Johannine Revelation, Nicene Witness

Abstract

On its seventeenth centenary, I seek to reassess the theological significance of the Nicene Creed, drawing inspiration from Athanasius, who came to see the Creed as a privileged transmission of the apostolic teaching based on the Revelation granted by Christ. I attempt to bring into focus the nature of Revelation, referring to Karl Barth and Jean-Luc Marion. Criticizing the deflationary approach to Nicaea and Athanasius, which has been common of late, I read the layers of meaning in the Creed with special attention to the way the Creed builds on Johannine themes, and I reassess its ousia language.

Perhaps no event in Church history carries such enduring prestige as the Council of Nicaea, though it is not the Creed of 325 (N) but that of 381 (C) that counts as “the most influential non-biblical text in the history of Christianity”1. Recalling a riddle put to children, should one say “the glory that was Greece” and “the grandeur that was Rome” or vice versa? I would like to ask what precisely the “glory” or the “grandeur” of the First Ecumenical Council consists of? Eusebius underlines its “grandeur” as an achievement of ecumenical unity, and the celebration of its seventeenth centenary sometimes proceeds in that key. Athanasius affirms its “glory” as witnessing the revealed doctrine about the true divinity of Jesus Christ. Reading the Nicene Creed as an interpretation of the Johannine Prologue, I shall try to bring into focus this singular event of transmission (paradosis) in its concrete texture and reflect on how it is to be appropriated today2.

1. Eusebian Grandeur and Athanasian Glory

Eusebius calls the Council “a new work produced by God” (Vita Constantini 3.2.1). Aaron Johnson says that compared with previous synods described by him, it may seem “not such a new thing after all”3. However, Eusebius’ perception of a novum and of a divine work should not be dismissed, given that he was the most historically informed person of his time and a sensitive theologian. To apprehend the weight and the texture of the Nicene event, his perceptions of grandeur should be noted. To describe Nicaea as “only the most recent instantiation of the ongoing maintenance of peace and unity in the universal church”4 is to miss its revolutionary impact as precisely the first universal synod. In fact, Johnson does not adopt this deflationary stance but signals “a series of unique features that set this synodal narration apart from all others in Eusebius’s corpus”5. This narrative uniqueness may reflect not only the narrator’s lively imagination but a singularity of the event itself.

The use of synods to define doctrine had begun in Antioch, the third greatest city of the empire, decades before. Nicaea was held in the outskirts of Byzantium, which had only just begun its transformation into Constantinople, the New Rome, site of the Council of 381. The grandeur of the site depended on the proximity of the imperial seat. The unprecedented role of the Christian Emperor (not to be compared with the involvement of Aurelian in the affair of Paul of Samosata sixty years earlier6) is what Eusebius most emphasizes. Constantine had emerged on the Christian stage in a blaze of heavenly vision, even if “the vision described by Eusebius may in fact be a Christianized substitute for a pagan vision of Apollo that happened as early as 310”7 and which Constantine’s Christian advisors “said was the Onlybegotten Son of the one and only God”8. Anticipations of Nicaea become more intense when we learn that the president of that Council, “Ossius, bishop of Córdoba, was certainly at Constantine’s side by the winter of 312–313 and may have been consulted at the earlier date when (and if) the vision occurred”9.

Describing Constantine’s entry at the Council of Nicaea, Eusebius gushes about his physical beauty and spiritual majesty in almost cultic tones (3.10.3-5). We are told that the emperor’s gracious converse in Latin and Greek with the disputing parties enabled a unanimous faith to be established (3.14). This clearly refers to the Creed that Eusebius signed with some misgivings, but which he is ready to celebrate not only as an imperial achievement but as an instrument of Church unity. In calling the Council a “divine work”, he may refer to some joyful experience of grace in a postconciliar season of unity, even if he was working to rehabilitate the Eastern theology, with its traditional subordinationism and three hypostases against the “Asiatic” and Western traditions that stressed the unity of substance and had rather unnervingly triumphed in the homoousion10. His last great theological battle has been against the dangers of that theology as manifest in Athanasius’ colleague Marcellus of Ancyra (De ecclesiastica theologia, 335 CE).

Another note of grandeur is the scale of the event, which Eusebius describes as an ecumenical synod11 in a work left uncompleted by his death in 339, the very time when Athanasius was beginning his Orations Against the Arians, where he, too, calls Nicaea an ecumenical synod. Paolo Sarpi noted that the expanding Church and the ease of communication throughout the empire necessitated larger assemblies to resolve divisions and that they were called ecumenical in reference to the reach of the empire12.

But moving from the Life of Constantine to Athanasius’ more theologically oriented recalls of the Council, we can see that the same sense of a unique event is more deeply felt in the latter. Eusebius is a thinker of the Church and of the imperial State, grand affairs indeed, whereas Athanasius subordinates both of these to the questions of Christology and of salvation. Athanasius has none of the grandeur of a court theologian but is an ascetic at home with desert monks, a clue missed by those who talk of him as “driven by ambition”. Eyes fixed steadily on the goal, he saw the Creed through to its final triumph and full recognition.

2. Deflationary Scholarship

At least since Bishop Richard Hanson’s account of the Arian Controversy in 1988, Anglophone scholars have tended to reduce Nicaea and its Creed to the status of political maneuvers13. Old hostility against St Athanasius has revived, with a tendency to give undue credence to the accusations of his enemies. Hanson prosecutes Athanasius both for alleged “misbehavior” and alleged theological weakness in not countenancing a passible God: “Athanasius realized the value of an anti-Arian line in justifying his conduct”; “his best defence against the all too damaging accusation of misbehaviour in his see was to move the attention of the faithful of the public from the issue of episcopal administration to that of soundness of doctrine”14. Such snide remarks have become almost de rigueur in discussing Athanasius. Combing the complex historical dossier about the patriarch’s alleged crimes, the critics often miss the theological greatness of his work. Historical scholarship and hermeneutical sophistication inevitably militate against perceptions of grandeur and glory or claims that the Council had a special providential status and that Athanasius, like Luther, had a unique theological role15. Refreshingly, Sara Parvis has expertly corrected a trend that would lead to robbing Nicaea and Athanasius of any effective theological authority16. To put it more strongly, secularization has come to bite its own tail and has left our world depleted and hollow. A secularizing approach to Scripture and Patristics has impeded critical retrieval of the tradition, an outstanding task to be pursued in the key of theological thought.

Lewis Ayres states, “Nicaea’s creed was not designed to do much more than: (a) earn the approval (however grudging) of a majority present and (b) make it clear that certain perceived errors of Arius and his early supporters were unacceptable”, so that it “was both intended to reflect the views of the coalition who framed its distinctive terminology, and yet had to hide some of their idiosyncrasies in order to provide a common front”.17 It is true that the confutation of Arius was the main point of the Creed at first. But to refute an error on such a major point as the divinity of Christ cannot be just a ploy or tactic. Even were it intended as such, words have meanings and referents. Critics of Nicaea portray the council fathers inconsistently. On the one hand, they are seen as nasty tacticians honing their legal precision, “that is, from the ousia of the Father”, while muttering to themselves, “we got him!”, and on the other, they are seen as resorting to utter vagueness with homoousion to keep their own tattered coalition together.

But another anti-Arian clause, “true God from true God”, cannot be written off as legalistic metaphysical machination18. It has been a proud and direct utterance of faith ever since the Creed (in its later form) was enshrined in Christian worship, and I see no reason to think that the fathers of Nicaea did not intend it as such. Mark Edwards says, “We should not exaggerate the significance of this pronouncement—there is strictly no Nicene doctrine of the Trinity after all”19. The term “Trinity” does not figure in the debates leading to the Creed and seems a red herring in this context. What the Creed determined about the true divinity of the Son is in itself of the greatest doctrinal significance, and if “it emerged as the oecumenical pattern of Christian orthodoxy”20 later in the fourth century, this is not just an ecclesiastical arrangement but comes from recognition of the full significance (and truth) of what it proclaimed.

We are told that the Council was forgotten immediately, going unmentioned in Athanasius’ Contra Gentiles—De Incarnatione, written during his first exile, in Trier (335–37). But there is a prominent mention of both Nicaea (I, 7) and of the keyword homoousios (I, 9) at the start of Athanasius’ weightiest work, the Orations Against the Arians, of which the first two were written in Rome, in 339–40, with the third added later in reaction to Serdica, 34321. Given this reference I would query Ayres’s statement that “Athanasius’ decision to make Nicaea and homoousios central to his theology has its origins in the shifting climate of the 350s and the structure of emerging Homoian theology”22. It is true that “In this early text [the Orations] he provided no defense of the Nicene Creed; he did not use it as a touchstone for his own trinitarian theology; he did not appeal to it as a standard of orthodoxy”23. However, the Orations are steeped in the Nicene diction of ousia,24 including the phrases ek tēs ousias and idion tēs ousias tou patros, and we also find ei theos ēn alēthinos ek tou theou (3.27, as an Arian objection, evidently to the Nicene Creed); the Son is theos alēthinos (3.19). Athanasius’ intense concern with Christology and Christological orthodoxy generated its own rich vocabulary in meditation on controverted scriptural texts such as those from Ps 45, Prov 8, Acts 2, Jn 1, 10, 14, Phil 2, Heb 1, etc. In any case, as Sara Parvis points out, “the pre-Nicene debates over the relationship of the Son’s ousia to that of the Father continued unabated after Nicaea, only ever briefly interrupted by attempts to avoid ousia language altogether”25.

Mark DelCogliano discusses the retrieval of Nicaea in the 350s in terms of “a skillful consensus-building movement”, developing strategies such as claiming to represent “the middle ground between extremes”, shaping creeds as minimalist as possible but not too ambiguous, and cultivating imperial patronage26. This risks reducing a struggle for the faith to a mere political campaign. Athanasius’ Orations are called a “manifesto”, and we are told that “in the early 340s, Athanasius began to conceive of his ecclesio-political struggles with the Eusebians as a quest for orthodoxy against the Arianism of his opponents”27. Well, the Orations are far too rich and well argued a text to be treated as an ad hoc manifesto,28 and they are in continuity with the Henos sōmatos of Bishop Alexander, some twenty years earlier, which shows marks of Athanasian style, as both Newman and Christopher Stead point out29. Given the golden theological succession from Alexander to Athanasius, the following remarks are quite inapposite: “Athanasius’ election as bishop is shrouded in rumour…. Hanson nicely sums up the best we can say about it: ‘Athanasius was indeed elected, but not by immediate and unanimous acclamation, and not without suspicion of sharp practice’”30. Harnack states that Athanasius’s role in the production of the Nicene Creed itself is beyond doubt31. DelCogliano underestimates the deep foundations of Athanasius’ thought; it is its theological depth rather than strategies of presentation that ensured its ultimate victory. To portray him as a wily, opportunistic Church tactician is rather unfair, given his heroic career, and it is absurd to present his theology itself, the source of his incredible consistency, as opportunistic.

Accusing Athanasius of misleading Pope Julius and the Western bishops by smearing the Eastern bishops as Arians, DelCogliano misses the actual implications of the latter’s efforts to rescind Nicaea or to consign its Creed to oblivion. Hilary’s approbation of the second creed of the Dedication Council of Antioch (341), twenty years after the event, does not necessarily discredit Athanasius’ suspicion that it leaned to Arianism; read from the Nicene vantage, its long-windedness seems in constant flight from the key points of Nicaea.

As the Nicene Creed became better known in the West, Ayres notes, “we seem to see a growing opposition to Constantius’ attempts to force western councils to agree to the decrees of Sirmium 351, and at the core of this opposition are figures later central to Latin Neo-Nicene theology…. This opposition was both theological and political”32. In DelCogliano, the theological quality of the opposition is glossed over so that the bishops’ resistance to the emperor becomes unintelligible. Why would they court danger by tussling with the world’s most powerful man unless something of supreme import was at stake? Of Western bishops who rallied to Nicaea, such as Hilary, Eusebius of Vercelli, Phoebadius of Agen,33 Potamius of Lisbon, or Gregory of Elvira,34 we are told that “These initial western appeals to the Nicene Creed were probably not motivated by prior acceptance of it but by dissatisfaction with Constantius”35. Here, again, political skirmishing overrides theological conviction, as if N were picked up just as a handy weapon. What these bishops expounded in careful writings outweighs anything the Homoians produced at the time. DelCogliano lauds the consensus-building efforts of the Eastern bishops in this and other such creeds over the next twenty years, ignoring that they are all predicated on rejecting Nicaea.

When one drops the Nicene line that Athanasius kept firm and clear, one easily slips into apologetics for Arianism: “The doctrine that the Son was ‘a perfect creature, not like other creatures’ was not empty rhetoric. It was an essential component of a widespread eastern theology that understood the Son as a unique and divine ktisma [creature], an immutable mediator separate by ousia and physis both from the unbegotten Father and from the created order. This theology bridged the gulf between God and creation, not through the Incarnation of an ontologically divine Son, but through a mediator who was both a ktisma and God”. Those whom Athanasius “condemned as ‘Arian’ did uphold the existence of a divine unchangeable Son through whom the creation and salvation of humanity was achieved”36. Without Athanasius, we might be living with that kind of theology still, and bothered by a sense of something missing. “The wide spectrum of doctrinal views that existed within eastern Christianity at this time”37 was tested against Nicaea and generally found wanting. To repeat the test today will not change the result. Gwynn sees Athanasius as “completely sincere” in imposing “the ontological unity of Father and Son” and admires “the magnitude of his theological achievement”, a vision “symbolized in Athanasius’ writings from the 350s onwards by the Nicene Creed”,38 as if the Creed were just a word salad to be given meaning retrospectively. “No student of Athanasius would question the sincerity or depth of his religious beliefs”39. Indeed, just as no student of Haydn or Mozart would question their musical taste and no student of Veronese or Vermeer would doubt that they were able to paint. “He was a product of his times, and his career offers a valuable insight into the great formative period of Late Antiquity”, but “he also transcended his times”40. Such generic praise qualifies as “faint”.

At Sirmium in 351, “a worry was expressed about whether using ousia language for God had materialistic implications, a concern that some scholars have interpreted as anti-Nicene”41. But does not this echo Arian objections voiced at the time of the Council itself? The homoousios is the most notorious piece of unbiblical terminology in the Creed, but the very word ousia aroused intense resistance, reaching a climax in 358 in the “Blasphemy of Sirmium” and in the “Dated Creed” of 359. The bishops at Rimini, 359, rallied to Nicaea, but their own delegates to Constantius overturned this stance, and in a second session, the Rimini assembly succumbed to vague Homoian diction42. Athanasius’ reassertion of the homoousios at his synod in Alexandria in 362 boosted resistance to enveloping homoianism, which persisted into the next century. While the Heteroousians such as Eunomius seem to have burned themselves out or been crushed by the massive refutations of Basil and Gregory of Nyssa, the Homoians kept up a sturdy theological culture, as we see in Augustine’s disputation with the Arian Gothic bishop Maximin in 427 or 42843.

Constantius, long an established villain in Church history thanks to the vitriol of Athanasius, Hilary, and Lucifer of Cagliari, is now lauded as a consensus-builder, like his father before him and Theodosius later: “Constantius came to adopt the stance of the heirs to the Eusebians in the East, that Athanasius’s theology represented a minority position out-of-step with their brand of anti-Arian, anti-Marcellan, anti-Photinian consensus-building and was thus an obstacle to reconciliation between East and West”44. But this unraveled when the “blasphemy of Sirmium” in 357 “issued a confession of faith that condemned all use of ousia language for God (absolutizing the concerns in the Sirmium Creed of 351)”,45 and because of Constantius’ “heavy-handedness in promoting his imperially endorsed creed”46. But one could equally say that the Homoians were split by “rifts” and “fracturing”47 from the start and were working with “a naive understanding of unitedness and peace”48.

Athanasius kept thinking theologically, more and more realizing that the actual text of the Nicene Creed, including the homoousios, was crucial to his defense of the full divinity of Christ against the various unsatisfactory and contradictory proposals of successive synods; hence, the series of lucid essays in the 350s that revisited the Council: De Decretis,49 De Sententia Dionysii, De Synodis, all of which vindicate theological principle over against strategic consensus incautious of doctrinal consequence. DelCogliano admits that the De Decretis launched the pro-Nicene alliance on the best theological premises: “the ἐκ τῆς οὐσίας and ὁμοούσιον functioned primarily as ‘grammatical rules’ for interpreting scriptural language about God”50. But the lingering suggestion that these “rules” were mere ploys for wrongfooting the Homoians and not a witness to divine truth, with a fundamentum in re, needs to be resisted.

3. From Christ to the Apostles to the Bishops

In later texts, Athanasius talks of the Creed as a divine event, as “the word of God that remains forever” (Is 40:8)51. While not directly an event of Revelation, it is a privileged transmission (paradosis) of the apostolic teaching: “the sound faith, which the Lord granted (ekharisato), the apostles proclaimed (ekēruxan), and the fathers transmitted (paradedōkasin) who came together at Nicaea from the whole of our world”52; “the tradition from the beginning and the teaching and faith (paradosin kai didaskaleian kai pistin) of the Catholic Church, which the Lord granted (edōkan), and the apostles proclaimed, and the fathers preserved (ephulaxan)”53. The bishops’ role is merely to transmit or preserve, but it is in intimate continuity with the Savior’s Revelation and the apostolic kerygma. “Athanasius wants to indicate the direct connection of transmission between the word of God and the confession of Nicaea, and thereby to withstand from the basis any objection against the unbiblical terminology of that confession”54. If we believe in the reality of the founding biblical event, then the majestic authority of the Nicene Creed can find its basis not in the human achievements of theologians, bishops, and imperial officials, but in the astonishing truth revealed in the Johannine Prologue and triumphantly articulated over against all inadequate or distorting accounts of it before and after the Council. The complexity of exegesis and the history of dogma may make such a statement seem naive, but the proclamation of the Gospel and its contemplative reception and the recital of the Creed in the setting of eucharistic worship represent fundamental Christian acts that cast the sophisticated exercises of scholarship into a secondary position.

Freshly converted and victorious, one of Constantine’s first acts was to convene a council in Arles, attending it himself, “a revolutionary act from a Christian perspective, since participation at synods was normally limited to bishops and clerics, but a natural step for a Roman emperor, who, as Pontifex Maximus, was responsible for maintaining the peace of the gods (pax deorum)”55. Constantine boosted the sacred authority of the Council: “For I tell you, as is the truth, that the judgement of the priests should be regarded as if God himself were in the judge’s seat”56. Later, of Nicaea, he would say, “the judgement of three hundred bishops cannot be other than the doctrine of God”57. A quite contingent idea of Constantine, to resolve the doctrinal dispute by holding a council (as attempted at Arles) and to do so in the form of a Creed, generated the First Ecumenical Council, forming a distinctive institution, which began a series stretching down to Vatican II (1962–1965). But it was the failure of the many synods dotting the Arian controversy to rival or replace Nicaea that ensured the growing stature of the latter. The perception of a special providence at work here made the authority of Ecumenical Councils as such an article of faith, as a matter of divine positive law58. The dogmatic postulate was in considerable tension with the empirical heterogeneity of these assemblies,59 and their unimpressiveness as in the skullduggery apparent at the Council of Ephesus (431 CE) or the feeble performance of the Fifth Lateran Council, for example.

There was a general consensus that “the church owed to synods its continuance or at least its prosperous continuance”; but the specific novelty of Nicaea was its “positive written fixing of the Faith”60. This singular event was greeted at first with puzzlement: “The specific authority of Nicaea, i.e., the reception of its symbol as a positive norm of faith, is anything but a self-evidence”61. In Hilary’s De synodis, the post-Nicene synods are viewed positively as in part “a necessary improvement on and completion of Nicaea”,62 whereas in Athanasius’s De synodis they are generally seen, in their mutual contradictions, as an Arianizing relapse from the Nicene faith. Hilary takes written confessions of faith lightly while not denying their usefulness. He traces layers in the Creed, from the supreme mystery of the infinite God through the worship of the Son to the secondary details such as the word homoousios. “The homoousios is the second, not the first word of the confession. The pater ingenitus necessarily precedes it. The mystery of Christ cannot be spoken in a single ‘naked concept’ (brevi et nuda sermone) such as the expression una substantia, but only in dialectical, mutually ‘canceling’ (aufhebenden) steps”63.

4. Retrieving John as Revelation

The notion of divine Revelation was central in twentieth-century theology64 and played a crucial role in bringing about the sea change in Church culture effected by Vatican II. The Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, promulgated by Paul VI on 18 November 1965, had come a long way from the first draft, in the style of Cardinal Ottaviani’s Holy Office, presented three years earlier, and owed its gestation to an intervention of John XXIII and the input of Yves Congar, OP. The final text is laced with Johannine references65. In recent decades, however, reference to Revelation seems to have almost disappeared from the discourse of exegetes and theologians. The conclusion of the Modernists, that “there has never been a specially revealed religion”66, seems to have silently imposed itself, and with it the disappearance of a special science of theology. Scripture is seen as a record of human reflection on God rather than as attesting to a divine word. The first four Ecumenical Councils are seen as political compromises rather than foundational teachings marked by divinely warranted infallibility. Can we nonetheless believe that despite the complexities and obscurities of historical witness, we may recognize that a Revelation has occurred and has been received and that a line of authoritative teaching has been established, albeit in a far more pluralistic way than in simpler presentations?67

The divine nature of Jesus Christ is most explicitly revealed in the Johannine Prologue and is most formally taught in the Nicene and Nicaeo–Constantinopolitan Creeds. For many theologians, that doctrine is a mere claim, a theologoumenon, from which we can salvage, at best, the idea that the God at work in Jesus Christ is none other than the one true God.

The notion of Revelation seems to have emigrated from the theologians to French philosophers, occasioning complaints about an apparent conflation of theological and philosophical discourse:

By thus understanding phenomenological terms (appearing) by way of theological ones (Revelation and Incarnation), Marion and Henry align phenomenology entirely with theology…. Janicaud therefore rightly accuses Marion and Henry of theologising phenomenology: theology and phenomenology, he insists, make two; the leibhaftige Gegebenheit of phenomena cannot be elucidated by referring it to the verbum caro factum of God’s self-revelation68. Marion rejects this charge, however, claiming that his argument is made on entirely philosophical grounds. Specifically, he frames it as a critique of Husserl, in contrast to whom Marion proposes a more fundamental understanding of phenomenality: the mere givenness of phenomena to consciousness. He considers the phenomenon of Revelation to be the prime example of this, since its givenness would exceed or saturate all possible intentional horizons69.

In recent years, Jean-Luc Marion has been issuing untimely reminders of the crucial place of Revelation. The first word in his title, D’ailleurs, la revelation,70 is a kind of “ahem!”, modestly recalling something that has been forgotten. Less idiomatically, it means “from elsewhere”. Marion sees the reality of Revelation in the “phenomenality” of scriptural events, notably the theophanic and christophanic scenarios of the Fourth Gospel. He draws frequently on Karl Barth’s classic phenomenology of Revelation in the first volume of his Kirchliche Dogmatik, which built on Luther’s account of the Word of God71. Barth was not entirely comfortable with talk of the phenomenality of Revelation, being aware of the danger that his thought would be taken as a kind of philosophy. The word of God is not some bland phenomenological datum but a concrete event; the Word is addressed to us from God, not in mystical perception but as the listening Church (not for nothing does he write a Church Dogmatics), in the threefold form of the past Christ event, the scriptural record, and the present kerygma. To retrieve the reality of Revelation, we need to reread Barth’s mighty work and also the works of Luther, which he quotes abundantly at this stage in his career. Marion is more inspired by Pseudo-Dionysius, who conveys far less concretely the reality of biblical teaching and the Paschal Mystery and whom Luther famously denounced in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church as “more Platonizing than Christianizing”.

Bultmann’s account of John centered on Revelation, facing the problem that the Revelation had no content other than that Jesus is the one sent, the Savior of the world, etc. In his lectures on the Fourth Gospel in Münster, in 1925–1926, Barth does not treat the Gospel text directly as the word of God but discusses the Evangelist as a witness. This is in line with his general view of Scripture as attesting the word of God.

Discussing the term Logos, Barth writes the following:

The possible meanings of the term, however viable they may have been at the time, are ruled out, according to which the Logos essentially and primarily denotes a principle, be it of epistemology or of the metaphysical explanation of the world: the Logos as the highest idea in the sense of Neoplatonism, the Logos as the creating and governing world-reason in the sense of the Stoa, the Logos as the spiritual power that holds the center between God and the material world in the sense of Philo. If Philo in particular is the “source” of John, then, as Overbeck has shown well, John would really have made use of this source with sovereign freedom, distorting Philo beyond recognition72.

A current trend in German-language exegesis, represented by Udo Schnelle, Joachim Ringleben, and Troels Engberg-Pedersen, connects the Johannine Logos with philosophy in a way that overrides Barth’s perception and implicitly denies the possibility that the Evangelist is attesting an event of divine Revelation. Treating John as a philosophical text close to Stoicism, Engberg-Pedersen is insensitive to the numinous character of John’s language as it sings in the contemplative spaces of the Church and her mystics across the centuries. The same must be said of Fabien Muller’s recent proposal to read John 1:1 in Hegelian terms: “Im Anfang war der Begriff”73.

The pauses and repetitions in John make no sense to those who read John as a philosopher. For instance, John 1:2 merely repeats John 1:1 (though, as Barth notes, not resuming the sentence “Theos ēn ho Logos”). To say that this is some literary effect of rhythm or chiasmus is rather lame. Rather, one might see it as marking a pause for contemplative thought (contemplative, not conceptual). Rather than a cascade of metaphysical propositions, the two verses slowly unfold aspects of an eternal event or situation, marked by the past tense ēn, sounded four times. The metaphysicizing exegetes tend to complain about pointless repetition in John, but in reality, the repetitions reflect an effort to hold in and to communicate patiently an overwhelming flood of (contemplative, not conceptual) insight.

5. Nicaea’s Exegesis of John

καὶ εἰς ἕνα Κύριον Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν, τὸν uἱὸν τοῦ θεοῦ γεννηθέντα ἐκ τοῦ πατρὸς, μονογενῆ, τουτέστιν ἐκ τῆς οὐσίας τοῦ πατρος, θεὸν ἐκ θεοῦ, φῶς ἐκ φωτός, θεὸν ἀληθινὸν ἐκ θεοῦ ἀληθινοῦ, γεννηθέντα οὐ ποιηθέντα, ὁμοούσιον τῷ πατρί, δι’ οὗ τὰ πάντα ἐγένετο τά τε ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ καὶ τὰ ἐν τῇ γῇ, καὶ διὰ τὴν ἡμετέραν σωτηρίαν κατελθόντακαὶ σαρκωθέντα, ἐνανθρωπήσαντα….

Τοὺς δὲ λέγοντας Ἦν ποτε, ὅτε οὐκ ἦν, καὶ Πρὶν γεννηθῆναι οὐκ ἦν, καὶ ὅτι ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων εγένετο ἢ ἐξ ἑτέρας ὑποστάσεως ἢ οὐσιάς φάσκοντας εἶναι [ἢ κτιστόν] ἢ τρεπτόν ἢ ἀλλοιωτὸν τὸν uἱὸν τοῦ θεοῦ, τούτους ἀναθεματίζει ἡ καθολικὴ καὶ ἀποστολικὴ ἐκκλησία74.

5.1. Where Did the Logos Go?

The disappearance of Logos from N may be due to perceived subordinationist associations of the hallowed term, which would have particularly clustered around Origen’s use of it. While the Alexandrian Logos theology represents the tradition from which both Arius and bishop Alexander emerged, the word “Logos” had acquired unwelcome associations from Paul of Samosata, who represented the still vibrant tradition of dynamic monarchianism. Though he ascribes a Logos to God and even calls it Son, it remains “an impersonal force”, which, as such, is “utterly unable to step into the world of appearance”, being superior to everything visible75. To the Fathers of Nicaea, “Son of God” seemed “more evangelical and less Hellenizing”76. It addressed the nerve of Arius’s dissent, which bore on the reality of divine sonship. Eusebius’ Creed has “Logos of the Father, God from God, light from light, life from life” before “only-begotten Son”. Mark Edwards says that Logos does not occur in any other declaratory creed (a type of creed that came into use in the fourth century)77. “While it implied to some, like Alexander of Alexandria, that the Son is related as intimately to the Father as a word is related to the one who utters it, there were others, like Arius, who followed Origen in holding that it betokens the Son’s relation to the world as the architect of rational order”78. “Although the word Logos is biblical, we need not be surprised that the Council of Nicaea shunned the choice that the adoption of it would have forced upon them”79.

That all things come to be through the Son—δι’ οὗ τὰ πάντα ἐγένετο—has less salience in the Creed than the Gospel’s declaration that all things come to be through the Logos. The addition of τά τε ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ καὶ τὰ ἐν τῇ γῇ in N, not retained in C, does not suffice to give the Creed a broad cosmic dimension and rather suggests an effort to fill up a felt lack with a hollow rhetorical flourish. The Nicene κατελθόντα καὶ σαρκωθέντα, ἐνανθρωπήσαντα, are rather dry expressions, missing the broad scope of the epidemia of the Logos in Origen, and also only faintly reflecting the climactic paradox of John 1:14. The Logos has made a magnificent return in Vatican II and in the work of Jacques Dupuis, SJ, as the platform of a vision of Christ present beyond the frontiers of the churches80. It must be regretted that no such perspective surfaces in the Nicene Creed, which thus lost and caused the Church to lose a major feature of Johannine and Origenian vision.

5.2. Monogenēs

Nicaea omits “firstborn of creation” (a Pauline expression) because of the difficulty of identifying its referent—the eternal or the human nativity? In N, “the epithet monogenēs is now placed in a position which forestalls any possibility of referring it to the incarnation rather than the eternal sonship”81. The Creed or Creeds of Jerusalem, variously postulated as a source of N or as influenced by it, has the same “and in one Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God” as N, but adds ton monogenē82.

According to some, the early presence of monogenē in the Old Roman Creed (R) derives not from John but from Luke 1:3583. Kelly finds it “extremely doubtful whether in fact the redactor of R can have been thinking of Lk. I, 35.… The language indeed seems more reminiscent of Mt. I, 20”84. But the word is specifically Johannine and could have been appropriated from John to name Christ’s human birth in these early creeds. In Nicaea, it recovers its Johannine use as referring to his divine birth from eternity. “As indicating the peculiar relation of Jesus to God it is confined to the Johannine writings (Jn 1:14, 18; 3:16, 18; 1 Jn 4:9). There it stresses the uniqueness of Jesus alike in His Sonship (so different from the sense in which men can be the sons of God), in His intimacy with the Father, and in His consequent knowledge of Him”85.

It does not seem correct to say that in N, “monogenēs means ‘from the substance [ousia] of the Father,’”86 since the rather legal-sounding specification, τουτέστιν ἐκ τῆς οὐσίας τοῦ πατρος is appended to the entire clause “begotten of the Father monogenēs”87. The sense “from the substance” is not contained in the word monogenēs or in the word “begotten” but is read into the phrase “from the Father”, elaborated to “from the essence of the Father” in a distinct doctrinal innovation. The creed Arius submitted to Constantine has ton monogenē, ton ex autou88. Why then would the Nicene Fathers think the addition of monogenēs (“probably an accretion to the original nucleus”89) harbored a thrust against Arius? Eusebius’ defense of ek tēs ousias in Ep. Caes. 9 makes no reference to the word monogenēs. Athanasius, too, explains ek tēs ousias as intended to forestall Arian interpretations of ek tou theou, a phrase that was equally applicable to creatures (Ep. ad Afros, 5). Simonetti does not cite the word monogenēs when he states that ek tēs ousias was intended to “bring out better the concept of real generation, … introducing a specification of the too general concept of generation, which concept the Arians had already rejected as implying the derivation of the Son from the Father as part of him”90. Simonetti finds Origen making a similar disparaging remark on ek tēs ousias in ComJn 20. 157–991. Ousia invited material associations or just an over-positive assertion of “being”. More than Aristotle’s prōtē or deutera ousia, “to people of a Stoic cast of thought (and the impact of Stoicism on the mind of the ancient world was a powerful one), ousia might suggest just matter, stuff, nothing more or less”92. But Simonetti may be wrong to connect ek tēs ousias so closely with the notion of generation.

When “begotten” is repeated, a second ousia specification is appended, homoousios tō patri, which is “only comprehensible as a necessary supplement” to ek tēs ousias93. The expression “was anticipated only by Theognostus, an Alexandrian teacher quoted by Athanasius in defence of the Nicene wording (Decrees, 25), but otherwise held to be of questionable orthodoxy”94. Origen did not have “from the ousia” but “from the dunamis” of the Father (ComJn 13.153)95. The synod of Antioch earlier in 325 said that the Son is from the Father’s very hypostasis (Syr. qnômâ)96.

The historical construction of the creeds lends itself to archeological examination. There is no precipitation in this construction, the fruit of slow reflection, producing accretions as a result of theological insight (as when, in one account, the original ninefold construction of the Old Roman Creed is enhanced with two expansions of the second article)97. Within the text of N and of C, we discern layers of theological utterance that can be assessed with some independence from the detailed historical investigation—one layer provided by scriptural diction, another by prior confessions and their liturgical use, another by accretions directed at heresies, another by refinements drawing on metaphysical diction98. Reading the Creeds back to their scriptural matrix rather than forward to later speculations is the key to bringing their meaning and purpose into focus. Of course, that is not a simple one-way reduction but implies a complex tug-o’-war between the different layers.

Ironically, the champion of biblical theology, Karl Barth, does not use this key. In his rather tangential comment on C, he connects monogenēs willfully to the unique, exclusive authority of the Son as Revealer99. He sees the Creed as expounding the three Seinsweisen (modes of being) of God, which goes beyond what the Creed enunciates. The phrase does have a warrant in the tropoi tēs huparxeōs of Basil and Gregory of Nyssa, but that theologoumenon should not be projected back into the Creed. Moreover, those who expect the champion of Revelation to subordinate the utterances of the Creed to the supreme “saturated phenomenon” (Marion) of Revelation will be disappointed to find that he emphatically asserts that the Creed goes beyond and above Revelation to affirm the objective ontological facts behind it, to the discomfiture, as he supposes, of liberal theologians. “In relation to the revelation that happened in Jesus Christ something is to be said beyond the revelation something drawn from the revelation about a beyond and above. What is to be said is this: what Christ is in the revelation, just that is he beforehand in himself”100. The Revelation transmitted in the Apostles’ preaching, foundational for Irenaeus, Tertullian, and even for Origen, was more a matter of propositions than of experiences, events, or phenomena (in contrast to the emphasis of the Gnostics). The Christian reality (or what Henri de Lubac called le fait chrétien) embraced not only the Paschal Mystery, the eucharistic life of the Church, the witness of the Martyrs, but the solid regulae fidei conveyed by the Apostles and their successors. The angularity of these propositional landmarks cannot be ironed out by a phenomenological reduction.

Seeking to step back to the original texture of the Nicene faith, and perhaps even to overcome its language to bring out a more dynamically biblical form of that faith, we can construe N’s ousia language as nestling in a context of biblical, and specifically of Johannine language. If the teaching of Nicaea is “granted” by the Lord, the reference cannot be to the teachings of Jesus during his earthly ministry since not even the discourses attributed to Jesus in the Fourth Gospel convey the teaching on the status of the eternal Logos found in the Johannine Prologue. Of course, one could imagine the Evangelist deriving this teaching from sayings such as “I and the Father are one” (Jn 10:30) or receiving it from Jesus in unreported communications. But perhaps Athanasius sees the risen Lord as communicating this teaching through the Holy Spirit. It is, in any case, not deduced by human speculation or mythical mapping like Philo’s but communicated in divine Revelation.

5.3. Theos, Phōs, Theos Alēthinos

The word “from” (ex, ek) occurs five times in the second article of N and twice in the anathemas101. It is a word that carries strong Johannine echoes. The preposition does not occur in the Johannine Prologue with reference to the origin of Jesus from God; we hear that the Logos is pros ton theon (toward or with God) and that the only-begotten God is in the bosom (en tō kolpō) of the Father (1:18); Jn 1:14 has para patros. In the body of the Gospel, Jn 3:2 has apo theou, but Jesus comes ek tou ouranou at Jn 6:42, 50-1, ex ouranou 6:58,102 and finally ek tou theou at Jn 8:42, 47103. The Johannine usage refers to the whence of Jesus (and of believers) rather than to ontological derivation, which is the concern of all occurrences in N. it has a dynamic event quality, linked with verbs of motion such as “come”. (In Origen, too, the dynamic visitation, epidemia, of the Logos, and its dynamic participation in the Father’s divinity are more in evidence than a worry about exact ontological status.) In N, “the preposition retains its full significance throughout” and the ex’s rejected in the anathemas are balanced against ek tēs ousias in the body of the Creed104.

While Jesus is “the light of the world” (Jn 8:1), the Logos is not called “light”; rather, “in him was life, and the life was the light of humans” (1:4). Just as the Creed applies “theos” (and “alēthinos theos”) equally to the Father and to the Son, so “light” too is upgraded, signifying full divinity when applied to the Father and the Son. The phrase “light from light” occurs in Plotinus (Enneads IV, 3.17.13) and conveys all the majesty of emanationist vision, which of course is very hierarchical and, in a Christian adaptation, would be subordinationist. The Creed appropriates the rhetoric of such a chain of being, keeping the order of first and second but insisting on their equality.

The unprecedented “true God from true God” is again, as Lietzmann notes, “unavoidably recognizable as an accretion (Zusatz), for it is a doublet of ‘theos ek theou’”105 and has a clear anti-Arian purpose. It is “a fusion of two Johannine verses” (Jn 17:3 and 1 Jn 5:20)106. Lietzmann thinks it shows “how extrinsically the redactors worked; they would have needed only to add alēthinou above, to avoid the repetition”107. It is not necessary to draw this conclusion. The redactors define first that the Son is “God from God”, thinking of “theos ēn ho Logos” in John 1:1c and then completing the Johannine pros ton theon (1:1b) with ek theou. Theos ēn ho Logos means, according to Karl Barth, that “the essence of the Logos… is identified with the essence of the quantity designated as ho theos. Its theotēs is ascribed to him without reservation”108.

The first anathemas attached to the Nicene Creed are directed at the notorious claims that “there was, when he was not” and “before being begotten, he was not”. Among the three occurrences of “was” here, the first carries some of the Johannine meaning of eternity (unless it is merely logical quibbling).

6. The Emergence of Nicene Singularity

If John’s Son christology is in effect essentially a large-scale metaphorical elaboration of the prologue’s Logos christology (more ambitious than any metaphorical elaboration of Philo), then the Son christology should be read as a part of the Logos christology. That is, various aspects of the Son christology should not be read independently of the Logos christology, but rather as intended to serve the Logos christology. I am thinking not simply of the accusation that Jesus was making himself equal with God (5.18) and Jesus’ striking claim to be one with the Father (10.30); for such claims are an obvious expression of Logos/Wisdom christology—Logos/Wisdom being the self-expression of the otherwise invisible God. Nor am I thinking only of the sending motif, where the Son sent is wholly representative of the Father who sent him (e.g., 10.36; 12.45). I am thinking more of the features of John’s Son christology normally referred to as the Son’s ‘subordination’ to the Father—summed up by 14.28, ‘The Father is greater than I.’ In fact, however, the thought is not so much of subordination, as though that was already an issue. The issue is not the relation between the Father and the Son (as later), but the authority and validity of the Son’s revelation of the Father, the continuity between the Father and the Son, between the logos unuttered and the logos uttered109.

Over against this harmonizing account, Harnack’s insistence on a sharp difference between the broad vision of the Prologue and the account of the Son in the body of the Gospel, such that the former becomes a kind of Alexandrian portico to the main text, is valuable110.

Referring to Jn 3:35; 5:17–19, 26, 30; 6:38, 57; 7:16; 8:16, 28–29; 10:17–18, 29, 38; 12:49–50; 14:10–11, 31; 16:32, Francis Watson writes the following:

This is the Logos-Son speaking. Similarly, the worship offered to Jesus (20.28), from John’s perspective, is the worship of God as manifest in the Logos (1.1, 18; 10:33–36). The intimacy of ‘I and the Father are one,’ of the mutual indwelling of Father and Son, of the immediate continuity in message and works between Father and Son, are all alternative (and more personally vivid) ways of indicating that the incarnate Logos is the self-expression of God. It is only when the early church’s Logos christology is supplanted by the Son christology of Nicaea, and the Son christology becomes detached from the Logos christology that the issue of personal relationships within the divinity arises and talk of ‘subordination’ becomes necessary to maintain the balance within the by then much-refined monotheism of the Fathers111.

Here, again, the anxiety to bring Logos Christology into play in reading the language about the Son in the body of the Gospel undercuts attention to the texture of the latter. Watson continues in the same vein, which is rather forced:

In the context of the fourfold canonical gospel and its reception, the Gospel of John is important not so much for its supplementary narratives as for its radical Christology, which asserts Jesus’ equality with God—not as a ‘second God’ but by virtue of the mutually constitutive relationship of Father and Son. It has been asserted again and again that the Johannine Christology has little or nothing in common with the christology of Nicaea, that it is far from the evangelist’s thought to see Jesus as ‘very God from very God,’ and that it is his subordinationist statements that express his real view. Yet the Nicene account arises in large part out of an ongoing dialogue with Johannine and other scriptural texts. Indeed, that dialogue—of which the object is Jesus—is already underway within the texts themselves112.

The supposition that proto-Nicene concerns underlie either Jn 10:30 or Jn 14:28 is gratuitous and distracts from a reading of those texts on their own terms. The Johannine Son (not to be equated bluntly with the Logos) is intimately identified with the One who sent him but knows that One, the Father, as greater than he (again, the issue is not the status of the Logos over against God), Nicene parsing of the texts will refer expressions of subordination to the humanity of Jesus, not his divinity, or will refer them to his being from the Father, in any case saving the equal status of the divine Christ with the Father as Nicaea prescribes.

Is there a dialogue within the scriptural texts themselves about the ultimate status of Jesus, that is, about his equality with God? The only place where such a dialogue could come into proximity with Nicaea is the Johannine Prologue, for only there is the divine identity of Christ presented independently of his human Incarnation. There we read that the Logos is pros ton Theon, toward God, and is himself Theos, not ho Theos. The text lends itself to solicitation in a Nicene direction at the cost of some hermeneutical violence. To argue that only a Nicene reading makes full sense of the Gospel is a strenuous task.

While some modern exegetes read into John the Nicene equality of Father and Son, the greatest ante-Nicene exegete of the Gospel is evidently subordinationist and has no thought of declaring an equality or consubstantiality of Father and Son. This might give rise to later imputations of heresy, but it was not considered unorthodox in its time. Some champions of Origen attempt to portray him as in accord with Nicaea, but their arguments are feeble113. “The difficulty of finding Nicene orthodoxy before Nicaea has been a familiar theme since Petavius”,114 and efforts to find it in John and in Origen are unavailing.

A striking instance of Origen’s subordinationism is found in the Munich Ps 15.1.3, where it is not only the incarnate Son who needs the Father (who for his part is anendees) but even as Sophia the Son prays to the Father, at first sight, a unicum in Origen’s writing, as Perrone observes115. The Son is heteros… kat ousian kai hypokeimenon tou patros (“distinct from the Father in nature and person”116) (De orat. 15.1; PG 11.465).

A recent suggestion that the Nicene Creed should be read as a doxology, in the key of praise, misses the theological gravity of the Creed of 325 and its anathemas. We are told that pisteuomen should be translated as “we trust” rather than “we believe”, and that the Creed should be seen as “piling affirmation on affirmation”, “more praise than proposition, more song than statement of belief”117. While some of the fourth-century creedal texts may be garrulous and lavish of affirmations, the Nicene Creed (and even the Creed of 381) weighs every word. One recalls Newman’s reflections on the need for great discretion in formulating dogmas that bind conscience and even determine salvation. Even what sounds like a rhetorical descant—”God from God, light from light, true God from true God”—is, in fact, a doctrinal tightening of Johannine ideas, ironing out whatever may seem indeterminate in the language of the Prologue. A punch-drunk “piling affirmation on affirmation” would have been a fatal behavior on the part of the Nicene Fathers, laying them wide open to the sharp objections of the Arian adversaries.

The authors seem never to have looked at the text of 325 but only at the Creed of 381. The tight, taut diction of “toutestin, ek tēs ousias tou Patros” and of the anathemas shows clearly that the Creed is meant to articulate as precisely as possible what is to be believed about the eternal Son. Aquinas says that faith propositions reach the thing itself, fides attingit ad rem118. To aim at objective referentiality in speaking of God is very different from bursting into blithe “song”, though the Creed does maintain a tone of reverence appropriate to its subject. While the text of 325 is tight-lipped to the point of brusqueness, particularly in its sudden conclusion: “And in the Holy Spirit”, the additions of 381 are also very carefully measured. “And of his kingdom there will be no end” is a quote from Scripture (Luke 1:33), chosen to refute a heresy ascribed to Marcellus of Ancyra, not a mere devotional ornament or rhetorical cadence. The words “adored and glorified” in the third article likewise do the doctrinal work that “homoousios” did for the Son and are not merely a burst of doxology.

Creeds are “part and parcel of the liturgy. They share the fortunes of the prayers and services in which they are embedded”119. The redactors of the Creed were thus shaping a prayer to be used liturgically, but the intent of defining dogma co-exists with this, and indeed clashes with it in such cumbersome phrases as “toutestin, ek tēs ousias tou patros” and such obtrusive words as homoousios (as still felt today!). “The practice of producing creeds as proofs of one’s orthodoxy was, apparently, conventional in the fourth century, and agreed with the prevailing disposition to treat creeds as tests”120. The solemnity surrounding creeds in baptismal liturgies conferred on them “immense prestige”,121 and no means of articulating faith could match in solemn, numinous weight that of a declaratory creed to be recited by the whole community.

At Antioch, a few months before Nicaea, “under Ossius’ direction, the bishops introduced an innovation in ecclesiastical practice: they issued a creedal statement”122. Arius and Alexander had been composing creedal utterances in letters. The timing of the expansion of this to a synod is an argument for the authenticity of the Antiochene synod, sometimes contested. The famous synod held in the same great city in 268 had produced a statement of doctrinal import. So we may observe a progression from the letter of the six bishops in 268 to the creedal statement of Antioch 324/325 to the conciliar Creed of 325, which in its concision and focus produces an effect of crystallization. The status of Nicaea is due to how its Creed sights the essential issues that tended to get lost in previous too voluble utterances and how once formulated, it proved impossible to surpass or reduce the faith of Nicaea.

7. Homoousios and Beyond

The concision and focus are linked with the most innovative feature of the Creed, the use of the word homoousios. This word may be compared with the Tristan chord, which inaugurated a new age in the history of music. Just as after Tristan composers itched to explore the possibilities of chromaticism, ending in atonality (with dodecaphony as the musical equivalent of frozen Byzantinism?), so likewise after Nicaea theology took on a more consciously metaphysical cast, soon developing speculative virtuosity (patently heterodox in Aetius and Euonomius, professedly orthodox in Marius Victorinus). Simonetti thinks the word homoousios cannot come from the Origenian tradition but reflects “Asiatic and also Western (Ossius) milieux, in which the predominant Monarchian tendency led to little or no emphasis on the personality of the Son and which therefore would not have a particular bias against that term”123. Alexander did not use homoousios, and his successor Athanasius was shy of it until exposed to Western influence. Though both probably accepted the term at first primarily as an effective weapon of resistance to the Arians rather than for its inherent theological merit,124 the term gradually acquired the status of the key term of Trinitarian theology, summed up as consisting in the homoousia of three hypostases.

After its brief outing in Contra Arianos I, 9 Athanasius did not use homoousios again until De Decretis in the 350s, but eventually, “he uses the term homoousios perhaps 150 times”, and the uses are “almost without exception closely geared to the actual clause of the Nicene Creed… as if Athanasius had only learnt to use the term through his defence of Nicaea”125. The Creed’s asymmetry in placing homoousios within the Son’s derivation from the Father (and not speaking of an abstract divine ousia shared equally by all three persons) is in accord with the Johannine presentation of Christ as “to” and “from” the Father, even if the language of mutual indwelling at Jn 10:38, 14:10–11, and 1 Jn 4:15 might be (mis)appropriated for the more abstract, symmetrical construction. Homoousios is best read in light of “from God” and “from the ousia of the Father” as presupposing the one-way bestowal of the Father’s substance (in a concrete sense, as in Luke 15:13) to the Son126. This would make it wrong to say that the word homoousios is “more philosophical than theological”127. Later, the abstract language of homoousia, consubstantiality, tends to obscure the concrete movement of the Creed from God to his Son and Spirit, and also loses the contours of the Johannine Trinitarian vision128. Here, we may note a more threatening encroachment of metaphysics (though still not “more philosophical than theological”). Particularly in the West, the tendency to wrap the Trinity up in a logic of substance and relations diminishes the distinctive profiles of Father, Logos (only-begotten Son), and Pneuma. The Creed inaugurates a century of bishops’ theology (Athanasius, the Cappadocians, Cyril, Ambrose, Augustine), marked by over-concern with the regulation of doctrinal correctness and oblivion of the larger horizons of the old Church teachers such as Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Origen who set Christ in a cosmic perspective.

The relationship between N and C has become an immensely complex topic. After reviewing a string of often strained hypotheses,129 Wolfram Kinzig puts forward a dizzyingly complex set of theses on the origins of our familiar Nicaeo–Constantinopolitan Creed, with a spindly diagram to match130. Many steps in his argument can no doubt be contested, ensuring an endless debate. Interesting is the role ascribed to a Roman synod of 377/78, where the tradition of N crosses that of R, the Old Roman Creed131. The edict of Theodosius I in 380, Cunctos populos, intriguingly promotes a Trinitarian worship (ut secundum apostolicam disciplinam evangelicamque doctrinam patris et filii et spiritus sancti unam deitatem sub parili maiestate et sub pia trinitate credamus); this “cultic veneration of the entire Trinity” was rooted in the West but contested in the East132. As seen in Trinitarian tracts such as those of Tertullian and Augustine, the West was always more fascinated by the unity of substance and trinity of persons, whereas the East was more in touch with the biblical unfolding of the mystery, from Creator to Redeemer to Sanctifier, creating tension with the language of ousia.

To retrieve the scriptural grounding of the Trinitarian Creed is the best way to forestall the perception of the classical doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation as a nest of hopeless contradictions. That was the scathing conclusion of Friedrich Loofs, but the problems he alludes to were, for the most part, already raised in the fourth century, when Trinitarian discourse was still in fieri and people could formulate their misgivings more freely133. The answers given then, as in the scrupulous parsing of Gospel utterances in terms of whether they refer to the human or the divine natures or to the derivation of the Son from the Father,134 cannot be dismissed as unconvincing apologetics, though they have become strained in light of modern scriptural scholarship, and though the classical ontology presupposed may have become alien or inaccessible to modern thought, more attuned to event than to substance.