Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Welcome to the Truth Exchange podcast. This is a weekly program with Dr. Jeffrey J. Ventrella where he answers questions from subscribers around the globe, answering questions about worldview, cultural apologetics and other miscellaneous items. I'm your host, Joshua Gilo, and this is another edition of the Director's Bag.
[00:00:30] Speaker C: The Council of Nicaea took place over 1700 years ago, almost 300 years after the resurrection of Christ. And some of our writers and subscribers to the Director's Bag, as well as to the dicta in the recent one that just came out this past week, were asking questions about its importance. And so if we could go back to the very beginning, what is the Council of Nicaea and what kind of doctrines arose at that council?
[00:00:57] Speaker D: That's a great question.
[00:00:58] Speaker A: It's really important to have an understanding of God's providence in history and governing truth and shepherding it after the close of the New Testament canon.
[00:01:08] Speaker D: So the Council of Nicaea was an ecumenical council. That is to say, it brought together.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: Leaders, bishops or elders and some deacons to hash out things that were problematic.
[00:01:23] Speaker D: In the church that were causing schism, actually.
[00:01:25] Speaker A: And Nicaea was called because of a.
[00:01:29] Speaker D: Bishop named Arius and his followers. And what did Arius do? Arius wanted to preserve the fact that.
[00:01:36] Speaker A: Christianity believes in monotheism. There's only one God. But the way he did that in view of the Scriptures, was to claim that Jesus was a creature, that he, in other words, he denied the Trinity. And so that Christ was a creature, he was greatly favored, but that's all he was.
[00:01:57] Speaker D: He was a creature. He was not very God, of very God.
[00:02:01] Speaker A: And so the formula of Nicaea really focused on is Jesus like God or is he the same as God in his being?
[00:02:14] Speaker D: So when it really pivoted upon literally.
[00:02:16] Speaker A: One iota, the Greek letter iota, is Jesus like God, homoiousia, a similar being or substance, or is he homoo usia the same? And the Scriptures testimony and the Council.
[00:02:35] Speaker D: Of Nicaea made it very clear, he is very God of very God. That Christ is the same substance, the.
[00:02:41] Speaker A: Same being as God. And so we have here a real affirmation of the Trinitarian doctrine of the.
[00:02:51] Speaker D: Co equality and co eternity of all.
[00:02:54] Speaker A: The persons of the Trinity, one God in three persons. That's a pretty big issue because that's the issue that really separates us from orthodoxy and from heresy.
And so why Nicaea continues to be relevant today is that we have modern.
[00:03:13] Speaker D: Groups such as the so called Jehovah's.
[00:03:16] Speaker A: Witnesses, which are Aryan, they believe that Jesus was a created being and they.
[00:03:21] Speaker D: Even crafted their own translation of the.
[00:03:24] Speaker A: Bible to kind of rig it in a way that suggests that Jesus is a created being. That is simply false. It is very problematic. And anyone who denies the Council of.
[00:03:38] Speaker D: Nicaea would be outside of Christianity.
[00:03:43] Speaker A: They would not be someone who would be recognized for trinitarian baptism or anything along those lines. And so those were the situations that dealt with Nicaea.
[00:03:55] Speaker C: Were some of these doctrines that were handled at the Council of Nicaea, were they old, are they new? Did they originate like such as. And I'm sure you have heard it on PBS to History Channel to Discovery Channel when they do those type of documentaries that come out during Christmas and Easter, that the Trinitarian doctrine is actually invented at that time with Constantine. Are these new doctrines? Are these old doctrines?
[00:04:21] Speaker A: Yeah, that's just a classic liberal claim. And what I mean by that is.
[00:04:25] Speaker D: Liberal, not faithful claim at all.
[00:04:28] Speaker A: Nicaea did not create the doctrine of the Trinity. Nicaea recognized it as being contained in the teaching of the apostles, who derived it from the very canon of the Scripture, in fact, the very word Trinity. Now, there's some dispute on this, but it's traditionally held in the scholarship that.
[00:04:50] Speaker D: It was coined by Tertullian, the early.
[00:04:53] Speaker A: Church father, who existed and lived well before Nicaea. And these controversies arose.
[00:04:59] Speaker D: Tertullian also gave us a notion of religious liberty.
[00:05:02] Speaker A: This is well before the Constantinian compromise. And then of course, we have the very witness of Scripture that teaches that there's one God in three persons. In the very opening chapters of Genesis.
[00:05:15] Speaker D: We see the Spirit of God and.
[00:05:17] Speaker A: So on and so forth. And then it gets more crystallized as we understand who in fact Jesus is. And so he is very God, of very God and very. And a man as well. One person, two natures.
[00:05:33] Speaker C: Somebody had wrote in and asked the question further, do we need to hold to every view that took place during the Council of Nicaea? For instance, one questioner stated that the Council of Nicaea determined Mary as the Theotokos and that that is an error that haunts the Church today.
[00:05:51] Speaker A: Yeah, so a couple of thoughts there. One is when we talk about every aspect or that it seems to be asking a question that borders on kind of a more modern controversy, quote, called strict subscriptionism. So if the question is that we must take a humanly crafted documents and elevate that beyond all criticism and adhere to it, we. We would reject that because in fact, the creeds themselves, certainly later on talk about Scripture being the final authority. But let's talk about this notion of Theotokos it can be translated Mother of God or bearer of God. And we need to understand this, I think more carefully in context.
[00:06:37] Speaker D: And so the idea here is, and.
[00:06:39] Speaker A: Why it was really crystallized subsequent to.
[00:06:42] Speaker D: Nicaea, where was explained in the Council of Ephesus in 431.
[00:06:47] Speaker A: The idea is, was rebutting the notion.
[00:06:51] Speaker D: Of a group of heretics called the Nestorians. They followed the teaching of Nestorius, who.
[00:06:58] Speaker A: You know, history has not been kind to him. He probably wasn't as bad as his followers were, but I call them nasty Nestorians.
[00:07:06] Speaker D: But the historians wanted to affirm and.
[00:07:11] Speaker A: Did affirm that Jesus was two persons.
Not that he was one person with two natures, 100% God, 100% human, but.
[00:07:24] Speaker D: He was actually two persons. And this of course would cause all.
[00:07:27] Speaker A: Kinds of problems with the hypostatic union.
[00:07:31] Speaker D: And so the idea was they would.
[00:07:33] Speaker A: Say that Mary was the bearer of Christ but not of God because they wanted to deny that God could be so set forth into the created order. And so with the Council of Ephesus, again, 431 and so forth, the.
[00:07:56] Speaker D: The church leaders basically said, no, wait a minute, we're not saying that this in any way divinizes Mary. What we're saying is what she carried.
[00:08:05] Speaker A: Was a person, a whole person that had two natures and hence she is the mother of God.
[00:08:14] Speaker D: So that's really how we understand it.
[00:08:15] Speaker A: I think that, you know it. We need to be charitable and read this in context, not in any way ascribing to mariolatry or some of the.
[00:08:26] Speaker D: Marian doctrines that developed in the medieval era.
[00:08:29] Speaker A: But the reality is that she is, I have no trouble saying she is.
[00:08:34] Speaker D: The mother of God when understood in context.
[00:08:36] Speaker C: Dr. Ventrell, you mentioned full preterism in your last dicta. What is preterism?
[00:08:43] Speaker A: Yeah, that's an important point. I probably should have footnoted that and explained it. So the preterism is a hermeneutical approach to that indicates that we have to take seriously the significations in certain passages of Scripture. When it talks about Jesus coming soon, or this is near, or it's quickly. And so the idea is there are to look at the prophecies concerning what particularly Jesus talked about with respect to the first century. Did those become fulfilled very quickly, that is to say, in the first century?
[00:09:27] Speaker D: Some of them certainly did.
[00:09:28] Speaker A: I think we see this in the.
[00:09:31] Speaker D: Prediction of the fall of Jerusalem.
[00:09:33] Speaker A: If we compare and contrast the Lukan passage with the Matthew passage, clearly he's.
[00:09:39] Speaker D: Talking about something that that particular generation.
[00:09:42] Speaker A: Would see and that generation would see what the destruction of Jerusalem by, by Titus in 70 A.D. the full praetorist, though departs from orthodoxy and says that every prophecy, including the second advent and the resurrection of the dead and the.
[00:10:02] Speaker D: So called, they would say final judgment.
[00:10:04] Speaker A: Occurred by 70 AD. Well that's just heretical.
[00:10:08] Speaker D: It's certainly denied by the mystery of.
[00:10:11] Speaker A: Faith where we profess weakly, or we should.
[00:10:14] Speaker D: Christ has died, Christ is, is risen.
[00:10:16] Speaker A: Christ will come again. And so the full praetorist says that everything's fulfilled and this life is as.
[00:10:24] Speaker D: Good as it gets. This is your best life now.
[00:10:27] Speaker A: So there's no consummation, there's no victory over death, there's no bodily resurrection, the graves don't open and these sorts of things. And so we have to be very.
[00:10:39] Speaker D: Careful that we don't.
[00:10:42] Speaker A: It's like when you like a particular theologian and then you say everything they do is right.
[00:10:48] Speaker D: Well, that's really.
[00:10:49] Speaker A: We need a greater modesty and humility there and submit our minds to the Scripture in the same way. We need to understand that one particular hermeneutic idea doesn't control all of our interpretation of the holy text.
[00:11:08] Speaker D: And by the way, praetorism would negate.
[00:11:10] Speaker A: Oh, I don't know, 2000 years of Christian teaching from the scriptures on that. Again, there's no second Advent, no new Jerusalem, none of those things. It's really a sad idea. It's like being in a conspiracy theory.
[00:11:24] Speaker D: Once people go down the full preterist.
[00:11:27] Speaker A: Rabbit hole, they really have a hard time getting out.
[00:11:31] Speaker C: One is to be gained by holding to the full preterist view. Because it seems to me, and I think you laid out a very fair understanding of what full preterist holds to. But it reminds me of when I used to do street evangelism and I would engage with atheists, for instance, and say, what is your hope truly? And they would say nothing. I die, my body goes in the ground. That's it. And that sounds like the same view of the full preterist. What happens? What is there to gain? Nothing. You die. That's it.
[00:12:10] Speaker A: Right. Where's the blessed hope?
[00:12:13] Speaker C: What is there to be gained for the full preterist?
[00:12:15] Speaker D: Why?
[00:12:17] Speaker C: Other than the fact that they believe that that's the reality, but that's just. It's a hopeless one, it seems.
[00:12:23] Speaker A: Right. I think that's exactly right. I think it's frankly a gnostic impulse.
[00:12:28] Speaker D: I think they have the secret knowledge and I think they like being part of the club.
[00:12:33] Speaker A: And of course Paul warned about these People, These people aren't new. Hymenaeus and Alexander taught that the resurrection's already occurred.
False. He calls them irreverent babblers. You know, we should avoid these kinds of folks. The book of Romans talks about this as well in chapter 16. So this is a clearly non orthodox heretical position. Full preterism or hyper preterism. So. So we have to be very, very alert to these kinds of things.
[00:13:06] Speaker D: But you're right.
[00:13:07] Speaker A: From a practical, you know, sociological standpoint, what's your only comfort in life and in death? Well, there is none.
Disease? Nope, you got it. New body. Nope. You got it right now. I mean it's really.
[00:13:21] Speaker D: And by the way, these guys are.
[00:13:22] Speaker A: Now teaching that Christ's second advent was not physical, in contrary to Acts chapter one, that that is that his second coming is because of it's a new covenant. This is their argument that it's completely spiritual, which means that they are now becoming, bordering on, if not identity, identical with a form of heresy called modalism.
[00:13:48] Speaker D: Which unravels the Trinity as well. So one heresy leads to the next heresy.
[00:13:53] Speaker A: It's very, yes, problematic. And that's the benefit of having these creeds that erect a scaffolding where we can hang our hats and go, okay.
[00:14:03] Speaker D: These things have been decided, let's not deviate beyond them.
[00:14:06] Speaker A: We have to trust that the Holy Spirit guided these godly men in past.
[00:14:10] Speaker D: Eras to provide for us the outline of Christian Orthodoxy which we profess.
[00:14:16] Speaker A: And in fact, you couldn't even get.
[00:14:17] Speaker D: Baptized in the early church unless you.
[00:14:20] Speaker A: Were in fact in Rome. They discipled people. Three years, three years of discipleship with doctrinal teaching and then before they would.
[00:14:30] Speaker D: Apply the baptismal waters. This is to adults, of course, new converts.
[00:14:35] Speaker A: They had to confess a Trinitarian Orthodoxy. Father, Son, Holy Spirit, kind of important.
[00:14:42] Speaker D: And as we'll soon see next week, unfortunately many in the Church don't even.
[00:14:46] Speaker A: Believe the Trinity, which technically puts them outside of Christian Orthodoxy.
[00:14:52] Speaker C: Indeed, Emperor Constantine called the Council of Nicaea and great things came from it. Could it not be said that to have a godly president call modern day council would be good for the churches today, which are quite divisive and divided over a number of issues?
[00:15:11] Speaker A: Yeah, I appreciate that comment as well. I mean, Constantine gets a lot of bad raps.
[00:15:16] Speaker D: I tend to think Constantine was a very good emperor.
[00:15:19] Speaker A: His conversion was genuine. Peter Leithart's book defending Constantine I think is very helpful in this regard because Peter's a careful scholar.
[00:15:29] Speaker D: So the question is.
[00:15:30] Speaker A: Well, first we don't have an empire.
So would it be the same if a president, in our situation, the executive branch, were to call that? Shouldn't it be the entire government suggesting that?
[00:15:45] Speaker D: Well, perhaps.
[00:15:46] Speaker A: The trouble is, of course, is that.
[00:15:49] Speaker D: We don't believe in an Erastian view of church and state.
[00:15:52] Speaker A: In other words, we don't believe that the state dictates to the church its doctrines. And Constantine didn't do that.
[00:15:59] Speaker D: He is unfairly criticized.
[00:16:00] Speaker A: He simply said, hey, you ought to get together and figure this out because there's real problems in the east and in the West.
I think that we need to be reluctant here because we don't really have the kind of character in leadership, wherever you look, that I would have confidence in. To be able to do that, both in terms of the political situation nor in terms of the ecclesiastical situation post Reformation. I think it would be a very, very difficult task. We try to do those things. We try to get together.
[00:16:36] Speaker D: You know, the Westminster assembly tried to. Tried to unify England, Wales and Ireland.
[00:16:44] Speaker A: They had the Westminster standards, but that's about it. Institutionally, they still didn't get along very well. Scott, the Scots, you know, rebellious as always. So there we are.
[00:16:57] Speaker C: Yes. Oh, yes, those Scots. What to do with those Scots?
[00:17:02] Speaker D: They wear dresses.
[00:17:03] Speaker A: I mean, come on.
[00:17:04] Speaker C: Yeah.
Talk to me about the. About Tertullian and him. You had mentioned earlier in this episode about religious liberty and that Tertullian was one of the first to kind of bring that onto the scene. What did that look like in his mind? Does it look similar perhaps to what we see today in the United States? Or is it different notion of religious liberty?
[00:17:26] Speaker A: Yeah, no, he was really the genesis of this. And the idea was, because he was involved in essentially the Roman Empire, where in Roman lore, being a part of.
[00:17:40] Speaker D: The pagan deities was equivalent to being a citizen.
[00:17:43] Speaker A: Whereas the Christians, based upon the text.
[00:17:46] Speaker D: Of Scripture, Romans 13, a classic example, would say, no, there's legitimacy to the.
[00:17:52] Speaker A: State, but it's not being identical to being a citizen in Christianity identified with the Church. The church doesn't have that sort of litmus test. So the idea was that you don't coerce belief. That belief is voluntary. And this is again predicated upon imago dei. And so that coming into the church was voluntary. It was about discipleship, it was not about coercion. And so he believed that you could not that a coerced faith was no faith at all. And so he believed that religious liberty required it because of who we are.
[00:18:31] Speaker D: Created in the imago day, the image.
[00:18:33] Speaker A: Of God that mankind must be free, have liberty to pursue truth, and that truth would ultimately win out.
[00:18:42] Speaker E: This concludes a recording of the Director's Bag. For more resources from Truth Exchange, please visit us online at www.truthexchange.com. you can follow us on X as well as Facebook for more updates and content related to Truth Exchange. Be sure to join us next week for more questions from the Director's Bag. I'm your host, Joshua Gilo, and this is the Truth Exchange podcast.
