Who exactly was Jesus?
This question was at the heart of the Council of Nicaea, held 1700 years ago this year (in AD 325) and in two councils afterwards.
Christians all over the world will be celebrating this anniversary on Tuesday this week (20 May).
The question about who Jesus was had become urgent, because the faith with Jesus Christ at its heart was spreading rapidly all across Europe and Asia-minor. The language of the Christian and Jewish Holy scriptures was not enough to explain who Jesus really was both in relation to God and in relation to his own humanity. At Nicaea theologians and Bishops from all over the Christian world met to try and make sense of this question. They took into account what the Holy Scriptures said about Jesus, how Christians and Christian communities were experiencing the reality of Christ in their hearts and in their midst and finally they took into account the limits of the philosophical language and concepts that were available in fourth and fifth centuries. After two months they came up with the Nicene Creed, and finally after another hundred years’ of ongoing discussion, with the Creed we still say at our main Sunday services. As we can see, the section about Jesus in these creeds, trying to define who he is and what he achieved is by far the longest section.
There will be much celebration and discussion this year about the anniversary of the remarkable get together in what is now Iznik in Western Anatolia 1700 years ago. It was certainly a discussion which was worth having at the time, and it might just engage our own contemporary imagination about who Jesus is now for us and for the world.
Bernhard Schunemann
