CHAPTER VI

THE GRADUAL FORMULATION OF THE

DOCTRINE

A. At the Council of Nicæa.

No man can say that JESUS is the LORD but by the HOLY GHOST.-1 Cor. xii. 3.

The GODHEAD of the Father, of the Son, and of the HOLY GHOST is all One: the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal.-Ath. Creed.

THE history of the period which we are about to consider is the history of the gradual expression of the mind and consciousness of the Church by the power of the Holy Ghost' and 'to the Glory of GOD the Father '2 that 'JESUS is the LORD.' It is the history of unflinching steadfastness and of miserable inconsistency, of uncompromising courage and of pitiful time-serving, of clear and outspoken statement and of disingenuous attempts to escape from the meaning of words. It is the record of persecution and imprisonment and exile and mar

tyrdom bravely endured for the sake of the truth. It is the chronicle of debate and argument and controversy. And through it all there was gradually being wrought out that clear and unwavering confession of the Faith which we who have entered into the labours of our fathers have received from them as a sacred 'deposit' to hand on to our children. Shame on us who repeat so glibly and so heedlessly the tremendous words of the Creed which were made sure to the Church at the cost of the struggles and the tears and the blood of those upon whom in the Providence of GOD came the task of welding together the watchwords of the Catholic Faith.

For at such a cost it was that the Church of the fourth and fifth centuries gave her answer to the question, 'What think ye of CHRIST?' That answer was given categorically by the Great Councils which we now speak of as general or œcumenical,1 but we must not forget that the answer so given was the outcome of far more than the deliberations and discussions of the Ecumenical Councils themselves. Rather it was the outcome of the lives and deaths of those who took part in them, and was prepared for and succeeded by events which even

1 See Note C at the end of this volume on 'General and Ecumenical Councils.'

apart from their actual connection with the great question in dispute are fraught with tremendous interests of their own.

It will be well at the outset to ask ourselves what is meant by an Ecumenical Council-what it is which makes a council oecumenical-what test we are to apply to any given council with a view to deciding as to whether it is oecumenical or not. And the only right answer to such a question is that the test of a council's oecumenicity is its after-acceptance by the whole Church. A council is not œcumenical, as we might have thought, because the whole Church was represented at its deliberations, but because it truly expressed the mind of the Church, and it is obvious that the question whether such expression was a true one or not could only be decided by the consent of the whole Church given, perhaps only gradually, in the years succeeding the promulgation of the council's decrees. Two illustrations may be given of this - the Council of Ariminum in A.D. 359 was a larger council than even Nicæa itself and was certainly intended to be œcumenical, yet it actually denied the Faith; whilst that of Constantinople in A.D. 381, which is now accepted as oecumenical by the universal Church, was no more than a Council of Eastern Bishops. "The inerrancy of a Council can never be guaran

teed at the moment.

The test of the value of a council is its after-reception by the Church."1

Ecumenical Councils, we may say, look both forward and backward-backward to the implicit teaching and mind of the Church from the beginning which they claim to express, and forward to the judgment of the whole Church on their claim to express her mind. So, before we pass on, we may impress upon ourselves two facts by way of caution: (1) not to regard these, or in fact any, councils as promulgating something fresh to be believed by the Church which was not believed before, but rather as giving expression and making explicit what was always implicit from the beginning-not, that is, as revealing the Truth but as witnessing to it, and (2) not to allow ourselves to imagine that there is any 'short cut' to arriving at the Truth. If the Fathers of the Ancient and Undivided Church discovered the mind of the Church as to the fundamental doctrine of our LORD's Person only at the cost of such tremendous and unceasing pains, nay more if the Apostles themselves were left in uncertainty as to Who and What He was when one word from Him would have made all clear, are we to wonder, or to complain, if now we are left to arrive at the Truth on so many

1 Bp. Forbes, XXXIX Articles, p. 229.

points on which we fain would know it by methods which we may find troublesome and even painful? Certainly there is nothing in the history of the period which we are considering, as also there is nothing in the Holy Scriptures themselves, to lead us to suppose that it is the Will of GOD to reveal to us, at any given moment without trouble on our part, the eternal truths about Himself and the truths about His dealings with us in time. Rather it would seem that it is God's Will to train us by the discipline and probation of uncertainty into the fulness of the stature of manhood in the Faith.

So much may be said, at the outset, with regard to what is meant by an Ecumenical Council, and to what is implied in that meaning. Bearing this in mind, we pass on to consider what the answer was which the Ecumenical Councils gave to that momentous question of the LORD Himself, What think ye of CHRIST?' or, to put it in other words, how they bore witness, and gave expression, to that mind of the Church which, informed by the teaching of our LORD and of His Apostles, had as yet not been expressed in all its fulness in the centuries which preceded the Council of Nicæa.

The plan will be, in this and subsequent chapters, to speak first of the doctrine and then of the history, although it will not be possible to avoid