1700 YEARS ON: NICAEA’S PARADIGMATIC
STATUS FOR THE OECUMENICAL FAITH.
John A. McGuckin
Thank you all, so much, for the invitation to address Concordia University on this occasion of the 1700th anniversary of the council of Nicaea. Tonight I would like to look at the issue in four short treatments over the next 45 minutes or so. The first would be a very brief historical outline of what that meeting was and why it happened; the second will be about its theological statement, and whether that met or resolved the issues in crisis, in whole or in part; the third will be a look at how it tried to lay down a standard of legal governance of churches; and lastly, to what extent this first of all international Christian legislatures can still offer us any useful paradigms of authoritative contemporary Christian ecumenicity.
A. The Historical Background.
We all probably know the outlines of the story, so let me just rehearse it quickly, so as to set an initial context. We know a lot about an idealised view of the church in the late first century from Acts of the Apostles, but have very little knowledge concerning the actualities of its detailed devolvement and governmental principles over the next one hundred and fifty years. But we can deduce strong probabilities from what would emerge later. The first is that the various local communities spread extensively especially in the nexus of the coastal ports and inland trading hubs. These very early communities seem to have been aligning with each other on the principle of observed best practice: something gained by looking over their shoulders at other Christian communities in their purview. This was how they shared what would become a liturgical canon of holy scriptures and developed a spreading system of governance by Elders increasingly directed by a senior Overseer or Episcopos; known to us now by the early English word ‘Bishop’. Bishops stirred the communal developmental pot considerably. Already by the year 150 Tertullian mentions that the Greek Christian world regularly met in common gatherings of bishops of a larger area (a province) which were known as synods, or ‘coming togethers’. These synods, by the mid 200’s, had become a standard way of Christian communities resolving larger-scale problems, or setting down standards of good practice. To this synodical province-wide system we might add that certain urban centres of the Late Roman world were actually super-cities which had attracted bright talent from all over the world (including Christian intelligentsia) and whose historic culture, advanced legal courts and schools made them obvious ports of last appeal in times of trouble. Such cities playing that role among the very early Christians were Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch. To their cultural ascendancy was also added an impressive Christian heritage. As well as a centre of canon law, Rome was also the city of martyrs; Alexandria was the world centre for literary analysis but also renowned for its philosophers and theologians; Antioch was not only a city of rhetoricians but also a cradle of the original Gospels and a trend-setter of liturgical style. These super cultural centres set the development of international commonality in the second and third century church.
By the middle of the third century three ecclesiastical cog-wheels of: episcopal synods, super city precedences, and emergences of notable theological writers, created the potentiality for international Christian tensions (wrong gear selection as it were) on a larger scale than ever before. The particular gear slip that resulted in Nicaea started almost exactly one hundred years before the crisis occurred. Around 220 a theologian in that febrile city of Alexandria composed the first great systematic work of theology Christians had yet seen: On First Principles. It has authority and brilliance in many parts. It gave the church rules of exegesis that would become definitive; but it also tried to present evangelical metaphysics in terms recognisable to philosophers, and in so doing added what many simpler Christians regarded, at the time, as dangerously speculative innovations. The bishop of his super-city, Demetrios of Alexandria, was alarmed by the book and tried to censure Origen by an appeal to his fellow Roman super-bishop, Pope Pontianus. But other bishops supported Origen and ordained him as a presbyter in Palestine where he set up the first known Christian university.
One of his many deep scholia, or questions posed to his senior class, was the issue: if the Son of God was born of the all-originating Father, was his existence within history or out of it? And was his rank equal or inferior to that of the Father who begot him? We should remember here that a scholion, as posed in the ancient schools was a question that the professor did not intend to fully answer, since it was designed to be an intellectual workbench for the assiduous student.
This is our key background: but now we move onward a century to the year 320. Various schools in different parts of the Christian world had still been mooting this issue of advanced metaphysics. Alexander, the current fourth century bishop of the Alexandrian church, himself was a devoted reader of Origen, and had set up a regular seminar for his clergy to discuss points of theology. He and his close associates tended to the preferred overall Origenian solution that the Son of God was born before time and thus could be said to have an origin but not a beginning, since the latter was a time-bound notion. But one of his senior presbyters, named Arius, had trained in a different school, at Antioch and, in a meeting in 320, challenged his bishop’s basic premisses, by insisting at the symposium that if the Father gave the Son an origination, then the Son logically must have had a beginning in his origination and before that could not have existed. We can imagine that this challenge stopped an otherwise happy clergy retreat, and since the issue would not lie down and go away, Alexander eventually called a local synod of his other Egyptian bishops and excommunicated Arius for teaching that the Son of God had a beginning in time, and was thus a creature, albeit a very exalted one: which is probably what Arius intended to say as well – but which was a corollary, or implication, of the initial argument. Knowing his rights under canon law, however, Arius appealed against this judgement to other important bishops 1, especially those whom he knew shared his views: not least Eusebius of Nicomedia, the incumbent of the imperial city, who had the ear of the emperor Constantine, and who now gave Arius his support.
Arius’ supporters in Alexandria started writing a Greek slogan on the walls: En Pote Hote Ouk En (There was a time when He [the Word] was not), to which Alexander and his deacon Athanasius, arranged to have their supporters go around and add ‘Ouk’ to the front of the phrase: the absolute negation: ‘There was not a time when he was not.’ Arius also produced a poetic version of his teachings on Christ and the Word (the Thalia) hardening his position in several ways by searching out biblical proof texts that he applied literally, insisting, for example, that the Book of Proverbs taught that God ‘made’ Wisdom in the beginning as a medium of his creative works 2. This was now a perfect storm involving all the core elements that coalesced to make a theological crisis in antiquity: 1st, the involvement of a super city episcopacy, 2nd the emergence of a controversial theologian’s writing in opposition to a major bishop and his synod, 3rd a clash of different provincial synods, and 4th a public challenge to the commonality of belief on a major issue, which had hitherto been vaguely presumptive more than clearly formulated.
An added complication was that although the emperor Constantine was clearly a friend of the Church, he was currently embroiled in the final states of the civil war he had initiated 20 years earlier, now in the final stages of unseating the eastern emperor Licinius who had himself begun to classify the Church as his enemy, thereby allowing Constantine to appear as the champion and liberator of all eastern Christians. Constantine wanted to use the church structures in the East, especially the superintendent powers of local bishops, to advance his own reach into the hinterland of the Greek territories. The present state of episcopal disunity rising out of the clash between Arius, Eusebius of Nicomedia and Alexander of Alexandria, frustrated his plan to elevate bishops to the rank of imperial magistrates. This was why, in Autumn of 324 Constantine sent a letter to Alexandria urging reconciliation, in the hands of Hosius his Latin episcopal consultant. In November of that same year Hosius, presumably following the emperor’s mandate, directed a council at Antioch at which Eustathius was elected to the episcopate there, and supporters of the Arian cause were deposed. A more general synod was announced at the emperor’s pleasure at Ancyra for 325, which was later changed to Constantine’s own base camp 3 at Nicaea so that those attending could also participate in his own 20th anniversary celebrations. Bishops were allowed the use of state transports to facilitate their travel. The local bishop at Nicaea, Theognis, was a supporter of Arius and knew his colleague Eusebius of Caesarea would support him also. Ranged against them from the outset would be the core group of Alexander of Alexandria and his deacon Athanasius, Eustathius of Antioch, Hosius of Cordoba and the two delegates of the Roman Pope Sylvester. 4
B. The Nicene Statement of Faith.
The meeting at Nicaea, was the greatest gathering of international bishops the Christian church had ever witnessed to date. It opened on May 20th 325 and closed on August 25th. It produced its famous statement of faith, the Creed, or Ekthesis, on June 19th. 5 The meeting opened at Constantine’s field palace in an atmosphere of great excitement. Delegates were gathering from all over the Roman world and a mass of other attendees had also turned up: monks, merchants, and especially rhetoricians who spent several weeks before-hand giving sets of philosophical speeches to anyone who wanted to dispute, on what intellectual issues needed to be clarified and how they thought best to do it. By the end of May the imperial troops sent away the non-essential parties, allowing only bishops to enter the imperial hall for the proceedings.
The bishops also had, clearly, already been busy. It seems their first idea of solution was to have submitted written denouncements of all their enemies to the emperor directly, but this was foiled by Constantine himself, who began proceedings by ostentatiously bringing a burning brazier in before his throne and one by one burning all the petitions and mutual recriminations he had received from everyone. After thus clearing the ground to make it obvious that what followed was to be the official trial of events he began to direct business as if it were some kind of magisterial occasion. This was his inauguration of a plan that he later put into formal legal effect when he raised all Christian bishops to the status of parallel local magistrates, able to hear the causes of all those who appealed to them in local civil cases, bypassing the provincial law courts. 6
The arguments among the bishops were directed by Hosius, the emperor’s chosen delegate through whom he tried to bring the assembly to uniformity; but it proved increasingly difficult to come to a general resolution. Bishops Maris of Chalcedon and Secundus of Ptolemais offered a statement of faith drawn up in agreement with Arius’ theology and objecting to the synod’s condemnation of his Thalia treatise. They too would eventually be condemned by the synod: which shows how things were going generally against the Arian theology; but there was a lot of resistance among the assembled bishops to commit to anything deeply specific about the actual question at hand: the nature of the divine relation of Father and Son: an apparently straightforward enough question to ask the church in what was now its fourth century. Was the Word-Logos God in an absolute sense or not? Was Jesus divine or not?
Of course the Arius-Alexander dispute, built over the head of Origen, had made that simplicity of question a lot more complicated. The synodal majority seemed to have early on accepted the solution Origen himself preferred: namely that a being originated outside time could still be called eternal. What now emerged as of issue in the relation of divine Father and Son was this question: could one be of the same being, without actually being that same being? I’ll run that one again shall I? Could the Son be of the Father’s being (the same essential nature) without being just a synonym for the actual Father. And if he could, so as to be truly divine, how could this be squared with the Christian confession that God is one, not multiple? It was a rather fearful, but understandable, reluctance to get into a morass of new, non-biblical, theological statements that held the synod in a stalemate. But by June it was obvious that something had to make a breakthrough.
That chance came with the issue of the trial at Nicaea of one of the church’s leading contemporary intellectuals: bishop Eusebius of Caesarea. He had been censured at Hosius’ earlier synod of Antioch in 324 for objecting to Hosius’ preferred refutation of Arianism by affirming that the Son was the same substance as the Father (Homoousion), and thus divine, just as he was. Eusebius was head of the university town of Caesarea Palestina, and was the chief guardian of the school of the famous Origen. His objection was not rooted in his desire to defend Arius, rather to defend the point that his ancient mentor had insisted on: that divinity is totally devoid of all material substance, wholly spiritual; and therefore a term like ‘same substance’ was a very inappropriate materialist analogy to apply to Godhead. Because of his resistance at Antioch in 324 Eusebius had been provisionally deposed from office. Now, at Nicaea, he appealed that decision and was rehabilitated because he offered to the assembly his church’s ancient baptismal creed as proof of his faith in the divine Son of God: the creed of the ancient and venerable church of Jerusalem.
Here, the synod members saw a green light out of their stalemate. This liturgical creed could be the basis of re-stating the fundamental faith of the whole church. All it needed on top of the old traditional statement that Eusebius offered, was a set of explanatory amendments. But these amendments the bishops now offered could thus be seen not as innovations at all, simply glosses on what the ancient creed had always meant. So the solution proposed itself, and this is why the Nicene statement of faith is fundamentally a baptismal affirmation such as that required of any neophyte with a few amendments. If anyone criticised the bishops for making the faith too technical, they could well reply that they had only restated what any novice was required to know about Christianity; with a few clarifications.
Well actually, those clarifications are quite extensive, and very subtle. To the very simple credal confession of a new believer, namely that: “I believe in the Almighty Father who made all things, and in his heavenly Son who came enfleshed to save us by suffering and dying, rising to glory and returning as Judge in the eschaton, and also in the Holy Spirit” – (a quincunx within a triad, any structuralist might notice) the synodical fathers added no less than seven distinct amendments or extending-clarifications: six of them to do with Christology, and the final one to make specific the church’s belief in the Holy Spirit. That final statement about the Holy Spirit they deliberately left bare and exposed: for it had been church praxis up until then not to make any written statement about the Holy Spirit, and only permit the baptising bishop to give a secret discourse on his nature and work on the evening before the actual baptisms. This archaic ‘doctrine of the secret’ (the arcana mystica) was not going to be altered by the Nicene synod, and in fact it took another 57 years, until the Synod of Constantinople in 382, before those clauses on the Spirit were extended and clarified.
So, those six Christological amendments to the creed represent all the chief work that the synod agreed to set its hand to. I won’t go into all of them. Clearly some of the seven are simple dittographies of the preceding clause; a rhetorical flourish meant to emphasise by repetition with a nuanced crescendo . For example to its statement of the true divinity of the Son of God the synod took the original baptismal affirmation: that Jesus was the Son of God through whom all things were made (two statements taken directly from the New Testament 7); and added on to it a five-fold repetitive emphatic list: The Only Begotten, Begotten before all ages, Light of Light, True God of True God, Begotten not made. Each of these statements was boldly offered to stand against Arian theology: so in that sense the synod members were being pro-active and decisive. Even so, they played very safe indeed, for each of those five statements is a fairly explicit citation of the Apostolic faith as already recorded in the New Testament texts. 8
What has often been said to stand out in this process as a completely non biblical nail- in-the-coffin for Arianism, as it were, is the seventh affirmation: that the Son is of the same essence as the Father: Homoousion. We note that no attempt is made to semantically define Homoousion. But it is incorrect to say that this is wholly unbiblical. In the first instance it is clearly an integral part of that list of six earlier statements all set to the subordinate explication of the credal line: ‘The Only Begotten of the Father.’ As such, like the other clauses, it is a subordinate biblical exegesis in its integral character and can only be read that way. Secondly, it is , of and in itself, a biblical allusion to Hebrews 1.3. The modern NIV version reads this as follows: ‘The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.’ What the Greek actually says is, that the Son is the:παπαύύγασμα τῆῆς δόόξης καὶὶχαρακτὴὴρ τῆῆς ὑὑποστάάσεως αὐὐτοῦῦ : the radiance of God’s glory (which is where the clause ‘light of light’ came from) and the ‘very imprint of his substance’. And this is because, until much later in the fifth century, the words hypostasis and ousia were both synonyms for the essence of a thing. And in this instance, it can be clearly seen that the simpler term homoousion is used here as a stand in for Hebrews’ use of hypostasis.
The great Anti-Arian theologian Athanasius of Alexandria, who was present at Nicaea, and who succeeded his bishop and mentor Alexander of Alexandria six months after the council, used the homoousion for the rest of his life as a quick litmus test to see if his disputants were Orthodox or Arian; but in his more private writings he expressed some regret that the term used at the synod was so vague and so ready to be mocked by the intelligentsia as open to materialist interpretations. He himself wished they had used the phrase ταυτότης της ουσιας or ‘identity of essence’. That insight would have to brew for another generation until the later Cappadocian Fathers spelled out a more complete Trinitarian theology in the following generation.
So, overall it is clear that the synodical fathers took a rather simple set of statements about the Son of God, as found in the old Jerusalem baptismal creed; namely that he was the Son of the Father through whom the world was made and, in opposition to the Arian teaching that he was essentially an elevated creature, amplified them with specific New Testamental glosses to show that the Son was also divine, within, not additional to, the divine essence of the Father. On such a basic and important point of theology – one which in ancient times, and even today for many in Judaism and Islam, seemed to external critics to compromise Monotheism – the fathers of Nicaea were very tentative and very careful in no instance to go beyond the Apostolic witness of the New Testament. Even the famous homoousion, as we have seen, was a recycled New Testament confession.
But there is one other aspect of their theological construct that we ought to notice: and it is equally important but perhaps less noticed than this. Read the Christological statements closely and slowly and one clear message emerges: all of the attributed aspects (what they called the epinoiai) of the Son of God, are attributed to the self-same subject whether those aspects are what we might call ‘heavenly’ (such as eternal generation, or creative power in the making of the cosmos), or ‘earthly’ ones (such as suffering and dying). The Son of God, whether in his glory, or his passion, is addressed as one and the same single subject. The logical corollary of this – and it was not something the conciliar fathers deliberately constructed but something that had been in the traditional creed from the outset – was that Jesus himself can be said to be divine. And yet, as every Christian knew, he was truly human. How that single divine subjectivity could be combined with an acceptance of different states of being, one unlimited, one circumscribed, was not something they either realized they needed to address, or felt willing even to go there. That would be a slow-fused theological bomb that would detonate in the following generation and be the subject of intense and controversial debate across the next six oecumenical councils from the fifth into the eighth centuries. It would cause a profound and still unhealed fracture in the eastern Orthodox churches after the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and to this day the issue still marks deep differences in the spirituality of the western catholic and protestant communions.
C. The Anathemata and Canonical Legislation of Nicaea.
Such was the theological workload, and the accomplishment of the Synod of Nicaea. In case the simpler folk did not quite get what the Christological acclamations had done, which was a worry for the bishops attending, as they all knew they had to give an account to their churches when they got home, the synod appended to the credal text six cannon blasts aimed at the essence of the Arian theology: damning six reductionist statements concerning the Son of God’s eternity and ontological unchangeability. It quoted them from Arius’ writings and then anathematized them outright. We are able to see the account Eusebius of Caesarea wrote back to his church members to explain the events of Nicaea in which he makes himself out to be the hero of the event and everyone else coming round to his views more or less. It is a fantasy history, but perhaps typical of the way receptionism is shaped by the local version of events given. This tendency of rhetoric to obscure as much as it clarifies perhaps explains for us why there are so many repetitive dittographies in the final version of the Ekthesis: so as to rule out excessively elastic exegesis on the part of dissenters.
The work of the synod was not quite finished, however. Having got the clergy together in such an international assembly it seemed good to the emperor and to the senior super-bishops to resolve matters of international governance that had long been causing mutterings between churches. Constantine wanted the high clergy to serve as local magistrates and here was their chance to put their own house polity in order. To the theological work of the synod, therefore, they added ‘canons’ . Canon is the terms for a law or law-code in the church. The Greek word means ‘rule’ or ‘measure’. Nicaea produced 20 canons. 9
The first legislates that any man who has voluntarily agreed to castration should be denied promotion to the priesthood. Some have mistakenly interpreted this as indicating a continuance of Jewish religious law that demanded bodily integrity for those serving in the temple. But the law explicitly allows those who have been castrated by slave masters or in time of war to be admitted to orders freely. What is at issue here is an attack against one of the leading Arian theologians of the day: Leontios of Antioch. He was a skilful writer and favoured by the imperial household. As a presbyter of Antioch he fell in love with a young girl called Eustolia, and unable to marry her, wanted to live with her without the imputation of sexual immorality. He chose castration which was, in that era, regarded as an acceptable ascetic pathway for a pagan philosopher; but his lifestyle was looked on askance by many in the church. Pressure eventually caused him to be suspended from clerical orders but in 344, during the Arian ascendancy in Antioch he was placed on the episcopal throne by the emperor Constantius II. So this first canon, as well as the third which is related, is an additional attack on one of the leading Arian writers of the era.
The second canon and many others of the twenty after it, calls for a stabilization of church procedures after a long period of persecution where necessity often led to cutting of corners. Canon two specifically demands that no one should be baptized from paganism and then swiftly made presbyter or bishop. In earlier times of troubles the local Christians had sometimes sought the aid of legally trained pagans, magistrates or rhetors, to protect them and their corporate rights; offering them the episcopal throne in return. This canon implies such protection is no longer necessary under a Christian emperor. Many of the other laws are designed to regularize a very disrupted Eastern church as it emerged from major persecutions and radical secessions caused by conflicting theologies. The chief theme among the twenty laws is that bishop’s authority should be moderated by provincial synods where general good counsel could serve to underline good practice (canons 4-5). Bishops and priests ought not to move around and no one should ordain outside his own jurisdiction. The canons also set terms for the readmission of dissidents and believers who had denied the faith in times of persecution. Converts from sects which confessed the Trinity were to be admitted generously, with their sacraments acknowledged and their ranks preserved. Those from unitarian sects were all to be admitted as laity needing baptism.
Canon six established the principle of major capital cities of the empire having a kind of senior supervisory role. Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch were most in mind here. Jerusalem was also admitted to this list in terms of honour (canon 7), though not necessarily of jurisdictional sway. This system grew rapidly afterwards into the governance of international Christianity by means of five patriarchal sees. Constantinople, once it had grown to high imperial status in the late fourth century was added into this mix; and the grinding together of these four super-sees through later Christian history (for Jerusalem always remained a venerable by-water of later Christian affairs) caused almost as many crises as problems it ever solved.
D. Does Nicaea have any abiding paradigm status today?
Even from this account, which barely gives a sense of the tensions, arguments, and background conflicts which caused the Council in the first place, it must surely be sensed that the meeting could well be seen as a bewilderment to many who attended. And yet, in terms of the longer history, the result was simplified into a great victory over the Arian theologians who had suggested that Jesus was a holy creature of God, but not part of the divine being. It did not advance any significant distance at all into solving the question that its clear affirmation obviously caused – which was how could Christianity affirm Monotheism and yet also sustain the full divinity of the Son of God alongside the Father. This would be left to a later generation of theologians at the two Councils of Constantinople in 381 and 382. Their work, and their synodical creed, has also gone down in history, and is now commonly known as the Nicene Creed, and recited at the eucharistic liturgy in many churches: so great was their reverence for the foundational work of the Council of 325, and their desire not to be seen departing from it by the additions they made to it. As part of many academic celebrations that have been occurring all over the world in this anniversary year, I was recently invited to an Anglican event in Britain, discussing the Nicene Creed in detail, and when I received the papers suggesting how the invitees should shape their remarks, it dawned on me that the conference organizers had mistaken the synod off 382 for that of 325, and had no idea at all of their mistake. So I thought it best to slip away discreetly rather than spoil the whole tenor of their meeting.
Such simplifications, rendering great events into cartoons, as it were, that can easily be passed on so that the substance of the message survives the complexities of the historians, scholars, and theologians (who are not all the same thing by any means) is an important part of receptionism in the Church. And tonight I would like to end by considering Nicaea for what it might really mean to us in this day and age. Few believers in my experience as theologian and priest ever come to me tormented by the issue of whether eternal generation rules out or can include supremacy of being. Few believers ever seem to me to be greatly occupied in their religious lives by issues of the inter trinitarian relations. And that is probably just as well. But that does not mean that somewhere in the Church such foundational metaphysics have been wisely addressed. The Nicene fathers, at the simplest level, taught clearly enough that Christian faith, from its biblical origins, confesses the historical Christ as the eternal Son of God who shares the essential being of God the Father. It makes that affirmation not on the basis of metaphysical speculation per se, but rather on the close reading of the many liturgical confessions of praise of the work of Jesus, which are found in the New Testament texts: and there they found that work to be summed up in the dynamic that Christ presented the Father absolutely and authentically to the world and in so doing saved that world from error and alienation from God.
Simplifications can often be good an important things in their own right. And Nicaea can still offer many happy hours of metaphysical discourse for those who wish to go along that road. But for most of us present this evening there is another lovely simplification that Nicaea can and should offer us: and it is this: it stands as the one great syllogistical synopsis of the New Testament faith in Christ that so many generations of Christian believers have always looked back on as a flag flying on the beach-head. It’s role as the flag of common Christian identity is something that is not likely to diminish in the ages ahead, but rather to become all the more important as the Church of Christ finally emerges (one hopes) out of the many centuries of the past where so much time was spent in recriminations and narrow apologetics. Inter Christian dialogue has too often degenerated into narrow-minded sniping. Our duty, following Christ’s own solemn prayer to the Father 10 that all his disciples ought to be One should rather have been a patient seeking for a common hymn of joyous belief, and celebrating, in the face of a puzzled and disbelieving world, how great is the commonality of our Christian faith and how relatively few those things which truly divide us. Nicaea, taken as a common coin of ecumenical discourse can tell us in all simplicity what really matters in primary theological discourse; and to that extent how much else is actually a sub-set that we shouldn’t lose our tempers over.
NOTES
1. In turn (wrongly) accusing Alexander of teaching the old discredited Sabellian Monism in his theology.
2. Proverbs 8.22 in the Septuagintal version used in the early church.
3. The site of Nicaea is now on the eastern extremity of the lake of Iznik in ancient Bithynia (modern Turkey). It started as Constantine’s campaign camp after he completed his conquest of Licinius in the east and emerged as the sole ruler of the Roman empire – hence the title Nikaia – or ‘Victory town’.
4. The presbyters Victor and Vincentius.
5. The ‘Nicene Creed’ now recited at the eucharistic celebrations of so many Christian churches today is not that of Nicaea, but actually the creed of the Council of Constantinople 382 which was an extended amendment of the original of 325.
6. It would make access to justice much cheaper and easier for poor people, and ensure that Christian standards of justice would also play a part in proceedings: by no means always the case in the notoriously bribe-ridden civil courts using professional pleaders.
7. e.g. Lk. 1.35; Mk. 3.11; Coloss. 1.16.
8. c.f. Jn. 3.16; Ps. 2.7 & Heb. 1.5, 5.5; Ps. 109.3 (LXX), Jn. 1.1. & Prov. 8.25; Jn. 1. 9-13 & Jn. 8.12; Jn. 1.1-2, Jn. 17.3 & 1Jn. 5.20.
9. They are available online at: https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf214.vii.vi.i.html
10. Jn. 17. 21-23