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For many modern Christians, the Council of Nicaea marks a basic decision of the church about its faith. After that crucial event, all who disagree with Nicaea's insistence that the Son is one in being (homoousios) with the Father could only be considered heretics.

But that is not how people saw it at the time. The idea that Nicaea was a fundamental turning point developed gradually over the decades that followed. Modern Christians should certainly accept the church's decision for Nicaea and the Trinitarian faith, but they should know that the Spirit only slowly led Christians to the true reading of Scripture.

There are two reasons Nicaea was not originally regarded as the decisive moment that many textbooks assume. First, the idea that a creed with fixed wording might serve as a universal standard of belief had not yet developed. The council made an ad hoc decision, and it stated its faith in terms that clearly differentiated its beliefs from Arius's. But nobody at Nicaea assumed that this particular wording would stand as the fundamental Christian confession for centuries to come. Local creeds continued to be used for teaching converts and children until the next century. (One of the best examples is the "Apostles' Creed," which originated as the local creed of the Roman church.) The Council of Nicaea was well known (because of its size and its association with Emperor Constantine), but no one regarded its confession as a universal marker of orthodoxy. At that point in history, no creed was treated that way.

Second, the controversy between Arius and his bishop Alexander was the product of wider tensions in the early fourth-century church. Nicaea was one battle in a much wider war between different ways of interpreting what the Scriptures said about the Father and the Son. The wider conflict continued for decades. Some popular books have also presented the fourth century as the period in which "Jesus became God." The idea that Christians did not previously consider Jesus divine is, however, unfounded nonsense. But it is clear that Christians differed considerably over what God meant. Many assumed that there could be degrees of God: Christ was God, but not the one God, the Father (such people often appealed to 1 Timothy 6:16).

Arius played a key part in the events that led up to the Council of Nicaea, but he did not have a role in the controversies that raged between 325 and 381. After the council, Arius was readmitted to communion by many bishops after he placated them with a somewhat bland confession of faith. Then, in 337, he died.

Here are the main players in the controversy that erupted in the years after Nicaea:

Marcellus of Ancyra: one of the most important leaders of Nicaea itself, but one who had strongly unitarian tendencies [see p. 32].

Athanasius: bishop of Alexandria from 328. In 336 and 339 he was exiled for maladministration, including charges that he had been violent towards his opponents. Some who had also opposed his predecessor Alexander were delighted to be able to remove one of their theological opponents. Athanasius's exile was not purely a matter of theology, but he hoped to present the conflict that way. In a rhetorical masterstroke, he presented his enemies as "Arians" rather than "Christians." Many Western theologians accepted this terminology, and in the later decades so did some Easterners.

The Eusebians: a large group of Eastern bishops who stood in a broad tradition that encompassed both the church historian Eusebius of Caesarea and the slightly lesser-known Eusebius of Nicomedia. They insisted that there is a basic ontological distinction between Father and Son. But they insisted just as strongly that there is an ineffable closeness between Father and Son, such that the Son's being can be said to be from the Father in some indescribable sense, and that the Son is "the exact image of the Father's substance" (cf. Wisd. 7:25-26; Heb. 1:3). Such theologians found Athanasius's insistence that the Son is the "proper wisdom of the Father" too unitarian. Comparing the relationship between the Son and the Father to the relationship been a human person and his or her wisdom was too simplistic, they felt. In such a picture God was truly one, but was the Word of God really distinct from God the Father? Arius himself may be considered a slightly idiosyncratic "Eusebian," but the other members of this tradition were not in any way dependent on Arius, and they knew little of his particular theology.

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