The Council Of Nicea ( 325 )

Fee completes his writings with his own conclusion: “The Spirit must be reinstated into the Trinity, where he has never been excluded in our creeds and liturgies, but has been practically excluded from the experienced life of the church.” Moreover, he argues that the very nature of the Triune God, as being three yet one, must become the character of the church both in its oneness and in its function, by the very application of the Spirit’s threefold work of the Trinity. Without this experience, the witness of the churches to the Resurrection today will remain generally ineffective in comparison with the witness of the early Christians, though they lived in a culture very similar to ours. As the title of Fee’s book emphasizes, we are meant to find God’s Spirit empowering for us in the present era while at the same time awaiting the consummation of Christ’s final return.

The Nicene Creed is the creed or profession of faith that was adopted in the city of Nicaea by the first ecumenical council, which met there in the year 325. At that time, the text ended after the words "We believe in the Holy Spirit", after which an anathema was added. The doctrine of the Trinity is commonly expressed as: "One God, three Persons”, but this word "Trinity" does not appear in the Bible. So the doctrine is formally defined in the Nicene Creed, which declares Jesus to be: "God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father." in 325, the Council of Nicea set out to officially define the relationship of the Son to the Father, in response to the controversial teachings of

Outline the development of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity from the New Testament Church to the Nicene Creed.

At the center of the Christian faith is a mystery. This mystery has everything to do with the identity of God, the nature of Christian community, the salvation history and our understanding of Christology. This is the mystery of the Trinity – how is the Godhead fully three persons, and yet one nature? Theophilus was the first to name the ‘triad’ nature of God in his letter To Autolycus in 170 A.D. Tertullian was the first to offer terminology to describe this mystery in Against Praxeas claiming “the Trinity” involved three ‘persons’ of one substance. This theology emerged from the Biblical witness, even though scripture offers no doctrine of the Trinity itself. Even more so, the development of the doctrine of the Trinity grew from the early church’s worship, witness and corporate experience. When faced with a mystery, heresies can’t help but emerge. Docetism and Arianism, Adoptionism and Monarchianism, Nestorianism and Monophysitism are just a few of the heresies that emerged in attempts to explain away the mystery. And yet, theologians from the second century to the twenty-first century are faced with the challenge of witnessing to this mystery in both the theologia and the oikonomia of the Trinity. The church experiences the economic Trinity as new believers are drawn into Trinitarian community through an ongoing

God the Son is revealed in the Christian Scriptures. God the Spirit is revealed in the Church. The Trinitarian doctrine states that there are three co-eternal, equal persons in God, which is the notion of unity within community. The Trinitarian doctrine was further developed and defined at the councils of Nicaea in 325 CE and Constantinople in 381 CE. God was always trinity, however gradually this reality became known through revelation. Jesus calls God and speaks of the spirit which indicates a plurality in God. The difficulty is reconciling the concept of monotheism with the notion of God existing as three persons. The divine essence is common to all three, however the three persons have attributes or properties which distinguished them eg Fatherhood, sonship and sanctifying power. Once essence means that the actions (creation, redemption, sanctification) are attributable to all. Mutual relations is the concept that the terms Father and Son are not titles but expressions of a relationship and thus all three persons are co-equal

This heretical view is further fought against through Athanasius’ extensive focus on Jesus’ death and the implications that this had on humanity as told by the Bible (Young, 2010, p.55); Romans (10:9) explicitly states Jesus is the Lord and the only route to salvation. So it can be argued, if Jesus is not God, as Arius suggests, then it is not possible for humanity to reach salvation, which results in diminishment of the purpose of Christian faith. Thus, it is acceptable to assume that the Nicene Creed’s assertion of the homoousious relationship of God and Jesus, as a rejection of Arianism, was essential to early Christian theology because it provided certainty for the establishment of the faith.

In the two following centuries the Forum was still enriched with the temple of Antoninus and Faustina and the temple of Romulus, the arch of Septimius Severus and the basilica of Maxentius. With the splitting up of the Roman Empire into an eastern- and a western part in 395 A.D., the power of Rome declined considerably and with it the significance of the Roman Forum. Constantinople become the new ‘center of the world.’ The Forum started to

With paganism on the decline and Catholic Christianity on the rise, Saint Augustine was one of many to experience a spiritual conversion in the first few centuries following the death of Christ. Although he was oftentimes unaware of God’s presence in his life before he underwent conversion, Augustine was certainly aware of the presence of his earthly companions - his friends. As seen throughout Saint Augustine’s Confessions, Augustine’s spiritual journey towards conversion to Catholicism is paralleled by his friendships. No individual friendship is the sole cause of Augustine’s spiritual progress or lack thereof, but as Augustine grows older the developing complexity of his friendships ultimately culminates in his conversion.

In conversation with Daniel Migliore give an account of what it means to confess that God is triune. Give care to an explication of “economic and immanent trinity,” and perichoresis.

The Trinity consists of God, the Father, Jesus, the Son of God and the Holy Spirit. The Christian faith recognizes there is one God and He is one with His Son, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. The purpose of this essay is to describe the interrelationship of the three persons of the Trinity. This will include the concepts of the economic trinity, the essential trinity and the social trinity.

To please the Council of Ephesus and the Church, Cyril of Alexandria and John of Antioch agreed on a compromise that met the concerns of both sides. This compromise stated that Jesus was both the “perfect God and perfect man composed of rational soul and body…consubstantial to the Father as to his divinity and consubstantial to us as to his humanity” (Kereszty, pg. 248). This meant that Jesus was a human of divine nature, recognizing these two physeis. Unfortunately, this compromise did not last long. After Eutyches was convicted by the synod in Rome, he appealed to other Bishops. This lead to the rise of the Monophysite movement, headed by Eutyches.

When the Nicene Creed was created and finalized in 381 A.D., there were many heresies under the umbrella of Christianity. The Nicene Creed seeked to address these heresies and remove them from mainstream worship. One of the many heresies in this time was Arianism.

Mary Ann Fatula’s The Triune God of Christian Faith provides for the reader the inner life of God as well as insight into the human reality. Fatula’s writing draws the devotional discussion of the Trinity as the present-day effect of the Trinitarian faith is called to support attempts to articulate and live the Trinitarian mystery. The Trinity in a human’s life is the content of our definition of our human meaning and for an infinite gift: love. Each of us has a desire for achieving meaning, for love, and for wholeness. Fatula in her book develops the study of the divine ‘persons’ and states the importance of understanding what it is to be truly a ‘person’ of both human and divine potential.

On the other hand, Athanasius, the leader of the bishops in the west, claimed that the Father and Son were equal and of the same substance. In 325, as a mediator, Constantine called together a council of bishops at Nicaea in Asia Minor. While condemning Arius and his teachings, the council declared the complete equality of God the Father and the Son. The teaching that Father and Son were made up "of one substance" became part of the Nicene Creed, the statement that helped to unite Christianity. The council addressed other issues as well, including the method for consecrating bishops.

One of the most important events in church history includes the Council of Nicea. The First Council of Nicea happened in 325 and involved the first gathering of Christian bishops and the Roman Empire not as enemies but as allies. The bishops wanted to solve the dispute over Arianism. Arianism is the belief that Christ was more than human but something less than God. Arianism taught the people that Jesus