Nicene Christianity

• 1. Introduction

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  Nicene Christianity is the doctrinal tradition that binds together the vast majority of Christian churches on earth today. Its foundation is a single text: the Nicene Creed, hammered out at the First Council of Nicaea in AD 325 and then revised at the First Council of Constantinople in AD 381. But the story behind that creed is far more contentious than a short document might suggest. What question was so urgent that emperors called councils to settle it? Who were the rivals whose ideas nearly won out instead? And what happened to a church that was, by one definition, officially dead by the year 451? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The Arian Rival

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  Arianism was the main rival to Nicene doctrine at the time of the First Council of Nicaea in AD 325. The disagreement was not about peripheral matters but about the very nature of Jesus. Nicene Christianity holds that Jesus is divine and co-eternal with God the Father. Arianism held something quite different: that Jesus was the first among created beings, and therefore inferior to God the Father. This dispute belongs to the field scholars call Christology, the study of Christ's nature and divinity. The Gothic kingdoms, for a period, kept Arianism alive as a living religious tradition. Their conversion to Nicene Christianity during the 7th century AD finally eclipsed the Arian movement as a rival force.

• 3. Empire and Official Faith

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  Religious historians and scholars use a specific definition when they speak of Nicene Christianity as a state institution. By that definition, it became the first officially endorsed state church of the Roman Empire in AD 381, backed by the Roman emperors from that date forward. The story of its end as an official state church is equally precise. The Council of Chalcedon in AD 451 was convened to address a fresh set of Christological disagreements: whether Christ had one nature or two. The council concluded that Christ had two distinct but inseparable natures. After that council, the Roman Empire established Chalcedonian Christianity as its state religion. Churches that held to a single-nature view of Christ were excommunicated by the Empire and went on to become the Oriental Orthodox Churches.

• 4. Outside the Creed Today

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  Non-Nicene Christianity did not vanish with the medieval period. Today it includes both Protestant and non-Protestant non-trinitarian groups. Among the most prominent are Jehovah's Witnesses, the Unitarian Church of Transylvania, and Oneness Pentecostals. The majority of the Latter Day Saint movement also falls outside the Nicene tradition, though one notable exception exists within that movement: the Community of Christ, formerly known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, is recognized as a Nicene Mormon group. The persistence of these communities across centuries points to how unresolved the christological questions of AD 325 remain for a significant portion of Christians today.