Standing the Test of Time: Conciliarity and Remembering the Council of Nicaea 1700 Years Later

Though it happened 1700 years ago, the Council of Nicaea exemplified a principle that is fundamental to certain Christian traditions (e.g., Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy) today: conciliarity.

The occurrence of “ecumenical councils” in the early Christian centuries is familiar to many yet often hard to conceptualize. But there’s good reason to take a moment to examine this phenomenon in our present moment.

A Divine Modus Operandi in History

Let’s begin with a wider historical and theological framework: both Jews and Christians believe that God acts within creation and history to bring about his purposes. As Frederick Bauerschmidt notes in Catholic Theology: An Introduction, “the Judeo-Christian God is the One who, while not bound by history, acts from within history, through specific people and events, for the sake of all humanity.”

This could be illustrated, for instance, by God’s covenant with Abraham, which God initiates and ratifies on his own terms. That covenant describes not only what God will do for Abraham and his descendants, but also that through Abraham “all the nations of the earth will be blessed (Gen. 12). Second, this collaborative principle continues in all the subsequent covenants that build on the first: God’s saving activity in history occurs in, with, and through human communities. That is, God’s action is humanly mediated. God chooses and enlists particular humans, within particular human communities, as cooperators, collaborators, and co-participants in that work. The Incarnation is, of course, the fullest realization of this principle of God’s self-revealing and saving activity in history in and through the human birth, life, teaching, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

This is all so familiar to us that we often fail to reflect on the fact that it could have been otherwise. God had lots of options! God could have chosen to accomplish his purposes alone, unilaterally, without any human contribution, collaboration, or mediation. God could have chosen to reveal himself to every living person, individually, without any external mediation, in the interiority of their very souls. The entire drama of salvation could have been accomplished privately and internally.

It’s crucial to note that the “Christ-event” (the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus) prompts his earliest followers to begin to reconsider many assumptions about God and his saving relationship to human beings. For example, that God’s power and wisdom could be most apparent in the weakness and absurdity of the crucifixion; or that the oneness of God could encompass the plurality of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; or that God’s plan of salvation included not just Jews, but also Gentiles (i.e., non-Jews). In addition to these, another new conviction began to take hold among the earliest Christians, especially as it became apparent that Jesus was not returning immediately to establish the Kingdom of God on earth. It dawned on the early community that God’s saving activity in history had another phase, falling between the Christ-event and his Second Coming. That phase involved what Paul in the Letter to the Ephesians called “the mystery of the church,” a mystery that had been concealed to all earlier generations, being “hidden for ages in God,” but has “now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit.” At its core, this mystery is that “the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (Eph. 3:3-6).

God’s wise and providential plan for universal human salvation is centered on the Church as the divinely chosen instrument and vehicle for this purpose: “so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known.” In the history of God’s covenantal relationship with Israel, Jesus is not the end of history, as they had supposed, but rather the center of it, and “salvation history” is going to continue. Not only that, but the focal point of divine agency in this new phase of salvation history is the Holy Spirit, bestowed upon the Church at Pentecost. Yet true to form, the Spirit intends to accomplish the divine purposes in history in and with human collaboration, and that collaborator is the community of believers, the Church.

The Council of Jerusalem

An initial illustration of how this collaborative effort will proceed is found in the middle of the Book of Acts, the first written history of the Church.

Recall that the mystery of the Church, the reason it exists, is to unite Gentiles with Jews into the one Body of Christ to accomplish God’s universal plan of salvation. So, it would seem that God ought to be very keen about the details of that merger. We might imagine that God would have a clear plan for the Church to follow in bringing all that about. But by the middle of the first century the Church was confronting a fundamental question and major conflict precisely over the issue of how Gentiles were to be incorporated into God’s new plan for Israel: did they need to submit to the Law of Moses? 

This was not a minor or trivial matter. It went to the heart of Jewish and Christian identity and pinpointed the essential meaning of the Gospel. Yet apparently, before Jesus left the scene, he had not informed anyone what God’s will or plan was on this most crucial issue. And, there were, as yet, no Christian Scriptures to consult. So, what to do?

All the leaders of the community, “the apostles and elders,” gathered in Jerusalem to decide what should be required of Gentile converts to the new “way.” That is to say: they held a council. Scholars refer to this as the “Council of Jerusalem” and it seems to have occurred around the year 50. 

Apparently, it was an intense meeting, marked by strong opinions and heated exchanges. But in the end, they reached a momentous agreement that Gentiles were not obligated to submit to the Mosaic Law.

Something crucial happened next: the gathered leaders put their decision into writing so that it could be disseminated and promulgated among all the communities of believers. They expected their decision to be authoritative and binding. And at the end of the letter, they wrote these words: “For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to impose on you no further burden than these essentials” (Acts 15:28).

What emerges here is a crucial principle, a fundamental pattern, a modus operandi, that can be called “conciliarity.” As the Church endeavors to accomplish its divine commission in history, to remain faithful to what it has received (the “deposit of faith”) from the Lord, and to be “led into all truth” by the Spirit, it attempts to discern the truth and to work out the details through special gatherings of its acknowledged leaders, whose decisions, communicated in writing, are recognized as authoritative for the believing community.

Early Catholicity: Formation of a Christian Community

As the Church moved into the second century, a living and organic, but also structured, ecclesial institution began to emerge. Its recognized leaders are the bishops, who have succeeded to the place, i.e., the function and authority, of the apostles. Already by the end of the first century, Ignatius of Antioch began calling this the “Catholic Church.”

Importantly, the role of the bishops was to be the visible sign and also the instrument of Christian unity. So, the catholicity of the Church is deeply bound up with its episcopal nature. Patterned on the “threefold office of Christ” (Prophet, Priest, and King), the bishops had a triplex ministry, which was doctrinal, sacramental, and jurisdictional, namely, to teach, sanctify, and govern.

It also continued the practice of convening councils or, in Greek, “synods,” as the mechanism and instrument by which to resolve debates, settle conflicts, render judgments, and arrive at consensus at the supra-local level. These councils were episcopal, i.e., principally of bishops, who, because they were acting in Christ’s name, had the authority to make decisions binding on the Church. Thus, by the second century, councils had become one of early Christianity’s most characteristic institutions. 

The Council of Nicaea 

In the words of John O’Malley in the book When Bishops Meet, all these early developments 

culminated and received paradigmatic form with the first church-wide council, the Council of Nicaea, 325. The role of Emperor Constantine at it strengthened the analogy between councils and the Roman Senate. The emperor had moved the imperial capital from Rome to Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), and he convoked the council to meet under his watchful eye in his palace in nearby Nicaea.

The primary impetus for the Council was a theological dispute threatening to tear the Christian community apart, something neither the bishops nor the emperor wanted—though for very different reasons. The primary focus was the teaching about the second Person of the Trinity, the Son, coming from a presbyter in the great church of Alexandria, Egypt, whose name was Arius. The assembled bishops rendered a judgment regarding Arius and his doctrine, which they expressed in the form of a new literary genre, a “creed:” a written profession of right faith or doctrine.

But the bishops also used the occasion for legislative purposes: they made laws regarding certain behaviors, with penalties attached for non-observance. For instance, they levied penalties against clerics who castrated themselves, they forbade admitting to the clergy converts from paganism until they had undergone a period of testing, and they strictly forbade clergy to bring a woman to live in their household unless she were their mother or sister. In later centuries, such decrees were sometimes called “reform decrees.” The juridical genre the council used to formulate its decrees was the canon, a generally short ordinance proscribing or prescribing certain behaviors, with penalties attached for non-observance. 

Discerning What Is True and Good

Divine activity in salvation history is primarily God’s work: “I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail” and the “Spirit will lead you into all truth”; And “lo, I will be with you always, even to the end of the age.” But apparently, by divine decision, that work is also, secondarily and derivatively, yet no less truly, one in which the (very) human community, or “people of God,” participates and cooperates.

God’s providential plan is worked out in salvation history, not by sailing above all the messiness, or by showing up, here and there, in a blaze of glory, but rather within, and through, even beneath sinful human beings and their flawed human institutions. This includes the Church, which in its human dimension is always in need of reform.

Viewed from within, accordingly, Church history is complex, ambiguous, perplexing—in a word, messy. Most of the time, there are no bright clear lines, no simple binary between “good guys and bad guys,” heroes and villains—no “history without tears”—without tragedy, without shortcoming, without failure. As Pascal said, specifically in relation to the Church and its failings: “Jesus must be in agony until the end of the world.”

Yet, despite all that, the Christian community is emboldened to press forward with confidence in discerning what is true and good, through the guidance of the Spirit. This conviction underlies and undergirds the conciliar nature of Christian traditions like Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. 

The Council of Nicaea, whose 1700th anniversary is celebrated this year, was the first of seven so-called “ecumenical” or “church-wide” councils of the early (undivided) Church. Today, those early councils and their doctrinal decrees are considered authoritative, to one degree or another, by many (though not all) of the various expressions of Christianity. For Roman Catholics, there have been more than a dozen subsequent councils that are also authoritative, including the two most recent, Vatican I and Vatican II. In these ways, the crucial principle of conciliarity manifests itself. 

Image licensed for editorial use via Adobe Stock.