Editor’s Note: This essay is part of our extended series celebrating the 1,700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed.
When the Emperor began to pay attention to the dispute between Arius and Alexander, it took some time for him, as Lewis Ayres notes, “to see their dispute as more serious” than the trivial matter it appeared to be at first glance. Whether Constantine saw anything more than a threat to the unity of his newly acquired empire is likely lost to history. But in fact there was a deep fissure, beyond the very public scandal of the dispute, in its wider liturgical and theo-political implications. An awareness of this looming threat is clear in the brief eschatology of the Council’s statement.
The closing clause of the first long sentence of the Nicene Creed—“who is coming to judge the living and the dead”—seems trivial compared to the great energy pumped into the ontological debate within which it is sandwiched. There is no question that the origin of the Son’s relation to the Father and the status of the problematic Greek letter iota in homo[i]ousian were the principal focus of both Emperor and Council.
Still, the narrative of the Incarnation, or “economy of salvation” in the vocabulary of the Greek theologians, culminating in the coming judgment, serves as the bulky center of the Council’s final statement. The implication is that the ousia controversy, the story we tell first when explaining the Nicene Creed, is not simply a matter of syntactical clarity. In fact, the syntax in question has everything to do with the Church’s trust in the unfolding of a salvation event, an event whose “last word” treats Christ’s return in judgment. How are these issues connected?
Though Nicene eschatology has receded some from the theological horizon after 1,700 years, it was once, if not foregrounded, at least a salient feature of the conciliar tradition’s interpretive charge. This becomes clear if we look at the lead Nicene protagonists in the later fourth century. As Basil of Caesarea (d. 379) emerged as the inheritor of Athanasius’ mantle and the elder statesman of the so-called Cappadocian fathers, he drew attention not only to the importance of the Son’s ontological connection to the Father, but also to a portion of the eschatological connection to which the Creed gestures.
In his Hexaemeron, a series of commentaries on the six days of creation, Basil suggests that a trust in God as the creator of all things is essential to the coherence of God’s judgment on all things. “God is the Creator of the universe, and the just Judge who rewards all the actions of life according to their merit.” Those who cannot see him as Creator have no reason to trust him as Judge. But if the one who is “Goodness without measure” made the world, then his initial judgment, “it is good,” is the one we can trust. So too is his final judgment, sorting out the sins and evil of earth from the goodness that shines through.
This is one of the ways that the fourth-century Pro-Nicene theologians, to use Lewis Ayers’s term, distinguished themselves from Origen (d. 253), who in many other ways was foundational for their teachings. In Origen’s account of things, the beginnings of creation were murky; he argued that if God is unchangeably Lord, there must always be a creation for him to be Lord of. This vague logic didn’t satisfy theologians in the fourth century; Origen’s presentation was evidently perceived as unconvincing. For Basil, Origen’s account invites a resistance or challenge to eschatological finality. In other words, a creation that has no beginning in God can have no trustworthy end in God.
Basil’s connection shows that God can only judge what he creates. Others—Athanasius in the east, Augustine later in the west—draw our attention to the role of the Son or Logos in the creation. This focuses the same theological impulse on the second hypostasis/person. The Son is the divine one in whom all things came to be, and so he is also the one we hope will come to judge the living and the dead.
The Creed acknowledges this intimate connection between God’s creating and God’s judging when it grants the Son a role in both divine activities. It has something more, though, to reveal about the eschatological trustworthiness of Son. To see what this is, we’ll need to tend to the Greek.
The key to the connection between Christ’s identity and his coming in judgment is the way the Council wrestles with the word begotten. This was a key point of contention, as the Arian party insisted that unbegotten (agennetos), describes the divine essence as such. If that is the case, then the Son is not a bearer of the divine essence, not homoousian to patri. But the Son can be both begotten and God from God: this is the central insistence of the Nicene faith.
The Son then is begotten of the Father, gennathenta ek tou patros; he is also the one through whom all things are made, di’ ou ta panta egeneto. There is a rhyme, or a pun, at work here, since that latter word, egeneto, derives from the word sometimes used for created (genetos). Jesus is gennetos, and the transmitting source of all that is genetos: begotten, and the Lord of all that comes into being.
The distinction returns in the anathemas at the statement’s end: “But those who say … ‘before he was begotten he was not,’ prin gennathanai ouk an, or ‘he came to be out of nothing,’ ouk ex onton egeneto, these the Catholic and Apostolic Church condemns.” Athanasius, the early and best-known defender of Nicaea after the Council, spills a decent quantity of ink on the infamous iota of the ontological debate, the letter on which so much of the Council’s debate hung. Athanasius also had much to say, though, about another Greek letter, the no less consequential “second nu.” The Father is agennetos and agenetos, unbegotten and uncreated. The Son is gennetos and agenetos, begotten and uncreated. Why does this confusion merit a conciliar condemnation?
The critical point, as I have hinted, lies in eschatological punctuation of the opening gambit. The one under debate in the city in 325 was the one who is “coming to judge the living and the dead.” If he is to come as judge, then there must be some relation of kinship between the Son and world, even amid radical distinction. There must be, as a council nearly a millennia later would put it, a similarity within an ever-greater dissimilarity.
As God from God, begotten and not made, the Son has the authority to judge that no creature could have; as the one through all things came to be, the Son has the limitless wisdom that makes him the appropriate judge of all things.
That kinship, so important for Athanasius, would later gather steam during the theotokos debates of the fifth century, the question of whether we may call Mary “mother of God.” And the key to understanding this point, evident in Nicaea and carrying through to that later question, is found in the analogy between creation and being begotten. What happens to Jesus when he is born of Mary is what happens to all creation: he comes to be.
This is both like and unlike—admittedly radically more unlike than like, but still like—what “happens” to the Son in all eternity, as the Father’s eternally begotten. Gennetos is the pattern on which genetos forms. Put simply, being created in time is a distant analogy for being eternally begotten.
So when the Creed offers its narrative of the economy, from creation to eschaton, the key assertion is that the one who is “begotten, not made,” and through whom all things are in fact made, is the one who is coming in judgment. In his hypostasis, as Chalcedon would later develop and clarify Nicaea, Christ forms the link between the coming-to-be creature and the begotten God.
Let’s run a counterfactual to understand better. What if this were not the case? What if the one through whom all things came into being was not God from God? Or what if, as begotten, he were also made?
Then, the Creed implies, he would not be a trustworthy judge, one with both the divine authority and the excessive wisdom to render a final word on the lives of the living and the dead. There could still be a faith in the ultimately just creator God, but this creator would remain abstracted from the gospel of the man from Nazareth and the faith of those called Christians.
This potential failure of Christ’s eschatological authority is the source of what I referred to as the theological and political crisis that either raised or ought to have raised the anxiety of the Emperor. Christianity was at risk of becoming a faith in which the character on whom its entire understanding of the world hinges was one without authority to judge the actions of people, kings, and nations. Kings could go out and make war, senates could legislate, and judges could pass rulings, without concern for whether their decisions conflict with their baptisms.
Only the liturgical and dogmatic insistence that the Son is the begotten God as well as the inner principle —the logos—of all creation allows him to be the one whose last word of judgment is trustworthy and unsurpassable.
Anthony D. Baker, PhD is a Guest Writer. He is Clinton S. Quin Professor of Systematic Theology at Seminary of the Southwest, Austin, Texas. Dr. Baker is the author of several books including Diagonal Advance: Perfection in Christian Theology (Veritas, 2011) and Leaving Emmaus: A New Departure in Christian Theology (Baylor, 2021).
