The Neighborhood Podcast
This is a podcast of Guilford Park Presbyterian Church in Greensboro, North Carolina featuring guests from both inside the church and the surrounding community. Hosted by Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing, Head of Staff.
The Neighborhood Podcast
"Celebrating the 1700th Anniversary of the Nicene Creed" (October 5, 2024 Sunday School)
Presenter: Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing
A single line—“There was a time when he was not”—ignited one of the most consequential debates in Christian history. We open with the shared words of the Nicene Creed and follow the thread back to crowded halls near the Bosporus, where bishops gathered under an emperor’s gaze to settle what felt unsayable: one God, three persons, no shortcuts. Along the way, we pull apart the analogies that seem helpful (the three hats, the board of directors) but quietly bend the truth, and we sit with Arius long enough to understand why his view protected something real even as it risked losing the heart of the gospel.
We talk frankly about Constantine’s motives and why politics and prayer collided in the fourth century. Legal tolerance made underground arguments very public, and public arguments demanded careful words. That’s how phrases like “true God from true God,” “begotten, not made,” and “of one being with the Father” took shape—not as ivory-tower flourishes but as guardrails for worship and the logic of salvation. If Christ is not fully God and fully human, the hope Christians stake their lives on starts to crumble. The councils at Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381) become less distant events and more like family meetings whose minutes still guide how we pray, teach and sing.
We also map where we’re heading next: digging into what “we believe” commits us to, how the Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son,” and why the creed gives more airtime to the Son and the Spirit than to the Father. The tone stays curious and grounded—no claim to having all the answers, just a community trying to speak truthfully about a God who exceeds our categories and meets us in flesh and breath. Stay through the closing prayers and you’ll hear why doctrine is never abstract for us; it shapes how we carry one another.
If this journey helps you think or pray more clearly, follow the show, share it with a friend who loves history and theology, and leave a review with the creed line that challenges you most. Your reflections help guide where we go next.
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So, let's confess our faith using the words of the Nice and Creed. Does anybody have a copy of it? Alright. Here we go. We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten and not made, of one being with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became truly human. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate. He suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the scriptures. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end. We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets. We believe in one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen. Alright. Just take about 60 seconds or so, maybe a little bit more, and just write down one question or curiosity you have. And then once you have done that, again, invite you to come up and just place it right up here on the board. Alright, the end. I'll see you all next week. And uh so, yeah, so that's a really great humorous video of how the church has really struggled over the millennia to kind of come to grips with what this means. And that's really what led to the beginning of the Nicene Creed, because what the Trinity does is it puts us in this odd position where we have to maintain two things at once, that God is, that the three persons of the Trinity are one God, on one hand, but also distinct persons, right? Those two things do not easily exist with one another. So perhaps at the end of this class you will have all the answers. If you do, let me know because I don't have all of them. Um but it might be at the end of this class we might kind of be like Patrick at the end and be like, okay, it's an inexhaustible mystery that we will never understand. We just we just do the best we can to receive it by faith and understand that we can't put God in a box. Well, I think there's some there's something to that. But let's talk a little bit about why this caused such a stir. Remember that uh the Christianity was not adopted by the Roman Empire until what the fourth century, um, until not long before the Nicene Creed came about. So for the first couple hundred years of Christianity or the way of which it was called, it was all underground, right? There may have been controversies, um, but controversies aren't quite so loud when you're having to hide in basements, okay? So the church may not have settled the question of what exactly Jesus Christ is in relationship to God the Father, but I really think that one of the reasons that this kind of blew up was precisely because Christianity was adopted by the Roman Empire around the fourth century, because all of a sudden Christianity was it was it was legal to be a Christian. The persecutions for the most part came to an end, and now that Christianity was the adopted religion, well actually at the beginning of the fourth century, Roman Empire did not quite adopt Christianity. They just decided to become rather supportive of it, I'll put it that way. It's not till later that it became the official religion. But when it became sanctioned, when it was no longer illegal, all these conversations about what the Trinity meant kind of bubbled up to the surface, and all of a sudden they're happening out in public, which brings us to a Roman emperor by the name of Constantine. Constantine was the one that convened this council in which I think more than 300 bishops attended. And I think it's important that we understand that Constantine probably was not that concerned with the particular theological nuances of a discussion of Trinitarian theology. If Constantine really didn't care that much about the Trinity and how Christians spoke about Jesus, why do you think that he may have had some reasons to convene this council? If it wasn't theological, why do you think that he called this together?
SPEAKER_02:There was conflict.
SPEAKER_01:He wanted peace, exactly. So he he got this council together not for theological reasons, but for political reasons, right? Now that Christianity was coming out of the closet, so to speak, and was becoming more accepted, now this schism in the church between who God was was threatening his political coalition, so to speak. So there are many different ways that we can talk about the Trinity that can be somewhat problematic in ways that try to uphold either the distinction of the three persons or God as one. My uh theology professor Peter Hobby, that I mentioned in my sermon today, would often say that there is no way to speak of the Trinity that isn't at least somewhat heretical. That it's good to go ahead and start the conversation now. But over the years, there were a couple different analogies that people tried to wrestle with this. One is that God is like a heavenly board of directors of a corporation made up of three equal partners, three equal people that have three equal leadership positions in the world, so to speak. Does this prioritize the oneness of God, or does this prioritize the distinction of the three persons? Yeah, distinction. So on that spectrum, that one definitely tries to uphold the distinctiveness of the three persons. Another one, which was mentioned in the video, is called modalism, which is this idea that God is kind of like this man or woman that wears three different hats. So how I can be like a father and a pastor and a son at the same time. Does that emphasize the distinction of the persons of the Trinity, or does that emphasize the oneness of God? That one emphasizes the oneness of God, right? I'm always Stephen, right? I don't change, but right now I'm wearing my pastor hat. Later on today, I'll take this off and go to my girl swimming lessons, and I will be dad. But I'm still the same person. So that really doesn't kind of settle the question. Um but the one that really started this was Arianism. And Arianism was this idea that Jesus Christ was not fully divine. Um Arianism was kind of describing the Trinity like the sun, is a star that puts off both heat and light. Right? If we go outside right now from the stock from the sun, we receive both light and heat. For Arius, who was a bishop, he considered God the Father to be what? The Son. And for Jesus and the Spirit to be what? The heat and the light. And the reason he did this was because he really wanted to protect the sovereignty of God the Father. Because of kind of the play the influence of Greek philosophy, particularly Platonism, he really couldn't accept the fact that God would become human. He just he just did not know what to do with that. So he really he didn't have anything against Jesus, okay? I'm not trying to make Arius out to be this villain. But he really wanted to protect the sovereignty of God the Father, which is usually how heresy comes up. It's usually someone who's trying to refute one truth in order to protect what? To protect another truth, right? I think we do a disservice to the heretics of our faith when we make them out to be these villainous, evil people that just want to know how they're going to destroy Christianity. No, these were faithful people that were trying to embrace the mystery of God just like the rest of us. In fact, I can make a case that we as Christians owe a great debt of gratitude to the heretics over the past several thousand years. Why might you and I be thankful for heretics such as Arius? What do they force the church to do? To think, to make a decision. They force the church to clarify what it means. Every faith needs to do that. Every business, every nonprofit from time to time has to go, okay, why do we do what we do? Well, the heretics are the ones that really lead this. Um you said you wanted to say something about Arius and the nature of those guys.
SPEAKER_00:I told my class in the middle of last month that when all the bishops met and so forth, and they had these votes, it was really only one vote against what they wanted to do, and it was Arius' vote, and so they excommunicated him, and that is true. And then I had read that they then beheaded him. I found out this week that is not true. It's worse than that. The story goes that Arius was walking along in Alexandria, where he was from, and one afternoon his whole insides erupted, and he fell over dead. And that led to a great expression of either delight from some people or fury from others. And uh the story may be apocryphal. It may just be a story that somebody invented, but I thought it's interesting he's walking down the street. And after all this, he suddenly falls over dead. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, so as with all of those stories, uh sometimes it's best to take them with a bit of a bit of a creative salt. But either way, things did not end very well for Arius. So, fast forward to the year 325. And uh because con because Emperor Constantine really wanted the Christians to settle this question so he could get on with unifying his empire, he called over 300 bishops, mostly from the east. They were half a dozen or so that came from the west, I believe, from Germany and Spain and places like that, but the majority were represented by the East. And they were they gathered in what is um modern-day Turkey. If you look at the back of your sheet of paper here, you'll see where Nicaea is. You may notice where Istanbul is, what is now known as Istanbul then was known as what? Constantinople, right? Have any of us ever been to Istanbul? Constantinople? Constantinople. Um I I have been to Istanbul, and of all the places I've traveled, it's one of my just absolutely favorite places. I highly recommend that you go. Um, but the first council of Nicaea met in Nicaea or Ishnik. I'm not quite sure how that do we have any Turkish scholars in here? Um known, which is right across the Bosphorus Strait to the to the southeast from Istemble. Got all these bishops together, and it was quite uh quite the pomp and circumstance. Uh you have to remember just how bizarre it must have been to be gathering in the presence of the emperor of Rome after Christianity's very complicated relationship with the Roman Empire. Um you think that that Jesus died, and then we had a couple hundred years of Christianity being underground, and persecutions of Christianity kind of ebbed and flowed for a hundred years, and all of a sudden the Roman Empire is saying, Okay, you're cool now. Let's get together and talk. You can imagine being a Christian being a little bit a little bit hesitant about this. So Emperor Constantine made a really big show of it, invited them into his palace in 325, in which they came up not with the version of what we read. The version that we read, that is quote unquote the final version, was actually finished not in 325, but in 381. Somebody fact check me on that. It's either 381. Huh? Thank you. And then as our our uh our Irish friends here reminded us, modalism, which was this idea that God kind of transforms from one person then to another and then to another, kind of resurfaced, which prompted the last part of the Holy Spirit, which mostly came in 381. So you can kind of think of the Nicene Creed as happening in two distinct stages. So this is this is the 1700th anniversary of two-thirds of the Nicene Creed. If you all want to gather back together in the year 20 uh 20 uh 2081, when I will be a very young 92 years old, we can celebrate uh that anniversary as well. But Arius was famous for the line of saying, There was a time when he was not. Can you all say that with me? There was a time when he was not. Who do you think the he is in that sentence? Jesus Christ. Because in his idea, Jesus just kind of appeared when Jesus was born. In other words, we affirm that all three persons are co-eternal with one another, which means what? They're all together, they're all equally old, right? Uh Arius could not accept that because he really could not fathom that Jesus could ever simultaneously be a hundred percent human and a hundred percent divine. He just could not accept the fact that God would come to us in an icky human body that gives birth and smells bad and then dies and decay. He just couldn't accept that. What you and I just maybe are okay with because we've lived with it our whole lives. He really just could not accept that. But the rest of Christianity felt very differently that said, no, we do believe that Jesus Christ is fully co-eternal with the other two persons of the Trinity. So, for example, there are a couple lines in the creed that Arius just could not accept for that reason. Does anybody want to take a look at the middle part of the Nicene Creed and pick out a part, a portion of that creed that was likely directed directly at Arius?
SPEAKER_02:True God from true God.
SPEAKER_01:True God from true God, absolutely. That's one of the things because for Arius, Jesus was maybe divine, but in a bottom tier or a lower tier. What's another phrase in the middle that you think Arius would have a big problem with? Begotten and not made, yeah. We'll talk a little bit in the coming weeks about the semantic difference between begotten and made. Is there another uh line in that that really would have just made Arius pull his hair out? Truly. There you go. Truly human and became truly human. That line right there is to stick it to Arius and twist the knife and say, no, we believe that Christ was fully human. So this came about in the butt and I don't believe it was a particularly close vote. Um Arius was definitely in the minority. And um we might feel quite uh sympathetic to him. We all know it's not easy to be in the minority, um, but again, this uh this came about around 325 CE. Then modalism reared its ugly head, and then the last third of the Nicene Creed came around in what year? And where did that meeting happen? Constantinople. Yes, so the first meeting in 325 happened in Ica. And the second one that really kind of solidified the version that we know of was in Constantinople in 381. Does that answer everybody's questions? Um the phrases that we're going to be talking about over the next few weeks are going to be a couple key phrases. What does it mean to say we believe? What does it mean to say that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son? What's the difference between being begat, begotten, and made? What does it mean? Somebody uh asked the Catholic and Apostolic Church. Again, the Nicene Creed is one of the most widely used creeds across Christianity. So that's kind of what we're going to be focusing on for the next three weeks. Next Sunday we'll focus primarily on God the Father. Week after that, God the Son, and the week after that the Holy Spirit. I will note, if you look at the Nicene Creed, you will notice that the three persons of the Trinity do not get equal attention. Who gets the least attention? God the Father, right? Which tells you that they really weren't arguing over God the Father because they obviously didn't think that God the Father needed much attention. You'll note that God the Spirit, the Son, and the Spirit receive a whole lot more attention. Trying to keep an eye on our time and let us get us out of here as close to noon as possible, because I don't want a class full of hangry, hangry people. So, any initial questions about this? I don't promise to have all the answers, but I will certainly take notes and try to get back with you all next week if I don't know. Yes, ma'am, Joyce.
SPEAKER_02:What was Arius? Was he wrong with it all?
SPEAKER_01:He was a I think he was from Egypt, if I'm not mistaken. He he was an Egyptian bishop, uh, what we would actually call a presbyter, uh which is which is another word for bishop or an elder, which is where we get our name as presbyterians. So yeah, he was from he was from Egypt. Uh Athanasius, the word of the both artists and Athenian. Athanasius was was uh one out today. So yeah, he was from Egypt. And as I said, most of the people at the council were from Eastern Christianity because you've got to remember, at that time, the center of Christianity was not Rome. That didn't come until much later. At that time, the center of Christianity was the East, in particular Constantinople, or Estendable, as we know that. So if you've ever been to Estemble or Constantinople, you will probably go to something like uh the Blue Mosque. Or anybody know the other really big famous mosque in Estemple? The Aya Sophia is the other one. And all of the most of those buildings have at different points in history been either mosques or uh or Christian places of worship as well. Other questions. All right. Well we will gather again next week, real briefly. Are there any big prayer requests before we we close in prayer today? None at all. Absolutely. Others.
SPEAKER_00:We gather in your name to remind ourselves that it takes this to be your people. And so now we pray for those among us who are your people. We pray for Evie and her treatment. We pray for Pat and his recovery and his treatment, and we pray for their spouses and their children as they all work together to discover just how precious life is and how difficult it is to live life without you. So we pray that you would be with them in these times of struggle, and that you would be with us to strengthen them so that all of us may still be your one people. In Christ's name we pray.
SPEAKER_01:All right. Happy lunch, everybody.