Reading the Nicene Creed Through a Liberative Lens
The following excerpt from Joerg Rieger taken from the World Council of Churches publication, Towards Nicaea 2025, edited by: Benjamin Simon, Vasile-Octavian Mihoc, Ani Ghazaryan Drissi, and Andrej Jeftić. Towards Nicaea 2025 seeks to offer fresh perspectives on how the Council's theological and ecclesiological insights can foster contemporary Christian unity. The text is open-access and can be found here.
The Resistance Factor of Co-equality
JOERG RIEGER
While the Roman Empire had a significant impact on the formation of theology, the crucial question is in what sense creeds can exceed the perspective of the empire. Is there some ambivalence in how they do theology that escapes being homogenized by the empire, some theological surplus that pushes in a different direction, providing different theological and political impulses? For all the influence of empires, there is something about Christianity that seems to challenge the status quo of empires. After all, the 2nd-century philosopher Celsus already perceived Christianity as a threat to the Roman Empire and a voice of rebellion; Christian monotheism, he claimed, would lead to the rejection of the values and gods of the wider community.1 Once again, the main problem is not that bishops and emperors were “political” when they developed the creeds. The question has to do with whose politics were played out and whose politics were repressed as the creeds were formulated. Early Christianity was a socially and theologically diverse group that included not only the powerful but also large groups of lower-class people. Their influence might be envisioned in various ways—and here is where we need to begin our search for the theological “surplus” of the creeds.
The lives of upper-class Christians and the lives of the lower classes were intertwined in a special way. In early Christianity, the classes were not as strictly separated as they were elsewhere in the Roman Empire. This connection between the classes might have been beneficial for all, but it had particular benefits for the rich because it supported their claim to power and justified their wealth. The churches themselves were major landowners and employers.2 Nevertheless, these interconnections of rich and poor might also have had unexpected impacts on the formation of doctrine in the councils. As Peter Brown has shown, the sense of solidarity with the poor that distinguished Christianity in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th centuries “challenged the rich and powerful to be aware of the sufferings of their fellow humans, as God himself had shared in human suffering.” At the core is the “early Christian sense of the joining of God and humanity in the person of Christ, and by mysterious extension, in the persons of the poor.”3 This joining of God and humanity had practical consequences that seem radical even today: The Theodosian Code included five laws that supported church asylum as an existing ecclesial practice. Asylum seekers included not only people unable to pay their debts but also people accused of criminal charges.4
One of the problems of Nicaea is that the unity Athanasius constructed after the fact produced a kind of homogeneity that was not realized at the Council itself. The notion of homoousios, for instance, is not a homogeneous concept and it is commonly noted that this term, suggested by the Emperor Constantine, does not have much precision.5 But this imprecision and the ambivalence that goes with it might turn out to be a good thing. Even a historical theologian like Grillmeier, who does not problematize Nicaean homogeneity, praises the open-endedness of the homoousios.6 In the indeterminacy of the homoousios and the fact that the Council relied on older theological resources, Grillmeier notes a certain independence from the empire. Going beyond Grillmeier’s fairly idealistic portrayal, we might find in this indeterminacy a mark of the multitude of the people who cannot easily be pressed into one form.
If the lex credendi is indeed the lex orandi—that is, if what is believed is rooted in common worship7—we need to allow for the possibility that some aspects of the indeterminacy and ambivalence of the term homoousios have to do with popular worship. In this case, the piety connected to the lives and struggles of the people cannot easily be pressed into Athanasius’ efforts to create homogeneity. Ambivalence and openendedness might therefore be closely tied to the fact that the empire can never completely control the people. This ambivalence might also remind us of the diversity of the bishops, who most of the time were not in agreement either, an important fact that was suppressed in Athanasius’ later accounts. Orthodoxy itself, we must note, contains tensions and ambivalences. Once this belief in the homogeneity of orthodoxy is challenged, the homogeneity of empire can be challenged as well, and orthodoxy itself can be seen in a new and constructive light.
Here we need to rethink how we usually judge theological concepts. In regard to the homoousios, for instance, we tend to assume that if the term is conceptually vague and indeterminate, it must be because it is politically rather than theologically motivated. But what if the opposite is true? In the Roman Empire, the desire to give precise and unequivocal definitions seems to be pushed by those who seek control and who pursue the politics of top-down power. There may be good theological reasons to keep things open and indeterminate. This does not mean that everything is relative. While no one may have been able to say what the term homoousios included, the key point of the Council was that everyone would have known what it excluded. In the end, Athanasius’ own understanding may have been more open than is commonly realized; he later broadened his own horizons and accepted the theology of the homoousios camp.8 A position that develops limits rather than positive guidelines leaves some space for surplus and even resistance.
The diversity that was a fact of life in the Roman Empire and particularly in the early church might therefore be seen as a place where resistance could ferment.9 Contrary to a common assumption, the history of the church is not that of initial unity that branched out into diversity later, but of a diverse and complex reality that did not easily conform to an empire seeking to enforce uniformity.10 This diversity comprises both theological and social positions, and the open-endedness of such positions can help resist the grab for power by the few over the many.
Another way in which the Council of Nicaea’s affirmation of Jesus’ co-equality with God challenged the Roman Empire has to do with what most likely was one of the worries of Arius. Arius’ concern might have had less to do with a “low Christology” (as liberal theologians have tried to understand him) than with a very high view of the unity and the holiness of God. Claiming divine co-equality and putting Jesus on the same level as God would challenge both the unity and the holiness of God. Such a God would no longer be separate from and above the messiness of the world. In addition, putting Jesus on the same level as God introduces the latent threat of challenging God’s impassibility and immutability and an erosion of unilateral top-down power. In this sense, Nicaea’s efforts to put Jesus and God on the same level opened the door to another understanding of God—although this was probably not yet recognized by most of the Nicene fathers or by Constantine: the Arians might have been clearer about this and were thus rightly worried. This move had long-term consequences, both theological and political. The Nicene connection of Jesus and God introduced not only equality but also a messiness into the divine itself that challenges homogeneity and deconstructs conformity and notions ofsameness. When the Nicene Creed introduced another person into the Godhead, difference became part of the divine heart of reality and unilateral control was challenged.
Church historian Justo González has formulated another possible consequence, based on Jesus’ life and ministry: “If a carpenter condemned to death as an outlaw, someone who had nowhere to lay his head, was declared to be ‘very God of very God,’ such a declaration would put in doubt the very view of God and of hierarchy on which imperial power rested.” González surmises that this challenge to the empire was the reason Constantine had second thoughts and why he ordered Arius re-admitted into the church.11
By introducing Jesus into the Godhead, Nicaea also opened the way for future questions about the immutability and impassibility of Godself—although virtually everyone at the time, whether heretic or orthodox, from Arius to Athanasius, agreed that God is impassible. If Jesus did indeed suffer and die on the cross, God’s own immutability and impassibility would eventually need to be reassessed. Moreover, including Jesus into the Godhead as co-equal (homoousios) challenges a kind of metaphysics that regards being, ousia, as static and predetermined. God’s being now needs to be seen in connection with the work of Jesus Christ—Christ’s life in all its complexity, divine and human, including his resistance to the powers that be.
It is, therefore, hardly an accident that the life of Christ is not mentioned in the creeds; such “accidents,” like Freudian slips of the tongue, always point to deeper repressions (and the surpluses that spring from them). The challenge to empire posed by the life of Christ would have just been too great. Yet the subversive potential of the creeds is located precisely where they are connected to the deeper realities of Christ’s particular life (in solidarity with the outcasts of his time and challenging the religious and political establishment), even if only at the levels of the unconscious. Where the creeds without particular attention to the life of Christ are considered sufficient, on the other hand, this challenge is lost.
A final note: when traditional and classical Christology today is often identified in terms of theories that deal with Christ’s “sacrifice,” the Christology that emerged in Nicaea can offer some relief, because it did not canonize theories of sacrifice and substitution.12 Nicaea’s stubborn focus on the incarnation of Christ might push us in new directions that emphasize what is life-giving rather than death-dealing.
1 Reference in Peterson, Der Monotheismus, 60–61
2 See Averil Cameron, ed., Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. XIV: Late Antiquity, Empire and Successors, 425–600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 337.
3 This is the summary of his book Poverty and Leadership (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2002), 111–12.
4 See Rapp, Holy Bishops, 254, 257.
5 Grillmeier points out Constantine’s confusions in his understanding of the first and second persons of the Trinity, and questions how much sense his homoousios would have made. Christ in Christian Tradition, 261–64.
6 Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, 270.
7 This is Prosper of Aquitane’s principle: “The rule of prayer should lay down the rule of faith.”
8 What matters to him is that there is a common opposition to those who see Christ as a creature. See Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 210.
9 There existed a certain amount of pluralism in the empire, more so in the east, but keep in mind that “the imperial government was tolerant of cultural diversity, as long as its political authority was not challenged,” Meyendorff, Imperial Unity, 25.
10 If it is a misunderstanding that the church was unified at first, and then branched out into diversity later, the image of the “hourglass” is more appropriate—the narrow part signifies the efforts of the councils to create unity. See Gregory J. Riley, One Jesus, Many Christs: How Jesus Inspired Not One True Christianity, But Many (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), 101.
11 Justo González, Mañana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990), 108.
12 When the Nicene Creed talks about salvation, it states, “for us humans and for our salvation [Christ] came down and became incarnate, became human, suffered and rose up on the third day, went up into the heavens, is coming to judge the living and the dead.” Jaroslav Pelikan and Valerie Hotchkiss, Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, Vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 159.