Jesus as God: A Survey of Church History with W. Robert Godfrey

GODFREY: In our last session we set the stage for this new controversy that the emperor Constantine was going to have to face in the life of the church, the controversy sparked by the teaching of Arius and by the sharp criticism that Arius received from his bishop in Alexandria, Bishop Alexander. The bishop thought, of course, he had a right to discipline Arius, but Arius had powerful friends and Arius soon was appealing outside of Alexandria for help, and eventually they both appealed to the emperor to weigh in and to make a verdict. Constantine liked to be appealed to, it's one of the nice parts of the job of being emperor -- you get to make decisions, you get to run things, but Constantine wasn't quite sure what ought to be done about this. And then someone, we don't really know who, someone made the suggestion that there ought to be a great council of the church called and held.

Now before this there had been smaller councils, regional councils of the church held, often called synods that would bring bishops together to discuss local issues and try to settle them. But no one had ever suggested a big council to represent the whole church, and Constantine liked this idea, and so he called for a large council of bishops to meet, about three hundred bishops came to this council, and is known to history as the first ecumenical council of the church. Now ecumenical in that context means universal -- the first universal council of the church. And Constantine called for it to meet in the city of Nicaea. Nicaea is a small city about fifty miles outside of Constantinople, or modern day Istanbul.

And Constantine chose that city in part because it was small and so it was easy to control in case there was any rioting that might go on, and he chose it also because he had an imperial palace there -- he had lots of imperial palaces, but this was one of them -- and so he went himself to this council, and indeed in effect presided over the council, and it was a most remarkable gathering. Here were bishops, some of them still maimed from having been tortured in imperial prisons as young men, now invited to the imperial palace by the emperor himself. And in the room where they met, Constantine greeted them dressed in gold and purple, all his most impressive, majestic best, and he addressed the council as "most dear brothers," a remarkable condescension on the part of the emperor, to embrace these bishops who, as I say, only decades before had been persecuted, now as brothers welcomed to this council. So they were really impressed, which meant they were more inclined to kind of go along with what Constantine wanted.

Nonetheless the debate was ferocious. How are we going to solve this theological problem? Who is Jesus in relation to the Father? How can we understand that? What is the best way to express it? Arius was there, supported by a variety of bishops, and Alexander was there, supported by a variety of bishops, and by his new, young, right-hand man, then just a deacon in the church, by the name of Athanasius. Athanasius, one of the great heroes of the ancient church period, later recognized to be a saint by the Western and Eastern churches. Athanasius, a man of great courage, of great faithfulness, and of great insight into theological truth, and Athanasius would later become bishop of Alexandria, and become the key defender of orthodoxy, and he would actually be exiled five different times, thrown out of his church, and then called back, always defending the truth. And so, associated with Athanasius came the Latin phrase, Athanasius contra mundum -- Athanasius against the world. He stood against the whole world in the name of truth and he ultimately prevailed.

So as a young man he's there at Nicaea, and this debate goes on. How are we to understand the relationship of the Father to Jesus, the Father to the Son? Now when you think about it, there are a limited number of options as to how to understand the relationship of the Father to the Son. The one that Arius was promoting really was that the Father created the Son. So the Father is God, and the Son is a creature. He may be a wonderful creature, He may be a creature created before the world was created, He may be superior to all human beings, but He's only a creature. And that position of Arius is still around today. It's the position the Jehovah's Witnesses hold to, that's what they will try to tell you when they knock on the door. So that's one idea -- that the Father creates the Son.

Another idea is that there are really two or more Gods. That the Father is God and the Son is God, but they're different Gods. That's kind of what the Mormons teach. But that of course runs against the whole Jewish tradition that Christianity had inherited that there is one God. If there's anything you learn from the Old Testament, it's that there is one and only one God. So, if there is only one God, the option that the Father and the Son are different Gods doesn't really work. There was another option advanced by some in the early part of the church called modalism, and modalism says that there's just one God, and Father and Son are just different names for the one God. So when Jesus is on earth, He's the Son, that's His title, but His person is really the person of the Father, because there's only one God. And these people were actually willing to say the Father died on the cross. Well, immediately you can see that really sounds strange, doesn't it? There's nothing of that in the Bible. So this modalism protected the oneness of God, but it didn't really protect the distinction between the Father and the Son. And so there were options that were, in a sense, easy to rule out. There are still modalists today, there are Oneness Pentecostals -- have you ever heard of the

Oneness Pentecostals? They deny the Trinity, they say there's just one God, Father and Son are just titles for the same person. At this council then, there was this discussion, "Well, how can we express the fact that the Father and the Son are both divine, but are distinct?" And they came up with a word, homoousion in Greek, which is translated "same substance" in English. The Father and the Son share the same divine substance, they are homo, which is the Greek word for same, ousion, which is the Greek word for being or substance or essence. They are the same substance. Athanasius and Bishop Alexander liked that word; they thought this was the word that would be the trap to catch Arius. This is the word that would flush him out and show how heterodox he was. Arius and defenders said, "Well you can't impose that word on us, that's not a Biblical word, we're just being Biblical." You always have to worry about people who resist theological technical terms in the name of being Biblical, and at least examine whether they're not trying to hide something. Athanasius saw, "We need a technical word

to flush him out and really make clear his problem." When Constantine heard that Alexander and Athanasius liked this word he rallied around. Again, we don't know if he really understood what he was doing, but at least his instincts were not bad at that moment, and so they wrote a confession, they wrote a creed, the Nicene Creed. I don't know if some of you know that creed. Well, the critical part of the Nicene Creed is what it says about Jesus, and what it says about Jesus is: "He is God of God, Light of light, very God of very God, begotten not made" -- see, there's the denial that He's a creature as Arius had taught -- "begotten not made, being of the same substance with the Father by whom all things were made," and that's where this one word in Greek, two words in English, is brought into the creed, and Arius hated it, his supporters didn't like it, and Constantine came up with the clinching theological argument. He said, "You either sign the creed, or you're exiled."

And it was amazing how effective that theological argument was, and how many people rallied around to affirm that, in fact, Jesus was of the same substance with the Father. The council of Nicaea did some other very important things that we often overlook. This is in 325, Nicaea in 325. It did some disciplinary things for the life of the church. It set the date of Easter. Every time we celebrate Easter we are following the council of Nicaea. We may not remember that, but you know it's a very strange calculation by how we calculate Easter every year, but that was decided at the Council of Nicaea. It was decided so Easter would always fall on Sunday, because Easter celebrates the resurrection of Christ, which happened on Sunday. Nicaea also passed regulations about the disciplinary life of the church.

Every newly elected bishop has to be approved by other bishops in the area. Any person excommunicated can only be received back into the church by the bishop who excommunicated him. And the sixth canon of the Council of Nicaea said that Rome, Antioch, and Alexandria should be given special recognition to hear appeals of issues that can't be settled locally by the bishops, so there's that recognition of these important special sees? So this discipline was very important and it became very important, particularly relative to Arius later, because Arius was excommunicated after Nicaea by Bishop Alexander, and that meant that Nicaea had said Arius could never be brought back into the church except by the bishop of Alexandria. And Arius refused to sign -- some of his supporters claimed later that when they signed the creed, they had inserted an iota -- a little i in the Greek word changing it from homoousion to homoiousion. And the word homoi means similar.

So they said, "We didn't really say He was of the same substance with the Father, we said he was of a similar substance with the Father." They probably didn't really do it, but they claimed they did later, and what the church discovered after Nicaea is that instead of having two parties, they now had three. This is often the result of a church council, when you try to solve a split. So you have the Nicaean orthodox, who say homoousion -- the same substance, and then you have the Semiarians, as they come to be known, who say homoiousion -- similar substance, and then you have the Radical Arians who say heteroousion -- a different substance. And you have these parties now sort of warring at each other and Constantine is not happy. And over time, Constantine becomes convinced by the Semiarians that this is sort of a battle in a tea cup and the best way is just force everybody back together. And that's what Constantine orders. Everybody should just get along. The problem is, for everybody to get back together, Athanasius, now bishop of Alexandria, has to lift the ban of excommunication against Arius. And guess what? He refuses to do it. And guess what? He's exiled and deposed by the emperor, and a new bishop is put in his place who'll

do what the emperor tells him to do. And so, there's going to be a grand ceremony for Arius to be received back into the church, for the ban of excommunication to be officially lifted and his supporters are all so excited and the night before this is to happen, Arius dies. And Athanasius and all his supporters say, "You see? God struck him down." And Arius' supporters said, "See? Athanasius and his supporters poisoned him." It was wild times back then. We don't know for sure what happened, but it's very unlikely that Athanasius poisoned him or anybody like that. In any case, now Arius is removed, but the controversy isn't solved. There is this ongoing struggle, this ongoing problem, and for another fifty, sixty years it'll go up and down. Athanasius will go in and out of his office. Emperors will come and go, and different ones will take different sides. All three of Constantine's sons will succeed in various ways to the throne, and then they will die and a nephew of Constantine's will come to the throne in the middle of the century, known to history as Julian the Apostate.

Julian was raised a Christian, appeared to be a Christian, but the moment he came to the throne, he renounced Christianity and tried to restore the old pagan religion. He was the last pagan emperor of Rome. And Julian decided the very best way to ruin Christianity was to just let all the different Christian groups fight with one another as openly as possible, and Julian was in some ways kind of clever about that. He also wanted to revitalize Judaism as much as possible, and Julian called upon the Jews to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, and actually some effort was made to begin the process of rebuilding the temple. A Christian historian of the time claims that when they went to dig on the temple mount fire came forth from the earth and killed those who tried to rebuild the temple. Indiana Jones should have been there, we'd have been able to find out exactly what happened, but it's a wild time under Julian. He only reigned about four or five years or he could have done a lot of damage to the Christian cause, but he died, and as he lay dying he is supposed to have said, "You have won, pale Galilean," so he sort of conceded that he failed in his

effort to revitalize paganism and to destroy Christianity. What did happen then was that orthodoxy began to establish itself, and finally a new emperor, Theodosius, in 381 calls a follow-up ecumenical council, the second ecumenical council at Constantinople, and it reiterates, it reiterates what Nicaea had said about orthodoxy. And this then really is the final moment of the victory of Trinitarian orthodoxy. It is at this moment that the church has come solidly, clearly, irrevocably to embrace the doctrine of the Trinity. Now that's not to say, when the Jehovah Witness knocks on your door and says, "Well, the Trinity isn't in the Bible, and the doctrine of the Trinity's only a late development," this is not to say that earlier Christians didn't believe in the Trinity -- they did, but it is to say that this is the moment at which Trinitarian orthodoxy really, really triumphs.

Now I understand that R.C. did a series called The Mystery of the Trinity, and the Trinity as a doctrine can be difficult, can't it? It's sometimes a difficult doctrine to explain to people, and we've seen that in some of the critique of Islam against Christianity, "Well you claim to believe in one God, but you really have three Gods," and it's hard to explain to outsiders, sometimes hard to really grasp as insiders the doctrine of the Trinity. But one thing we have to hold on to is that the essential Trinitarian teaching is Biblically clear and simple. That's not to say there aren't lots of things to explore, and lots of ways in which we need to deepen our understanding of the Trinity, but when we speak of the Trinity we say, "There is one God." We do not compromise it. That's what the Bible teaches, that's what we believe, there is one God; there is only one God.

But as we look at the Bible, we have many verses that say very clearly, "The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God." Those statements are clear in the New Testament. Also we find clearly stated in the New Testament, the Father is not the Son, and the Son is not the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Father, so very clearly we have in the Bible all of the critical working pieces of the doctrine of the Trinity -- One God, three Persons who are all divine, and the Persons are distinct from one another, but still one God. Now the mystery is we can't exactly explain how that can be, but the pieces individually are really very clear and simple, and the fact that we can't explain it shouldn't be such a huge surprise, should it -- that we can't understand God? That's not a huge surprise. In fact, you know when you pause and think about it, most of things we say about God really boil down to saying, "He's not like us. We're finite," it means we're limited in time and space, and we say, "God is infinite." Do you really understand infinity?

If you do, come and talk to me after, because I don't. What infinite really is is not finite. We're finite, we understand that, and we understand that God is not finite, although exactly what it means to be not finite is kind of beyond us. We're time bound, and God is eternal, which means he's not time bound, but exactly what it means to be not time bound is beyond our experience. We can talk about it, we can have ideas about it, but we can't fully comprehend it, even what it would be like to be omniscient, to know everything, to have all power, to be, as the theologians put it, immense, filling all things without taking up any space. All of these are true things about God that we derive from Scripture, but in each one of them we recognize it goes beyond what we can fully understand about God. So we shouldn't be surprised that His Trinitarian existence goes beyond what we can fully understand.

Athanasius was not standing up for a rational principle. He was not using a technical theology to establish the reign of rationality. He was standing up for the Bible. He was standing up for the fullness of what the Bible said about God and about Jesus, and that's why this Nicaean orthodoxy has really stood the test of time, and has served the church so well. So as we come to the end of this lecture, we see the important understanding that was reached about Jesus in His relationship to God. And in the next lecture we're going to come back and look at the struggle of the church to understand Jesus in His relation to humanity. If Jesus is fully divine, what does that imply about His humanity? And we'll look at that next time. Thank you.