Nicaea Didn't Invent the Trinity (What Happened Is Worse)

The creed signed in 325 gives the Holy Spirit one short line and no description at all. The thing those bishops did set up outlived the argument by about sixteen centuries.

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A Roman emperor summoned the bishops to a lakeside town in Asia Minor, they took a vote, and by a narrow margin Jesus was upgraded to God. The Trinity got assembled in a room by politicians in robes, the losing books went into a fire, and the Bible was stitched together from whatever survived.

Half of that is wrong, and the half that’s right has been softened in the retelling until it stopped being alarming.

The creed of 325 is short enough to read in two minutes and has been sitting in the public domain for seventeen hundred years.

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The Creed Gives the Holy Spirit One Line

Most of the document the creed produced is about the Son. He’s “begotten from the Father, only-begotten, that is, from the substance of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father.” Then come the curses, aimed at anyone who says there was a time when the Son didn’t exist, or that he came from nothing, or that he’s a different substance from the Father.

Then the whole question of the Holy Spirit gets this: “And in the Holy Spirit.”

That’s the entire treatment. No claim that the Spirit is divine, no statement about equality with the Father, no relationship spelled out with anything else in the document. A group of bishops who had just spent weeks arguing about a single Greek preposition’s worth of difference in the Son’s status wrote five words about the third person of the Trinity and moved on to their next agenda item, which was fixing the date of Easter.

You can’t make out the Trinity from a text like that. Nicaea settled one question, and it was a narrow one: how the Son stands in relation to the Father. Everything else people credit to that council is being read backward into it.

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The Holy Spirit Had to Wait More Than Half a Century

The creed most churches recite on Sunday is the revision produced at Constantinople in 381, and by then the line about the Spirit had grown into something you could build on: “the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spoke through the prophets.”

It instructs you to worship the Spirit alongside the other two, which is a liturgical instruction doing the work a doctrinal claim would normally do. The bishops in 381 got as close to the statement as they could without making it, because a large number of churchmen in the east were still refusing it outright.

The doctrine in the shape Christians now inherit, one being in three persons, got hammered into that shape by three bishops from central Asia Minor across the 360s and 370s, and then by Augustine of Hippo in North Africa, who was still working on his book about the Trinity in the 420s. That’s a century of argument after Nicaea, conducted mostly by people who hadn’t been born when Nicaea met.

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The Word That Fixed the Problem Had Already Been Condemned

The term the council settled on, homoousios, means “of the same substance.” It doesn’t appear anywhere in the Bible. That was the first objection raised against it, and the objection never went away.

Worse for the bishops who had to sell it, a council at Antioch in 268 had rejected that exact word when a bishop named Paul of Samosata used it, on the grounds that it collapsed the Father and Son into one thing. Plenty of the men at Nicaea knew this. They were being asked to make the test of orthodoxy a word that an earlier council of their own church had thrown out.

The emperor pushing the term had never been baptized, had no training in any of this, and by his own letters found the whole dispute petty. He wanted the bishops to stop fighting in public, and homoousios had the useful property of being unacceptable to the party he’d decided to lose.

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Wrong Belief Became a Capital Offense in 325

Alongside the creed came an imperial edict, and this is the part that gets left out of both versions of the story. Arius and his supporters were ordered to be called Porphyrians, after a philosopher who’d written a demolition of Christianity a few decades earlier, so that their name would carry the stink of the church’s enemies. Every copy of Arius’s writings was to be found and burned. And anyone caught concealing one was to be put to death.

For roughly 250 years before this, Christians had been the people dragged in front of magistrates over what they believed about a god. In 325 they got hold of the machinery and had it running within months. The creed was the product everybody remembers. The delivery mechanism was a criminal statute.

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If even a small fraction of regular readers became supporters, I’d spend less time running the business side of this publication and more time in the archives doing the research this work demands.

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Sixty Years From a Creed to a Corpse

The statute outlasted the argument it was written for, which is the whole problem with building one.

The Nicene party lost control of the empire almost immediately. Arius was recalled from exile within a few years, and Athanasius of Alexandria, the creed’s fiercest defender, was driven out of his own city five separate times. In 359 around four hundred bishops meeting at Rimini signed a compromise statement that dropped “same substance” altogether. Jerome, the translator who later produced the standard Latin Bible, wrote about that moment that the whole world groaned and was astonished to find itself Arian.

Then the wheel turned back. In February 380 the emperor Theodosius issued a law commanding every subject to hold the faith of the bishops of Rome and Alexandria, and specifying what would happen to everyone else: “since, in our judgment, they are foolish madmen, we decree that they shall be branded with the ignominious name of heretics,” to be punished first by heaven and then by imperial authority. The council of 381 followed a year later and ratified the winner.

In 385, a Spanish bishop named Priscillian was tried at Trier and beheaded along with several of his followers, on a charge of sorcery that everyone understood to be standing in for his teaching. He was the first Christian executed by Christians for believing the wrong thing. Two of the most powerful churchmen alive, Martin of Tours and Ambrose of Milan, protested the killing and were overruled.

Sixty years separate the creed from the execution, and nothing in between required an invention. The instrument was already built and sitting there, and each new definition that came out of each new council arrived with a penalty attached to refusing it. That’s what Nicaea produced, and it has very little to do with a vote about whether Jesus was divine.

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In the bonus section for supporters, I’ve put the creed of 325 and the creed of 381 side by side, line by line, with every addition, deletion, and quiet substitution marked, including the four curses that were in the original and got dropped from the version your church recites.

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Sources and Further Reading

• R.P.C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy 318-381 (1988), still the standard account

• Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (2004)

• Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition (1987)

• Richard E. Rubenstein, When Jesus Became God (1999)

• Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God (2014)

• Charles Freeman, A.D. 381: Heretics, Pagans, and the Dawn of the Monotheistic State (2008)

• Virginia Burrus, The Making of a Heretic: Gender, Authority, and the Priscillianist Controversy (1995)

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