Before the creed of Nicaea

This year is the 1,700th anniversary of one of the great turning-points in church history, the Council of Nicaea (325), which was called to deal with a matter that was of the highest importance: Who is the God who has revealed Himself in the person and work of Jesus of Nazareth?

The quest to answer this question is deeply rooted in the Scriptures, where, as the American Presbyterian theologian, Benjamin B. Warfield, once put it, the “doctrine of the Trinity lies … in solution; when it is crystallized from its solvent it does not cease to be Scriptural, but only comes into clearer view”.

Thus, Irenaeus of Lyons (c.130 – c.200), who sought to evangelise the Rhône valley from the church at Lyons, has a perspective on the Godhead that is explicitly Trinitarian. He referred to Jesus as ‘our Lord and God’. He employed the adjective ‘eternal’ to describe the Holy Spirit, thereby implying the Spirit’s deity. And over against the speculation of various heretics known now as Gnostics that this world and its inhabitants came into existence through the work of a being who was not the true God, Irenaeus asserted that God made all things without the assistance of anyone outside of Himself. And yet He did have help, namely, what Irenaeus called ‘the hands of the Father’, namely, ‘the Son and the Holy Spirit’.

Or consider the portion of a third-century hymn discovered in the 1920s at a rubbish dump at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, a few miles west of the Nile.

May none of God’s wonderful works
keep silence, night or morning.
Bright stars, high mountains,
the depths of the seas,
sources of rushing rivers:
may all these break into song as we sing
to Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
May all the angels in the heavens reply.
Amen! Amen! Amen!
Power, praise, honour, eternal glory to God,
the only Giver of grace.
Amen! Amen! Amen!

This hymn of worship clearly implies what the fourth-century councils of Nicaea and Constantinople would affirm to be the nature of God, namely, His Triunity.

Yet another witness to a full-blown Trinitarianism comes from the writings of Gregory Thaumaturgus (c.210/215–c.270/275), who studied under the brilliant exegete Origen (c.185‒254) and who went on to become an evangelist in the region of Pontus. Gregory was on his way to becoming a lawyer when he met Origen in what is now Beirut, and Origen persuaded him to give up the study of law for that of theology.

In a small treatise written for a certain Philagrius, and which is extant only in a Syriac translation, Gregory declared most powerfully: “[T]he divine and indivisible substance of God is undivided and single in form; … [but] the Son is never divided from the Father, nor the Holy Spirit again from the latter … For as no division or cleft is conceived of between mind and idea and soul, so neither is cleft or division conceived of between the Holy Spirit and the Saviour and the Father.”

How then was the Christian world of the fourth century convulsed by what we term the Arian controversy over the deity of the Son and the Spirit? Well, the answer to that will occupy our next few columns in these autumn months.