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Five Foundational Councils
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Almost as soon as soon as Christianity became legal, Christians began having “universal” meetings (called ecumenical councils) to clarify what it was and what it believed about Christ. They weren’t really global meetings by our standards today, but they involved key Christian leaders from around the Mediterranean Sea and the Roman Empire.
Those of us who are Protestant strive to go back to the Bible as the source of what we believe and practice. That impulse is crucial! In the meantime, we sometimes underestimate how important the first few centuries of Christianity were for nailing down some of the details. After all, the Bible has to be interpreted, and there are different interpretations of the Bible.
Arius, for example, who featured in Dr. Bud Bence’s video for this Lesson, believed in the Bible. He probably believed in the Bible every bit as much as Athanasius did. But his interpretation of the key passages was different. When Colossians 1:15 calls Jesus the “firstborn of all creation,” does it mean that Jesus is part of the creation or, as the New International Version translates it, “over all creation”?
God used the Church of the first few centuries to clarify the answers to these questions. We usually say that the first five ecumenical councils established orthodoxy or “right belief.” In hindsight, we might think that the answers to their questions were obvious, but it may seem that way because the Church has already settled these issues. With regard to Arius, for example, there probably were more Arians in the church at one point than there were followers of Athanasius. But Athanasius’ position is the one that won the day, we believe because, over time, the Holy Spirit made it so.
The Council of Nicaea (AD 325)
As Dr. Bence mentions in the video, Emperor Constantine called the first ecumenical council in the city of Nicaea in what is now northwest Turkey. We can debate whether Constantine was a true believer or not – he wasn’t baptized till his deathbed. A cynic might suggest he became a Christian for political reasons because he saw it as a potential way to unify the empire. He claimed that a sign of the cross appeared in the sky to him, with the words written under it, “In this sign you will conquer.”
Constantine called the Council of Nicaea not so much because he wanted the church to arrive at a particular position on the Trinity. His main goal was for the church to be unified. After all, a divided church would not help create the unity in the empire that he wanted.
Dr. Bence described the lay of the land. Arius was a priest from the Egyptian city of Alexandria. He was teaching that the Son of God had not always existed but was the first and most important of God’s creations, subordinate to God the Father. But in his mind, there was a point when the Son did not exist.
Athanasius would come to represent the fully Trinitarian position over time (he was not yet a bishop at the time of Nicaea). If Arius claimed that “there was a point when the Son was not,” Athanasius and his bishop argued that Jesus was “eternally begotten of the Father.” They were “of the same substance” (homoousios), co-eternal, co-equal. This is the position that would win the day.
A compromise position was also in the mix. This was the suggestion that Jesus was of a similar substance to God the Father (homoiousios, notice the extra i that Dr. Bence mentioned). But in the end the full equality of the Son and Spirit with the Father was affirmed, with no subordination between them.
Note: You sometimes hear people say that the Council of Nicaea decided what books belonged in the New Testament. You also sometimes hear people say that Constantine forced the Roman Empire to be Christian. But Nicaea was about the Trinity, not Scripture, and it would not be till 380 under a different emperor that Christianity became the only legal religion of the Romans.
| Council | Date | Issue | Heresy | Decision |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nicaea | 325 | Trinity | Arianism | One God, one substance,3 persons, All equally God. |
| Constantinople | 381 | Trinity, Holy Spirit | Arianism, Apollinarianism | Nicene Creed affirmed |
| Ephesus | 431 | Person of Christ | Nestorianism | Jesus was one person |
| Chalcedon | 41 | Natures of Christ | Eutychianism | Jesus was one person with two natures |
| Constantinople | 55 | Clearning up the past | Reaffirmation |
Debates in the 300s
The decades between the Council of Nicaea and the Council of Constantinople were key to the Trinity becoming the official understanding of Christianity. At one point, public sentiment might actually have gone in the opposite direction. Three very important writers in this period are known as the Cappadocian Fathers.
Cappadocia was a region in middle Turkey just above Tarsus where Paul was from. The three Cappadocian Fathers were Basil the Great, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus. These three presented models to help conceptualize the Trinity and arguments to support the position taken at Nicaea. They thus paved the way for the final confirmation of Nicene belief in 381.
Another debate taking place in the 300s was between thinkers at the city of Antioch in Syria and thinkers from Alexandria in Egypt. These two groups are sometimes known as the Antiochene School and the Alexandrian School. Those in Antioch emphasized reading the Bible in context and did not want to minimize the humanity of Jesus. Those in Alexandria favored allegorical readings of the Bible emphasizing the divinity of Jesus more than his humanity.
The Council of Constantinople (AD 381)
It was not Constantine, but the Emperor Theodosius I who not only made Christianity the only legal religion of the Roman Empire in AD 380, but Nicene Christianity its legal religion. So, it became illegal to be an Arian after that date. It’s no surprise, then, that Theodosius called an ecumenical council the next year in 381 to clean up some fifty years of continued debate over the Trinity.
The Council reaffirmed and expanded the Creed of Nicaea, resulting in what we now know as the Nicene Creed. As some had previously doubted the full divinity of Christ, this Council put to rest any questions about the full personhood and divinity of the Holy Spirit. A group in Macedonia, north of Greece, contested that the Spirit was divine. They were called the “Spirit-fighters” and their heresy, “Pneumatomachianism.” The Council indicated that their belief was heretical.
The Nicene Creed
We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father. Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.
Some heresies are more heretical than others. The Council of Constantinople also declared Apollinarianism as heretical. Apollinaris, trying to figure out how the humanity and divinity of Jesus fit together, suggested that Jesus had a human body but a divine Soul, the Logos of John 1:1. In a move these councils would make more than once, the full humanity of Jesus was affirmed. We will return to this issue below.
The Council of Ephesus (AD 431)
The controversies over the precise nature of Christ’s divinity did not end in the 300s. Emperor Theodosius II called another council at Ephesus in 431 because of the difficulty of explaining how Jesus’ human and divine natures fit together. A church leader named Nestorius almost seemed to think that two distinct persons were there in Christ, a divine person and a human person.
The exact contours of the debate might seem a little silly to us today. Most church leaders wanted to call Mary, the mother of Jesus, the “God-bearer,” a reflection of the fact that the veneration of Mary was on the rise. Nestorius did not want to call Mary a “God-bearer” (theotokos). He wanted to call her a “Christ-bearer.” The fact that the word theotokos was sometimes translated as “the Mother of God” probably led some later to take their devotion of Mary too far, but this was not the original intent of the word.
As picky as the distinction between “God bearer” and “Christ bearer” might seem, Nestorius was accused of seeing the person of Jesus as different from the second person of the Trinity, with them both co-existing in the same body. The Council of Ephesus condemned this position. Nestorius was condemned for his teachings and removed from his high position in the church.
The Council of Chalcedon (AD 451)
Next to Nicaea, this council was perhaps the second most important of the five. At the Council of Chalcedon, the sense of Christ as one person with two natures was clearly affirmed. The heresy in this case was Eutychianism. Eutychus suggested that Christ’s humanity was like a drop next to the ocean of his divinity. You might as well just say he was divine.
Many Christians today effectively view Christ similarly. Jesus’ human nature is effectively ignored. But the Council of Chalcedon would not allow for this reduction of Jesus to one nature, a divine one. (The heresy that Jesus only had one nature is called Monophysitism.)
The result of the Council was the “Chalcedonian definition.” This definition of Christ as being one person with two natures effectively addressed all the heresies about Jesus from Nicaea to Chalcedon.
orthodoxy: right belief. Orthodoxy grew as the early Christians had debates over the specifics of Christian faith. Councils met. Creeds made clear statements. Then there was general consensus on many other things.
heresy: false teaching. As the Church increasingly clarified true and false teaching, certain ideas became known as heresy or false teaching. Ideas that were under discussion at one point became no longer open to debate.
The Second Council of Constantinople (AD 553)
Next to the preceding councils, the Second Council of Constantinople is not nearly as significant. We might liken it to tidying up the room after all the heavy furniture is in place. This council addressed some of the teachings of important thinkers of previous centuries that in hindsight were now thought to be off track.
One such person was Origen, an important church father who lived around the year AD 200. Origen had been deeply influenced by the philosopher Plato. Although he was not a Gnostic, Origen seems to have believed in a kind of universalism. He believed our souls pre-existed our bodies. So then, at death, they returned to their original pure state. This perspective was condemned at the Council.
The thinking of three other theologians from the previous centuries was also condemned at the council, chiefly because they were thought to be too Nestorian. They had been part of the School of Antioch in the 300s. If there is a fine line on the question of the balance between Jesus’ human and divine natures, they were thought to emphasize his humanity too much.