Preface: I delivered the following reflection at the “Remembering Nicaea” event at Valparaiso University on October 2, 2025. This post will also be published on the “Pray, Tell” blog.
I want to begin my reflections this evening with this challenge: let us try to understand the situation of Christians around the year 325. In 325, Christianity had been legal for only twelve years. There was no single universal governing structure, no global synod of bishops, no general assembly. We certainly know that the Lord Jesus had sent his disciples to preach the coming of the kingdom of God and to bear witness to him. We know that the apostles preached - and it was this preaching, this witness of storytelling, of gathering in memory of the Lord Jesus, that communities began to form around the apostles.
Christian Beginnings
The Christian beginnings were not easy. They endured through disagreements, like the question on whether or not circumcision should be required. They argued with one another. The apostle Paul had a “crash course” with the apostle Peter and then “withstood him to his face” (Gal. 1,2). The apostles Paul and Barnabas shared a common ministry, and then they parted ways (Acts 15). Christians gathered at the mercy of people willing to open their homes to them, to allow them to worship in their large dining halls and to gather in their courtyards. They did not have formal graduate schools of theology with fancy service books, vestments, and a nice salary with benefits. In the earliest days, their leaders prayed to the best of their ability.
They often encountered opposition and persecution. Some of their people offered sacrifices to idols to avoid torture and execution. In their mercy, Christians pleaded for restoration to the community, and upon the recommendation of a letter vouching for them from a confessor (one who had suffered from persecution), they were readmitted to the community. There was never smooth sailing for early Christians, in between their own internal disputes and the vacillations between governmental tolerance and brutal persecution. The small communities remained faithful in the spirit of apostolic witness to Jesus Christ.
Christianity after the Edict of Milan (313)
The situation changed for Christians in the early fourth century when Constantine assumed the imperial throne and legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire in the year 313. Constantine moved his capital to the east after defeating Licinius in 324. The global community that found itself legal and very much in the interest of the imperial officials was in turmoil. Christians had confronted a number of difficult challenges. Now they were facing a significant shift, from being an exclusive community, somewhat guarded, to learning on the fly how to open their doors to an influx of people.
The bishops, as shepherds of the churches, had already navigated some difficult waters. Early Christians endured differences in interpretations on Jesus from within. Adoptionists believed that Jesus was an ordinary human whom God adopted as his son at the time of his Baptism in the Jordan. Docetists believed that Jesus only appeared to be human. In the early fourth century, a priest from Alexandria named Arius articulated a concept of Jesus that made sense to many people. Arius taught that God had created the divine Word of God (Jn 1) in time, and that the Word differed from humankind and was something like a great angel. The Word’s willingness to offer his life on the cross for the salvation of humankind made him worthy of worship, so God exalted him.
Arius’s description of Jesus violated the apostolic memory of Jesus as the divine son of God whose divine nature was not created. So Arius’s teaching was controversial and sowed division within the Christian community. Before we turn to the convocation of the council itself and its implications for the fourth century church and for 21st century Christianity, let’s take a moment to consider the situation of the pastors - as best as we can.
The Pastoral Challenges of the 4th Century
The bishops were confronting an instance of a popular religious public figure who had a following and was making assertions that were incompatible with the Church’s memory of Christ. The Church did not have a centralized institution or bureaucratic mechanism to address this issue. It would have been possible for some bishops to convene regionally and write a letter that clarified that Church’s belief, but we cannot read back into history any appointed officer who could identify the problem and initiate a process to deal with the questionable teaching. Furthermore, pastors may have been overwhelmed by the new influx of people coming to the church, seeking Baptism, along with the new relationship Church leaders had with the emperor and his officers.
Having paused for a moment to consider just how much was on the pastoral plate of the bishops, we can now acknowledge the emperor’s decision to convene a council that deliberated the theological issues, composed the first part of the Creed, and also dealt with a number of disciplinary issues. Let us also note that history always favors the winning side. Many of the writings of Christian thinkers who were condemned as heretics, such as Origen, Arius, Nestorius, and Theodore of Mopsuestia, were burned, and we often know of them only through the lens of the winning side.
The history of the council of Nicaea reveals some hesitation on the part of the participants to speak of divine essence or substance. What aspect of materiality can be attributed to God? The bishops decided to declare that the Son of God was one in essence (consubstantial) with the Father to confirm the equality of the Son with the Father, while disavowing any attempt to imagine the material substance of God - who is transcendent and incomprehensible to all of us while ever reaching out in divine love.
The creation of the initial Nicene Creed - which was completed at the council of Constantinople in 381 - has multiple consequences for Christians. The Creed became a concise statement of faith that could be taught and learned by ordinary Christians as the universal Christian confession of faith in Baptism. The debate at Nicaea and the ecumenical councils that followed expanded the complex discussion on the nature and person of Jesus Christ. And finally, the emperor Constantine played a pivotal role in seeing the council of Nicaea through to its completion, and this council inaugurated the process of the imperialization of the Church. In other words, the Church had a new relationship with the state and Church governance took on many of the attributes of the state - which was, to say the least, consequential for Christians up until our present day.
I want to conclude my reflection on why the council of Nicaea matters with three short final reflections.
Faith and Why it Matters
First, the matter of faith in Christ. The Church remembered Christ as the one who fulfilled the prophets, the son of God, sent into the world to save humankind. By defining Jesus Christ as true God of true God,” incarnate by the Holy Spirit and virgin Mary, who became human - the Church was remaining faithful to the apostolic memory of God in our midst. The Gospel accounts proclaim the apostles’ witness, their memory of the very Jesus Christ who sent them into the world. They remembered Jesus as the one who inaugurated the kingdom - whose appearance started the reign of God in this world. The Church was confessing what theologians would later call “superergatory” - a work above and beyond all other works - God becoming human without relinquishing any of his “godness.” This is what we mean when we say that God is “incarnate.” God becomes human while remaining God. God becomes ‘one of us,” lives “among us,” and is “like us in every way” - except for sin (Heb. 4).
There is no better way to express faith in a God who remains active and continues to pour out divine love for the life and healing of the world. The remarkable thing about this idea that certainly belonged to the apostles, and which the apostles preached to their church communities was that the credal statement was handed down from one generation to the next, up until this very day. This is not a matter of people gathering to remember what God did “back then” - it is a matter of confessing who Jesus Christ is now, today, in 2025 - true God of true God, begotten, not created, consubstantial with the Father, and incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary.
When catechumens recite this Creed as they approach the baptismal font, and when the community of the baptized recites it when they are gathered for the Eucharist, they are confessing that they have received the great privilege of citizenship in God’s kingdom. They are confessing belonging to a holy nation that actually has an eternal city. They belong to the body of Christ that was, is, and shall be - and a body of Christ with the risen, living Jesus Christ as its head. This is why it is not only possible, but also essential for us to marvel at Jesus Christ, true God of true God and human - not only as one who lived among us over 2,000 years ago, but who remains among us now and forever.
Faith in Christ and Christian Higher Education
The presence of the incarnate God in our midst has consequences for us, to be sure. Let us then move on to the penultimate point of this reflection - the significance of this confession of faith in Jesus Christ for Christian higher education and its future. I realize that many of us are very tired of the problems afflicting higher education these days. We know that our university may be standing on a precipice, at a turning point that may be consequential for the future of its thriving. Conversations about the role of Christian faith and identity are a top priority of this university’s immediate future and its incoming president.
The spirit of scientific inquiry and the threat of religious restrictions on academic freedom figure into these conversations. We may ask how the continuation of a Christian university might contribute to the university’s well being. The history of this university certainly offers voices of witness to the ways this community might draw upon the wells of faith in Christ who is true God of true God for the life and healing of the world.
I would like to propose that the Christians who gathered for the council of Nicaea adapted to their circumstances. They attended a gathering convened by a new emperor, and stretched themselves to compose a credal statement by employing language (one in essence, or consubstantial) that did not belong to the Scriptures and Christian tradition. While Christians have historically been part of the problem, they have also proven willing to address the problem by marshaling formidable intellectual resources anchored in their faith in the risen Christ. Reducing or eliminating the Christian voice from the public discourse of higher education will impoverish it and will hasten the dilution of scientific pursuit by depriving it of its queen - theology. This 1,700 year anniversary of the council of Nicaea is an occasion for Christian higher education to renew its commitment to Christian identity, not as a political agenda to police the inquiry of the academic schools and departments on this campus, but to remind the world that faith and reason make a remarkable and beautiful pair.
The Body of Christ and the World
The final point concerns the obvious problems we see in the world today. Horrific wars are taking lives in Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, and elsewhere. The world order is experiencing its own version of death and rebirth while producing saber-rattling that threatens to take more lives and impoverish global well-being. Ideologues are seizing the global pulpit enabled by digital media to question truth and promote hate and destruction of their opponents. It is not only Christian higher education that stands on a precipice - it is also the world.
The council of Nicaea inaugurated a relationship between the imperial state and the churches that influenced the Church’s apparatus, its institutions, and its exterior life, even through imperial decline, the rise of the nation-state, and the post-Soviet period. Political leaders of all ages have seized the opportunity to manipulate the Christian narrative and fuse it with power agendas for earthly glory. This anniversary of the council of Nicaea reminds us that its core message is not and was never about some messianic age that would be manifest in a particular empire, country, political party, or leader.
The very fact that ordinary people of all nations, languages, genders, and ages have memorized the Nicene Creed bears witness to its interior message; that message is that the power of God is in the only-begotten son of God who voluntarily took up the cross, carried it, and gave his life on it.
He gave his life on the cross out of love for all of us. He gave his life on the cross to annul death. He gave his life on the cross for the life and healing of the world. He rose from the dead and continues to make his dwelling in us, his body.
And yes, his body is wounded, his body bears the marks of longsuffering, but his body continues to live in this world, and the life of his body bears witness to the truth that love pouring itself out for the sake of the weak, the vulnerable, the afflicted, the hungry, the imprisoned, the sick, the bereaved, and the persecuted is the only everlasting power.
The body of Christ, in spite of her wounds, has endured through the reign of Constantine, the holy Roman empire, the Byzantine, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, British, Soviet, and all other empires and nation-states of this world. And it will continue to endure because of the life breathed into it by its head, Jesus Christ.
The pastors who gathered at the council of Nicaea ministered in an enormously violent and troubled world. They responded to the challenges of their time by confessing faith in the Christ revealed and given to them by the apostles. Today’s body of Christ can overcome the tribulations of this time and of the world by continuing to bear witness to the love of God poured out by Christ until the end of the ages. And it is in this way that our remembrance of Nicaea and its confession of faith in Jesus Christ, true God of true God, that we can contribute to the life and healing of the world today.