1,700th Anniversary of the First Council of Nicea
Detail of an icon from the Mégalo Metéoron Monastery in Greece, of the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea.
Saint Peter’s Church commemorates the 1,700the Anniversary of the First Council of Nicea throughout 2025, particularly at liturgies on Sunday, July 27, 2025. These two articles, the first written by Saint Peter’s Senior Pastor Jared R. Stahler and the second written by The Rev. Thomas S. Drobena, PhD, pastor of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Stafford Springs, CT, and professor (adjunct) of theology at Assumption University, explore historical, theological and ecumenical themes and implications of the Council.
On the First Ecumencial Council and Unity
The Rev. Jared R. Stahler
On “For us and for our salvation”
The Rev. Thomas S. Drobena, Ph.D
On the First Ecumencial Council and Unity
The Rev. Jared R. Stahler
This year marks an important anniversary for the entire Church: churches of both the East and the West. The First Ecumencial Council, or the First Council of Nicea, was called at the request of Emperor Constatine in the year 325 CE. Held in Nicea, modern day İznika, Turkey, it is generally accepted that the Council had enough persons present to begin in June of that year and that by the end of July general consensus had been reached, making it possible to speak of the Council as having concluded.
In the Orthodox liturgical calendar, June 1 commemorates “The Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council.” At Saint Peter’s, on Sunday, July 27 we commemorate the 1,700th Anniversary of the Council of Nicea, coinciding with the anniversary of its conclusion. Indeed, our commemoration parallels the conclusion of a historic pilgrimage: “From Rome to New Rome,” led by Archbishop Epidophoros of America and Archbishop Joseph Cardinal Tobin of Newark, with Pope Leo XIV and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew
The Council’s primary purpose was to address a locally-held, but spreading, theological perspective that Christ as God the Son (often spoken of as the Second Person of the Trinity) is lesser than God the Father (the First Person of the Trinity). Originating with the theologian Arius, a priest from Alexandria, this teaching threatened the unity of the Church. At the Council, 318 bishops, and still more theologians, from across the Empire participated in dialogue, seeking understanding and a common way forward.
The theological word that is perhaps most important to the Council of Nicea’s effort to maintain unity is the Greek word “homousion.” It is a challenging word to translate, and honestly may be best left untranslated. Sometimes we see it rendered as “consubstantial” (this word emerges from Aristotelian thought and is, itself, complicated) or “of one Being” (a modern, ecumenical translation). Here’s the important thing: in speaking of God the Father and God the Son as being “homousion,” the Council achieved consensus and avoided the heretical — that is to say, not consonant with Scripture — implication of Arianism, namely that one part of the Trinity could be a creation of the other. This theological effort resulted in the formulation of much of what we know today as the Nicene Creed, the final version of which was established at the Council of Constantinople in 381 CE. Then, and now, the Creed is an enduring symbol of unity for all Christians. (At another time, we will explore the alteration to this Creed which divided East and West, as well as the Lutheran-Orthox dialogue which helped Saint Peter’s, and other Lutheran churches, make regular use of the original.)
More than a millennia after the Council, in a dispute with the then-Bishop of Rome seeking theological clarity — not division — and unity, the “Evangelical party” (later called, Lutherans) submitted at the request of another Holy Roman Emperor – Charles V – the Augsburg Confession of 1530, a theological formulation imbued with the theology of the First Ecumenical Council and the early Church Fathers. While the proceedings around the Augsburg Confession were ultimately unsuccessful in maintaining unity, Lutherans persisted: The Book of Concord, printed in 1580, begins with among other things, the Nicene Creed.
The Book of Concord
Given this history, when Lutherans and Roman Catholics began formal dialogue with one another following the close of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), the first item brought up for dialogue was the Nicene Creed. This was chosen not because it was considered a challenge but because it was considered a place of unity. The first dialogue report, published on July 7, 1965, is titled “The Status of the Nicene Creed as Dogma of the Church.” Though never officially received (an effort that would bear much fruit!) by either the Roman Catholic Church or the Lutheran World Federation, the report remains an important foundational step Lutherans and Roman Catholics continue to take, together, toward visible unity of the church after so many years of division. It is auspicious, indeed, that the 60th Anniversary of the First Lutheran-Roman Catholic dialogue coincides with the 1,700th Anniversary of the First Council of Nicea. An anniversary, I pray, that will see not merely a visible unity between Lutherans and Roman Catholics, but also with the Orthodox communions.
Finally, it is important to note that the First Council of Nicaea also determined a means for calculating a common day of Easter. This, too, remains a goal. The common celebration of Easter shared by East and West this past Easter 2025 was achieved only by accident of calendars.
Allow me to close this article with a vision. If these churches can move toward greater visible unity, building on the unity of the First Council of Nicea in both theology and liturgy, ours will be a most powerful witness to a divided world. By the grace of God, we pray for and continue to work to embrace the unity already given us by God as a gift in Christ Jesus.
The Rev. Jared R. Stahler is senior pastor of Saint Peter’s Church in New York City and co-chair of A Partnership of Faith in NYC, a consortium of senior leaders of Jewish, Christian and Muslim houses of worship.
On “For us and for our salvation”
The Rev. Thomas S. Drobena, Ph.D.
On July 28, 325, the Roman Emperor held a banquet. The guests were not senators or statesmen; the gathering was not debaucherous or defined by political intrigue and maneuvering. The guests were mostly older men, not particularly well-dressed, their skin darkened by their days in the sun, and many of them bearing the scars of torture. “Bishops,” they were called, overseers of the Christian Church, which only 12 years earlier had been an illegal association and in the decade before that almost hunted into extinction by the same empire that was now endowing it with gifts.
One such old man was Paphnutius, an African monk from upper Egypt who had been tortured under Emperor Maximinius Daia about 15 years earlier. When he refused to deny his faith, an example was made of him. After plucking out his right eye and shattering his knee, his tormenters sent the crippled old man to Palestine to work in the mines, there to repent of his crime of loving Christ. Now at this banquet the new emperor approached him, embraced him gently, and kissed the empty eye socket as a sign of respect and regret for what he had endured. Many holy men there were greeted and honored in this way, a tearful scene and a great reversal to the glory of God who “sets a table before me in the presence of my enemies” (Psalm 23). It was a new day in the life of the Church.
Around 300 bishops were in attendance, around a thousand representatives of the Church from throughout the known world in total. The Emperor, Constantine, was not yet a Christian himself, but his mother, Helena was a devout believer. Perhaps more importantly, he attributed his victory over his rivals and his meteoric rise to become the sole emperor of Rome to the intervention of the Christian God who revealed to him the sign of the cross, with the words “In this sign, you will conquer.” Constantine endowed the Church with many gifts—not that unusual, in a way, since Roman Emperors considered one of their most important and ancient duties to be themselves priests and protectors of Rome’s religious life.
Now Constantine had called leaders of the Christian Church out of hiding and to his summer palace on the Sea of Mamara, at a place called Nicaea. There they would meet for two months, discussing some questions of church order, church discipline, and church teaching. The emperor did not have a vested interest in the outcome. The sources tell us that when there was a disagreement he would complement both sides, thanking them for their input and applauding their explanation of their view. The council at Nicaea answered questions such as how the date of Easter would be calculated, established uniform rules for clergy, and provided guidance for how to readmit into fellowship those who had lapsed from the faith during the persecution. The most pressing conversation, however, was that around a debate within the Egyptian Church. The Church had for centuries already plainly said that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that Jesus was God the Son, born in the flesh. However, how the Trinity “works” remained, of course, a holy mystery. One Egyptian priest in particular, a man named Arius, was afraid that people were mistakenly thinking that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not Three Persons of God, but three roles, or “modes”—job titles, if you will—of the one true God, acting at different times in history. To prevent this confusion, in his zeal Arius overcorrected and emphasized the difference between the persons of the Trinity, not their unity. Arius concluded that Jesus is God, but in his view, not in the same way that the Father is God, eternally and always. Arius caused a stir among the faithful when relying on reason at the expense of Scripture, he said of God the Son, “there was a time when he was not.” That is to say, Arius believed that God the Son was at some point “made” by the Father.
The council affirmed that the faith handed down to them in the Scriptures is not that Jesus is a lesser God. The catholic and apostolic faith is that Jesus is the one true God. To help explain this conviction, the council composed the statement of faith that bears the name of the place they had gathered: the Nicene Creed. In it they affirmed that Jesus is “God from God, Light from Light, True God of True God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father.” This was no small thing. For these holy people who had suffered for their faith, they were unwilling to compromise their firm conviction of who this Jesus was who was born, suffered and died, and risen from the dead. This Jesus, the Son of God, was no less than the one true God. Indeed, this was no dusty theological dispute, but a matter of life, death, and salvation. These assembled men were also pastors, given care of God’s flock, and for the sake of the souls entrusted to their care did not want any ambiguity about who Jesus is. For them, no one need doubt their salvation, because the one who saved us was God. And so, they enshrined this belief in the words, “of one being with the Father.” Jesus is God in the same way that the Father is God, having the same “stuff” of divinity.
But this was not to be a philosophical reflection on the nature of divinity. Who Jesus is, his divine identity, was so important because of what he did and why. The Creed continues: “For us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven…” What wonderful news and purest Gospel! We can know with certainty who God is and what God is like, because God has taken on flesh and become one of us in the person of Jesus Christ. This “why” of the incarnation reveals why it was so important for the early Church to not compromise their belief in who Jesus is. These beautiful words “for us and for our salvation” were not invented at the council. They are ancient enough that we are not quite sure of their origin, except that they were already being used in a local creed by the church in Caesarea, whose bishop, Eusebius, may have suggested it’s inclusion by the council.
Athanasius of Alexandria, who attended the council as a deacon wrote extensively on this point. In his treatise “On the Incarnation,” Athanasius again turns our attention to these beautiful words. Athanasius is aware that the difficulty for many (indeed, for poor Arius) was in understanding why God would do such a thing as Christians proclaim. In 1 Corinthians (1:23), Saint Paul acknowledges that this is “a stumbling block for Jews and foolishness to Greeks” that Christ would be crucified. But for Athanasius and those at the council, stronger still was the knowledge of God’s love, that the God who can do anything, did in fact do the unthinkable for us. He writes:
“For the explanation of these matters one must remember what was said earlier, that you may be able to know the reason for the manifestation in the body of the Word of such and so great a Father…although he is incorporeal by nature and Word, yet through the mercy and goodness of his Father he appeared to us in a human body for our salvation.”
As Christians we continue to have confidence in this knowledge that everything that God has done in Christ, he has done for us. Martin Luther himself emphasized this wonderful insight, that throughout the Gospel we find assurance that God is on our side. From the words of the angels to the shepherds of Bethlehem “for you is born this day…a savior” to the Christ’s own words on the night of his betrayal that his Body and Blood are given “for you,” we are reminded that the story of our redemption is not simply a series of events in history, but the revelation of God’s innermost being. Athanasius continues, that God chose to not leave us abandoned to our own devices and to sin and death, devoid of knowledge of him, but elected to save us. And to accomplish this, he did not send another prophet, or an angel, but the very Image of God (Colossians 1:15) himself, because he alone could renew that same image in humanity.
Roland Bainton in his introduction to “Martin Luther’s Christmas Book” summarizes beautifully what this all means: “What man, if guided by his natural promptings, would do so much for another? Why should God humble himself to lie in the feedbox of a donkey and to hang upon a cross?” For those gathered at the Council of Nicaea 1700 years ago it was of paramount importance that all who know Jesus know that they can be sure of who he is. If Jesus were not God, he could not save us. And so out of great, inconceivable, wonderful love, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. What we could not conceive of doing, God did in Christ “for us and for our salvation.”
The. Rev. Dr. Thomas S. Drobena is pastor of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Stafford Springs, CT, and professor (adjunct) of theology at Assumption University.