Nicaea and the Nearby Disease

This has been the year to celebrate the 1700^th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea in 325. As C.S. Lewis observed in his tribute to Athanasius, without the Trinitarian doctrine initiated by Nicaea, orthodox Christianity would have disappeared from history.

But we need also to remind ourselves in this new era of exploding antisemitism that the legacy of Nicaea has been disastrous for Jews.

As Kendall Soulen has observed, the Nicene-Constantinople creed finally approved in 381 was an example of structural supersessionism. Which means that the structure of the creed leaves out Israel’s history and election. It fails to name explicitly the Jewish people and their role in the history of salvation and neglects pointed mention of the Jewish identity of Jesus and the apostles and the earliest church.

The synodal letter that was sent out after the council of 325 told “all our brethren in the East who formerly followed the customs of the Jews” to shift the Church to a non-Jewish calendar and “celebrate the said most sacred feast of Easter at the same time with the Romans.”

And Constantine’s letter, also written and sent after the Council, is full of antisemitic invective. He wrote that it is

unworthy . . . to follow the customs of the Jews who had soiled their hands with the most fearful of crimes, and whose minds were blinded. . . . we ought not therefore to have anything in common with the Jews . . . .we desire to separate ourselves from the detestable company of the Jews. . . . it is your duty not to tarnish your souls by communications with such wicked people. . . . [they are] the murderers of our Lord.

It was this disgraceful pattern of suggesting that God was done with the Jews—and that we should be too—that set in motion a repulsive way of thinking that would eventuate in the Holocaust.

Do We Throw Out the Baby with the Bathwater?

The temptation remains—and some have yielded to it—to refuse to try to learn anything from Nicaea/Constantinople because of the antisemitism that seemed to emerge in association with the Councils. It was what could be called a nearby disease.

Should we therefore distance ourselves from Nicaea and Constantinople and the Church that was built on this foundation? Especially since the Christian Church went even further in one of the canons at Nicaea II in 787, prohibiting Jews from living as Jews—that is, keeping the Sabbath or keeping kosher?

I suggest that this would be a dangerous mistake. To fail to learn from Nicaea and Constantinople and then later from the Council of Chalcedon (451) would be to fail to learn the full meaning of the incarnation of the God of Israel in his Son Jesus the Messiah. Which means we would get the story of salvation wrong. And bad theology always leads to misdirected worship and faulty living.

And to encourage us not to throw out the baby (the theological truths of Nicaea and Constantinople) with the bathwater (the antisemitism and supersessionism that soon emerged), let me suggest two things.

Unexpected Motives

First, that the structural supersessionism of the creed was not have been inspired by antisemitism after all. And second, that the change of the date of Easter was not directed by antisemitism but was an effort to bring unity to a divided Church.

So let’s first look at the creed. Some fault the council because, they say, no Jews were among the 318 fathers of the Council. Actually the odds are that Jews were among them because eighteen were from the area we now call Israel and many more from the East—Egypt, Phoenicia, Syria, and Mesopotamia—areas known to have many Jews in a century when many had converted to follow Jesus.

Also, the creed does not question the formal status of Israel in salvation history. It had already been more than two hundred years since the Church formally rejected Marcionism by including the Hebrew Bible in its canon (c 144). And the creed contains anti-Marcionite statements—Jesus was raised on the third day “according to the Scriptures” and “the Spirit has spoken through the prophets.”

Furthermore, the creed implies the Jewishness of Jesus when it says Jesus “came down from the heavens and was made flesh by the Holy Spirit and Mary the virgin.” This was taken from the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament which was the Church’s predominant version) where a “virgin [parthenos] shall conceive and bear a son” (Isaiah 7:14).

Acknowledging Jewish Origins

The creed also reflects Jewish origins by its emphasis on God’s oneness—”I believe in one God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.” These words echo the Hebrew Bible’s emphasis on God’s oneness against the polytheisms of the ANE. And the distinctive word of this creed—homoousios (the same nature and being)—is used precisely to protect the Jewish monotheism of the Christian faith. In God there is nothing besides the fullness of God. The Son and the Spirit are nothing less than God himself and not intermediate beings or creatures as Arius asserted about the Son.

This Christology is what drives the creed, not antisemitism. Many of the Fathers may have been antisemitic, but the driving force of the Council was the threat that Arianism—not Judaism–posed to the full deity of the Messiah and therefore to the full truth of salvation.

Besides, nothing in the Creed itself is antisemitic. And the letter from Constantine, recent scholars such as Timothy Barnes (in his Constantine and Eusebius from Harvard University Press) have argued, might have been written by Eusebius decades after the Council. Eusebius has become well-known for having changed dialogue and narratives to serve his own ecclesial purposes. In this case he seems to have manipulated Constantine’s imperial authority for the sake of his own battles with other churchmen.

A Need for Unity

Second, the change from a Jewish calendar to a Roman calendar was driven by a need to bring unity to Easter practice and to honor the Messiah’s resurrection which all agree took place on Sunday and not another day (Saturday) that using the Jewish calendar was leading the churches in Asia (now western Turkey) to observe.

The disagreements over the date for Easter went back to the New Testament itself. The synoptic gospels say the crucifixion was on the day after the Passover while John says it was on the day of the Passover. But all four gospels agree that the resurrection was on Sunday, the first day of the Jewish week. The Asian dioceses adopted the “fourteenth day of the moon” as the key date to order their Easter celebration, while most of the other churches kept Easter on a Sunday. And strictly speaking, the Asian churches’ choice of the 14^th moon for Pasch rested on the authority of John’s gospel not the Jewish tradition of Passover (see Daniel McCarthy’s chapter in The Cambridge Companion to the Council of Nicaea).

The Church’s final decision about Easter, which is not in the Council documents themselves, had to do with finding unity, and both practices were trying to be faithful to Scripture. Neither was being driven by antisemitism. Both letters that mention getting away from Jewish practice were written after the Council was over.

Ironically, the eventual decision on the date of Easter mandated that it be celebrated on the first Sunday (to mark the resurrection of the Messiah) “that follows or coincides with the vernal equinox”–which recalls the Jewish origin of the feast, 14 Nissan.

There is a great danger if we refuse to learn from Nicaea 325 and its completion at Constantinople in 381.

Asserting Jesus’ Divinity

We might not recognize what the Council recognized, that if Jesus was Messiah but merely a created Messiah, as Arius supposed he was, then we are not saved at all. For then we are joined not to God and God’s nature, but to another creature with merely creaturely nature. The latter cannot destroy the power of death, since it is itself under that power. Another creature has no capacity to heal sickness of soul, since all of creation is under a curse. And no creature can pay the infinite debt owed by humans, because a creature cannot be infinite and so cannot pay an infinite debt. So if Jesus was not God, then not only are we not saved but still lost and broken and diseased and debt-ridden, but we are also worshipping a creature—which is idolatry.

Jesus’ question to Peter is just as compelling today: “Who do you say that I am?” The Council’s answer was, “None other than the eternal Son of God.” It shows us that the hermeneutical key to Christology is what the theological tradition has called the “communication of idioms.” This means that both human and divine attributes are assigned to Jesuds of Nazareth. So we can say God himself cried as a baby in the manger and was a teenager for a few years. We can also say that the man who said he didn’t know the last day was also the Son of God who decided to lay that knowledge aside during his incarnation.

The payoff is that we in our humanness—with all of our fears and weaknesses—were taken up with the Son of God to the Cross for our sins, and then through the resurrection to eternal life in the Trinity. This is what it means to be saved. It could be done only by a God who was also fully man.

Apart from this, there is no salvation. And because of this, we know that God himself really does understand when we suffer and struggle. For since he was a man (and the Word still is the Jewish God-man!), he suffered the same temptations and weaknesses and struggles that we do. So he really does understand us.

The Only Begotten

Some fault Nicaea for making a distinction between “making” and “begetting.” But this was important because the Bible says Jesus was the “only-begotten Son,” which might seem to imply that Jesus was made a son just as we are made sons and daughters of God. But the Council insisted that while we were “made,” Jesus was “begotten.” “Making” produces something of a different sort, while “begetting” produces something of the same kind. Bees make beehives but beget bees. Ants make anthills but beget ants. Humans make houses but beget other human beings. The Father made the world but begets the Son from eternity—so that there never was a time when the Father was not begetting the Son. And since the Father was begetting in this case and not making, what he begat was someone of his very own, identical nature and being. Hence the Son was fully divine.

This is why the Council said the Son was homoousios (of the same nature as) the Father. The Arians complained that this was not a biblical word. But as Athanasius later replied, they themselves used far more unbiblical words such as “ungenerate” (not made or begotten by anyone) and “ineffable” (suggesting an infinite gulf between the Father and all else, with the Father alone having everything that pertains to God).

Yet the more important issue was not unbiblical words but unbiblical concepts. Sometimes it is necessary to use an unbiblical word such as “Trinity” to teach properly and clearly a biblical concept. This is also why theology is necessary and the Bible alone is not enough—without an orthodox community and tradition to interpret it. Arius and his followers were adept at using Scripture to support their position. The orthodox had to use new words—words not found explicitly in the Bible, such as homoousios, to defend biblical concepts. The use of biblical words alone was not enough to defeat heresy and clearly teach the biblical message of salvation through the Jewish messiah.

Our Triune Task

So what must we do? Three things.

First, we should expose the disease of antisemitism that inspired these letters after the Council and then the persecution of Jewish practice in the Church. We must also show the unbiblical nature of the supersessionist theology that led to Christian persecution of Jews over the centuries that followed.

Second, we must pray and work ecumenically for a revised creed that brings Jewish salvation history and the Jewishness of Jesus and the apostles back to the forefront. We should incorporate these Jewish roots into our liturgies.

Third, we must refuse the tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater, to refuse the potent medicines of the Great Tradition that have been used to treat the disease of antisemitism. If we neglect the teachings of the Councils that drive that Great Tradition, we will miss its deep understandings of what happened by the Holy Spirit when the God of Israel sent his Son as a Jewish boy and man to live and die and be raised from the dead.

For only if God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, could we be saved. This is what Nicaea 325 continues to teach us.

Gerald McDermott is the author, co-author, and editor of 25 books and hundreds of articles. His most recent book is A New History of Redemption: The Work of Jesus the Messiah Through the Millennia.