Document
In imagination – an introduction
My name is Anna. I come from a small town in North Africa and I am a Christian. My bishop is preparing to travel to Nicaea for the meeting there and I am helping him pack what he needs. He has to travel light of course, since part of the journey will be by boat, but in any case he has not much to take with him. Not long since he was released from the galleys, and sometimes I have to bathe the marks of the whip on his back, so he will not relish this travel. He is a wonderful and gracious man and I have such love for him. He accepted me and my whole family into his church, even though during the persecution we gave in and made sacrifices to the Roman gods to save our lives – and he has protected us against those even in our congregation who wonder whether he should have done that. Of course, he has helped us make a proper repentance and he recruited us to help with the widows and orphans to show that we really do want to make a new start. He believes that forgiveness is part of the good news of Jesus. I am so relieved that we found him and that he is our bishop.
Life is complicated here, because there is another man who also claims to the bishop of our town. He has a different congregation, and they say he is the true bishop. In their congregation, my family would certainly not be welcome. They don’t allow anyone who avoided persecution by making sacrifices to attend worship, to take communion or to be part of their community. Their bishop says that only those who always did exactly the right thing during the persecution can belong to the church now. He believes that the church is for the pure, for the righteous, for those who stay faithful even in the worst of times. In his church they honour the martyrs of the persecution all the time, and make it clear that they are their successors.
I can’t begin to tell you how terrible the situation is, and how much I regret that, in some ways, I am the cause of it. When our own bishop was elected, there was a public gathering in the town square and people shouted in protest that someone like him could never be a bishop – not so much because of his own past life on those galleys, but because he is prepared to welcome people like me back into the church. People shouted disgusting and vile things at members of our congregation, and even threw stones and caused a riot. One person even punched our bishop-elect so hard that he broke his jaw! Some of them had the nerve to go to the Roman governor to try to get him to prevent our bishop’s appointment. But those who wanted him to be bishop had acclaimed him loudly in the street, shouting his name and raising their hands, just as they do in the Roman senate, and so the governor didn’t interfere. The people from the other congregation were furious, and their so-called bishop got his scribe to write a stinking letter to us. And now the Roman authorities are frustrated because they want to know which bishop is the real one, the one they should talk to about civic life, and of course, there are two claimants who can’t agree.
So, I’m hoping, first of all that our bishop gets to Nicaea first, and safely, so that he can make it clear that he is the rightful bishop of our town. And I’m hoping, and praying, that the meeting at Nicaea might find a way to settle the question of whether the church is only for saints and martyrs, or whether it’s possible for repentant sinners to come back. As I listen to the Gospel readings on Sundays, I can’t help thinking that Jesus welcomes sinners, even if he does say, ‘Go, and sin no more’. But we shall see… [1]
***
How far we have come
It is easy to forget, from the perspective of today, that Christian disunity has sometimes meant something much more than the kind of cultural diversity that we generally want to celebrate today, but has led to violence, blood-shed and the kind of enmity that could not possibly witness to Christ the prince of peace. In most parts of the Christian world today, we have come a long way; from contest and competition, from mutual suspicion and hatred, to collaboration and even, sometimes, to real, if imperfect, communion. When people complain that the ecumenical movement has failed, it is important to recognise how far the ecumenical movement has actually brought us. We no longer kill one another, throw stones, or enlist secular authorities to help us in our fights (or at least much more rarely!). Today, in many places around the world, we are more likely to pray together, to befriend each other, and to work together to promote a joint witness to governments and people.
It may be important then, in these times, to remind ourselves how urgent the need for unity really was for the bishops and people who gathered at Nicaea. It wasn’t just that the emperor Constantine wanted a united church for his now united empire. There is plenty of evidence that Christians themselves were determined to resolve the differences that had emerged among them, and, most of all, to find words that they could say together about who God is and how Jesus’ relationship to the Creator of all things. There were some who even thought that the terrible persecution, that had ended only a few years before, had been a punishment from God for their disunity. The impulse for unity was strong among Christians. It was not only the conceit of the emperor. He may have given them the means to travel, a place to gather and the promise of imperial support for the results, but the initiative was not entirely in his hands.
Today, among the churches, we are sometimes fearful of what unity might mean, or what might bring it about. Some look at the Council of Nicaea and see it as an example of the kind of unity that is enforced, by imperial or colonial power, that eliminates diversity, that turns some into heretics, that writes anathemas and sends some into exile. They might see the Nicene creed, that had its genesis at the council of Nicaea and was later extended at the council of Constantinople in 381, as a tool for silencing minority voices. They might even have in mind that the creed came to be part of the toolbox of the British Empire, as colonial subjects were made to recite it. The story of Nicaea thus sometimes plays to the tune of those who, in our time, are suspicious of unity.
Of course, a unity that is enforced is not real unity, certainly not the kind of familial communion, the mutual giving and receiving that is Christian unity, the union of parts of a body living in harmony, needing each other and celebrating each other. If Nicaea was, in any sense, an enforced unity, it was not a truly Christian unity. But, if we fear unity because of its false manifestations then we may be in danger of forgetting the scandal and terror that comes with disunity, with the kind of disunity that can be bloody and death-dealing. Thus, we may find it hard to imagine what those bishops, and the accompanying lower ranking clergy who travelled with them to Nicaea, might have been seeking to overcome. It would have cost many of them a great deal, in terms of long and risky journeys, potentially angry meetings with their opponents, and the even larger risk of coming out on the wrong side of the argument, to venture to Nicaea. Some of them might have been barely aware of what the arguments were about, not schooled in argument, and even naïve about the politics at work. The world of the early church councils was not one that many of us today could readily or willingly navigate. By all accounts, discussions were ‘robust’, even violent sometimes. There was pressure applied sometimes to get a preferred solution through. Undoubtedly, some bishops were not above making use of friendship with the emperor to get the result they wanted. By some accounts, if you were on ‘the wrong’ side, there was a risk you might be quietly led away, to who knows what fate. But, even in such a climate, there were those who committed time, energy and their reputations to the search for a real and deep unity that would last. It is easy to underestimate the cost to those who came to Nicaea and their determination to find solutions for Christianity’s divisions. There was much at stake. The wars between various factions needed healing. The danger of fragmentation and thus oblivion for Christianity was real. The risk of unfaithfulness to Christ was, to many, palpable.
The unity proclaimed at Nicaea
The New Testament reveals that the Church has always celebrated diversity and difference. To read the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John is to see that the Christian narrative can take very different shapes and that witnesses to Jesus Christ come with extraordinarily diverse voices. Yet, there is also always a strong thread, through the varied stories of the Christian communities that we encounter in the epistles, calling for unity. This unity is grounded in metaphors of the body, but above all, in the oneness of Jesus with the Father, and in the oneness of the disciples with Christ. In John 17, for example, we read
“The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one.”[2]
But also in Matthew 11,
“All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”[3]
The unity at the heart of the Gospel message is not crudely institutional or structural, but a union of love, a deep and eternal intimacy, that is about giving and receiving, mutual dependence and enrichment. It is this kind of unity, above all, that those at Nicaea were tasked with putting into words. Constantine may have wanted to find a way through what he saw as fractious quarrels so that he could have a united religion for his united empire, but the bishops at Nicaea had a different imperative for unity, based on the foundational narrative of the faith they shared; about God who is one, a story of the union of divine and human in Jesus Christ, and of the union of Christians with Christ and thus with each other.
The opening statement of the creed of Nicaea is about the oneness of God. ‘We believe in one God’, the source of everything that exists. There are no other gods, or demi-gods, but one God, who is the source of all. This statement marks an absolute break from the Roman religious world (and of course implies, if Constantine cared to think about it, that he could never be made a god himself). It makes plain that all things have their source in this one God, and thus that all are holy, valuable, precious and good. Creation is diverse, but united in its source in the one Creator. This is what it means to say that ‘we believe in one God’.
The creed of Nicaea goes on to speak about who Jesus is, about the heart of what Christianity is saying to the world. Jesus is ‘begotten from the Father’, ‘of one being with the Father’, echoing the language of the Scriptures. Jesus comes from the very being of God, not as something created by God (and therefore separate from God), but as one who is ‘of the same being’, completely at one with God, eternally. It expresses the confidence that what we have seen in Jesus of Nazareth, the one who had compassion on the people, who touched the sick and who welcomed those despised by others, this Jesus shows us what God is, not only what God is like, but what God is and is eternally. The complete and eternal unity of Father and Son is what Christianity proclaims. It’s not that an eternal God raised up for a time an earthly human being, but that God is always what we see in Jesus – love, compassion, self- giving and self-emptying. They are one.
In Jesus, God also becomes one with all flesh, all. The Nicene creed, the Nicene faith, is all about unity, but union of the profoundest and most transforming kind.
Receiving gifts from Nicaea
My own study of Nicaea has done many things. It has revived within me a sense of the scandal and the risks of disunity. It has stirred up in me a sense again of sorrow that in so many centres of population in our world today there is more than one Christian community, and that our witness is divided. It has reminded me that being reconciled to this division is an easier option than working for the kind of unity for which Jesus prayed. It has inspired me to admire those, at Nicaea, who risked the dangers of travel, who put themselves on the line and risked being ‘wrong’, who spent weeks and even months searching for words and phrases that could hold most (if not quite all) Christians together. Reading the creed and the decisions of Nicaea has opened up for me a space again in which unity is much, much more than ecclesiastical politics, or even an ecumenical movement. It is the heart of the Gospel and of our understanding of what we have come to know about God, through Jesus Christ. It is actually, as those at Nicaea understood profoundly, the very core story of our faith. It is the unity, the integrity, at the heart of God that is the starting point for how we live in the Church and in the world. It’s not that we have to agree on everything, but it’s so important to get that central narrative of the Gospel right, otherwise we lose what it is that Christians have to bring to the world.
The Nicene creed of 325, I believe, is a beautiful piece of writing, almost poetry and certainly prayer, telling the story that is the beginning of all our stories in the Church today. We should admire those who braved appearing before an emperor so soon after a terrible time of persecution, who spent that time searching for the best words they could find that would bring unity. Of course, not absolutely everyone agreed, it took decades for the words they found to become widely accepted, and sometimes the means of achieving that acceptance were not admirable. But they were words that express well the unity of God, the eternal unity of Christ with God, and the unity into which we, as Christians, are invited.
Rowan Williams has written, of the theological debates of the early centuries of the Church,
“The Christianity that emerged as the predominant voice was consistently anxious to put Humpty-Dumpty together again, as we might say; they wanted to re-establish a vision of the universe and its history that made one story, one system. Hence, their strenuous opposition to any scheme that divided God the Creator from God the redeemer and, increasingly their opposition also to theologies that divided the human and the divine in Jesus.”.[4]
What is amazing is that those at Nicaea could say what needed to be said, to secure this faith that does not divide, in a very few words and phrases. People ask why the creed did not say more about Jesus’ teaching, his life and ministry, his passion and death. It seems that those at Nicaea were content to have different accounts of all those things, to accept the diversity and difference of four Gospels, but they were committed to agreeing those few things on which the significance of our faith depends. Without them, we are not Christians. But with them, we are free to express the diversity of culture and expression among us. This is not, I believe, an oppressive unity, but more like an invitation into the life that God wills for us, as those in communion with one another.
There is an, understandable, fear today of saying anything that might deny anyone else’s voice, that might exclude minority voices. Those at Nicaea knew what such exclusion could be. And perhaps that is why they (mostly) did nothing more violent than publish anathemas, while the lions and the gladiators lay quiet. But to be clear about the central story of Christian faith is not in itself to oppress or exclude, for its proclamation is itself good news for a world broken and fragmented by violence.
Nicaea’s inspiration for today
In 2022, the small church to which I belong celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the union in 1972. At a service to mark this occasion a former General Secretary, David Cornick, said
‘Unity isn’t an exercise in ecclesiastical joinery. It is growing into Christ, becoming the people Christ wants us to be.’[5]
In a time when church unions are no longer being negotiated, how can Nicaea help us grow into deeper union with Christ? We could revive, firstly, a sense of urgency about the unity of the church, the kind of urgency that inspired people in the early fourth century to travel over land on mules and primitive carts and to go on meeting together until there were words they could say together. Secondly, we could celebrate more fully and together a sense of the essential heart of the Gospel, the message that the world needs to hear, that we are called to love one another. Thirdly, we might commit ourselves to live always in union with Christ, who died at the hands of the empire, and in whom God was joined with all humankind. Then, I think, we would look at our divided churches and see how absurd and unfaithful we are being. For, we believe in one God, and in Jesus Christ, of one being with the Father, who because of us human beings and for our salvation came down, and became incarnate…
Rev. Dr Susan Durber
World Council of Churches President from Europe
[1] I am grateful to many authors for the background to this imaginative piece, but particularly to Ramsay MacMullen, Voting for God in early church councils, Yale University Press, 2006
[2] John 17:22-23a
[3] Matthew 11:27
[4] Williams, Why Study the Past. The Quest for the Historical Church, Darton, Longman and Todd, London, p. 41
[5] David Cornick’s sermon, accessed April 29th, 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8K4MZWjH7I&list=PLtV0Wy0Q-tkLKRpaZFFr8qm-GMi7VvEeF&index=8
