Christian Churches Mark 1,700th Anniversary of the Nicene Creed

“By schisms rent asunder, by heresies distressed.”

Those lyrics, from the third verse of Samuel John Stone’s “Church’s One Foundation,” written in 1866 to rebut heresies about biblical inspiration then ripping through the Church of England, have a timeless quality about them.

They could have been written in A.D. 48–50 when the nascent church convened in Jerusalem to disabuse adherents of the notion that new Gentile believers had to adopt Jewish ways (see Acts 15). And they could have been repeated in every century since, starting already in the next one.

A second-century teacher named Marcion tried to scrub Scripture of the Old Testament — he thought it was about a different God from the New Testament God, an evil creator god of the Jews. Gnosticism, also from the early centuries of the church, held that special spiritual knowledge (gnosis), apart from that revealed in Scripture, was necessary for salvation. Then there was Montanism and Donatism and Docetism and Apollinarianism… There is no end of heretical “isms.”

But the major heresy of the church’s first four centuries was Arianism. Arius, a presbyter from Alexandria, held that Jesus was a created being, not co-eternal with God, and thus not fully God. Said he: “If the Father begat the Son, then he who was begotten had a beginning in existence, and from this it follows there was a time when the Son was not.”

Arianism was no small offshoot of the orthodox faith. Arius was no ascetic crank hurling anathemas from atop a desert pillar. Arianism claimed thousands of followers from all stations of life, from slaves to sovereigns. Indeed, Emperors Constantius II and Valens subscribed to the teachings of the subordinationists, and priests, monks, bishops, and whole congregations aligned with the anti-Trinitarians.

So riven was the faith that a church-wide council was called by Emperor Constantine. That convention, labeled the Council of Nicaea, brought about 300 church bishops together in A.D. 325 in the Bithynian town of Nicaea (today the Turkish city of Iznik) to settle, in repeatable, creedal terms, the divine nature of God the Son and his relationship to God the Father.

This year, 2025, marks the 1,700th anniversary of this historic council. Pope Francis hopes to celebrate the anniversary in Turkey later this year, and commemorations are scheduled throughout the anniversary year, some at the ancient site itself.

In that original conclave, Athanasius, the orthodox champion, was set against Eusebius of Nicomedia, who represented the Arians. The great church father led the council to embrace the Greek term homoousios (“of one substance”) to describe the Son’s relationship with the Father and reject the weaker Arian term homoiousios (“of similar substance”).

There was, in this case, an iota of difference between the two words, and a crucial iota it was. The historian Edward Gibbon is said to have remarked that never had there been so much energy spent on one vowel.

A preliminary creed was penned to spell out the orthodox belief, which was then refined at the Council of Constantinople in 381. This revised statement has come to be known as the Nicene Creed, which Christians now recite in worship. It confesses Jesus as “the Only Begotten Son of God … true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father.”

Heresies Never Die

Arianism, alas, did not die a quick and expeditious death. It lingered for decades following the council, even centuries, and indeed, distresses the church to this day. It manifests itself in theology that rejects Jesus’s divinity. We see it in certain sects on the borderlands of the faith — Unitarians, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, all of whom deviate from historic, creedal Christianity.

But most prolific, and potent, is the emphasis on Jesus the teacher, Jesus the example, Jesus the wise rabbi, Jesus the brave martyr but not Jesus who is God from God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father, the father’s eternal Son made man.

The view mostly surfaces publicly with liberal theologians who long ago abandoned the miraculous. For them, Jesus remains a potent figure, indeed, as Father Dwight Longenecker wrote, a human being who is “so fulfilled and self-actualized that he has ‘become divine.’”

The difference between ancient Arians and those bearing that heretical mantle today, Longenecker muses, is

that Arius was actually explicit in his teaching. The modern heretics are not. They inhabit our seminaries, our monasteries, our rectories and presbyteries. They are the modernist clergy who dominate the mainstream Protestant denominations and who are too many in number within the Catholic Church as well. They are not a separate sect or denomination. Instead they infest the true church like some hideous parasite.

And, alas, most shockingly, they have influenced those sitting in the pews of some of the most conservative churches in America – evangelical churches. A study from 2022 found that evangelical believers were far more positive about human nature than in previous years — 65 percent believe that “everyone is born innocent in the eyes of God”; 48 percent no longer think God is omniscient and never changing but now hold that God “learns and adapts to different circumstances.”

Where the modern-day Arians have gained traction is with this remarkable finding — 43 percent of evangelicals agreed with this statement: “Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.”

The Council of Nicaea was concerned exclusively with doctrine, with belief. We celebrate its anniversary in a world that has gone in the opposite direction. Our world is defiantly anti-dogmatic. Doctrine is considered irrelevant at best, “divisive” at worst. Concern about doctrine may have been necessary in an earlier age, we’re told, but now, here today in our postmodern world, it only tears apart Christians who should be united against … oh, let’s see … injustice and sexism and climate change and cisheteronormativity. Creeds divide, the old ecumenists used to say, and deeds unite.

Christianity is a propositional faith, and to diminish the importance of the propositions by definition erodes the faith. But doctrine informs ethics as well; what you believe determines what you do.

The Council of Nicaea taught us the importance of pure and correct belief. Let’s hope celebrating its 1,700th anniversary this year will jog the conscience of the modern church to revisit doctrinal theology. The modern church ignores it to its peril.

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