The Seven Holy Ecumenical Councils

So begins St John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ... All things were made by him ... And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us ...”

As he thought about those words, the 4th century priest Arius of Alexandria saw a simple way to explain our Lord Jesus Christ’s status. This is what Arius said: Before time began, there was just one God. When God decided to create, he first created the Word, then he created everything by the Word. Since the Word was the first and greatest of the spirits God created, he made the Word his son. It was this - the Word/Son - that became a man in the womb of the Virgin Mary.

To many Christians, the teaching of Arius was understandable because it was logical. After all, if we call someone ‘a son’ we know that he was born after his father. So the Arians had a slogan: “There was [a time] when the Son did not exist.”

The contest between the Arians and the Traditionalists was long and bitter. It threatened the Church. So God did something extraordinary. The old Roman Emperor had recently died and his youthful son, Constantine, was fighting rivals. The night before a crucial battle at the Milvian Bridge, Constantine saw a vision of the Christian cross with the words: ‘In this sign, conquer!’ When Constantine eventually became the sole Roman Emperor, he established his new capital (Constantinople) as a purely city, and put XP (the first two letters of Christ’s name in Greek) on his army banners.

Finding the Church bitterly divided over the Arian controversy he called together a Council at Nicaea. He chaired it himself. There, 318 bishops attended.

Every relevant passage of Scripture was carefully studied - including the one the Arians loved to quote: ‘My Father is greater than I.’ (St John 14:28). Great care was taken to interpret every Scripture according to ‘the mind of the Fathers.’

In the end It came down to a question which could not be answered from Scripture. Was Christ the same essence or merely a similar essence to the Father? The bishops prayed for the Holy Spirit to guide them.

Then they wrote the first part of the creed which we call the ‘Nicene Creed.’ Arianism was carefully excluded: ‘One Lord Jesus Christ ... begotten of the Father BEFORE ALL ages... True God of True God, begotten NOT MADE, of ONE ESSENCE with the Father...’

After the council, Arians did not give up. They tried hard to get people to tolerate them by using language which was vague enough to accommodate both sides. However, after the Arians got toleration they worked hard to gain the positions of power in the Church. Once in power, they kicked out traditionalists like St Athanasius who followed the Council of Nicaea strictly.

Thus the people who held and upheld the true Catholic Faith learnt a hard lesson: You cannot compromise the essentials of the Faith. If you do compromise, you end up losing control of the Church. It was during this Arian takeover that St Jerome made his famous statement: ‘The whole world groaned and marvelled to find itself Arian.’

It is not surprising that Arianism arose in Alexandria as it was a great centre of Greek learning. Arius gave the best rational explanation of the Godhead that anyone had ever produced. Today, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Theosophists still use it. But at the centre of the Christian Faith is an irrational mystery that has to be grasped, not by reason but by faith - not in the mind but in the heart.

The Arians who had been declared heretics by the First Ecumenical Council continued to increase by:

However, it slowly dawned on many people that the Holy Spirit had indeed guided the First Ecumenical Council to correctly interpret the Holy Scriptures, and that the people whom the Arians were persecuting were in fact saints.

A last ditch attempt to make Arianism respectable was made by Macedonius, Archbishop of Constantinople. He taught about the Holy Spirit what Arius had taught about the Son i.e. that the Father had created the Holy Spirit and then created everything with the Spirit’s help.

In response, a second Ecumenical Council was convened at Constantinople in 381 AD. It condemned the teaching of Macedonius and added to the Nicene Creed all those words ‘And [I believe] in the Holy Spirit.’ So the Nicene Creed which we say at the Eucharist actually reached its present form at the Second Council at Constantinople.

The Council also dealt with a heresy taught by Bishop Apollinarius of Laodicea. He taught that a human being consists of body, soul and spirit; and that in our Lord’s case his human spirit was replaced by the Divine Logos. [The “Logos” is the “Word” mentioned at the beginning of St John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God...”] If Apollinarius had been correct, it would have meant that our Lord was not fully human. This, the Council said was heretical.

[Later the Church Fathers saw that man does not have three natures but two: Body and Spirit/Soul. The Soul and the Spirit are like the two sides of the same coin.] While they were together, the bishops made a few more decisions. Here are some of them:

• Churches established in heathen lands must follow the Traditions of the Fathers and NOT adapt doctrine to the local culture;
• The Bishop of Constantinople was to have the second place of honour after the Bishop of Rome because Constantinople was now the new capital of the Roman Empire;
• Maximus who had been made an archbishop by trickery and misinformation was not a bishop at all even though the correct form of consecration had been used;
• They made clear rules as to who may accuse a bishop and how the case was to be tried. They also forbade Christians to take their disputes before civil courts;
• They said Easter Day was to be always on a Sunday and not like the Jewish Passover which can be on any day of the week;
• They said that baptism must involve three immersions corresponding to, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” A baptism which had involved one immersion had to be done again.

This list shows that Ecumenical Councils did not just deal with points of doctrine but, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, made other decisions as well. The point was that the Church saw itself as one throughout the whole world - It now had an effective way of dealing with heresies and disputes as they arose.