Editor’s Note: This essay is part of our extended series celebrating the 1,700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed.
I came to a living faith in Jesus Christ when I was 11 years old, an encounter that set the direction of my life. At the age of 17, however, I read The Myth of God Incarnate, a book by a distinguished group of British theologians and edited by John Hick. They argued that the Church’s Faith, as defined at the Council of Nicaea, is a pointer or a picture of who God is. It’s a myth familiar to those who study religions that, while not literally true, nonetheless tells us something that is true in another, more symbolic sense. God is like this story of the Incarnation. God loves us and reaches out to us. It is not, though, a definition of the actual reality of God or a description of what God actually did in Jesus Christ.
That book, and the questions it posed, took me on a journey to study theology at university. I had no intention of giving my life to a myth. So I determined to spend my undergraduate days grappling with Scripture and thinking as widely and deeply as I could, to attempt an answer to Jesus’ question, “And you, who do you say I am?” (Matt. 16:15).
To wrestle with that question, I would need to engage with those who, over the centuries, had grappled with Scripture and who had themselves thought deeply about the identity of Jesus Christ and the reality of God. By the end of my university study, I came to the view that the Incarnational and Trinitarian faith of the Church, as set out by the Councils of Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381, was true to Scripture and true to who God is. I could give my life to this faith with intellectual integrity and spiritual energy.
The 1,700th Anniversary of the Council of Nicaea sent me on another journey—this time a pilgrimage to Nicaea and Constantinople. Without a car it’s still quite an effort to travel from modern day Istanbul to Iznik, the ancient city of Nicaea. I admired the bishops who made the journey in the fourth Century, especially Ossius and Caecilianus from the West. No doubt they were all grateful to the Emperor for paying their way. I imagine that, like me, they found the destination worth the stresses and strains of the journey.
Iznik is nestled in the hills on the shores of a vast lake that takes its name from the city. The city walls are still in place and most of the contemporary city lies within its boundaries. What an impression the bishops with their accompanying priests and deacons—about 2,000 people altogether—must have made on what most of us today would call a small town during their two-month stay. What a sight it would have been when the Emperor arrived from his residence in Nicomedia, modern-day Izmit, perhaps through the imperial gate that is still there, even though probably rebuilt over the years.
Iznik is prone to earthquakes, so there’s nothing left of the great basilica described so vividly by Eusebius of Caesarea. There is still a fairly sizable Church to see. Although not original to the time, it is very old and built on an ancient site. One can imagine at least some of the bishops with their clergy gathering for the Eucharist in a very similar church and others like it that once filled the city. Well preserved—and respectfully so—it’s now part museum and part mosque; no longer a working church, and it hasn’t been for centuries.
The remains of Nicaea’s amphitheatre can also be seen. It is where Christians would have suffered greatly before the Edict of Milan in 313. The amphitheatre was gradually put out of business by the rise of Christianity, with its different ethic of entertainment. A few frescoes can still be seen on its ruined walls, giving testimony to the fortitude of the Christians who died there, whose faith is no longer practiced in their town. Mary can be seen, faintly, holding her son, the Christ, before the world—the Word made flesh within her.
The way back to Istanbul was easier. I discovered what I expect the bishops knew better, that traveling across the water could ease the journey. The site of the Council of Constantinople is still to be seen in the modern city. The bishops gathered for their deliberations, again with the support, though not this time in the presence, of the Emperor in the aptly named Hagia Eirene, the Church of the Holy Peace. Used for many different purposes since the end of Byzantium, including an armament store, it’s now another museum, a rather empty space, devoid of most Christian signification apart from—thankfully—the large cross embedded in the golden vault above the apse.
The grand Hagia Sophia, the Church of the Holy Wisdom, close by, doubles up as a mosque and a museum. The church has been mostly stripped of its frescoes and mosaics, but a few remain in the main prayer space, shrouded by curtains. Again Mary, mentioned more times in the Quran than in the Bible, remains—shrouded but still visible to the determined eye, bearing witness to the Incarnation, whispering the mystery of the Trinity, still pondering these things in her heart.
On the other side of the square from Hagia Sophia stands the magnificent Blue Mosque, built a thousand years later. Like a mirror image, it looks strikingly similar to the church, but you soon begin to see that it’s a reverse image, theologically speaking—certainly when you step inside. By the time of its construction, Hagia Sophia would have been an active mosque with towering minarets on the outside and Quranic verses on the inside “correcting” what remained of Christian content. Stepping into the Blue Mosque, very much a thriving place of Islamic prayer and devotion, one senses that it was built to express with more clarity than a converted Church could manage the purity of (Islamic) faith stated so simply in the Quran’s Sura 112, a Sura that, in fact, bears the title “Purity of Faith,” and was said by Islam’s Prophet to be equal to one-third of the Quran.
Say, “O Prophet,” “He is Allah—One ‘and Indivisible’; Allah—the Sustainer ‘needed by all.’ He has never had offspring, nor was he born. And there is none comparable to Him.”
That is the translation of Sura 112 that I saw in the Yeni Cami Mosque, also not far from Hagia Eirene, where the council met to affirm and expand the work of Nicaea, and close to its sister church, Hagia Sophia, built to give glory to the Incarnate and Trinitarian reality of God defined by these two foundational councils.
My theological pilgrimage during Nicaea’s anniversary year has been greatly helped by Lewis Ayers’ Nicaea and Its Legacy (2004), which speaks of “two trajectories” discernible in the New Testament that sooner or later would need to be resolved. On the one hand, there was the movement that recognized the distinction between the Father and the Son. For Jesus in John’s Gospel prayed that “all people … may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent,” declaring, “I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do” (John 17:2-4).
On the other hand, there was the movement that recognized the closeness, even sameness, of Father and Son. For Jesus prayed on the same occasion that those who believe in him “may all be one,” saying, “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (John 17:21).
Arius was heavily committed to the first trajectory. The Son, for Arius, according to his Thalia, was “fathered” by God “as the beginning of all creatures.” Begotten by God’s “will,” the Son may be called “Mighty God.” However, “he possesses nothing proper to God, in the real sense of propriety, for he is not equal to God, nor yet is he of the same substance.” The result of Arius’ theological logic is that, because the Son is different in substance (that is, in nature or being or reality) from the Father, “God is inexpressible to the Son, for he is what he is for himself, and that is unutterable.”
Others on the side of difference and distinction put matters more subtly than Arius. None were persuasive to Athanasius, and those of like mind, who felt deep in their scriptural bones and spiritual guts that Arius’ logic lost the heart of the gospel enshrined in Scripture, encapsulated in the baptismal formula and embodied in the prayer and worship of the Church.
Athanasius and those with him contended for the Nicene homoousios not in order to blur the distinction between Father and Son or, in any sense, to erode the difference between God and the creation. They did so to preserve the radical Christian convictions about God’s self-revelation and our costly redemption—that what we learn of God in Jesus Christ is true (God is “utterable,” and we have heard that Word), and that the action of Christ is the action of God (and so our salvation is sure).
Nicaea did not resolve the tension between the two trajectories of “difference” and “sameness.” That would have to wait until Constantinople and the brilliance of the Cappadocians with their concept of the one ousia (one reality of divinity) of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the three hypostases of each (their distinct identities in the oneness of the same ousia).
The Council of Nicaea, though, did safeguard Christian faith from the end that Arius’ logic would have taken the Church, an end that would have stripped away what C.S. Lewis was to call, centuries later, Christianity’s one grand miracle: “the Christian assertion being that what is beyond all space and time, what is uncreated, eternal, came into nature, into human nature, descended into His own universe, and rose again, bringing nature up with Him.” See Lewis’ essay, “The Grand Miracle” in Lesley Walmsley’s edited collection of Lewis’ writings published in 2000.
It is somewhat disconcerting to visit modern-day Iznik and Istanbul—these cities once so full of churches where great and profound decisions were made by bishops in council— to find so little evidence of Christian life today, despite remaining home to the Ecumenical Patriarch. Nevertheless, it is good for Christians to be faced with the full outworking of the stripping of the “one grand miracle” that was an inevitable consequence of Arius’ theology. We see it demonstrated clearly by the sharp theological mind of Islam and its imageless mosques.
Perhaps there is, though, ironic comfort in knowing that the magnificent Blue Mosque opposite Hagia Sophia and not far from Hagia Eirene shines with the splendor of the sun glinting off tiles made in Nicaea; and that the faith of a woman is inscribed in Quranic words above the most important section of the Mosque, the woman who bore the one Christians call God’s beloved Son.
The Rt. Rev. Dr. Christopher Cocksworth is Dean of Windsor, having been previously Bishop of Coventry and Principal of Ridley Hall Cambridge after serving in parochial and chaplaincy ministry. He is also a member of the Foundation and Board of Directors of TLC.
