea was going to be considered an ecumenical council.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_03: It was in the decades afterwards that they looked back on the significance of that council and labeled it as the first ecumenical council.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_05: Well, maybe that uh brings up the next question about who brings these type of councils together?
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_05: Is there some official uh that did that for an ecumenical council?
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_05: Or uh was this uh these issues that were uh let's say bubbling up within the church, that the church said we need to get together?
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_05: Or maybe there's some other unifying force that brought uh the council together.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_03: In the case of what we call ecumenical councils, and keep in mind that those were councils not for the whole Christian world, but for the Roman world, it was the Roman Emperor who called the council.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_03: So when a doctrinal dispute became significant enough that it didn't look like a series of smaller councils would be sufficient to resolve it, various bishops might ask the emperor to call an ecumenical council.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_03: And that happened for the first time in 325, as Constantine, who had recently become a Christian and had recently gained control over the whole Roman Empire, called a council for all the bishops within the Roman Empire to deal with the problem of Arius.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_05: We'll get to Arius in a moment, but uh in your book on creeds and confessions, uh uh you uh quoted Eusebius, uh early church historian who said how strange it was uh to have a Roman official call together a council like this.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, could you share with our listeners about that?
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, it really was a striking turn of events because in the very early part of the fourth century, beginning in the year 303, the Roman Emperor Diocletian launched the greatest persecution of Christians up to that point in the Roman Empire.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_03: There had been subsequent persecutions that were worse outside the Roman Empire, and particularly in the Middle Eastern Christian world today.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_03: But up to that point in the Roman Empire, this was the worst persecution anybody had seen.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_03: And Eusebius, the historian, lived through the worst of that persecution.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_03: And so after Constantine became a Christian and then gained control over the whole Roman Empire, for him to invite the bishops to a council and to pay their travel expenses, which he did from imperial funds, was just too unbelievable for anybody to realize it could be true.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_03: It was called a miracle that the situation had changed so quickly.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_05: Yes, I couldn't imagine what it would be like to be in that room where the Romans were persecuting you earlier, and then all of a sudden to have a Roman calling it this type of council together to decide a doctrinal issue.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_05: Uh it sounds um sounds amazing.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, it it was it was really, really an incredible turn of events.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_03: The many of the bishops who were present at the Council of Nicaea had themselves been persecuted.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_03: Some of them had been in hiding, some of them had had to take drastic steps to avoid being killed in the persecution.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_03: And now all of a sudden the situation is so dramatically different.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_05: So even though Pope Sylvester was uh Pope at that time, he was not the one who called this together, but it was the emperor Constantine.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_03: No, he wasn't.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_03: And it's important to recognize that at this point, the Pope, what we think of when we think of the Pope, that is the Bishop of Rome, had no particular authority in the church.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_03: At this time, actually, the word Papa or Pope was a term of endearment for your bishop.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_03: So if you were in Italy, you would call the Bishop of Rome the Pope.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_03: If you were in Egypt, you would call the Bishop of Alexandria the Pope.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_03: It was only much later and only in Western Europe that the Pope began to be seen as having authority over the entire church.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_03: The church in Africa, the church in Eastern Europe, the church in Asia never accepted the authority of the Pope over the entire church.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_03: And at this point, the Bishop of Rome didn't claim that kind of authority.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_03: He was considered to be a highly honored bishop, among other bishops who had authority over their own region.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_03: So it was not the Pope, Pope Sylvester, who called the Council of Nicaea.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_03: It was, in fact, the emperor who did so.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_05: Well, you've already brought up the many different places that the ancient church was, uh West Europe, whether places like uh Rome or Lyon, uh Africa, places like Carthage or Alexandria, East Europe, uh places like uh Ephesus or Smyrna.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_05: Uh did the Council of Nicaea have representatives from all over the ancient world uh present?
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_05: And if they did, did they each have uh equal consideration?
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, it's a very good question.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_03: One thing that I have mentioned just a few minutes ago and should reiterate is that the church was present not only in the Roman Empire, it was also present outside of the Roman Empire, deeper into Africa, much deeper into Asia than the edge of the Roman Empire.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_03: The Council of Nicaea was the invitations to the Council of Nicaea were sent out to 1,500 bishops, that is to say, to every bishop within the Roman Empire.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_03: About 300 of those actually came, uh some from as far away as Britain, and there were a few from outside of the Roman Empire who came.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_03: There seems to have been one from Persia, for example, who came.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_03: So the Council of Nicaea was primarily attended by bishops from within the Roman Empire, but they extended all the way across Britain, Spain, what we call France, Italy, Eastern Europe, uh, what we call Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, into Syria, uh, what we call Turkey today.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_03: So there were Christian churches in all of those places within the Roman Empire, and there were bishops representing all of those places.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_03: Although, if you do the numbers, I just said 1,500 invitations went out.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_03: About 300 bishops were actually there.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_03: So not nearly everybody came, but all regions within the Roman Empire were represented, and there were even a few delegates from outside the empire as well.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_05: And were they given equal consideration, uh, to your estimation?
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_03: That is a question to which the answer will be a little bit surprising.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, the short answer is yes.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_03: But one of the things to recognize is that they didn't have any votes.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_03: At ecumenical councils, nobody voted.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_03: It's Dan Brown is very famous for saying in the Da Vinci Code that at the Council of Nicaea they decided the deity of Christ by a vote.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_03: That is not remotely true.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_03: Not remotely true at all.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_03: In fact, at ecumenical councils, the basic idea was that the way you know the Holy Spirit is working is if everybody agrees.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_03: So you keep talking until everybody agrees.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_03: It was never really that clean cut.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_03: But they didn't ever actually have a vote.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_03: Once the consensus was recognized, the consensus would be articulated.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_03: And then the document expressing that consensus would be signed.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_03: All the bishops would come forward and very ceremonially they would sign their name and their title to the document.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_03: If you study those lists of signatures, you will find, okay, there were some people who seem to have been there who didn't sign or something like that.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_03: But officially at least, everything was by unanimous consensus at an ecumenical council.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_05: So it shouldn't ideally be about uh 320 or so who were there uh agreeing somewhat unanimously, correct?
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_03: Now, in the case of the Council of Nicaea, our information is a bit limited because we don't have acts, that is what we would call minutes.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_03: We don't have minutes of the ecumenical councils until you get to the third one, which was about a hundred years after the council of Nicaea.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_03: So that the first one at Nicaea in 325 and the second one at Constantinople in 381.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_03: We don't have acts, and so we don't have lists of who was there or who signed the decree.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_03: We have to piece the information together from various eyewitness accounts of people who were there.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_03: The traditional number of bishops at the Council of Nicaea is 318.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, the scholars who spend their lives trying to figure out exactly who was there by looking at a bunch of different sources suspect that the actual number may have been a bit less than 300, maybe between 250 and 300.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_03: So theoretically, all of those people would have been in agreement.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_03: There were only three people, as far as we can tell, who did not sign the condemnation of Arius, and we'll talk about in a few minutes.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_03: And they were not bishop.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_05: It's just interesting to think about a Christian meeting or a meeting uh having that much unanimity with that many people.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_05: I that's very, very striking.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, and and so that's yeah, officially, that would be the sign that the Holy Spirit was at work.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_03: Unofficially, how much talking, politicking, arm twisting may have been going on?
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_03: Well, probably a good bit.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_05: Well, once once this council came to its conclusion, would it be considered uh to be binding?
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, or was this more of people sharing uh their ideas and expecting uh to be sharpened before they go back to their home churches?
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_03: The short answer to that question is that it was supposed to be more like a binding decision.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_03: The slightly longer answer is that because this was the first ecumenical council, and they didn't know at the time it was going to count as ecumenical, there was a lot more ambiguity about this one than there would be about the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth ecumenical council.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_03: But even when you go to those later councils, the church tradition in the Eastern Church, what we today call Eastern Orthodox, and in the Western Church, what we today call Roman Catholic, is different on the question that you're asked.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_03: In the Eastern Church, a council becomes ecumenical when it is received by the entire church.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_03: So the council meets, they produce a document, the document circulates among the churches, and the churches recognize that to be the voice of the Holy Spirit.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_03: So then it counts.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_03: In the Western tradition, later, as the power of the papacy grew, the idea was that an ecumenical council becomes a binding document when the pope signs it, but not until the pope signs.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_03: Only one of the ecumenical councils had the pope present, interestingly enough.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_03: And so the document would be taken back to Rome and the Pope would presumably sign it.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_03: And in the later Roman Catholic understanding, that's when it becomes an ecumenical council.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_03: So there's a disagreement now between Eastern and Western Christians about what makes the council ecumenical.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_03: And even earlier, there was ambiguity about what actually made it ecumenical.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_05: But I guess not only ecumenical, but also authoritative, too, correct?
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, yes, that's right.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_03: And so the authority of a council would have to do with whether it was considered ecumenical.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_03: So one of the ways that we can think about this is that the church was not deciding arbitrarily what was true and then imposing that statement on all the people in the church by its presumed authority.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_03: What the church was trying to do was to listen to the Holy Spirit and to the scriptures and bear witness to the truth in a way that the church as a whole would recognize as being true.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_03: And that last bit, what I've just said, is more faithful to the way they understood their own tasks than saying they had inherent authority and whatever they said was therefore binding on everybody.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_03: That was that was a much later Roman Catholic understanding of the situation.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_03: Earlier, the idea was we're trying to express the truth as we listen to the Holy Spirit.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_05: And they were trying to express the truth related to a man named Arius.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_05: Can you tell us about Arius and why his particular viewpoint must have been such a problem?
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, there's certainly other must have been other teachers that didn't always have the right uh means of expression or the right thoughts.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_05: But who is this man Arius and why is his teaching such a problem?
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_03: So Arius was declared to be a heretic at the Council of Nicaea.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_03: But let's think about what we mean by calling somebody a heretic or calling something, some view, a heresy.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_03: It is not the case that a heresy is simply a mistake.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_03: If somebody misinterprets the Bible, if somebody makes a mistake, if somebody says something wrong, that doesn't mean it's a heresy, and that doesn't mean they're a heretic.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_03: What makes something a heresy is that it's a mistake so fundamental to the Christian faith, a mistake on something so central to the gospel, that if the heretic were right, that would make salvation impossible.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_03: So in the case of Arius, it had to do with his understanding of the Son, Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_03: And the point that the church was making was if Christ were the way Arius said he was, that kind of Christ couldn't save us, and therefore we could not be saved.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_03: And so in calling Arius a heretic, they're saying you're preaching a different Christ, a Christ who could not save us, and therefore it's a different gospel.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_03: So with that as background, what exactly was Arius saying about Christ that was so different that it was called heretical?
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_03: The short answer to that question is that Arius believed the son was a creature.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_03: That is to say, if this is God and this is everything created, in between them, let's draw a sharp line, a hard line.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_03: So everything that is not God is below the line.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_03: And Arius put the sun, also called the Word or Jesus Christ, put him below the line and called him a creature.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_03: That was the presentation issue.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_03: He called the sun a creature, said that the sun came into existence at a point in time.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_03: If you want to be really picky, Arius said the same the sun came into existence before there was time, per se, but the sun did not always exist.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_03: So he came into existence at a point, even though that point was before there was time, if you want to be picky.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_03: So he said the sun did not always exist.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_03: Now, what is going on behind that?
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_03: What's going on behind that is that in connection with a different view of the sun, Arius had a fundamentally different view of salvation.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_03: Arius thought that the sun is starting out here at the level of a creature and is effectively saving himself by rising up to God.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_03: And so when the sun rises up to God, he becomes our example so that we can follow him and rise up to God and effectively save ourselves.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_03: In response, the church was saying, we cannot rise up to God.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_03: We need more than just an example.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_03: We need more than just help.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_03: We need God Himself to come down to us and to save us by becoming human and living, dying, and being raised for our salvation.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_03: So Jesus had to be the Son of God Himself, equal to the Father.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_03: Not a creature, not lower, not a semi-divine halfway kind of God, but God just as fully God as the Father is.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_03: Otherwise, Jesus coming to earth isn't God coming down to save us.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_03: So Arius had a fundamentally different understanding of salvation as a human task, following the example of Christ.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_03: And he had a fundamentally different picture of the Son, Jesus, as this creature who could rise up to God.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_03: In response, the church said, no, God has to come down.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_03: So the son has to be just as fully God as the Father, or we cannot be saved.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_03: A particular presentation mistake about who the Son was was connected to an underlying mistake about what salvation is and how it's accomplished.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_03: And the church was rejecting all of that in rejecting what Arius said about the Son.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_05: So it's not just uh a wrong opinion, but it's uh an entirely different Jesus that the Council of Nicaea was was discussing.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_05: Is that is that fair to summarize it like that?
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_03: Some of the modern treatments of this whole issue in the fourth century make it out to be just a philosophical discussion.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_03: And the church was being mean in condemning somebody for having a different philosophical opinion about something that nobody can understand anyway.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_03: And that's really not what was going on.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_03: It was it was a fundamentally different Jesus, offering a fundamentally different kind of salvation, one that does not actually exist, that isn't biblical.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_03: And that's why the church condemned.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_03: That's what we mean when we speak of a Harris.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_03: If Jesus were really the way Arius said he was, that kind of Jesus couldn't save us in the way the Bible describes salvation.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_03: So is this decision that uh the Council of Nicaea made?
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, was it a close vote?
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I said a few minutes ago that they didn't actually have votes.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_03: So officially, no, it wasn't close at all.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_03: It was unanimous.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_03: If you peel some layers away from the onion and try to get into the nitty-gritty of what was happening, there were a lot of people there who at the beginning didn't clearly see what was wrong with Arius's thought.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_03: There were maybe 20 or so led by the Bishop of Alexandria, whose name was Alexandria.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: Alexander and his secretary, whose name was Athanasius, who would go on to be the most famous person of the fourth century, who very clearly understood the issues.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_03: And then you had a few people who were openly in favor of Aries.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_03: What seems to have happened is that the group led by Alexander was pretty quickly able to convince virtually everybody else of the significance of what was going on.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_03: And so they were won over to speak rather unanimously in opposition to Arius.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_03: That's what, as as well as we can tell from the sources we have, that is what seems to have happened.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_03: So was it a close vote?
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_03: If they had voted before they came, the nature of the question might have made it hard to tell who was saying what.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_03: But no, there was virtual unanimity once everybody understood what was going on about the fact that Arius' understanding was dangerously wrong.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_05: Well, then what did happen to Arius after all this?
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_03: Well, he was stripped of his title.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_03: He was actually not a bishop, he was an elder in the Alexandrian church.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_03: And he was removed from that position.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_03: But then he later befriended the Emperor Constantine and he defended his views to the Emperor Constantine.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_03: And Constantine asked the church to accept him back into fellowship.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_03: Now, Constantine was a new Christian and was a warrior and a politician, certainly not a great theologian, and may never have really understood what was actually happening.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_03: It's significant that the most important figure of the time, Athanasius, absolutely refused to accept Arius back into fellowship.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_03: So Arius died in the year 336 and Constantine died in the year 337.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_03: So both a little over a decade after the council.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_05: Dan Brown also said that the Council of Nicaea decided on uh on biblical books.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_05: Which books did he feel that were thrown?
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_05: Uh does he say they were were tossed out uh at the Council of Nicaea, or is uh Dan Brown mistaken on uh biblical books being tossed out at Nicaea?
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, uh Dan Brown is either intentionally or unwittingly reciting an urban legend.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_03: There's no evidence from the time that the Council of Nicaea dealt with the question of which books were in the New Testament.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_03: Um, by that point, by the time of the Council of Nicaea, it was very, very well recognized which books belonged in the New Testament, with a couple of exceptions, like the really short books, like um Second Peter and the three letters of John and uh Philemon and, or not even Philemon, but the book of Jude, the really short books may not have been used very much.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_03: So there was really not much of a question at that point about which books were in the New Testament.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_03: And as far as we can tell, the Council of Nicaea did not deal with that issue at all.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_03: So then where did Dan Brown get his information from?
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_03: In the ninth century, there was uh a writing that purported to be a history of councils up to the ninth century.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_03: And this writing is based mainly on legends and that sort of thing.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_03: But in this ninth century writing, it was claimed that the bishops at the Council of Nicaea took books into the church and they set them near the altar and they prayed for the Holy Spirit to make it clear which books were in the Bible.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_03: And according to this legend, this story, the Holy Spirit moved some of the books to the altar and set them on the altar, and those were the biblical books.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_03: The ones that stay down on the floor were not biblical books.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_03: But again, there's no reference in any of our documents from the fourth century or the fifth or the sixth century to anything like this.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_03: This seems to have been a legend that grew orally only in the Middle Ages and was first written down in the ninth century.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, this legend gained some currency in the modern world in the 18th century when Voltaire repeated the legend.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_03: And Voltaire probably uh repeated it in order to show how superstitious Christians were.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_03: That would probably have been Voltaire's face in doing so.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_03: And from Voltaire's mention of it, it was picked up in the 19th and the 20th century.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_03: And that seems to be where Dan Brown is getting his information from.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_03: Is it true?
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_03: No.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_03: If the church had talked about which books were in the Bible at the council, it would have showed up in some legitimate history in the 4th and 5th and 6th century.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_03: So we can be very confident that that was not the case.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_03: But there were councils, there were councils in the fourth century that did talk about the books of the Bible and that listed them.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_03: None of those was an ecumenical council, but we do have authentic historical records from some of those other councils.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_05: Dan Brown's uh writing might make for good uh popular literature, but uh not true history.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, in general, Dan Brown's uh Da Vinci Code is based on a lot of later legendary sources, and it's based on the premise that these later sources were the real ones and the church suppressed them.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_03: And that that is simply not true.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_03: The church in the fourth century had no ability to suppress writings on that kind of a scale.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_03: And so if these kinds of ideas had been common, there would be more evidence of it at the time rather than just later in the Middle Ages.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_03: So basically, Dan Brown is relying on medieval legends from the fringes of the church about uh marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, for example, as opposed to relying on the Bible or any solid sources from the early church.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_05: So go back then to uh some things that Council of Nicaea really did decide, and uh they did come to conclusion about Jesus Christ being homooousius.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_05: That's a fancy term, and most of our uh listeners may not even know what that is.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_05: Can you explain what homoousius means and why why is that significant?
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_03: Homoousius is a very hard word to translate, and so it's rendered in English in a number of different ways.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_03: Sometimes it is translated consubstantial or of the same essence or one in essence or of the same being or one in being.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_03: So it's it's a very difficult word to translate, and it was actually a controversial word in the fourth century.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_03: There were several decades of discussion and controversy about whether that word was a good word to use to say that the son is equal to the father.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_03: And at the end of that, the church decided, yes, that was a good word to use.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_03: And so the most controversial word of the fourth century became the most famous theological term in Christian history.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_03: But what does it mean?
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_03: Properly understood once the church had sorted out all of the discussions about what they meant by it and come to a consensus understanding of what they meant.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_03: What does homousios mean?
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_03: Basically, it means that the Son is God in the same way the Father is.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_03: To be God, in the Bible's understanding of the true God, is to have a certain character, a certain set of characteristics, what theologians sometimes call attribute.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_03: So when we look at the Bible, we build up a picture of who God is from his characteristics.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_03: He's not just knowledgeable, but he has all knowledge.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_03: He's not just powerful, but he has all power.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_03: He's not just loving, he's perfectly loving.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_03: He's not just just, he's perfectly just.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_03: He is present everywhere, he is eternal.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_03: So the Bible talks about God in ways that enable us to apply these characteristics to them.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_03: He's different from people, angels, demons, false gods in these ways.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_03: He's eternal.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_03: He has all power, he has all knowledge, he's perfectly loving, he's perfectly just.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_03: So all of that set of characteristics that sort of describes the character of God, you can call that God's essence.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_03: What it means to be God is to have this set of characteristics.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_03: When you call Jesus of the same essence as the Father, you're effectively saying all of those characteristics that describe the character of God apply to Jesus just as much as they apply to the Father.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_03: They apply to God the Son just as much as they apply to the Father.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_03: Later, the church would also use the same word to refer to the Holy Spirit.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_03: So you use the same sort of reasoning.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_03: That set of characteristics that describes the Father and also describes the Son, it also describes the Holy Spirit.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_03: And so the three of them are not three different gods with different characteristics.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_03: They are the same God because they have identical perfection.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_03: They have an identical character, they have an identical essence, they are homoousios with one another.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_03: So that's the way the church was using the word once they've had done enough talking to come to an agreement about what exactly they meant by that.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_05: Well, let's think uh now a little bit about some of the results of uh the Council of Nicaea and the Nicene Creed, which uh many of our listeners will be familiar with, uh, eventually came out of uh the time there at uh the Council of Nicaea.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_05: I'm just wondering if you might speak to that a little bit.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, how did the Nicene Creed emerge from the Council of Nicaea?
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_03: So, first of all, we need to recognize that the purpose of Creeds was not just to show that Arius was wrong.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_03: The purpose of creeds originally was to provide a means for the church in its worship to confess its faith in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_03: So the creeds are actually arose in the second century following biblical pattern.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_03: And they arose in connection with baptism and in connection with the Eucharist or what Protestants call communion or the Lord's Supper.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_03: As the church worships, the church affirms we trust in the Father, in the Son, in the Holy Spirit.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_03: So that's what creeds were for.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_03: At the Council of Nicaea in 325, the church took some of these creeds that had developed for that purpose, and they expanded these creeds in order to make very clear what was wrong with Arius' understanding of the Son.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_03: So you'd have a section of a creed about the Father and a section about the Son, and a section about the Holy Spirit.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_03: They greatly expanded the section about the Son and added words like homoousio in order to show really clearly what the problem was with Arius's thought.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_03: And one of the things that they added that was very important was the statement who, for us human beings, and our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnated.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_03: You'll remember I said that Arius had said the sun rises up to God and we follow.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_03: A big part of the church's response was to say, no, the sun comes down in order to save us.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_03: And that's a really important statement at the very center of the Creed of Nicaea.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_03: Then there was a lot of discussion, controversy in the fourth century about the creed.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_03: And other creeds were put forward for consideration, mainly because people were worried about the word homoousil.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_03: It wasn't in the Bible.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_03: They thought it was too philosophical.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_03: They were trying to figure out if they could say the same thing without the word homoousil.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_03: And so that went on for several decades.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_03: And once that conversation had come to a recognition of consensus, had come to an agreement, there was another ecumenical council that was held in Constantinople, today's Istanbul, in the year 381.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_03: Associated with that council is another creed or another version of the Creed of Nicaea that we now call the Nicene Creed.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_03: Some scholars don't think that creed was even written at that council.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_03: Let me simply mention that and say most of us don't think they're right.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_03: Most of us think that that creed did come from the council in 381.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_03: I think that the Creed of Nicaea was again modified at the Second Council in 381 to produce the final version of the Nicene Creed.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_03: The biggest difference is that they added a whole paragraph on the Holy Spirit because they realize between 325 and 381, we need to emphasize the full deity of the Holy Spirit, just like we emphasized the full deity of the Sun previously.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_03: And so they they went from just one sentence on the Holy Spirit to a whole paragraph on the Holy Spirit.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_03: So that creed is now called the Nicene Creed, which makes the Creed of Nicaea the rough draft, if you will, of the Nicene Creed.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_03: The way the church in the fifth century and following understood the relation between the two was to say this is the same faith.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_03: The faith of the church expressed by Nicaea.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_03: And what we call the Nicene Creed is the same faith as the Creed of Nicaea.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_03: That's the way the church understood them as fitting together.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_05: It would still be fair to say that uh as uh Christians today, um, at let's say before the Eucharist or um at a um membership uh service, or maybe just even as part of uh normal church worship, but when uh we as Christians say the Nicene Creed, we're still stretching back to many of the things that were discussed at the Council of Nicaea in in 325 AD.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_05: Would that be correct?
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, that's definitely correct.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_03: And I think there's something else going on here as well.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_03: When we look at the Christian church, sadly, there have been a lot of divisions in Christian history.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_03: But one of the things that unites the entire historic Christian church is the affirmation of the Nicene Creed.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_03: Every group of Christians in existence in the fourth and fifth centuries that has continued to exist subsequently, accepted the Nicene Creed.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_03: All the churches within the Roman Empire, all the churches of East Africa, what is today Sudan and Ethiopia outside the empire, all of the churches of Asia, including Persia outside the empire, India outside the empire, and later China, uh, Armenia, Georgia, all of the churches that were in existence at that time and have continued to exist, accepted the Nicene Creed.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_03: And the Nicene Creed is the only non-biblical document about which that can be said.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_03: So when we affirm the Nicene Creed, when we recite the Nicene Creed, we are speaking in a sense with one voice with the entire historic church all over the world and throughout Christian history.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_03: And the Nicene Creed is a unique vehicle for doing that.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_03: And so that's part of the reason why I think it's valuable for us, even in low church traditions that don't normally like creed statements.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_03: I think the Nicene Creed is still valuable for us to use on occasion.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_05: And so as Christians uh recite the Nicene Creed today, they are reaching back to 1700 years.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_05: And furthermore, they're also reaching back to uh the United Church from that time period as well.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, not and not only within the Roman Empire, um, but when when the churches that I just mentioned outside the empire, when they became aware of the Nicene Creed, uh which came usually at the very end of the fourth or beginning of the fifth century, all of them accepted it.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_03: And that's really significant, I think.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_05: Well, thank you so much for your time today, uh, Dr.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_05: Fairban uh Dr.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_05: Fairvan.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_05: We're very uh fortunate to have had your uh input on this uh momentous uh event within church history, and um certainly wish you the best in uh your continued uh writing and teaching uh at Gordon Conwell.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you very much.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_03: I hope this has been helpful and it's been a pleasure to be with you.