Quotes About Nicæa

The Council of Nicæa. An ecumenical council was a new experiment. Local councils had long since grown to be a recognised organ of the Church both for legislation and for judicial proceedings. But no precedent as yet prescribed, no ecclesiastical law or theological principle had as yet enthroned, the 'General Council' as the supreme expression of the Church's mind.

Any pattern of thought that in any way abstracts God 'himself' from this person [Jesus], from his death or his career or his birth or his family or his Jewishness or his maleness or his teaching or the particular intercession and rule he as risen now exercises, has, according to Nicaea, no place in the church.

Plain crosses replaced images of Christ and the saints in other parts of the empire, as in the apse of the Church of the Koimesis of the Virgin at Nicaea, where a cross supplanted a mosaic image of the Virgin.32 After the reaffirmation of the orthodoxy of icons in the ninth century, iconophiles removed the cross and reinstalled an image of the Theotokos holding the Christ child.

Nicaea really was, after all, a sort of "coming of age" for the Church—and like many adolescents, she hesitated to leave childhood behind.

Faith was the death of reason. Faith relied on blind allegiance, without thought, only an unquestioned belief. Irrationality seemed the nature of faith, and to institutionalize faith man created religion, which remained one of the oldest and strongest conspiracies ever formed. Look at what they fought about at Nicaea.

The Emperor Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea at his summer palace and invited the bishops to attend, all expenses paid. As an added lure, he even mentioned "the excellent temperature of the air." Constantine had his own agenda. He wanted to get this unsettled problem of Jesus' identity straightened out so that Christianity could better serve as cement for his sprawling empire. He

We in the West, perhaps ever since Chalcedon or even Nicaea, have read as the main text what the gospels treated as presupposition. In all four gospels, Jesus is the embodiment ("incarnation") of Israel's God. But this is not the gospels' main theme. Not even, I think, John's. The main theme is that, in and through Jesus the Messiah, Israel's God reclaims his sovereign rule over Israel and the world.