Editor’s Note: This essay is part of our extended series celebrating the 1,700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed.
In his treatise On the Deity of the Son, St. Gregory of Nyssa describes the ubiquity of the fourth-century Trinitarian disputes in public consciousness:
If you ask someone to give you change, he philosophizes about the Begotten and the Unbegotten; if you inquire about the price of a loaf, you are told by way of reply that the Father is greater and the Son inferior; if you ask “Is my bath ready?” the attendant answers that the Son was made out of nothing. (PG xlvi, 557b)
As a parish priest who moonlights as a graduate student in theology, I find that Gregory’s image of a populus teeming with personal interest in the specifics of Trinitarian doctrine makes me a little nostalgic for a day when theology had more imaginative weight among Christians. If we are honest, though, for many modern believers, the ins and outs of Trinitarian doctrine seem to make little difference for Christian existence.
We are less like Gregory’s bakers and moneychangers, quibbling over the meaning of eternal generation, and more like Immanuel Kant, for whom religious faith is reducible to a set of rational ethical imperatives. Religion, for Kant, is about the practical, and therefore its claim to truth is of an entirely different order than theoretical or scientific claims. Metaphysical speculations belong under the guillotine of practical reason. The theological casualty of Kant’s view is the doctrine of the Trinity, which “has no practical relevance at all. … Whether we are to worship three or ten persons in the Divinity makes no difference” because it is inconsequential to our conduct.
Kant’s attitude toward the Trinity is as commonplace as it is forceful. After all, how could one possibly fret over metaphysical abstractions like “eternal generation,” or the distinction between begotten and made, when we face existential threats on multiple fronts?—imminent ecological crisis, war abroad, political unrest at home, the seduction of authoritarianism, and the social malaise occasioned by the penetration of technology into practically every aspect of daily life.
One has the sense that, 1,700 years later, Nicaea doesn’t matter. What does matter, at least for Kant, is something like the dictum “God is love,” which offers firm ground on which we can conduct rational and morally upright lives. We can hear the faint echo of the Prussian philosopher descending from many well-meaning pulpits of the Episcopal Church: “If it’s not about love, it’s not about God.”
Why Nicaea Today?
In the interest of hearing what Nicaea has to say, perhaps we should first bracket a few presuppositions: First, the Kantian presupposition that the value of a doctrinal utterance lies principally in its ethical practicability. Second, the more subtle (yet all too common) idea that the subject matter of the Nicene Creed is reducible to a set of abstract metaphysical claims.
By metaphysical I do not mean the idea that the creed makes determinative and normative claims about God, creation, and the history of redemption. It certainly does. I mean something closer to the sense of metaphysics used by the philosopher Jean-Luc Marion, for whom the word designates a way of thinking that proceeds by freezing the phenomenon. This is an attempt to reach behind what manifests itself, thereby capturing God within a predetermined, closed concept of Supreme Being.
The problem with such a view, for Marion, is that when we hold on to such an antecedent concept of God, it becomes very tempting to measure Christ against this “pre-owned” ontic representation (see “‘We Are Not Yet Christians’: An interview with Jean-Luc Marion” by Kenneth Woodward, Commonweal, Dec. 17, 2022). Here, God in Christ becomes an object to be comprehended, not the living Lord.
It is such a metaphysical theology in which the identity of God was a foregone conclusion that became, in the fourth century, the guiding light of the theology now called Arian. For the thinking of much of philosophical antiquity, the “being” of God is beyond all self-differentiation, absolutely One and solitary in impersonal absoluteness. God is so singularly self-caused that his whole essence may be circumscribed in a single predicate: unbegotten (see, for example, the arguments rehearsed in St. Basil’s Against Eunomius).
The difficulty with this metaphysical presupposition is what it effectively eliminates. Jesus claims “I and the Father are one,” even as “the Son can do nothing of his own accord.” The solution of the non-Nicenes was to say that Jesus effectively does not fit what is permitted within our idea of deity, and so he must be some kind of semi-divine mediator between God and man, neither fully divine nor fully human.
Marion’s skepticism toward an overly metaphysical concept of God is not unique. The diagnosis of a certain forgetfulness in Western theology—present to varying degrees in a host of Catholic and Protestant theologians of the mid-20th century—typically concludes that the modern theological West has failed to adequately metabolize what the Nicene Creed teaches about the identity of God. The 20th-century Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner said that the average Western Christian can say with confidence that “God became man,” but it matters little to him that it is specifically the Son—and not the Father or Holy Spirit—who became a human being. Theology, for Rahner, was beholden to an effectively pre-Nicene idea of God, and this produced a Church for whom the Trinity became an ultimately disposable fixture of Christian thought and existence, a Church of “mere monotheists.”
Rahner’s historical narrative of this fall from grace begins with certain passages in Augustine’s De trinitate, develops through Peter Lombard and much of Western Scholasticism, and ends with the conviction that everything important about God is already said in the treatise on the divine unity. Everything trinitarian is extra. Pieces of this narrative are shared by Pannenberg, Moltmann, Jüngel, and Jenson. It is also the most contested part of Rahner’s argument. Two recent rebuttals, both of which probe the Hegelian impulses of 20th-century trinitarian thought, are Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and its Legacy and Thomas Joseph White, O.P., The Trinity).
The Identity of Jesus
Rahner’s diagnosis of the situation of modern belief, though seriously contested in recent works from an especially Thomist perspective, is persuasive in one key regard. Once the deo facto attitude of modern Christianity is one of “mere monotheism,” then the Christian God thus conceived stands or falls with the god who was pronounced dead by Nietzsche and Heidegger. Beginning with Karl Barth, much of Western theology in the 20th century intuited that the stakes of the Trinitarian doctrine were high. The Triunity of the biblical God is not merely something interesting that theologians think and occasionally write about, but is the sine qua non of Christian theology, witness, and existence in the world. There was, accordingly, a renewed attempt after Barth to digest what Nicaea has to say after the fact, as it were.
One especially perceptive attempt to revisit Nicaea comes in the theology of Robert Jenson (d. 2017). Consider how Jenson reimagines Nicene language about the identity of Jesus. Against the philosophically overdetermined possibilities I have described, the fathers at Nicaea describe the immanent pressure of Jesus’ self-description in the Gospels by teaching that there is “One Lord Jesus Christ,” who even as he is “begotten from the Father,” is “of one being (ὁμοούσιον) with the Father,” true God from true God. The Son who is from God is nonetheless true God, entirely possessing the fullness of divine life while nonetheless possessing this same fullness in the mode of receptivity from the One he calls Father. For Nicaea, any description of the biblical God that does not take into account both the true God and the from God—both the fullness of divine life and the production of divine life—are ultimately inadequate.
In the hands of Robert Jenson, this metaphysical tremor adopts a new existential weight. For Jenson, the proclamation of “true God from true God” represents a direct rebuke of a view of eternity as timelessness, as security from the historical contingencies and vicissitudes of temporal life.
Quite to the contrary, Nicaea opens the possibility of “eventful differentiation in God himself” (Jenson, ST 1, 102). But this “eventful differentiation” is not an abstraction nor an extra metaphysical entity. It is the concrete event of Jesus, who simply is his story that he has with creatures—birth, Jewishness, ministry, death, and resurrection.
God, for Jenson, is an event, a life with a particular narratable history and a future that is opened for him in his being raised by the Father. In short, what Nicaea makes possible is a God who needs no semi-divine mediator, “for the gospel proclaims a God who is not in fact distant, whose deity is identified with a person of our history” (ST I, 103. Emphasis mine). And this means that the whole “history” of the “person”—including his death on the cross and his Resurrection into God’s future—is constitutive of what it means for God to be God.
Whether Jenson’s vision of a God who becomes actual in his history with creatures represents the historical intent of the fathers at Nicaea (it most certainly does not) is beside the point. My point, rather, is that a “revisionary metaphysics” along the line Jenson proposes at least represents an attempt to let Nicaea speak with a surplus of meaning for us today. That is, within the identification of Jesus as “God from God,” we can see the whole Gospel in nuce. No longer is God, as he was for metaphysical antiquity, solitariness, aloneness, and timelessness; he is the true God who sends himself to us as Son, the God who is his own relation with, faithfulness to, and future for us; the only God who can save us.
The Rev. Jason Eslicker is Associate Priest at Trinity Church, Upperville, Virginia and a PhD student in systematic theology at Duke University. Previous appointments include curate at Church of the Holy Family, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
