Council Of Nicaea Quotes

until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet … a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal.” “Not the Son of God?” “Right,” Teabing said. “Jesus’ establishment as ‘the Son of God’ was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea.

In 315 CE, for example, the Synod of Neocaesarea (now Niksar, Turkey) banned men from marrying the wife of a dead brother—no levirate marriage. A decade later, in 325, the Council of Nicaea prohibited men from marrying the sister of a dead wife—no sororate marriage—and from marrying Jews, pagans, and heretics.

Although Christians were more interested in martyrdom than sexual purity between the second and fourth centuries, all began to change when Christianity received approval by Constantine I in 313, and became the official religion of the Roman Empire in 391. In 320 Roman legal provisions against celibacy were lifted and in 325 the Council of Nicaea ordered clerics to abstain from sex, marriage and keeping concubines. By the fourth and early fifth centuries Christians were looking for a new badge of heroism, and found it in sexual renunciation. The Christian quest for distinctiveness turned from death to sex.

The question of images had an important place in the Council called and presided over by Charlemagne at Frankfurt (794).[27] Both civil and ecclesiastical rulers were present, so that it legislated on all matters. The Pope sent his representatives. The decisions of the Second Council of Nicaea, which had established the service and adoration of the images, were set aside, though they had been confirmed by the Pope and accepted in the East. In their zeal for images, those who favoured their use went so far as to call their opponents, not only iconoclasts, but also Mohammedans. Nevertheless it was laid down in Frankfurt that all worship of images was to be rejected; there was to be no adoration, worship, reverence, veneration of them; no kneeling, burning of lights or offering of incense before them, nor any kissing of lifeless images, even though representing the Virgin and the Child; but images might be allowed in churches as ornaments and as memorials of pious men and pious deeds.

Persons. It took from AD 90-140 (period of PostApostolic Fathers) until the Chalcedon Council of AD 451 to complete the Trinity dogma.

The reason for the First Council Of Nicaea (325 AD) has been misunderstood by many. The Emperor Constantine set up the meeting with intention to clarify issues concerning the deity of Jesus. Some speculate that the deity of Jesus was established at that time, however, that is certainly not the case. Saying that the deity of Jesus was established at that time would be like saying that circumcision was established when Paul and Simon Peter met to discuss the issue of whether or not Gentiles should be circumcised. Jesus was certainly deity at His birth, and circumcision was certainly established in GENESES Chapter 17 when God made a covenant with a 99 year old Abraham.

Thus, the Opus Caroli Regis, while provoked by the decrees of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, is better understood as a document that addressed concerns regarding the role of religious images in Frankish territories. While condemning superstitious adoration of icons, the document also decries the actual destruction of religious images that have even limited pedagogical or decorative value. Yet, although the work equally denounced both iconoclasts and iconophiles, it ultimately contributed to the condemnation of Nicaea II at the synod of Frankfurt in 794, albeit over Pope Hadrian’s official ratification of the Council’s decrees

...sola Scriptura was never meant as a denial of the usefulness of the Christian tradition as a subordinate norm in theology and as a significant point of reference for doctrinal formulas and argumentation. The views of the Reformers developed out of a debate in the late medieval theology over the relation of Scripture and tradition, on the side of the debate viewing the two as coequal norms, the other side of the debate taking Scripture as the sole source of necessary doctrine, albeit as read in the church's interoperative tradition. The Reformers and the Protestant orthodox followed the latter understanding, defining Scripture as the absolute and therefore prior norm, but allowing the theological tradition, particularly the earlier tradition of the fathers and ecumenical councils, to have a derivative but important secondary role in doctrinal statements. They accepted the ancient tradition as a useful guide, allowing that the trinitarian and Christological statements of Nicaea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon were expressions of biblical truth, and that the great teachers of the church provided valuable instruction in theology that always needed to be evaluated in the light of Scripture. At the same time, they rejected recent human traditions as problematic deviations from the biblical norm. What the Reformers and orthodox explicitly denied was coequality of Scripture and tradition and, in particular, the claim of unwritten traditions as normative for practice. We encounter, especially in the scholastic era of Protestantism, a profound interest in the patristic period and a critical but often substantive use of ideas and patterns enunciated by the medieval doctors.

...sola Scriptura was never meant as a denial of the usefulness of the Christian tradition as a subordinate norm in theology and as a significant point of reference for doctrinal formulas and argumentation. The views of the Reformers developed out of a debate in the late medieval theology over the relation of Scripture and tradition, on the side of the debate viewing the two as coequal norms, the other side of the debate taking Scripture as the sole source of necessary doctrine, albeit as read in the church's interoperative tradition. The Reformers and the Protestant orthodox followed the latter understanding, defining Scripture as the absolute and therefore prior norm, but allowing the theological tradition, particularly the earlier tradition of the fathers and ecumenical councils, to have a derivative but important secondary role in doctrinal statements. They accepted the ancient tradition as a useful guide, allowing that the trinitarian and Christological statements of Nicaea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon were expressions of biblical truth, and that the great teachers of the church provided valuable instruction in theology that always needed to be evaluated in the light of Scripture. At the same time, they rejected recent human traditions as problematic deviations from the biblical norm. What the Reformers and orthodox explicitly denied was coequality of Scripture and tradition and, in particular, the claim of unwritten traditions as normative for practice. We encounter, especially in the scholastic era of Protestantism, a profound interest in the patristic period and a critical but often substantive use of ideas and patterns enunciated by the medieval doctors.

If God be simple, as He is, it follows that in saying ‘God’ and naming ‘Father,’ we name nothing as if about Him, but signify His essence itself...When then He says, ‘I am that I am,’ and ‘I am the Lord God,’ or when Scripture says, ‘God,’ we understand nothing else by it but the intimation of His incomprehensible essence Itself.

He therefore convened a general Council, to be held at Nikaia in 325 (spelled Nicaea subsequently in reference to the Council only).

the Council of Nicaea would prove to be the most important event of the fourth century

In AD 380 Theodosius I (ruled AD 379–395) issued a decree from Thessalonica that pronounced Christianity the official religion of the empire and ordered all subjects to follow it. This was the making of Catholicism, Christianity in its orthodox form approved by the emperor. According to the edict, those who submitted to this particular theological orthodoxy, treating the Trinity as a single deity according to the findings of the Council of Nicaea, were entitled to call themselves “Catholics.” All the rest—no distinction is drawn between polytheists, atheists, Jews, and theologically unsound Christians—were judged dementes vesanosque (“demented lunatics”), branded heretics, and threatened with punishment both divine and imperial.

In the end what was accomplished in Nicaea and Constantinople was the establishment of a Christianity that was completely separated from Judaism. Since Christianity could not define its borders on the basis of ethnicity, geographical location, or even birth, finding clear ways to separate itself from Judaism was very urgent - and these councils pursued this end vigorously. This had the secondary historical effect of putting the power of the Roman Empire and its church authorities behind the existence of a fully separate “orthodox” Judaism as well. At least from a juridical standpoint, then, Judaism and Christianity became completely separate religions in the fourth century. Before that, no one (except God, of course) had the authority to tell folks that they were or were not Jewish or Christian, and many had chosen to be both. At the time of Jesus, all who followed Jesus - and even those who believed that he was God - were Jews!

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

Though Constance was a worshipper of Sol, and not the One who created it, he wished to settle a dispute between orthodox Christianity and the arise of rhetoric from the heretic Arian, who claimed that Yeshua was not to be considered with God, but separate and without deity, and was not before He walked Gar. A council was called in Nicaea of Bithynia to settle the matter and bring unity of beliefs through out the Empire.

About the same time he established himself as the undisputed ruler of the Roman Empire, Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea.  This council blended Christianity and Mithraism, establishing the new Catholic (‘Universal’) Christian faith.  This new faith took the same core of familiar Mithraic festivals, but re-named them according to Christian themes.  This was done to such an extent that the accusation has been made that Catholicism (‘Universalism’) is really more Mithraism-in-disguise, than anything else.

How could it be that Theophilus, one of the earliest Christian apologists, wrote nearly 30,000 words about Christianity without once mentioning Jesus Christ? How come the name "Jesus Christ," in fact, doesn't appear in any Greek or Latin author until after the Council of Nicaea? Why was it that the only near-contemporary account that mentioned Christ, a suspiciously precise paragraph known as the Testimonium Flavianum, in Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews, had been proved to be a patent insertion into that historical narrative? How could Jesus have been born in 1 A.D. when the Gospels say he was born before Herod the Great died — and King Herod's death could be pinpointed to 4 B.C.? Even Philip Cardinal Vasta, now known to the world as Pope Pius XIII, had lamented that the greatest obstacle for spreading the Catholic faith today was that the historical existence of Jesus could no longer be made credible.

That the two religions were engaged in a contested Passover–Easter dialogue at this formative moment is not in doubt. Even after the Council of Nicaea in 325, with Constantine himself present, separated out the two holidays and made sure that should they fall on the same day it would be the Jews who moved their Passover, that combative dialogue continued.

The seven are the First Council of Nicaea (325), the First Council of Constantinople (381), the Council of Ephesus (431), the Council of Chalcedon (451), the Second Council of Constantinople (553), the Third Council of Constantinople (680), and the Second Council of Nicaea (787).

But why Jesus? Why not follow one of the many other good teachers and spiritual gurus out there? Because Jesus, we're told, is the only one in whom God and humanity have been irrevocably joined together. When the 318 bishops gathered at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, this is precisely what they hammered out: Jesus is the restored communion of heaven and earth; he is the coming together of God and man; and he is the Second Adam, who, by his obedience unto death, rescued us from the death brought on by our own disobedience.

near universal in the fourth century, of celebrating the Lord’s resurrection on a Sunday, the practice which was endorsed by the decision of the Council of Nicaea in 325 to separate the date of Pascha from the Jewish calendar and to insist that it be celebrated universally on the Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox.

IN the Church of Christ Truth is one, as indeed it should be. Historically it is one, common to all the Church’s faithful, and unchanging; it has been such from the great day of the Apostolic Pentecost, when the New Testament Church received its beginning, and after that for the course of two thousand years until our time, and it will remain such until the end of time. This attribute of the Church is splendidly expressed in the Church hymn (the kontakion) for the commemoration of the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea, which we celebrate on the Sunday before the solemn day of Holy Pentecost. Here are the words of this Church hymn: The preaching of the Apostles and the dogmas of the Fathers have sealed the one faith of the Church. And wearing the garment of truth, woven of the theology from above, she rightly dispenses and glorifies the great mystery of piety.

Although the decision reached was right, the way of reaching it, by the combined efforts of the Emperor and the bishops, and of enforcing it, by the power of the State, manifested the departure of the Catholic church from the Scripture. Two years after the Council of Nicaea Constantine, altering his view, received Arius back from exile, and in the reign of his son Constantius all the bishoprics were filled by Arian bishops;

The first surviving Nicholas reference to which we may attribute a measure of validity dates back to the period of AD 510–515. The writer was Theodor, lector of Byzantium. His Tripartite History depends entirely on three historians of the fifth century: Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodor. Nicholas’s name appears on the tenth line of this AD 510 manuscript in Theodor’s list of participants in the famed Council of Nicaea: the 151st attendee is listed as “Nicholas of Myra of Lycia.

Emperor Constantine had called a council at Nicaea in 325,