Today in history, the Council of Nicea was convened in 325, and over the course of the next month, settled the issue of Christology and the relation of Jesus Christ the Son to God the Father (among its other accomplishments). The council also produced the famous Nicene Creed, one of the most enduring documents in all of Christian history.
Contrary to popular belief, the Council of Nicea had nothing to do with the canon of the Bible, nor with 'creating' Christianity (both of which are myths perpetuated by a certain Dan Brown book). It was here that the orthodox belief was officially upheld: that Christ was both 100% man and 100% God, and that the Son, while a separate 'person', was of the same substance as the Father. For an accurate and detailed description of the council in layman's terms, I highly recommend Paul Pavao's book Decoding Nicea (which, incidentally, was one of the books that steered me towards the Early Church).
I'll make a longer post on the Nicene Creed sometime soon, since it's the one I adhere to. However, I do believe that Christianity, while growing in size post-Nicea, has decreased in quality. The writings of the Early Church - the writings of the men who sat under the Apostles! - have been largely pushed aside by the Protestant and Evangelical circles. Perhaps the Council's anniversary is just the time to bring up an Early Church discussion with your Christian friends.
The Logos has really become one of my favourite topics, and the Fathers of the Early Church are consistently a flowing source of insight on the Trinity. In the same vein as Tertullian's words, here is another interesting discussion on the subject. In his work Address to the Greeks, Tatian, an Assyrian theologian whose harmony of the four gospels was very popular in the 2nd century church, writes the following in a chapter entitled "The Doctrine of the Christians as to the Creation of the World":
God was in the beginning; but the beginning, we have been taught, is the power of the Logos. For the Lord of the universe, who is Himself the necessary ground (ὑπόστασις) of all being, inasmuch as no creature was yet in existence, was alone; but inasmuch as He was all power, Himself the necessary ground of things visible and invisible, with Him were all things; with Him, by Logos-power (διὰ λογικῆς δυνάμεως), the Logos Himself also, who was in Him, subsists.
And by His simple will the Logos springs forth; and the Logos, not coming forth in vain, becomes the first-begotten work of the Father. Him (the Logos) we know to be the beginning of the world. But He came into being by participation, not by abscission; for what is cut off is separated from the original substance, but that which comes by participation, making its choice of function, does not render him deficient from whom it is taken. For just as from one torch many fires are lighted, but the light of the first torch is not lessened by the kindling of many torches, so the Logos, coming forth from the Logos-power of the Father, has not divested of the Logos-power Him who begat Him.
I myself, for instance, talk, and you hear; yet, certainly, I who converse do not become destitute of speech (λόγος) by the transmission of speech, but by the utterance of my voice I endeavour to reduce to order the unarranged matter in your minds. And as the Logos, begotten in the beginning, begat in turn our world, having first created for Himself the necessary matter, so also I, in imitation of the Logos, being begotten again, and having become possessed of the truth, am trying to reduce to order the confused matter which is kindred with myself. For matter is not, like God, without beginning, nor, as having no beginning, is of equal power with God; it is begotten, and not produced by any other being, but brought into existence by the Framer of all things alone.
"In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God... And the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." - John 1:1, 14 [NKJV]
Most English Bibles today translate the Greek term Logos as 'word', though it can also mean 'reason', 'thought', 'mind', 'message', and 'wisdom'. God imparted His Logos to the fallen physical world in the form of the Messiah, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, and through His sacrifice laid upon Him the sins of the world, saving all those who believe and call upon His name. [Isaiah 53:6, Acts 16:31]
Crafting a clear and solid description of the Logos, however, can be a daunting task, but the writings of the Apostolic Fathers can provide excellent answers for such questions.
I recently finished Paul Pavao's excellent book, In the Beginning was the Logos: The Council of Nicea for Everyman, which earns my accolades as one of the clearest and most accessible books ever written about the history and theology of the early church. Chapter 17 deals wholly with the discussion of the Trinity and the Logos, not just at the Council of Nicea, but also in written works throughout the first several centuries of Christianity. Pages 316-318 highlight some of the fantastic words of Tertullian (c. 160 - c. 225 AD),
whose work Against Praxeas describes the Logos in relation to God:
"Observe, then, that when you are silently conversing with yourself, this very process is carried on within you by your reason, which meets you with a word at every movement of your thought... Whatever you think, there is a word... You must speak it in your mind."[5]
"I would not hesitate... to call a tree the son or offspring of the root, and the river of the spring, and the ray of the sun. Every original source is a parent, and everything which issues from the origin is an offspring. Much more is the Word of God, who has actually received as his own peculiar designation the name of Son."
"But still the tree is not severed from the root, nor the river from the spring, nor the ray from the sun. Nor, indeed, is the Word [Logos] separated from God."
"Following, therefore, the form of these analogies, I confess that I call God and his Word, the Father and his Son, two. For the root and the tree are distinctly two things, but correlatively joined. The spring and the river are also two forms, but indivisible. So likewise the sun and the ray are two forms, but coherent ones." [8]
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Pavao summarizes Tertullian's view on his page devoted to the Early Christian Definition of the Trinity as the following: "In other words, there was a time when the Logos of God was inside of God. God was alone, but he had fellowship with his own Logos inside of him. When it was time to create the world, it was then that God birthed the Word as the second person of the Trinity."
It is worth noting that Tertullian was the first theologian to use the word "Trinity" (in Latin, Trinitas), though a similar term had been used earlier by Theophilus of Antioch, being the Greek word Triados.
The following folktale is from the introduction to an article by Orlanda S.H. Lie, entitled The Concept of Time in the Medieval World View. The paper is very informative, but my favourite section is definitely the story at the beginning, poignantly illustrating what eternal life might be like. You can read the rest of the paper here:
http://www.medievalists.net/2014/04/01/concept-time-medieval-world-view/
Once upon a time a monk left his monastery for a walk in the cloister
garden. He had often been pondering the meaning of eternity and heavenly
bliss and had frequently prayed to God, asking him for an illustration
of one moment of heavenly bliss. All of a sudden he heard the lovely
song of a little bird, perched on the branch of a tree. He stopped to
listen and enjoyed his song until the bird flew away. When he returned
to the monastery, he was greeted by a porter, whom he had never seen
before. “Who are you?” the porter asked. “I am a monk of this
monastery,” he answered. “I stepped out for a little walk in the
garden.” But strangely enough, he couldn’t find anybody there who looked
familiar to him. But not only the people seemed different, somehow the
whole place had changed. The monk was utterly confused and did not know
what to make of it. When they asked him who the abbot was of the
monastery, and whether he could name some of his fellow-monks, he
provided them with the names of people none of them knew. Finally they
decided to consult the annals of the monastery. To their amazement they
discovered that the monk was referring to people who lived more than
three hundred years ago. Moreover, there was also an entry that
registered the strange disappearance of a monk who left the monastery
one day and never came back… And at that moment the monk understood
what had happened. This was God’s way of answering his prayer: the
pleasure he derived from listening to the bird’s song was God’s way of
giving him a foretaste of the timelessness of heavenly bliss. If the
beautiful song of this little bird was already enough to make him
forgetful of the time, how intensely more pleasurable and never-ending
must then be the joy of heavenly bliss in the after life!
