I know better than to jump in here. But that Nicean conference has one element that has always bothered me, Constantine.
The emperor of Rome calls church leaders somewhere to settle differences.
Rome and America have more parallels than most people want to admit. Imagine any president calling together all the prominent Christian leaders and making them hammer out a consensus.
And imagine this preside can have you executed at will.
Would it make you feel any better to know that the council’s decision went against Constantine’s favored position? Constantine favored Arianism, a school of thought that regarded Jesus as merely the greatest of God’s creations and not divine.
The problem with this piece is it fails to deal with all the contradictions and difficulties that come from a non-Trinitarian views of God. The councils (plural, Nicea wasn’t the only one to handle these questions) looked at all the variations of understanding the human and divine nature of Jesus and the relationship of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and finally settled on the orthodox Trinitarian, homeostatic understanding of God and Jesus that all but those on the fringes of Christianity hold today.
Imagine any president calling together all the prominent Christian leaders and making them hammer out a consensus. And imagine this president can have you executed at will.
>This has always bothered me too. Someone desiring to use Christianity to advance himself politically (Constantine) presiding over the first council, which would start a series of councils that would conclude a century later, concluding with the making of a ruling on the Godhead that would pronounce anathema (a curse) on anybody who didn’t see it precisely the way these Bishops saw it?
This doesn’t ring right at all. Something wrong in Denmark. All kinds of questions arise:
Other than Constantine, what makes the bishops that assembled the last word on this issue? The NT warns of falling away from original truths, these people lived three to four hundred years after the apostles, a lot of backsliding can take place in a far shorter time than that.
Not only so, but the very fact that councils were called on this issue begs the question: if the scripture is supposed to be so crystal clear on this issue, why all the dissent in the first place? It would help if there were a passage spelling this out very authoritatively for us somewhere. Stating it precisely as the bishops did by the time of the last council on the issue.
Why is these bishops take on the Godhead superior to anyone else with the Bible in front of them?