Nicaea - Renewing the Faithનમૂનો

We believe in one God, the Father, the almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.

In the midst of a world of multi-religious pluralism, the early Christians boldly proclaimed that they believed in only one God. In fact, he was the only God, the God of our Lord Jesus Christ. For this confession, many were persecuted, and others were put to death, often on the accusation of ‘atheism’, that is for denying the recognized gods of the Roman pantheon and its subordinate analogies among the nations. This one God was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, as revealed in the scriptures of the Old Testament, and enshrined in the Shema, the great confession of the Jewish people: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deut. 6:4). This one God, the Christians perceived, had been revealed by the Lord Jesus Christ, and confirmed by the Holy Spirit the Lord and giver of life, as the Father of all who believed in Jesus Christ (John 1:12). There were indications in the Old Testament that God was like a father to his people (2 Samuel 7:14), but it was the Lord Jesus himself who taught his disciples to pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven” (Matt 6:9).

Unlike the gods of Greece and Rome, however, God the Father was Almighty, and had no equal or partner. His reign extended from the heaven of the heavens to the world below the earth, and everything in between. At the end of the age when Christ would become all in all, every knee in heaven and on earth and under the earth would bow to him, confessing him as Lord to the glory of God the Father. In the great iconography of the eastern church, Christ is often depicted as reigning above the earth from heaven in the dome of many basilicas as the Christ Pandokrator, Christ the Almighty, sharing in the divinity of God the Father Almighty as his only begotten Son.

This one God, they confessed, was the maker of heaven and earth over which he ruled, not as a usurper or as an inheritor like the Greek gods who stole the world from their fathers, but as the designer and creator who made all things through his Son and for his Son (Col. 1:16). In fact, John the beloved disciple professed: “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made” (John 1:3). This encompassed not only the visible world of material existence, but the invisible world of the spirit as well: the world of powers and principalities in the highest of places (Eph. 6:12). It is for this reason, that an intimate relationship existed between the Father and the Son, who was the image of the invisible God (1 Col 1:15), or, as the writer to the Hebrews put it, “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Heb. 1:3).

In 325 on May 20th, the council of Nicaea was inaugurated by emperor Constantine who had brought together the great and the good of Christian leaders throughout the known world to resolve lingering debates about the nature of this relationship between the one and only God, who was the creator of heaven and earth, and his one and only Son, Jesus Christ, whom the Christians confessed as Lord. A priest named Arius had taught that Jesus was unlike the Father in his uncreated and eternal nature, and that God the Father almighty was alone and unparalleled in his divinity. Christ might be the first born of all creation, but he was not like the father who was uncreated and eternal.

Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, and his protege Athanasius, understood how wrong and dangerous this way of conceiving God the Father and God the Son was to the revelation of scripture and to the salvation of mankind, and so in their great defense of the divinity of the Son they began their credal confession with the ancient affirmation of faith in the one God that Abraham had believed in, who was the Father that Jesus had revealed, and who's ever and almighty power extended from heaven to earth and from the seen to the unseen.

This was no private confession or belief but a common inheritance, the paradosis, the tradition, articulated in the great “we” of the one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. 1700 years later, we who believe and confess, belong to this great “we” that is the beloved body of Christ, his Bride, the Church. May we ever so live and believe!

Prayer

Almighty and ever living God who rules and reigns in heaven above, and on the earth, through all things that have come into being and who can only be known through your One and Only Son Jesus Christ, we praise you and thank you and love you for allowing us to call you Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad, the Lord, our God, the Lord who is One. In this anniversary year, may we come to know you ever more deeply by faith, in your Son Jesus Christ.

John-Paul Lotz, Ph.D., serves as Associate Professor of Church History & Christian Theology at the Regent University School of Divinity.