Homoousios: The Word that Saved Christianity

I'm Bishop Nicholas of Myra. Ho, ho,

homoousios,

my friends. The Son is subordinate to

the Father.

Not in this church.

Unfortunately, no.

Nicholas of Myra, aka Saint Nick, aka

Santa Claus, did not actually slap Arius

in the face at the Council of Nicaea

because Arius never attended the

Council. But, it is a a good story, and

it's a story that comes down upon the

meaning of one word, and that word is

homoousios.

This was a word that found its way into

the Creed of Nicaea, and it would be

used to define orthodoxy for centuries.

Now, the word itself, homoousios, it

means of the same substance, of the same

essence, or of the same being. Applied

to God the Son, it meant that the Son

was of the same essence, substance,

being as God the Father. Uh this Greek

word, though it sounds very

philosophical and technical, is not

itself found in scripture, yet it became

the linguistic fortress protecting the

full divinity of the Son over and

against Arians and semi-Arians

who had a subordinationist Christology

that demanded that the Son was of a

lesser divinity to the Father.

However, the acceptance of this word to

describe the Son's relationship to the

Father was not straightforward, nor was

it uncontested.

An understanding why homoousios faced

initial resistance, and why it

ultimately prevailed and proved

indispensable

is a big part to understanding the

Christological debates in the 4th

century. So, that's what we're going to

do in this video.

The term homoousios was not a new word

coined at the Council. It is a word that

had been used before. In fact, it had

some heretical baggage. When the Nicene

Fathers decided to deploy it in the

Creed of Nicaea,

uh they employed a word that had been

used by Paul of Samosata, the 3rd

century Bishop of Antioch, whose

theology was condemned as heretical at

the Synod of Antioch in 268.

Paul had used the word homoousios to

describe the relationship between the

Father and the Son that effectively

collapsed their distinct identities into

a single divine person merely

manifesting itself in different modes,

and this is known as the era of modalism

or Sabellianism. So, it is fiercely

ironic that although Paul of Samosata's

use of the term homoousios

was regarded as a heretical innovation,

eventually the word homoousios would

become the rallying cry for the

pro-Nicene camp, and they would see it

as the main way of articulating the

unity and the same type of divinity

that's shared by God the Son and God the

Father. But, many people noted this

origin story for the word, and they were

a bit uncomfortable using it to describe

the Father and the Son. So, Eusebius of

Caesarea, he was a a church historian

and a bishop present at Nicaea, he

expressed reservations about the word

homoousios

precisely because of this association

with Paul of Samosata. And in Eusebius's

letter to his diocese explaining the

Creed of Nicaea, Eusebius acknowledged

that the term initially troubled him due

to its use by those who had deployed

homoousios to refer to a substance that

was divided between two persons. I think

you could say the concern is quite

legitimate. If homoousios meant that the

Father and the Son shared an identical

substance that was somehow divided

between them, then this threatened the

distinction of persons in the Godhead.

This threatened the very nature of the

triunity

of God. Let me add that it did not help

the pro-Nicene cause after the Council

of Nicaea that one of the Council's

strongest advocates, Bishop Marcellus of

Ancyra, took an extreme anti-Arian

position that had a kind of modalist

ring to it, which shows that some people

were interpreting or taking homoousios

in a modalist direction, which is

precisely what some bishops had warned

about and worried about. So, the

pro-Nicene camp, their their faction in

the the subsequent 50 years of debate,

they always had to fight a rear guard

action under suspicion that they were

covertly arguing or introducing the

modalist heresy.

Now, this historical context explains

the hesitation that some bishops felt

towards introducing a a non-biblical

word like homoousios. And more than

that, the ghost of Paul of Samosata

haunted the Council chambers and would

be brought up again and again in

subsequent discussions.

Yet, the Nicene Fathers carefully

distinguished their use of homoousios

from that of Paul of Samosata, insisting

that the term affirmed a shared divine

essence without implying a division of

substance or a confusion of persons.

So, why did the pro-Nicene faction

continue to use the word homoousios

given how problematic it was in terms of

origins, given the controversy

surrounding Marcellus of Ancyra, and

given that it's not a word that's found

in scripture, and is open to potential

misuse?

Well, you've got to remember that at the

Council of Nicaea, it was agreed that

the word was from God. Yet, the Arians

wanted to say as well that all things

are from God, you know, angels, humans.

So, the Son was from God like an angel

or even like Adam.

In response, the Council wanted to say

that the Son was from God in a very

special sense, as part of a unity with

God. So, they claimed he was from the

essence or substance of God the Father.

The word homoousios was fit for that

purpose. And furthermore, since Arius

had already explicitly denied this in

his Thalia, you know, his famous worship

song, he had denied that the Father and

the Son possessed the same substance,

there was no way that the pro-Arian

faction could wink or bluff their way

around the term. Pro-Arian bishops

excelled at using

orthodox-sounding language while

importing subordinationist content. So,

they could use the term

Son of God or other terms like Lord or

divine that could be accepted by

everyone, including the Arians, without

any reservations, but they had their own

particular spin, their own ideas in mind

when they were rendering. So, the word

homoousios,

you couldn't do that. You couldn't spin

it. You couldn't wink and or cross your

fingers while you were saying it. It was

immune to Arian equivocation. They

either accepted the word and what it

entailed, or they did not. And while the

word homoousios itself does not appear

in scripture, the reality it describes

pervades the New Testament's account of

who Jesus is.

Four texts in particular demonstrate why

the Nicene Fathers required language

expressing full divine equality and

essential unity between God the Father

and God the Son. I have several texts in

mind which I think demonstrate how

homoousios is part of the theological

judgment that the New Testament renders

about Jesus. So, in John 5:18, uh this

records a pivotal moment in Jesus's

ministry where his interlocutors, his

critics, uh want to kill him, and they

say they want to kill him uh not just

because he's breaking the Sabbath, but

because they claim he is making himself

equal with God.

So, the Judean authorities or his

Pharisaic interlocutors, they understood

Jesus's claim with crystal clarity. He

was asserting his equality with God by

saying that God was his Father, not in a

bland or general sense, but in a very

particular and specific relational

sense. So, his authority and his

commission came from God the Father. So,

the Fourth Gospel presents this equality

as the very reason for the opposition

against him. So, to retreat from the

word homoousios would be to dilute what

Jesus' contemporaries immediately

recognized. His claim amounted to

identification with the divine being

itself.

Staying in John's Gospel, we could go to

another text, you know, John 10:30,

which Jesus declares, "I and the Father

are one." Now, you can take that in a

modalist sense, but the Father and the

Son are distinguished throughout the

rest of the Gospel. But, it does show a

close relationship between the Father

and the Son, something that exists

within the orbit of Jewish monotheism,

you know, read John 17:3, uh there is

only one God, and yet out of that

monotheism, we see Jesus's unity with

the Father. So, there is one God in

Judaism, but Jesus has a particular

unity with God the Father. So, what is

true of God the Father is ultimately

also true of God the Son.

A third text we have to go to is

Philippians 2:6. So, we have here Paul's

profound meditation on the nature of the

incarnation. Now, is this pre-Pauline?

Is it a hymn or is it prose? Who knows?

But, this is a passage that very clearly

posits

an equality between the being of the

Father and the being of the Son. We read

in the text that Jesus is in the form of

God, and he did not consider equality

with God something to be exploited or

used to his own advantage. Now, myself

and others think that form of God and

equality with God stand in parallel, so

they're kind of referring to the same

reality, which is kind of a a unity of

being. It means Jesus didn't merely have

divine attributes or qualities that

approximated to a heavenly standard, but

he had a genuine participation in God's

being. Uh this equality is not something

that he acquired, something he achieved,

but it was something he already

possessed, intrinsic to his being. He

possessed it rather than pursuing it by

avarice or his own self-aggrandizement.

In to the contrary, he was in fact

self-humbling, and that's the striking

fact. Although Jesus is in the form of

God and equal to God, he chose to humble

himself to empty himself by taking on

human form and even becoming a servant,

a slave who died on the cross.

A final text we might want to consider

here is Hebrews 1:3. And this is where

the language does get a little bit more

philosophically sophisticated, because

we read in the the opening prom of of

Hebrews that the Son is the radiance of

God's glory, and listen to this, the

exact representation of his being. Now,

the term uh character uh refers to the

impression made by a seal, uh an exact,

precise representation that shared the

very form of its source. But, more

significantly,

the author specifies that the Son does

not merely represent God's activities or

attributes, but is his hypostasis, his

substantial reality, have the same

being. Uh this is ontological language,

asserting that the Son's relationship to

the Father involved a shared essential

being, not merely shared qualities or

functions. Now, if you take all these

texts together, from John, from

Philippians, from Hebrews, what we see

is that Jesus belongs to the one God

without abandoning monotheism, and there

is a close unity between the being of

both.

Jesus, God the Son, is intimately

related to the deity, to the divine

nature of God the Father.

The theological challenges facing the

4th-century church was how to articulate

this somewhat biblical paradox in a way

that preserved the oneness of God, that

there is only one God, not three gods,

that preserved the distinction of the

persons, but showed that God the Son

came out of God's own being, without

there being two gods, without him being

merely a mode of God's being, and yet

also rejected a subordinationist account

whereby Jesus was sort of, you know,

mini divine, lesser divine, or bronze

divine, or something along those lines.

The word homoousios did exactly that. It

said Jesus is divine in the same way as

God the Father, but he's not the same

person as God the Father.

Between the Council of Nicaea in 325 and

the Council of Constantinople in 381,

huge and continued debates took place

over this word homoousios, and whether

it should be abandoned, whether you

should say, you know, Jesus is

homoiousios, he's like the Father in all

respects.

But, amongst the church fathers,

Athanasius continued to defend

homoousios on the grounds that it alone

preserved the genuine worship of God the

Son.

The Arian position, by making the Son a

creature, necessarily made Christian

worship idolatrous, because they were

venerating a created being. Whether

Jesus was merely a man or an angel, if

he's not divine as God the Father, then

it is idolatry. And if that is the case,

then the Christians who were worshipping

Jesus were engaged in a heretical or

idolatrous activity, because only the

one true God can be worshipped. And yet,

everyone agreed that Jesus should be

worshipped, and he's being worshipped

alongside or in the context of God the

Father. So, homoousios secured the

theological foundation for the worship

practice already embedded in the

church's liturgy and devotional

traditions. The controversy over the

word homoousios might appear to modern

observers as archaic theological

hairsplitting, uh you know, disputes

over the minutiae of technical terms

that could have been avoided through

some charitable flexibility. But, such a

dismissive attitude fails to grasp what

was really at stake.

The Nicene fathers recognized that

language shapes thought, that

theological precision protects the

gospel, and that clarity serves both

intellectual integrity and pastoral

care.

The term homoousios, despite its initial

associations with modalism and its

rejection by Arians, proved

indispensable, because it was expressed

with philosophical precision what was

otherwise implied by scripture,

that Jesus Christ is fully God, sharing

the very essence of God the Father, yet

is distinct in person.

The biblical texts pointing towards this

reality, you know, Jesus' equality with

the Father, his possession of a divine

nature, his character as the exact

representation of God's being, it

required conceptual categories to

adequately explain that claim.

The 4th-century church's willingness to

embrace extra-biblical terminology in

the service of biblical truth offers a

model for theological method even today.

Scripture, of course, remains the

norming norm, the highest authority, but

conceptual precision sometimes requires

a meta-biblical language to describe

biblical language itself. Sometimes

you've got to go beyond scripture to

explain scripture.

When the Nicene fathers adopted the word

homoousios and put it in the creeds,

they did not import alien philosophy

into Christian theology. Rather, they

forged linguistic tools sufficient to

expound scripture's staggering claims

about Jesus Christ. The word homoousios,

which was, you know, initially rejected,

became the cornerstone of orthodox

Christology. Hey, thanks for watching

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