THE COUNCIL OF NICAEA AND THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY
The first and greatest concern of the bishops, a concern shared by Constantine, was the growing division within the church on account of a man named Arius and the teachings he espoused. To deliberate over Arius’s position, Constantine invited eighteen hundred bishops from throughout the Roman Empire, modern-day Spain to Syria, to convene at Nicaea in AD 325. Even though he offered to provide their transportation and lodging, only 318 had the ability to come. Some, such as the Bishop of Rome, were too advanced in age to attend, while others were physically incapable of making the journey due to disability from the persecutions or otherwise. Those who could come were described as “an assembly of martyrs” by church historian Theodoret. He describes Paul of Neo-Caesarea, a bishop from modern-day Turkey, as an example of one who “had suffered much from the cruelty of Licinius. He had been deprived of the use of both hands by the application of a red hot iron, by which the nerves that give motion to the muscles had been contracted and destroyed.” Other bishops at the council, such as Paphnutius of Egypt, had their eyes gouged or their limbs dismembered. Yet they braved the long journey to Nicaea for the sake of attending the discussions.
These men had lived through the greatest persecution of Christians the church had seen, suffering torture and dismemberment rather than compromising their faith. These were the men now summoned to discuss the controversial teaching of Arius: “that the Son had a beginning, but that God was without beginning . . . He is neither part of God, nor of any subjacent matter.”
The council gave Arius the floor, allowing him to share and defend his position. To clarify, Arius emphasized that he did believe Jesus was divine. As he had said in a letter to the Bishop of Nicomedia, Arius believed that the Son, “does not derive his subsistence from any matter; but that by his own will and counsel he has subsisted before time, and before ages, as perfect god, only begotten and unchangeable, and that before he was begotten, or created, or purposed, or established, he was not. For he was not unbegotten.”
So Arius believed that Jesus was indeed a god, but not God. The Father had “begotten, or created, or purposed, or established” Jesus before time and the creation of the universe; God had created a second god. When what Arius believed became clear, the council recognized his teachings as polytheism, and since the church had always taught monotheism, they deemed Arius a heretic. With 316 of the bishops in agreement, the council promulgated the Nicene Creed, the first ecumenical resolution of the church in history.
NICAEA IN POPULAR MEMORY
Seventeen hundred years later, the Council of Nicaea maintains a prominent place in popular memory, but the details are often misunderstood, as demonstrated by an encounter I had with a young Muslim in June 2010. David Wood and I attended an Arab festival in Dearborn, Michigan, because we heard that the event attracted more than two hundred thousand Arabs, and we figured it would be an excellent opportunity to talk to people about Jesus. So, donning a shirt that read “Jesus Always Loves You,” I walked through the festival with David and waited for people to approach us with questions.
We had a stimulating day with many enlightening discussions. While on our way out, a group of teenagers stopped us and indicated they had questions. Being a youth pastor at the time, I was always encouraged by connecting with teenagers interested in matters of faith, but this was particularly heartwarming because they had an air about them that reminded me of my childhood: confident zeal for Islam and utter skepticism of Christianity. I was not surprised at all when one of the first questions they asked involved Nicaea. A teenager asserted that Nicaea was “the first time they decided Jesus was God.”
I was actually impressed with him for correctly identifying the subject matter of the council. At the mosques I had attended as a youth, it was often repeated that Christians decided to take books out of the Bible at the Council of Nicaea and put other books in. I had challenged David with this assertion many years prior, but when we studied the council together, we discovered that it was entirely baseless. The books of the Bible were not even discussed at Nicaea. Since then I have noticed that, for whatever reason, people choose to situate all kinds of imagined church conspiracies at this council. So it was encouraging that the teenager got the subject matter right, but he got the context of the pronouncement completely wrong. This was not when the church finally decided that Jesus was God.
On the other hand, when the church was finally able to gather for an ecumenical council after three hundred years of intermittent persecutions, their very first concern was to put the cornerstone of their faith beyond dispute: “Who is Jesus?” All 318 bishops present agreed that Jesus was divine. No one suggested that Jesus was just a human. And when both sides had heard all the arguments, over 99 percent were in agreement that Jesus is no lower than God himself. Not just human, not just a prophet, not just a god, but God: “very God of very God.”
There is a reason for the unanimous view: the belief that Jesus is “in very nature God” was one of the very first beliefs of the church. The gospel has always been purely about God and what he has done for mankind: He created them, he loved them, he lived among them, he saved them, he guides them, and his kingdom is at hand. One cannot understand the gospel without understanding this. The doctrine of Jesus’ deity makes a tremendous difference in how the Christian faith works and what it means to follow Jesus.
In the same way as Jesus’ deity is fundamental for Christian theology, Muhammad’s prophethood is fundamental to Islamic theology. There is a reason Muslims have to affirm Muhammad’s status as a prophet every time they recite the shahada. If Muhammad is not a prophet, orthodox Islam disintegrates.
When people gloss over Christianity and Islam as if they were the same, they overlook this fundamental fact: Jesus has a very different place in Christianity than Muhammad has in Islam. Deity is distinct from prophethood.
Apart from being exemplars for their followers, in virtually no way are Jesus’ and Muhammad’s positions parallel unless we conflate Islamic and Christian teachings. Let’s carefully consider the Christian view of Jesus and compare it to the Muslim view of Muhammad so we can understand exactly how they are different and why it matters.
CHAPTER 10
COMPARING THE MESSENGER AND THE MESSIAH
It has been a decade since I left Islam, and I have had some candid conversations with extended family members in that time. Amid the many abstract theological issues, I try to keep an eye out for the more visceral questions, as they tend to provide insight into where someone really stands. One such question that I am commonly asked is, “We respect Jesus, so why can’t Christians respect Muhammad?”
In a sense, that is a fair question. Muslims rarely, if ever, say anything negative about Jesus, and I have heard Christians say very negative things about Muhammad. While I do agree that Christians ought to tread carefully when covering sensitive topics, this question is a classic example of inappropriately conflating the Muslim and Christian perspectives. From my experience, what Muslims generally “respect” is the Islamic understanding of Jesus, not the Christian understanding.
As an example, a family member who is particularly close to me once lamented that Muslims respect Jesus even though Christians do not respect Muhammad, yet in the very next breath he said that Jesus was “a weak and impotent God” if he died on a cross. When I objected that this was disrespectful to Jesus, he simply did not see it. It took a few moments to show him that, from my perspective, this was extremely offensive. He had a hard time understanding the offense, though, because he was so immersed in his own perspective.
What he needed in order to understand the Christian perspective was an account of who Jesus is from the very beginning.
A GOD WHO COMES INTO THE WORLD
As we saw in the previous chapter, the Quran explicitly says that Allah remains behind a veil, so Muslims conceive of God as a being who does not enter this world. Christians do not believe this, though, because their Scriptures
teach exactly the opposite: The Bible repeatedly shows God coming among his people.
Starting with the third chapter of Genesis, the very beginning of the Bible, we find God walking in the garden where Adam and Eve were (Gen. 3:8). In Genesis 18, God appears to Abraham as a man and talks with him. In Exodus 34:5–6, God stood with Moses and walked in front of him. In Exodus 24:9–11, Aaron, Moses, and seventy-two elders all saw God at the same time and even dined with him. In an even more tangible experience, Jacob wrestled with God in Genesis 32:24–28. In Exodus 13:21, when the Hebrews needed guidance in the desert, God personally led them as a pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night. In another, rather important account, God commanded the Hebrews to make him a tabernacle, a place where he would descend and “dwell among them” (Ex. 25:8–9 NIV). After they built it, God filled the tabernacle with his glory (Ex. 40:34). These many appearances of God on earth are often called theophanies.
Another theophany in the Torah, Exodus 3:4, actually has parallels in the Quran. In this passage, God calls to Moses from a burning bush. The bush was burning on account of the very presence of God, which is why God says, “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground” (v. 5 NIV). There was nothing about the ground itself that was holy, but the presence of God made it holy. God’s presence in the bush is reflected in the Quran, 27.7–14. When Moses approaches the bush, a voice calls out from it, “Blessed is He who is in the fire.” The Quran also envisions Allah as physically present in the fire. That the ground was holy is reflected in 20.12, where God says, “Remove your shoes, you are in the holy valley of Tuwa.” As in the Bible, there is nothing inherently holy about the valley; it makes most sense if it has been sanctified by the presence of God.
Regardless of how a Muslim might interpret the Quran, though, Christians have traditionally interpreted the passages from the Torah as theophanies. Yahweh is a loving God who desires intimacy with his people, so he comes among them.
GOD PROMISED TO COME AS A CHILD
During the days of Isaiah the prophet, God informed his people that he was about to do something special: He would be born into this world as a child. In Isaiah 9:6, the Bible says, “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Father of Eternity, Prince of Peace.” Christians from the very beginning have understood this verse as being fulfilled in Jesus: God, having come to this earth repeatedly before, is announcing his coming incarnation. The Mighty God will be born as a child. This comes just a few chapters after Isaiah 7:14, which says, “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.” Putting this together, Christians believe that hundreds of years before Jesus, the Hebrews were told that God would be born among them.
THE WORD BECAME FLESH AND TABERNACLED AMONG US
When God finally did come to live among his people, a new era began. The Scriptures for this era are called the New Testament. According to early church tradition, John, one of Jesus’ three closest disciples, wrote an account of Jesus’ life in the New Testament called the gospel of John. He begins his account by reminding readers of who Jesus was before his life on earth. John 1:1–3 are immensely important verses for understanding the Christian view of Jesus.
As we learned in the previous chapter, Christians believe the one God exists as three persons, and the second person is the Word. Just as the Quran is separate from Allah in one sense yet an expression of his divine knowledge and speech in another, so Christians believe that the Word is separate from God in one sense and a part of him in another. This is exactly the teaching of John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ”(NIV). The Word was with God (that is, separate from him in one sense); yet the Word was God (an expression of him in another sense).
The next verse teaches the corollary doctrine, that the Word is eternal. Again, just as Muslim theologians classically have taught that the Quran is the uncreated knowledge and speech of Allah, so the Bible teaches that the Word is eternal alongside the Father. “He was with God in the beginning” (John 1:2 NIV). From the very beginning, before time itself, the Word was present with God. It had to be, because it was an expression of God, who is eternal.
Also, just as Muslim scholars have traditionally taught that the Quran is best understood as Allah’s knowledge or speech, so the term for “Word” in Greek is Logos, and it embodies two concepts: reason and speech. These two meanings are captured in the English derivatives logic and dialogue. When God created the universe, he used his divine reason and his speech. These are the ideas embodied in the notion that God the Father created the universe through the Logos, found in John 1:3: “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made” (NIV). So the universe was made through the Logos, the Word—divine reason and speech.
Finally, departing from any parallel in Islamic theology, we find John 1:14: “The Logos became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” The Logos, the Word who is God, became a human and lived with us. According to John the disciple, that is Jesus Christ. Jesus is eternal, and it was through him that the universe was created.
What is fascinating about John 1 is that it is full of theology from the Torah, emphasizing that this is not a new belief but a continuation of what God had done at the time of Moses and the prophets of old. One example is the wording John chooses in verse 14. When he says the Word “made his dwelling” among us, he literally says the Word tabernacled among us, reminding his Jewish readers of the theophany in Exodus 40:34 and what God had done in the time of Moses. His glory was once again coming to dwell among man as he did in the tabernacle, but this time by being born as a human.
This is the Christian view of Jesus: The God who created the universe, who walked with Adam, who talked with Abraham, who wrestled with Jacob, who stood with Moses, who dined with Aaron, and who led the Hebrews—that mighty God fulfilled his prophecy that he would be born as a human child to us. Jesus is “God with us,” the second person of the Trinity, the eternal Word through whom the universe was created.
HE REALLY IS HUMAN
Before moving on, it is important to emphasize that Christians really do believe that God became a human. He was born as a baby, he ate food, he grew in wisdom and in stature, he wept, he suffered, and he died. He did not just appear like a human; he became one. But by the word became, Christians do not envision a change to God’s nature. God never changed during any of the theophanies in the Torah, and he was not changing during his incarnation. Christians traditionally teach that God, rather than changing, was taking a human nature in addition to his divine nature. This doctrine is called the hypostatic union. When the Bible says that Jesus “grew in wisdom and in stature” or that Jesus died by crucifixion, Christians believe it is speaking with respect to his human nature, not his divine nature.
Christians have traditionally taught that everything Jesus did on this earth, he did as a human. He taught as a human teacher, he received prophecies as a human prophet, and his miracles were performed as a human empowered by divine authority. This is why he tells his disciple Philip that people can do the works Jesus had been doing, and even greater (John 14:12).
But though Jesus was a human, he was not of the lineage of Adam, who, we should recall from chapter 1, passed on his broken image to his progeny. Jesus, being born into the world by the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:35), was a human as humans were meant to be: unbroken. Since Jesus never sinned as a man, and since he also had a divine nature, he could forgive the sins of mankind by taking the penalty of sin himself. This is one reason why Christian theology would not work if Jesus were not God.
Also, since Jesus was never broken by sin, he lived a perfect life as an example of how all the rest of us ought to live it. Not an example in the sense of someone who made all the right choices, but an example in the sense of the perfect prototype, the one that all humans were made to be like.
/> PROPHETS IN ISLAM: MEN TO FOLLOW
Functioning as an exemplar is perhaps the only parallel between Jesus in Christianity and Muhammad in Islam, but even in this similarity, the mechanics are different. For Muslims, Muhammad is the perfect example not because he is the unbroken image in which we have been made, but because he is the most perfect instance of man, the greatest one who ever lived. Indeed, for some Muslims, Muhammad’s greatness is legendary.
When I was ten years old, my mother enrolled me in a Sunday school course run by our local mosque in Norfolk, Virginia. The mosque itself was a Sunni mosque, but the teachers and students came from many branches of Islam. I had two teachers there, a Sunni teacher of general Islamic knowledge and a Shia teacher of Quranic recitation. For all practical purposes we believed the same things, which is why my mother could enroll me there; but there are certainly differences between the traditions, and at times I heard things there I had not heard before.
One day, my general Islamic knowledge teacher spoke on the nature of Muhammad. He emphasized that “Muhammad had many roles: prophet, merchant, general, husband, father, son, and more. In every role, he performed to perfection.” So far so good. That was what I had always been taught. But then he said something new: “Muhammad never showed any emotional weakness. Had he cried and his tears fallen to the ground, the land would have become infertile!”
Although my parents highly exalted Muhammad, this was a step or two further than they had ever gone. Not all Muslims believe in this kind of superhuman status of Muhammad, but traditionally Muslims do see him as the greatest man who ever lived, and this account illustrates how lofty a position some Muslims ascribe to the Prophet of Islam.
No God but One: Allah or Jesus?: A Former Muslim Investigates the Evidence for Islam and Christianity Page 7
