After inquiring who other people say that Jesus is, our Lord turned to his disciples and asked, “Who do you say that I am?” (Matt. 16:15 CSB). Peter spoke up, and said, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God,” to which Jesus responded that Peter uttered these correct words not on the basis of human wisdom or reason, but by the revelation of God himself (Matt. 16:16-17). Peter’s confession is therefore fundamentally instructive for what we are to mean when we confess Christ together.
When Jesus asks the disciples, “Who do you say that I am?”, they perceive that Jesus is asking a question of interpretation, rather than a question of reputation or where Jesus actually came from. It’s obvious to many that Jesus is a figure of great significance, whose apocalyptic arrival in first century Judea must be anticipated by the Scriptures. The disciples report, “Some say John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah, or one of the other prophets” (Matt. 16:15). Peter’s response likewise offers an interpretation that works to connect the dots concerning what God has said and done as revealed in Scripture.
When Peter says that Jesus is the Messiah, and “Son of the Living God,” we must immediately ask what these titles mean according to the Hebrew Bible’s expectations, as well as how Jesus interprets their fulfillment for us in himself. If we pull on the string of what these titles signify, the whole story of God comes with them: Jesus is the coming one who would speak God’s words (Deut. 18:15), suffer for Israel (Is. 52-53), sit on the Davidic throne (II Sam. 7:13, Zech. 9:9), and usher in the glorious kingdom of God (Dan. 7:13-14). Likewise, when Peter says that Jesus is the “Son of the Living God,” when surveyed across the unfolding expectations of the Hebrew Bible, and its reception by Jesus, and then by early Christians, this title points to ontology: Jesus is the Divine Son of the Father.1 When we go to explain all that is packed into Peter’s confession, the whole of God’s self-revelation in Scripture comes with it.
At least this was how the confession that Jesus is Lord functioned for the early church. In his classic work on the Nicene faith, John Behr says, “This question, posed by Jesus Christ, is the one that Christian theology seeks to answer.”2 Indeed, for both the early Christians and for us today, there is no greater question. From it unfolds the entirety of our faith, and in the act of confessing Christ with Peter proceeds the whole of the Christian life. But to get it right, to rightly confess Christ according to the Scriptures, we have to read the Scriptures well. The early Christians wrestled with precisely this, recognizing that a literal approach to particular words or passages without seeing the thematic coherence and theological trajectories of the whole, leads to misunderstanding God’s words about himself.3 It is their example that we seek to be better readers—and therefore better confessors—of God’s revelation in the face of Christ Jesus.
Taught By God
This article begins a series on “The Road to Nicaea” in which we seek to not only chart the important figures and theological developments leading to the Nicene tradition, but also we seek to put our cards on the table for what the project of the Alexandrian Institute is about. We’re convinced that Scripture is divine revelation—it is not merely a record of what God did and said long ago (which it is!). It is also God’s own self-interpretation of his speech and acts, a divine self-theologizing, God interpreting his person and work for us through people and places, genres and books across the canon, which we are to receive with and for the church. Scripture comes to us ready to “teach.” 4 It confronts us as ready to form us theologically to think God’s thoughts after him, and only in being so formed are we ready to hear God’s voice.5
As good Protestants, we certainly stand on the conviction of sola Scriptura, for God’s inspired Word has no authoritative competitor. Yet we recognize the wisdom of the church through the ages, especially in the consensus of Nicaea. Those who walked the road to Nicaea are well positioned to model for us today how to be “taught by God.” 6
The Nicene Confession
The first ecumenical council of the church, consisting of bishops and leaders from across the ancient world, convened in Nicaea in AD 325 to settle disputes over the very substance of Peter’s confession in Matthew 16: who is Jesus? What is his nature? In what way is he God’s Son? The council articulated a confession, a rule drawn from the plenary witness of the canon of Scripture, that summarized their answer to the question. The Nicene Creed, expanded in AD 381 at the fourth ecumenical council in Constantinople, offers a consensus grammar on the what Scripture says about who God is, his work in history, and especially the significance of Christ’s person and work in the incarnation and sending of the Holy Spirit.
Some may be quick to say that we do not find the creed in Scripture. It is a humanly constructive system laid over the top of Scripture. But to see the creed as something untethered from Scripture is to miss how thoroughly faithful it is to the whole of the canon, and how instructive it is in how to read the canon. The creed begins, like Genesis, with the recognition that God is the maker of all that is, “heaven and earth, all things visible and invisible.” Yet it also begins Christianly, which is to say trinitarianly, naming God as “the Father Almighty,” as the “only-begotten Son of God”, and as “the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life.” The canon is given by God to reveal God, which culminates in the Christ event by God showing himself to be Father, Son, and Spirit, speaking and acting that we might know him as he is. To recognize this is to show that we have understood the question presented to Peter, and that we can answer in the grammar of God’s speech about himself—that we get the message.
To articulate the full testimony of Scripture in describing our trinitarian God, the creed employs seemingly abstract terms: the Son is “begotten of the Father before all ages,” and “light from light, true God from true God.” Each of these are glosses, descriptive unpacking of the way the New Testament authors themselves describe Christ Jesus. God “has shone in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Christ Jesus” (II Cor. 4:6). He is the “radiance” of the Father’s glory (Heb. 1:3). The unbegotten Son’s glory is the glory of the Father (John 1:14, 17:5). Yet each of these statements in the creed drive at the identification of the Son with the Father: what proceeds from the Father is of the same essence [consubstantial, homoousion] as the Father.7 The Son who proceeds from the Father is one with him (John 10:30). These affirmations are the fruit of the theological reasoning of Scripture itself, which pressures us into submission to the way Scripture reasons for us about who Christ is and why that is important. But they were articulated in this way by the council to address the specific challenges of confessing Christ as Scripture compels its reader to while guarding against the Arian use of Scriptural terms while redefining their Christological importance.
More than just the words, then, we want to follow the logic of the creed, the way it leads us to “reason” about God as Scripture does.8 Like all contemporary confession in the church—in various places and languages—answering the question “Who do you say that I am?” is something we must all do in our own way and for our own time. When we confess Christ, we can’t start at Gen. 1:1 and recite all the way to Rev. 21:27. We have to summarize, and in so doing, we have to theologize, articulating the meaning and significance of God’s self-revelation in a contextualized miniature, in words we can understand together. The creed offers us a wise reasoning along the trinitarian and Christological pressure exerted by Scripture. It models for us how to hear God’s voice in faith.
The Road to Nicaea
The figures and discussions leading to Nicaea are often read as competing schools vying to define orthodoxy and heresy, and one community’s heresy just so happened to be another’s orthodoxy.9 Some argue that the development of the pro-Nicene tradition is the triumph of one competing Christology over others, full of political maneuvering or influence by Greek philosophical categories. But scholarship has gone a long way in demonstrating that the road to Nicaea isn’t a story of consolidation to a tradition that eventually won out, but a process by which Scripture and doctrine, interpretation and theologizing, developed in line with the received rule of faith in a way that was faithful to the boundaries and meaning of God’s self-interpretation in Scripture.10
So, we propose that Christians today, as we wrestle with what it means to read Scripture and to know God as he has revealed himself, as we argue over pericopes and sources in the canon, would be well served to walk the road to Nicaea. This road is paved by the early church theologians and interpreters of Scripture who followed the internal “pressure” of Scripture that pushes confessors of Christ to recognize him as consubstantial with the Father, co-equal in glory with the Father and the Spirit.11
