First Council of Nicaea

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

— John 1:1

The First Council of Nicaea was the first ecumenical council of the church, convened by Emperor Constantine and meeting at Nicaea in Asia Minor in AD 325, with roughly 220 to 300 bishops in attendance.¹ It had been called to settle a dispute that had split the churches of the Greek-speaking East: the presbyter Arius had taught that the Son was a created being, brought into existence out of nothing and therefore not eternal or fully God.¹ Against Arius, the council produced the Nicene Creed, confessing the Son “begotten, not made, of the same substance with the Father.”¹

Confessional Witness

The Belgic Confession names the creed this council produced directly, stating that “in this point, we do willingly receive the three creeds, namely, that of the Apostles, of Nice, and of Athanasius.”² The Thirty-Nine Articles likewise hold that “the Three Creeds, Nicene Creed, Athanasius’s Creed, and that which is commonly called the Apostles’ Creed, ought thoroughly to be received and believed.”³ The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession does not name Nicaea or its creed, but it states the same doctrine the council was convened to defend: God is “one substance, power, and eternity, each having the whole divine essence,” in “three subsistences, the Father, the Word or Son, and Holy Spirit.”⁴ A doctrine an ecumenical council settled in the fourth century and a Reformed Baptist confession restates in the seventeenth is the wider church’s shared inheritance, not a distinctively Baptist position.

Historical Development

Alexander and Arius

The controversy that occasioned the council began around 318, when Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, addressing his clergy on the Trinity and pressing the unity of the three persons in God, was challenged by the presbyter Arius over how the Son could be “begotten” of the Father without that begetting having had a beginning.⁵ The council’s answer to Arius became the Nicene Creed.

Constantine convenes a universal council

Constantine had already ended the state persecution of Christians in the western empire with the Edict of Milan in 313; some twelve years later, having acquired the eastern, Greek-speaking half of the empire as well, he was disturbed to find its major bishops divided by the dispute over Arius’s teaching.¹ After smaller efforts at reconciliation failed, Constantine called a universal council to meet at Nicaea, near enough to his own residences that he could take part in person; the state paid the bishops’ travel, and estimates of attendance range from 220 to more than 300, almost all of them from the Greek-speaking East.¹ Samantha Cheng, following Lewis Ayres, narrows the figure further: “around 250-300” bishops, meeting “from late May to July 325 at Nicaea in Asia Minor,” with Ossius of Cordoba “probably” presiding.⁵ The Arian question was the council’s central business, but not its only one: Constantine’s own goal was to unify a divided empire, and the bishops also took up the date on which Easter should be observed, along with several problems specific to the Egyptian churches and matters of clergy discipline and liturgy.¹

Aftermath

The council’s condemnation of Arius did not end the controversy. Athanasius, who succeeded Alexander as patriarch of Alexandria, spent the rest of his life defending the Nicene formula and was deposed from his see five separate times by opponents who favored Arian or compromise positions.⁶ Part of the difficulty was that Nicaea’s own creed had settled the Son’s status while saying almost nothing about the Holy Spirit’s, addressing the Spirit in only four words, “And in the Holy Spirit.”⁷ Provincial councils at Alexandria in 362 and Rome in 375 affirmed the Spirit’s own consubstantiality with the Father and the Son, but the wider question was not settled until the First Council of Constantinople met in 381, expanded Nicaea’s creed accordingly, and confirmed its verdict against Arius.⁷

Opposing Views

Arianism. Arius taught that only the Father is “unbegotten” and without beginning, and that before creating the world the Father brought into being an intermediary, called in Scripture “Wisdom,” “Son,” or “Logos,” through whom he made everything else; “there was a time when he did not exist,” and this Logos, though a “perfect creature,” was not consubstantial with the Father.⁸ The council condemned this position by name and produced the Nicene Creed to exclude it.¹

Monarchian alternatives. Bavinck traces two opposite errors on the same question: a denial of God’s unity in order to preserve his threeness, which is Arianism, and a formulation of unity that fails to maintain that threeness, which is Sabellianism.⁸ Paul of Samosata, an early precursor of Arius, held that Christ was a man exalted to divine sonship at his baptism, “firmly den[ying] Christ’s preexistence and deity,” an adoptionist position.⁸ Sabellius, by contrast, taught that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were “different names based only on God’s actions” for a single divine person or actor, not distinct persons at all.⁹

Objections and Responses

The council’s own bishops behaved badly at Nicaea. Doesn’t that undercut its authority? Calvin himself did not deny this. He wrote that with the church’s central article of faith at stake and Arius present “ready to engage any one in combat,” the assembled bishops nonetheless fell to “intestine dissensions” among themselves, trading “foul accusations” until Constantine personally intervened to quiet them.¹⁰ Yet Calvin drew a sharp distinction between the bishops’ conduct and the council’s verdict, calling Nicaea a council that “has been unanimously received, as it deserves, with the utmost veneration.”¹⁰ His point, made against a Roman Catholic claim that general councils cannot err in any respect, was the opposite conclusion: a council can be composed of quarrelsome, fallible men and still reach a true and binding doctrinal verdict, because its authority rests on Scripture rather than on the personal conduct of the men who gathered to confess it.¹⁰

Related Doctrines

References

Ronald E. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine: Introducing the Essentials of the Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), chap. 7, “One God the Father and One Lord Jesus Christ,” 68-77. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷
The Belgic Confession of Faith (1561), art. 9, “The Proof of the Foregoing Article.” ↩
The Thirty-Nine Articles (1571), art. 8, “Of the Creeds.” ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 3. ↩
Samantha Ming Sum Cheng, “The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit’s Eternal Procession in Church History,” in “Retrieving Eternal Procession: A Dogmatic Western Account of the Holy Spirit’s Relation to the Father and the Son in the Triune God’s Divine Life” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2025), 26-27. ↩ ↩²
Steven Tshombe Godet, “John Gill: Patristic Scholar,” in “The Trinitarian Theology of John Gill (1697-1771): Context, Sources, and Controversy” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015), 171-172. ↩
Charles Hodge, “Chapter VI. The Trinity,” in Systematic Theology, Volume I (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 452-453. ↩ ↩²
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 9, “The Triune God and His Counsel.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
Daniel David Scheiderer, “Trinity and an Eternal Covenant,” in “Eternal Covenant: The Trinitarian Shape of an Historic Baptist Doctrine” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2022), 111. ↩
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 4, chap. 9, “Of Councils, and Their Authority,” 402-412. ↩ ↩² ↩³