God's Story: A Student Guide to Church History (4 page)

Throughout Christian history we often find that when trouble arises through false teaching or heresy in the church, Christians have found the need to
define
themselves against the heresy. In doing this, they answer the question, “What do we believe?” The result has been a flurry of creeds, confessions, and catechisms down through the ages that testify to Christians trying to define and articulate what they believe and why they believe it. In the first several centuries of the church, the central issue of debate was over the person and nature of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

The emperor Diocletian (244-311)—who had begun an all-out persecution against Christians—divided the Roman Empire into two halves in 286:
Rome
remained the capital of the West while
Byzantium
(later renamed “Constantinople” and then renamed again to what is now Istanbul, Turkey) became the capital of the East. This division would create unforeseen consequences with a growing divide between the Western and Eastern churches, which would eventually lead to a formal split in 1054. This division is still seen today between the Roman Catholics in the West and Greek Orthodox in the East.

But something significant happened after Diocletian died. In 312, two co-emperors engaged in a battle to control the Roman Empire, Constantine and Maxentius. At one point in their conflict, Constantine (who was against Christianity) saw a vision of a sign of the Christian cross. Legend says that he also saw the words, “By this sign, you will win.” That night, he had a dream of Jesus commanding him to place a Christian symbol (presumably XP in Greek)
¹
on all his shields. Providentially, Constantine defeated Maxentius at the Battle of Milvian Bridge on October 28, 312 and credited his victory to the Christian God. That next year, in 313, Constantine issued the Edict of Milan allowing Christians to worship as they desire. Official persecution against Christians ended!

In response to various heresies and false teaching within the church, theologians and leaders have often gathered together to formulate creeds or statements of faith. One of the most prominent and notorious early-church heresies was
Gnosticism
[nah-sti-sizm]. Gnosticism taught that everything physical was corrupt and that only spiritual things were holy and pure. Gnostics also believed that they had received a secret knowledge
²
of God, a knowledge that translated them beyond the limitations of their corrupt physical bodies.

Because the physical world was evil, the Gnostics taught that Jesus only
appeared
to be physically human, but wasn’t truly human. Thus, they were forced to reinterpret verses like John 1:14, “And the word became flesh and dwelt among us” or Colossians 2:9, “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.” Some early church leaders, like Origen (c.185-c.254), preached against Gnosticism, but ironically seemed to also incorporate various portions of its belief into their teaching. Origen even taught that God would restore all of creation—even Satan—to a sinless, spiritual state. Eventually, most Gnostics separated themselves from Christian communities.

Another notorious early-church heresy was
Arianism
. Arius (250-336), an elder from Alexandria, Egypt taught that Jesus was not fully God. Rather, God the Son was created by and subordinate to God the Father. Thus, Jesus was not eternal and a lesser being than God the Father. This teaching is in modern-day cults like Mormonism and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Arianism became so popular—spreading throughout much of Europe—that emperor Constantine convened the First Council of Nicaea in 325 to address it.

First Council of Nicaea (325)

The First Council of Nicaea proved to be a defining event in the history of the Christian church. Not only was it the first ecumenical council of the church to attain consensus through representation (outside of the council meeting in Acts 15!), it also resulted in an early form of the Nicene Creed, which is still used in many Christian worship services around the world today. Your church might even use it from time to time!

At the heart of the First Council of Nicaea was the issue of the deity of Christ. Was Jesus fully God? The result of the council—led by Athanasius (c.296-373) of Alexandria—was a clear affirmation that Jesus was both fully God and fully man; that Christ was the eternal Creator and of one substance (or essence) with the Father. Tucked away in the Nicene Creed, we find the statement, “begotten, not made,” used to combat the Arian heresy. Arius himself, along with the only two representatives who didn’t sign the Nicene Creed (out of about 300 in attendance), were banished to Illyria.

First Council of Constantinople (381)

While the Council of Nicaea dealt firmly with Arius and his teaching, Arianism nevertheless remained popular throughout various portions of the Roman Empire. In 380, the Roman Emperor Theodosius I (together with Emperor Gratian) made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. The next year, Theodosius called a second ecumenical council in Constantinople to affirm Nicaea and to expand the affirmations to include more language about the Trinity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Thus, a section was added to the Nicene Creed of 325 to include a portion on the Holy Spirit. This amended Nicene Creed stands as one of the greatest expressions of the Christian faith ever produced:

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty

Maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ

The only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father

God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God

Begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father

Through him all things were made

For us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven

By the power of the Holy Spirit

He became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man

For our sake, he was crucified under Pontius Pilate

He suffered death and was buried

On the third day he rose again, in accordance with the Scriptures

He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead

And his kingdom will have no end

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life

Who proceeds from the Father and the Son
³

With the Father and the Son, he is worshiped and glorified

He has spoken through the prophets

We believe in one holy and apostolic Church

We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins

We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come

Amen

The Cappadocian Fathers—Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzus, and Gregory Nyssa—became the chief defenders of Nicene orthodoxy at Constantinople and helped formulate the language on the Holy Spirit that you see toward the end of the Creed.

Council of Chalcedon (451)

Twenty years after yet another ecumenical council—the First Council of Ephesus in 431 where Nestorius (386-450) was pronounced a heretic—the Council of Chalcedon in 451 took up the issue of the natures of Christ. Chalcedon affirmed that Christ had two natures—divine and human—in one person. This union of Christ’s two natures is called the “hypostatic union.” Famously, they formulated the Chalcedonian Creed, which spoke of Christ’s two natures being “without confusion, without change, without division, and without separation.” Today, we take much of this for granted. But we should be grateful for the hard work of so many that have gone before us to hammer out what the Bible teaches about who Jesus was.

Among the myriads of people who had a profound influence not only during their lifetimes, but also for the centuries to follow (too many to survey in this short book!), two stand out above others: Augustine of Hippo and Jerome.

St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430)

Even though Augustine rejected Christianity early on as too simplistic and unsatisfying, his mother, Monica, began to pray for his conversion. Over time, after dabbling in Manichaeism (a form of Gnosticism), he travelled to Italy where he heard the great preacher, Ambrose of Milan. God worked through Ambrose’s preaching and oriented Augustine toward the Christian faith. Ambrose would also later baptize Augustine in 387. His mother’s prayers came to fruition!

Augustine wrote many well-known and influential books, including
Confessions
(the first autobiography of its kind),
The City of God
(the first philosophy of history),
On the Trinity
(a classic text on the doctrine of the Trinity), and
On Christian Doctrine
(a guide to biblical interpretation).

He also engaged in a number of highly publicized debates, most notably against Pelagius. Pelagius (c.390-418) taught that original sin did not affect human nature and, therefore, the human will can choose good or evil apart from God’s grace or assistance. In response, Augustine rebuked Pelagianism—showing from Scripture that humans are dead in sin and carry the curse of the Fall of Adam (cf. Eph. 2; Gen. 3; Rom. 5). God has decreed the end from the beginning (Isa. 46), chosen a people as his own (Eph. 1), and preserves them to the end (Phil. 1). It is only by grace that anybody is saved (Eph. 2). A thousand years after Augustine breathed his last, his teachings would have a profound impact on the Protestant Reformation.

Jerome (c.345-420)

A biblical scholar, monk, historian, and theologian, Jerome became proficient in the original languages of the Bible, Hebrew and Greek. His most important achievement was the
Vulgate
, a translation from the original languages of the Bible into Latin. The
Vulgate
became the standard Bible of the Roman Catholic Church for the next 1,000 years! Latin had already taken the mantle as the “official” language of the church, in part, because it was the only language “unstained” by the injustice and treatment of Jesus (sealed on the sign above his head). The Jews (who spoke Hebrew) put him up for crucifixion and the Romans (who spoke Greek) did the deed. Latin, then, was the pure tongue of the church. Jerome also wrote many other works, making him the
second
-most voluminous writer of the period, the first being Augustine!

The history of the church between a.d. 100-500 centers on the official state sanctioning of Christianity in the fourth century and the development of the theology of the person and natures of Jesus, the Son of God. This latter point can be seen through a variety of ecumenical councils, all of which affirmed the full deity and humanity of Christ. We, today, often take for granted the doctrine of the Trinity as it is so nicely defined and articulated (e.g. Nicene Creed). But this came at a price—the defense of biblical doctrine against a raging set of heretical views. We stand on the shoulders of these men who have given the church a rich heritage of theology, faith, and passion for truth.

1. Why do people write creeds or confessions of
   faith?
   
2. What modern-day cults downgrade Jesus to a
   lower being than God the Father?
   
3. In line with St. Augustine, if a person is born
   “dead in sin,” how can he or she be saved?
   Can we, of our own accord, choose salvation
   apart from God’s gracious initiative? Why or
   why not?
   

1
X
(chi)
and P
(rho)
are the first two letters in the word, “Christ,” in Greek.

2
The Greek word for knowledge is
gnosis
, which is the root of Gnosticism.

3
This last phrase was added later.

O
n a chilly October morning in 2003, I went caving in a large cave in eastern Tennessee with several friends. So we wouldn’t get lost, we carved arrows into the sticky mud that blanketed the floor of the cave and set out candles along the way. After about an hour of squeezing through small cracks and crawling through small underground streams, we looked back through the stalactites and realized that we were completely lost. “Don't panic,” I thought to myself.