"The fictional story of the Council of Nicaea suggests that Constantine wanted to elevate the humble man Jesus to God status as an instrument of state control. The truth of the matter is that Constantine had no role in the debate beyond sponsoring the six-to-eight-week conference and giving his welcoming address. It is unlikely he even understood the subtleties and significance of the arguments. The debate revolved around the recent views of a Christian priest in Alexandria named Arius, who had proposed that Jesus was a bridge between humanity and divinity,
not the full incarnation of God himself. This was an innovation. Ever since the first century, Christians had referred to Jesus
as God. They took Old Testament passages that referred to the Creator and applied them directly to Jesus. They sang hymns to Jesus as Lord of heaven and earth. And they occasionally came right out and declared that Jesus was God. But this puzzled philosophically minded pagans who wondered how on earth
absolute Infinity (God) could be related to
finitude (a Jew named Jesus). Arius's solution was to say that Jesus was not
actually God but a godlike creature. He put his ideas in a poem titled
Thalia ("Banquet") and in popular songs to be sung in churches and elsewhere.
Arius's ideas spread. At some points in the next thirty years 'Arianism' could have become the majority position. Constantine just wanted to stop all the arguing. Somewhere between two hundred and fifty and three hundred and twenty church officials, mainly bishops, attended the Council of Nicaea. Only two voted in favour of Arius's proposal. The rest affirmed, 'We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,' as the resulting Nicene Creed puts it, 'the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one Being with the Father."
1Courage and Godspeed,
ChadFootnote:
1. John Dickson, Bullies and Saints: An Honest Look at the Good and Evil of Christian History, p. 73-74.
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