The Council of Nicaea was convened in 325 AD by Emperor Constantine to resolve doctrinal issues raised by Arius, a prominent elder of the church in Alexandria, Egypt. The issues largely revolved around the Greek word monogenes. The term literally means, “only generated” and is translated “only begotten Son” in the King James Version. The term is used to refer to Jesus Christ five times in the New Testament: John 1:14, John 1:18, John 3:16, John 3:18, and 1 John 4:9.
As background, in most modern versions of the Bible, for example, the NIV, ESB, and NLT, monogenes is translated “God’s one and only Son.” However, for purposes of this discussion, we will use the term “begotten” to correspond with the translation of the Nicene Creed. The controversy aroused by Arius, however, was not about translation.
In approximately 320 AD, Arius began teaching that because the Son, Jesus Christ, was begotten, his existence had a beginning. In a letter to the bishop of Alexandria, Arius wrote that the Son “is not eternal or co-eternal or equally sufficient with the Father.” Within just a few years, the eastern Mediterranean church was in turmoil because of the teaching of Arius.
Constantine was the first Christian emperor of the Roman empire. His Edict of Milan in 313 officially sanctioned benevolence for the hitherto persecuted Christian church. Constantine’s concern that the church be united in doctrine stemmed in part from his keen interest in the internal stability of the empire—a striking and providential alignment of the needs of the state and of the church. When the Arian controversy arose, he convened the Council of Nicaea to reach a peaceful resolution.
The Nicene Creed clarified several doctrinal issues, but the most intense controversy surrounded the definition of 1) the essence of God, and 2) the divine “begotten.”
The Essence of God
The Greek word for essence or nature is ousia. As applied to God, it might be thought of as the divine substance, or as pastor and theologian Kevin DeYoung says, “whatever ‘stuff’ goes into being God.” From the essence of God flow his attributes, for example his omnipotence, omniscience, and holiness.
For Arius, a being that was begotten was necessarily “made” or “created.” Arius insisted that “the only begotten Son” had a different divine essence than God the Father. Arius would refer to the deity of the Son in other respects, but his teaching did not consider the Son’s deity fully God when compared to the Father.
If the Son is less divine than the Father, critical scriptural problems arise. First, can a being of a less or different divine nature than the Father share the same glory as the Father? That is, is he as worthy of worship as God.
John 5:22-23 states that “the Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father.” Scripture teaches that the Son, Jesus, should be worshipped as God without any mention of a lesser amount or quality of worship.
Second, if the Son has a lesser divine nature, implications arise for the effectiveness of Jesus’s work to secure salvation for us. If the ousia of Jesus is less divine than the Father, would his sacrifice still have the same ability to satisfy divine wrath toward sin? Or the same ability to redeem the sinner in atonement? These doubts leave one with a less than secure foundation for salvation.
Again, such complications are not raised as an issue in the scriptures. Instead, Jesus said, “and this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all those he has given me” (John 6:39). Jesus stated his work would redeem ALL of those he had been given by the Father. There was no if, and, or but.
Further, the scriptures are clear that the Father and the Son are indeed of the same essence. Jesus states, “the Father and I are One” (John 10:30) and “the Father is in me and I in the Father” (John 10:38). Again, in John 14:11 Jesus states, “Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves.” Jesus’s statement referring to himself as “I am” (John 8:58), the same term used in the Old Testament for God, can be read as a claim that he was fully God just like the Father. The Greek term is homoousia which combines homo meaning “same” and ousia meaning “essence.” The Father and the Son are in a state of homoousia with each other.
In saying they are both fully God, we are not saying that the Son and the Father are simply different parts or modes of a single entity. The Father and Son are different: the Son is begotten, and the Father is not begotten. They are distinct, which introduces the concept that they are each fully God but represent two persons. Hence, combined with the Holy Spirit, the words of the hymnist ring true, “God in three person, blessed Trinity.”
The Nicene Creed goes on to say that the Son is “God of God, Light of Light, Very (or truly) God of Very God.” It restates the same concept of homoousia in multiple forms to be sure the words cannot be redefined and the meaning obscured. Indeed, most heresies take Biblical truth and simply change the meaning of the words. For example, cults may talk about salvation but mean something completely different.
The Nicene Creed affirms what the scripture teaches about the essence of God the Son in the statement that he was “begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.”
Begotten
The apostle John wrote, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son [only begotten] that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (italics added). The Arian view of God the Father’s relationship with the Son paralleled the human father-son relationship. Arian thought focused on the same sequence of events as the human parenting sequence: a human son comes after his human father, and the child does not exist before he or she was begotten. Likewise, the Arians believed the Son came after the Father. The Son had a beginning before which he did not exist.
As discussed above, this dependence on sequence leads to a conclusion that the Son is created and not fully God, a view that is not supported by a comprehensive reading of scripture. If the sequence view of begotten is faulty, then the “divine begotten” must be different than the “human begotten.” The divine Father-Son relationship provides a validation for the human family—we are indeed created in the image of God—but it does not mean the analogy translates whole between the human process and the divine realm.
Arian theology put a box around God by taking a human concept and superimposing it on the divine. We should never expect the nature of God to completely fit in a man-constructed theological box.
- Is the begotten nature of the Son mysterious? Yes, as are many aspects of God. Theological concepts are often mysterious if not outright paradoxes. For example, the conundrum that arises when the free will of man is contrasted with the sovereignty of God. Though seemingly incompatible, these two views are clearly taught in scripture.
- Is the begotten nature of the Son irrational? No, because it is consistent with scripture. If we presumed that we could comprehend fully the depth and breadth of the nature of God, now that would be irrational. The scripture says “for now we see in a mirror dimly; then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12, ESV).
I have a mental picture of our arrival in heaven, when our spiritual sight is no longer through a “dim mirror.” Pre-trib and post-trib, dispensationalist, Calvinist, Pentecostal, et al, we will all fall to our knees together, slap our collective foreheads, and exclaim, “oh, that is how it works!”
So, begotten as referring to the divine must be different than man’s natural understanding of the father-son relationship. When the scripture says that Jesus Christ is the only begotten Son of God the Father, the statement defines a relationship. The divine begotten is not a process, at least not in the way it is for mankind.
The Nicene Creed affirms the scriptural teaching about the begotten nature of the Son in the statement that he is “the only Son of God, eternally begotten by the Father.”
Since we reject the sequence interpretation of the divine begotten—or otherwise risk compromising the divinity of Christ—the use of “eternally begotten” in the Creed deserves some focused discussion.
Time and Creation
Time is an attribute of creation. Before creation, time did not exist. Timelessness is a hard concept to grasp because, as part of creation, we are immersed in time. But consider that time is transitory: the future is continuously turning into the past. The present is only an instant and no two moments of time can co-exist. Further, science has demonstrated that time is influenced by gravity to the extent that satellites further from the earth’s gravitational field must have an adjustment to their internal clocks.
This mutability, that is, the non-constant nature of time, demonstrates that time is part of the warp and weft of creation.
God, however, is changeless, immutable. Therefore, God is outside of time. God is eternal.
In the late 4th century, St. Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo in North Africa, described in his masterwork, Confessions,a clear distinction between time and eternity. He contrasted the “splendor of eternity” against time’s “moments [that] never stand.” Augustine reasoned that since God is eternal, he is above time. Augustine wrote, “You are the Maker of all time, and before all time you are . . .” Said from a different angle, an omnipotent God is not subject to anything in creation, including time. Augustine was quite right to deduce that time was not part of eternity: time changes, eternity does not.
Scripture states that all of creation was made through the Son. As the apostle John explains, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made” (John 1:1-3).
The Son was present at creation; therefore, he existed before creation with the Father in eternity. Since eternity is timeless, “before” and “after” do not exist in eternity. This puts a crimp in Arius’s stand on the divine begotten. How could the Son have a beginning in eternity, if eternity has no beginnings and endings?
Arius addressed this problem, though he did not resolve it. In his letter to the bishop of Alexandria (referenced above), Arius stated that the Son was “timelessly begotten by the Father” and was “created and established before all ages.” And yet, he insisted that the Son “did not exist prior to his beginning.” He claimed that the Son had a beginning even though in eternity there are no beginnings or endings.
The Nicene Creed cuts through this logic problem by simply stating that the Son was “eternally begotten.” By stating he was “not made,” it denies that “eternally begotten” requires a sequence like the human father-son relationship. The Creed thereby nullifies the Arian concept that the Son has a different essence and less deity than the Father. The scriptures’ designation of Jesus as the “only begotten Son” is a statement of relationship between the Father and the Son and not a process comparable to human begetting. The Son is always begotten, present tense.
Augustine provides an explanation of the divine begotten based on the scripture passage that states a thousand years are as a single day to God.
Your years are as a single day [Psalms 90:4]; and Your day comes not daily but is today, a today which does not yield place to any tomorrow or follow upon any yesterday. In You, today is eternity: thus, it is that You begot one co-eternal with Yourself to whom you said: Today have I begotten Thee [Psalms 2:7].
The “today” of God has no beginning and no end. The Son is begotten in a timeless today.
God the Father and God the Son have always existed. Before the worlds, before Genesis, before time, they were in the same filial relationship of love that they will always have. This relationship is present in parenthood—and this image helps us to identify with God. However, because we are finite, we cannot fully grasp or comprehend it. The nature of God as Father and Son is the backdrop for all of creation, for everything we know, see, or feel, from grasshoppers to galaxies. It is so profound as to be awe-inspiring.
Conclusion
The Nicene Creed rectified the Arian inaccuracies by stating that the Son was not made and that he is of the same substance with the Father. In so doing, it clarified that begotten as used of the Son does not have an exact parallel with human begotten.
The council of Nicaea, and its follow-on council held in Constantinople in 381 AD, resolved basic issues of doctrine. Paul wrote, “I know that false teachers, like vicious wolves, will come in among you after I leave” (Acts 20:29). The Nicene Creed provides a basis for orthodoxy, that is, vetted and accepted Biblical truth, that serves as a first line of defense against false teaching. The lack of adoption of the Creed by a religious body should be a warning sign of potential heresy.
The Arian controversy was primarily an eastern issue. Of the 318 bishops assembling at the council, the western church—France, Spain, Carthage, Rome—sent only seven representatives. However, in the course of time, the creed produced by the council 1,700 years ago would be adopted by the Roman Catholic church and all protestant churches as well as the eastern orthodox denominations. More than any other single text, the Nicene Creed represents the core of Biblical truth. The Creed is a bulwark of our faith.
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Bibliography
- Kevin DeYoung, The Nicene Creed (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2025).
- F. J. Sheed, translator, Augustine Confessions, Second Edition (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2006).
- Donald Fairbairn and Ryan M. Reeves, The Story of Creeds and Confessions (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2019).
- Unless noted, all scripture quotations from the New International Version, Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.
- Scripture annotated ESV is from the English Standard Version The Holy Bible, Copyright 2001, 2011, 2016 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers.
Photo Credit Unsplash.com
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