Introduction

Most of us probably do not remember the first time we heard the phrase “Son of God.” Even those with a more explicit knowledge concerning the claim that this “only-begotten” Jesus is “of one substance” with the Father probably don’t recall the first time they learned it. Moreover, among the vestiges (ruins?) of Christendom, it is still common to publicly hear Advent tunes whose forgotten lyrics pay homage to the ancient creed. But this is not to say we sit comfortably with Nicaea in the modern imagination. Even those who seek for deep understanding of these mysteries can find themselves—at various stages of their learning—wondering if all this discourse is only so much artifice. Maybe there is the occasional intellectual flair in the history of Christological reflection. But perhaps even this is simply the elegant tailoring of the emperor’s clothes, as exquisitely ornamented as they are imagined to be and literally nothing more. 

The imaginative pressures under which contemporary Christians labor are not reducible, however, to a simple lack of understanding. Even those who attempt such understanding (a) find it difficult to grasp the precise arguments in the history of theology and (b) are surrounded by secular hagiographies of deconversion and its relief from all these supposed tensions. Moreover, we are more than a little calibrated to imagine things in a modern way. Lewis captures our situation well: 

When a man who had only the ordinary modern education looks into any authoritative statement of Christian doctrine, he finds himself face to face with what seems to him a wholly ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ picture of the universe. He finds that God is supposed to have had a ‘Son,’ just as if God were a mythological deity like Jupiter or Odin. He finds that this ‘Son’ is supposed to have ‘come down from Heaven,’ just as if God had a palace in the sky from which He had sent’ down His ‘Son’ like a parachutist. He finds that this ‘Son’ then ‘descended into Hell’ – into some land of the dead under the surface of a (presumably) flat earth – and thence ‘ascended’ again, as if by a balloon, into the Father’s sky-palace, where He finally sat down in a decorated chair placed a little to His Father’s right. Everything seems to presuppose a conception of reality which the increase of our knowledge has been steadily refuting for the last two thousand years and which no honest man in his senses could return to today. (Miracles, New York: Harper One, 1960, 108-9)

Lewis goes on to describe the contempt that many modern skeptics have for Christian apologetics because one can always retrospectively make something sound smart with a bit of cleverness and ingenuity. But this is not the same thing as intellectual honesty. Lewis, of course, goes on to respond with arguably the best popular case for the Christian creed in the 20th century. I will not repeat his argument here, but rather use it as a catalyst to ask: What is it like to confess the Nicene creed in the 21st century? What does it mean to consider this ancient formula plausible and profound? What does it look like for a Christian to move from a childlike to a mature understanding of these things? This essay will gesture at an answer to these questions by naming the various reasons we have for confessing the Christian creed, and the kind of plausibility that comes with each. In pointing to this cluster of motives for our belief, I do not deny that there may be asymmetries between these authorities. However, my current purpose is to stare at them more or less “together” as the ingredients that constitute a full-personed persuasion concerning the claim that this man Jesus was and is the Logos of God.

Tradition and Authority

It might seem peculiar for a Protestant to start with the role that tradition and authority play in the mediation of this belief, but it should not be. Indeed, most Christians in the world did not read the Bible before they heard of its content (and interpretation) from parents and tutors. Moreover, all of this was likely connected to some fairly commonplace discourse of the church. So far so good. In what does the “authority” of such a tradition lie? If a modern Christian were to begin to wonder whether the deity of Christ is a truth or not, what role might tradition play as a testimony? What weight should it have?

Of course, the Protestant answer is decidedly not that tradition is infallible. But Protestants still maintain that certain kinds of tradition are generally more reliable and smarter than you. Even if, for instance, the historical texts of a discipline (math, physics) or any art (culinary practices, etc) is not thought to be infallible, we still have the instinct that it would be foolish not to consult them as a map for our own present situation. It is of course the case that a collection of discourse and customs can mediate folly, but inter-generational discourse is also simply how knowledge is built over many lifetimes of discovery. As Stephen R.L, Clark once put it (I’m paraphrasing a line from The Mysteries of Religion), a human only lives for around 70 years and that is the entire time they have to figure out reality. The tradition preserves thousands of individual projects into a kind of hivemind over many generations. This could be qualified, but for our purposes, it is sufficient to highlight what this means for ideas and practices that have endured a particular kind of longevity. The rational, philosophical, and exegetical tomatoes that have been thrown at this ancient formula are more than any one mind contains. For those who dig deep into the history and sources, however, it is clear that this doctrine has been discussed by the greatest minds in constantly changing circumstances, and with ever-refined tools. To say that the doctrine of the deity of Christ has proved enduring, even while subject to constant criticism, would be a severe understatement. 

One might compare the doctrine’s staying power in the intellectual order as parallel to the staying power of the institution of monogamous marriage in the practical order. The history of the human race is a history of testing the boundaries of this arrangement, but it has nevertheless remained the gravitational center behind all deviation, and the one historical constant (as an institution) in whatever a “history of sexuality” might be. This suggests that there is something solid about the practice in reality. It does not even always matter whether one understands it. Even when a child doesn’t understand why they can’t breathe underwater, there is no “theoretical test” for those who make the attempt. The attempt is death, and deviation from marriage is the same for a culture.

Circling back to our focus on an event in the history of ideas (the Nicene formula), it behooves the modern seeker or the modern doubting Christian to allow this fact to weigh heavily upon them: the Nicene formula has the authority of an extraordinary amount of testing, trial, and error. And the claim that this has been simply a matter of the tail wagging the dog is ignorant. One may disagree with the Nicene settlement, in fact, and recognize that this impression is an ignorant projection. Just as Tom Holland’s recent Dominion portrays the event of the Christ (however understood) as a rupture in the moral imagination of the human race, so also the recent works of Brian Daley, Frances Young, and Johannes Zachhuber have brilliantly portrayed the coming of the man Jesus as an event in the history of the mind. The problems it created send the human intellect on a journey that none of us can fully unhitch from. Later in Miracles, Lewis says that we often contrast modern folk Christianity (with all its crass incarnations and resurrections) with what we think of as a more highbrow spirituality. He notes, however, that modern hubris forgets that in the ancient world, Christianity really was an intellectual achievement, and the ideas we think posh today were initially experienced by Christians in highly superstitious and folk form. If nothing else, the modern person has reason to be patient, and learn humbly why and how this formula has survived.

The Testimony of Scripture

Whether the Nicene settlement was a positive development or not depends largely (if not entirely) on whether it rightly mediates the apostolic witness of the New Testament to Jesus Christ. And indeed, this is certainly what the bishops at Nicaea thought they were doing. To be sure, it is not that the debate did not include some elements that were post-exegetical (i.e. answering questions that were not explicitly asked in the text), but the dispute never left the attempt to understand the claims of Scripture, that Christ was “only-begotten” of the Father, etc. The authority of the Nicene formula was derivative of its success in unveiling this mystery and the questions that come with it. Chief among this is what must be true of Christ in order for mankind to be saved.

One thing that might confuse modern seekers on this question is the proliferation of recent scholarship that portrays the development of what would become Nicene Christology as a progressive departure (mediated through the second century) from the original grammar of the New Testament. It has of course been fashionable for a while to contrast Greek thought with the supposedly quite distinct “Hebraic” thought of the New Testament. And while a century and a half of scholarship has complicated this picture for a long while now, it remains an accent in a lot of discourse. What if, for instance, the very intellectual framework of Nicaea is incommensurate with the conceptual apparatus of the New Testament? What does “God” mean to a first century Jew, for instance? Who can be called “God” in Jewish monotheism and why? There is a resurgence of scholarship (especially in light of the 20th century rediscovery of so many early texts) that argues exegetically for Arianism or semi-Arianism (not necessarily as a label) as the proper reading of New Testament claims. One might say that the tomatoes are still being thrown and the arguments morph a bit both philosophically and exegetically. What is equally remarkable is that there is honest scholarship that continues to discover the unique way in which Christ is identified with the Father – even with all of these historical qualifications. See Crispin Fletcher-Louis’s Jesus Monotheism and Michael Bird’s Jesus Among Other Gods. 

Of course, the Scriptures are not hiding behind a pile of scholarly books. They are for the whole church, and the confirmation that Jesus is indeed of one substance with the Father comes especially and immediately from direct access to Scripture and the increasing understanding one has of its claims. There are things in the Bible that are hard to understand, but it is ordinary for the Christian (especially in an age of literacy) to grow in engagement with Scripture, to wrestle with it like Jacob wrestled the Angel. Some blessings of understanding are the reward of a long struggle, and our knowledge comes with battlescars. Many Christians have endured scholarly onslaught simply by listening to the Scriptures humbly and carefully. It is the ordinary Christian’s greatest arsenal, and need imply no hubris. Indeed, God loves the saints and teaches them through his Word.

The Fittingness and Universality of Christ

For the seeker or doubting Christian, it is likewise helpful to query (in addition to purely philosophical and exegetical arguments) into fittingness and (for lack of a better phrase) anthropological arguments. Lewis makes a brilliant case for the Christian understanding of the incarnation in Miracles largely through the “fittingness” argument–that the event of the incarnation realizes in a major key what is distributed throughout all creation and reality in a minor key. And indeed, perhaps in some more basic way, the metaphysical mysteries of the Incarnation are precisely those of creation itself (see Jordan Daniel Wood, Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor). Given the elegance of their presentations, I commend them here and make an adjacent point. There is a peculiar universality to the man Jesus. Indeed, there is no ethnic or geographical center to the world Christian movement at this point, and for all of the extreme diversity, each nation can pick up the Gospel of John in their own tongue, and experience it as illuminating their immediate and local world from the inside. And precisely for this reason, it remains remarkable that the general tendency of this universal movement has not been to discard the Nicene formula. There are exceptions, but even after the critique of colonialism (and its mostly Western obsession with the idea of Nicaea colonizing our minds), the global Christian momentum is still to see it as foundational and as a reality “ahead” of us and teaching us still. And indeed, it remains the invocation of Jesus–even just the utterance of his name–which forms a sort of glue and authority that holds Christian discourse and communities together. There is power, the church has always said, in the very name “Jesus.” Of what sort? It is not simply the inheritors of Christendom who say that this power is divine, and articulate it in the language of Nicaea. 

Knowing Christ

Of course, we would miss the desire of the nations, and the beatific vision himself, if we failed to see that this doctrine is also known in the immediacy of a relation to Christ. “All who call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” Paul writes. Here Paul, with the entire New Testament, links the relation between the saints and the God of Israel portrayed in the Psalms to the relation between all of humanity and Jesus himself. To know Christ is to know none other than a divine person. And indeed, this is the living heart of the doctrine. The coming of Christ from the heart of the Father is not properly analyzed without being relished and enjoyed. One might say that there are aspects of Christology which are an “existential inquiry.” Noting the simple fact of what has happened to us through encounter with him, we learn what he is. The Christian claim is that none but God can do what and as Christ does in me. Who can forgive sins but God alone? Who can save me but God alone? Where can I be taught to be like him but from him? Chief among the practices of the struggling saint is to return to the living Person of the Logos, who is above all theory and who is immediate to you in your search for truth. 

Conclusion

Is Nicaea plausible, then? For modern people, not usually. But then neither is reality itself plausible to them. Arguably, it is our detachment from the latter that obscures the plausibility of the former. Perhaps the above gestures help some work through the dialectic between these. For others, it is the descent of the Logos himself into their heart that renders the event itself plausible to them personally. Whatever the case, the incarnation of the Lord (like creation in general) is always first an event to be encountered before it is a mystery to be understood. 

Joseph Minich is a Teaching Fellow with The Davenant Institute, and author of Bulwarks of Unbelief and the forthcoming The Plausibility of Christian Faith. He lives in South Carolina and Florida.