This is the transcript of Restitutio episode 662: The Nicene Creed Is a Forgery with Sam Tideman

This transcript was auto-generated and only approximates the contents of this episode.

Audio file
662 Sam Tideman - Constantinopolitan Creed.mp3

Transcript

00:00 Sean Finnegan
Hey there, I'm Sean Finnegan and you are listening to Restitudio, a podcast that seeks to recover authentic Christianity and live it out today. It's recited in churches all around the world in many languages. It's the standard by which all modern Christians are measured. It's an artful and eloquent expression of doctrine. What am I talking about? Of course, it's the Nicene Creed.

00:29 Sean Finnegan
But what if I told you that this creed wasn't from the Council of Nicea in 325 AD? You'd say, yeah, Sean, everyone knows the Nicene Creed is really from Constantinople in 381. Or is it? My guest today is Sam Tiedemann of the Transfigured Podcast, and he has been digging into the historical record concerning the Council of Constantinople in 381. He wasn't looking for this,

00:56 Sean Finnegan
but what he found absolutely shocked him. Or perhaps I should say what he didn't find shocked him. The Nicene Creed people say today never got adopted at Constantinople either. What does this mean for the development of the Trinity? When did this creed get formulated and adopted? How does this affect Christians today? Get answers to these questions in today's episode.

01:22 Sean Finnegan
Here now is episode 662. The Nicene Creed is a forgery with Sam Tiedemann. Welcome, Sam. Thanks for joining me today.

01:38 Sam Tideman
I'm very glad to be here, Sean. Thanks for the opportunity again. Always fun to come back and talk to you.

01:44 Sean Finnegan
Our focus today is church history. And let's be honest,

01:49 Sean Finnegan
the Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox really dominate this space. So why is a nice Protestant like you, Sam, interested? Why do you care about church history?

02:00 Sam Tideman
Honestly, I just find it fascinating at some level.

02:05 Sam Tideman
I suppose everyone needs a hobby and an interest. But my main motivation and what really got me into it was growing up as a biblical Unitarian and then sort of entering the wider theological world is just trying to understand what happened. Where did these beliefs come from? Who of these beliefs has a more authentic claim to being the original teachings?

02:31 Sam Tideman
and what historical forces and persons and events cause things to be the way they are. I'm sort of a natural history buff by temperament, and so this combines my personal life and my interests in a really perfect way. And I honestly, I really enjoy reading a lot of the Church Fathers. It's not just sort of a labor

02:52 Sam Tideman
I do find actually a lot of them to be edifying and enriching too in many ways. So that's how I've come to be focused on the subject.

03:02 Sean Finnegan
Very cool. So I'm like you. I came across the question, well, if this is the way the Bible reads and this is the way the church is today, what happened? And just like chasing that question down,

03:17 Sean Finnegan
is what sucked me into the, I don't know if you could call it a rabbit hole of church history, but just wanted to get an answer to the question why. I want to get to the Council of Constantinople in 381. That's like our main goal, the bullseye of the target that we're going to be going towards. And I want to get to the Council of Constantinople in 381 because many today would say that this was the most significant church council of all time

03:47 Sean Finnegan
since it was there, allegedly, that the Nicene Creed that many hold today to be necessary for Christianity originated. But before we get to that, I wonder if you could just kind of take us through the 4th century a little bit and let's start with, say, Constantine. He calls the Council of Nicaea in 325 and then kind of like march our way towards this

04:13 Sean Finnegan
allegedly massive event in 381 where all the Trinitarian hopes and dreams came true.

04:21 Sam Tideman
Yeah, probably in the beginning of the 4th century, around the year 300, we can imagine that Christianity was a small minority of the Roman Empire. Call it 10 to 15% are numbers that I've heard. I don't think anyone knows precisely, but I think that ballpark would be about right for most scholars if you ask them.

04:40 Sam Tideman
in the early 300s is still a period of intense persecution. The Diocletian persecution is probably numerically the largest state instituted persecution of Christians during the Roman period. And then there's this guy, Constantine. I don't need to get into his whole backstory, but he is vying to become the emperor of the whole show. And before he's the emperor of the whole show, he has something of a conversion experience, although there's differing reports about this.

05:10 Sam Tideman
As he's fighting outside the city of Rome to become the leader of the western half, he has some sort of religious experience. And then this sort of leads him in the direction at least of becoming a Christian, although in many ways he still has a lot of his pagan upbringing and education with him. And then fast forward a little bit, he's finally won control of the whole Roman Empire in 324 AD. He calls the first ecumenical council

05:38 Sam Tideman
in church history in 325. There weren't ecumenical councils before then, mainly because it would have been too dangerous with Christianity being an illicit religion in the empire to gather in that large of numbers.

05:50 Sam Tideman
the kind of official numbers is that there was 318 bishops there at the Council of Nicaea. I think it's a little bit unclear, but they are gathering for the first time at Nicaea, which is basically Constantine's lake house outside the city of Constantinople, which he is making the new capital, but it's still under construction at the time of the council. I sort of joke that it would be like if Donald Trump held a ecumenical council at Mar-a-Lago or something like that.

06:19 Sam Tideman
And they settle a lot of things about, which bishops are in charge of which areas and how to handle church discipline and what to do about people who had lapsed under persecution. Do they need to, can they get their jobs back if they were a priest or do they need to get retrained and go through penance? And when should we celebrate Easter? And a bunch of questions like that. But one of the big questions was this dispute in Alexandria between Arius and his bishop Alexander over

06:49 Sam Tideman
I consider the dispute of what is the relation of the Son to the Father. Arius thought that the Son and the Father were very distinct. They had different essences. So basically the Father was fully divine and the Son was semi-divine. The Son was created and began to exist at a point in time. Whereas Alexander the Bishop taught that the Son is just as divine as the Father and was eternal.

07:16 Sam Tideman
the way that the Father was, but I think it's a common misconception that the Council of Nicaea was about the doctrine of the Trinity. I think you could say formally speaking, not a single person at the Council of Nicaea was an official Trinitarian in the sense that they believed that the one God was 3 co-equal but yet distinct, fully divine persons.

07:38 Sean Finnegan
Yeah, it seems like the threeness is missing, the concept of person is missing. So really it's a binitarian versus a Unitarian.

07:47 Sam Tideman
Or I even think of it as everyone's A Unitarian, basically. Everyone thinks that the one true highest God is God the Father. The question, is the Son really divine or kind of divine? That really is the focus.

08:02 Sean Finnegan
So it's not even Binitarian. It's not so much about co-equality, because on a strict reading of the Nicene Creed, you would still see

08:14 Sean Finnegan
a distinction, a subordinationist distinction between the Father and the Son, because the Father is the source, is God from God, right? Light from light. So you have the first and then the second, true God from true God. So you would say that basically people are seeing an elevation of the Son to a higher degree where he doesn't have a beginning. Yes. Like the assertion of the eternality of the Son, but not necessarily the co-equality.

08:44 Sam Tideman
Yes. It's basically, does the father give all of his divinity, the same kind of divinity to his son, such that the son is basically everything that the father is, or is there a distinction where the father has many of the divine attributes and traits and the son gets some amount of divinity, but not perhaps the full package? That is really the debate. The Holy Spirit is basically not discussed at all.

09:10 Sam Tideman
And they do issue the Nicene Creed, but it is not the Nicene Creed as what most people use with that term today. When most people discuss the Nicene Creed, quote unquote, they're actually using a creed that is, I think I did the math one time, 20% of the words of the original creed from Nicea get removed and 41% of the words get added. So that's a, you know, it's a pretty drastic change.

09:37 Sam Tideman
And so, but people call that the Nicene Creed. We'll go through history and we'll get to where that creed actually comes from. It's A fascinating story, but they issue a creed that's much shorter than the one that most people who would be familiar with that creed from church recite today.

09:52 Sam Tideman
But it's the first time that there is a creed that is sort of issued as an official creed from a council. But yet it's not like every church every Sunday starts saying that creed. And in fact, I think that most churches, to the extent that they might have had a creed that they might have used during baptism, I don't think that most churches at this time recited a creed every week. I think that creeds were used for sort of special occasions,

10:18 Sam Tideman
like baptism or perhaps for ordination or things along those lines. And that probably many different regions and many different churches had main local variations of what creeds that they used. There's probably a lot of commonality, but a lot of individual difference. And so this is the first time that there's sort of like one official creed, but it is mostly seemingly just binding for the people at the council.

10:41 Sam Tideman
right? Like everyone at the council needs to sign on to this and it's sort of like official at that level, but it's not like everyone takes it home and every church and every person getting baptized needs to recite the same creed. And in fact, there are reports of like Hilary of Poitier, who maybe I'll mention later, who I think is arguably the first real Trinitarian. He said growing up, he'd never even heard that there was an Icene Creed. So he was a Trinitarian

11:08 Sam Tideman
before he had ever even read or heard of such a thing as the Nicene Creed, which I think is funny. So I think that there's a, it's not like the Council of Nicea established for once and for all time the doctrine of the Trinity. Nowhere in the notes or in any of the writings of the people afterwards did they say, well, here's the quote unquote capital T, capital D, capital T doctrine of the Trinity. No one called themselves a Trinitarian. There's no record of them even using the word Trinity

11:37 Sam Tideman
or Trinitarian at the entire council.

11:39 Sean Finnegan
This is such an incredible point because everyone is so trained to think that Nicaea 325 is when the Trinity was codified. I think a lot of people would say, actually the Trinity was around before that,

11:54 Sean Finnegan
But that's just when it was codified. That's when it was ratified. That's when everyone agreed to it. But neither of those are true. We don't find the Trinity before 325 and we don't find the Trinity in 325. We don't even find a binitarian, a fully functional binitarian creed. What we find is something that is way more primitive and way less developed. This is huge. This is like, this could shake the foundations of so much

12:19 Sean Finnegan
Christian theology, don't you think?

12:22 Sam Tideman
There's a lot of pop apologetics and even scholarly stuff that will say things, basically like almost all Christians had been Trinitarian. They just didn't have the language to articulate it or had finalized the language. And then at the Council of Nicaea, all they do is formalize the language that they are supposed to use regarding the doctrine of the Trinity. There was one bad apple, Arias, but they kicked him out. So like, don't worry about it. He's just sort of the exception.

12:49 Sam Tideman
that proves the rule. That's sort of like if you listen to Wes Huff or Mike Winger, and I don't mean to pick on them, there's hundreds of people besides them that will give you...

12:58 Sean Finnegan
Well, they're very influential.

13:00 Sam Tideman
They are very influential, but there's hundreds of other people that will give you the exact same story, and they're getting it from someone who taught it to them. So it's not like they made up this sort of what I call the myth of what happened at Nicaea. But yeah, there were no formal Trinitarians that believed in a Triune Godhead.

13:17 Sam Tideman
as recognizable today. And in fact, even more pointedly, and this is relevant for later in the story that we'll probably get back to, is one of the anathemas in the Nicene Creed, the original 325 Creed. And an anathema, it's not just like saying this belief is wrong. It's saying that if you believe this belief, you are cursed and damned to hell. Right? And an anathema is a damnatory curse.

13:43 Sam Tideman
not just like a don't believe this sort of thing. People don't realize the weight that word really carried back then. But anyway, one of the anathemas from the Council of Nicaea is that no one is allowed to say that the Son and the Father are different Usia, and no one is allowed to say that they are different hypostases. And if anyone knows their Trinitarian formulas now, you're supposed to say that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one Usia, yet they are three distinct hypostases.

14:13 Sam Tideman
But that language that Trantarians use now is directly anathematized in the literal word for word anathemas from the Council of Nicaea.

14:22 Sean Finnegan
Well, let's go through that real quickly, just in case somebody's not familiar with those words. Usia is the word, it's actually the participle of emi. So emi is the word for to be, or I am in Greek. So the participle form is the word being, is what we would use in English.

14:40 Sean Finnegan
but often is translated substance or nature, right? So that's ousia. And then hypostasis or hypostasis is the word typically used in theology to talk about person. So you have the being or nature, substance, and then you have the person. These are the two main words to talk about Trinitarian theology. And you're saying that Nicaea not only got the Trinity wrong,

15:06 Sean Finnegan
that's what you're saying here, but also cursed and damned to hell, all modern Christians who believe that there are different hypostases, different persons in the Trinity.

15:18 Sam Tideman
Yes.

15:18 Sean Finnegan
This is unbelievable.

15:20 Sam Tideman
I know. So it's not even the case that the Council of Nicaea formalized the language. The formal language that Trinitarians use now is in direct contradiction, anathematized contradiction to the canons from the Council of Nicaea. Yeah.

15:35 Sean Finnegan
And this is why Protestants shouldn't study church history. Because if we do, then we are going to depart from the historic consensus on what we're supposed to believe, because we're going to find out the historic truth of the matter and the facts are not

15:56 Sean Finnegan
clean and nice and supportive of the modern confessions that people want to find evidence for. Whereas Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, they have a whole different epistemology. Like they could just say, well, the authority of the church is such that they can declare what we should believe regardless of the muddlings of the past or what the Bible says in a kind of limited way. I can see why there's been discouragement in this area or people maybe have read

16:25 Sean Finnegan
some of this stuff and said, this isn't safe. I better let me go on to something else.

16:31 Sam Tideman
Or that they get taught a very sanitized and honestly quite fallacious version of the events that has this nice tidy story around it.

16:40 Sean Finnegan
I think of the Gonzalez book, you know that one, the story of Christianity. It's kind of like the standard evangelical textbook and it's totally sanitized.

16:51 Sean Finnegan
And that's probably what Wes Huff and Mike Winger and

16:55 Sam Tideman
they learned it in seminary or something like that.

16:58 Sean Finnegan
It's very, very popular.

17:00 Sam Tideman
Interesting. I wondered where they were getting it from. I'll have to track down that book. I do think it's even a little bit of a problem for even if you're Catholic or Orthodox and believe in a strong sense of development, because it gets awkward when official church councils that have the full ecumenical weight of being a highly certified, highly authoritative church council are contradictory.

17:21 Sam Tideman
by some of the later ones. I do think that is a difficult theological question. All right, so that's what happens at the Council of Nicaea. Constantine's main goal, like Constantine in his own closing speech from the Council of Nicaea calls Jesus a second God who is subordinate to the first God and does the works and orders of the first God, but that they share the same perfection.

17:48 Sam Tideman
So when Constantine is understanding the word homoousius or same substance, I think he understands that they're equally perfect, right? The son has the same kind of perfection as the father, but he's literally, he uses the phrase in Greek, second God. And another thing I want to say is like, this isn't like Sam and Sean digging up weird, controversial minority fringe documents.

18:11 Sean Finnegan
This is not a conspiracy theory?

18:13 Sam Tideman
This is not conspiracy theory. Like you can find most of what we just said on the Wikipedia page. Obviously Sean and I, we go deeper than the Wikipedia page, but I'm just saying like this isn't like some fringe controversial historical opinion or revisionism. This is read the standard documents from the council itself, go back to the primary sources. There's no historical dispute among the scholars in this field about anything that we've said so far.

18:39 Sean Finnegan
Yeah, let us know if you do take a position that is

18:45 Sam Tideman
I will let you know clearly, yeah, defined by everything that I just said so far, I think I would be well within the huge, vast, overwhelming consensus of the scholarship. I will probably later in the episode dip my toes in speculation and controversy.

19:02 Sean Finnegan
So we'll just let people know when that's happening. So this is all stuff that's on the books. This is not a conspiracy. This is not like Nicea. There were no Trinitarians at Nicea.

19:13 Sam Tideman
in the formal contemporary sense. And I think, and we have pretty good reason. We have the writings of a lot of the people who are there. And we have detailed Christological books written by many of the attendees of the council, both before the council and afterwards, so that we can have a very clear look at the many of the key figures who are there. It's very clear there are even many modalists who are there.

19:39 Sam Tideman
Marcellus of Anchyra would be a very uncontroversial person to label as a modalist. And he was in attendance at the Council of Nicaea and signed on to the creed. So I think that Constantine also wanted the Council of Nicaea to be a big umbrella. I think he picked the word homoousius because it was ambiguous.

19:58 Sam Tideman
And that this allowed for people with differing theologies to unite under that word. A couple people still didn't like the word. The vast majority of people could figure out some way of understanding that word to accommodate it to their own theology. And that was intentional. Constantine was not seeking for one final theological answer to the question for all time. He was seeking unity and peace on the theological disagreement. And if that required giving people some wiggle room, he was fine with that.

20:28 Sean Finnegan
resolving A controversy.

20:30 Sean Finnegan
It wasn't about creative theology or setting the statement of faith for all time per se.

20:36 Sam Tideman
It kind of.

20:37 Sam Tideman
It kind of, I think Constantine probably in his mind thought, well, we got that one.

20:42 Sam Tideman
We can fix that problem.

20:43 Sam Tideman
Now that one's settled.

20:44 Sam Tideman
Don't need to come back to that.

20:45 Sam Tideman
If it was a little vague and a little bit of a compromise, so be it.

20:48 Sam Tideman
But that's probably the way it should be.

20:50 Sam Tideman
There's a, you know, he was fine allowing.

20:52 Sean Finnegan
He wasn't trying to define it very carefully.

20:54 Sean Finnegan
He was trying to find something that could be agreed upon.

20:57 Sean Finnegan
But this did not have the desired result, did it, Sam?

21:01 Sam Tideman
It did not have the desired result.

21:03 Sam Tideman
So Constantine will die.

21:05 Sam Tideman
I think he dies in 338 AD, if I'm remembering that correctly, plus or minus a couple years.

21:11 Sam Tideman
After he dies, his sons

21:13 Sam Tideman
fight for control of the empire in a very sort of Game of Thrones kind of style, lots of bloodshed.

21:21 Sam Tideman
And that was relatively common, honestly, in the Roman Empire at that period.

21:24 Sam Tideman
And so one of his sons, Constantius, sort of emerges.

21:27 Sam Tideman
I'm smoothing over a lot of history there.

21:30 Sam Tideman
But he was a strong Aryan sympathizer.

21:33 Sam Tideman
And so for the next couple decades, he will gather bigger and bigger councils that are affirming

21:40 Sam Tideman
more Aryan friendly or Aryan leaning creeds.

21:44 Sam Tideman
I think a lot of the bishops at the Council of Nicaea did not particularly like the word homoousius because it was considered unbiblical and was kind of weird in the tradition.

21:54 Sam Tideman
And I think it was very much felt that the Council of Nicaea was very heavy-handed from Constantine and that they wanted something a little bit more organically church driven.

22:04 Sam Tideman
here's another interesting fun fact is that the biggest council in the 4th century by far in terms of the number of people who were there and the geographical representation that was there is Seleucia and Remini, I think, if I'm trying to get that, Remembi, Remini, something like that.

22:25 Sean Finnegan
R-I-M-I-N-I.

22:27 Sean Finnegan
Remini is how I say it.

22:28 Sam Tideman
Yes, that sounds right.

22:29 Sam Tideman
And that was a gathering of East and West.

22:31 Sam Tideman
There were sort of twin councils.

22:33 Sam Tideman
One

22:34 Sam Tideman
sort of representing the West, one sort of representing the East, because the West tended to be more pro-Nicaea, the East tended to be more pro-Arian, and so they came up with a compromise creed that was the father and son are similar, so even more vague than Homoousius.

22:51 Sam Tideman
I think that Constantius thought that he had solved the problem.

22:54 Sam Tideman
The Council of Nicaea wasn't as geographically representative as the twin councils that Constantius held.

23:02 Sam Tideman
And so it's funny that when people think of the councils of the 4th century, if they learn Christian history from a textbook like the one that you mentioned, they'll learn about Nicaea and Constantinople, they have no idea that there were all these church councils in between.

23:16 Sam Tideman
And in fact, the biggest one

23:19 Sam Tideman
was not probably in the textbook that they read.

23:22 Sam Tideman
And it was convened by an emperor.

23:24 Sam Tideman
It had tons of bishops there.

23:26 Sam Tideman
The bishops signed on to it.

23:27 Sam Tideman
issued a creed.

23:29 Sam Tideman
Like how is that categorically different than the other councils?

23:35 Sam Tideman
And I think this brings up an interesting problem that you see in kind of council history is that some councils can get sort of deleted and memory hold by later councils.

23:48 Sam Tideman
But then it brings up the question of what makes a council authoritative?

23:52 Sam Tideman
Is it that it was called by the emperor and that there were lots of bishops there?

23:55 Sam Tideman
Apparently that's not a sufficient criteria to be an authoritative council because you can still get deleted from history if you do that.

24:02 Sam Tideman
So you can be deleted by later councils, but that seems to beg the question that any council at any time could be decided by a later council that it was not authoritative.

24:15 Sam Tideman
even that council that you would bring later.

24:17 Sam Tideman
So are councils right because they come to the right conclusions or are conclusions right because they were come to at a council, right?

24:24 Sam Tideman
There's all of these circular authority issues that are happening at this time.

24:29 Sean Finnegan
There's just revisionist history happening in every century, right?

24:33 Sean Finnegan
So they look back and they say, okay, which councils are most like what I believe today?

24:40 Sean Finnegan
Okay, those are ecumenical or those are authorized.

24:44 Sean Finnegan
And then another century passes, maybe the beliefs change a little.

24:47 Sean Finnegan
And so I think because of really Theodosius, which we'll get to in 381 and his strong arm position, there was a desire in the 5th century to look back and say, okay, well, let's ignore Rimini and Seleucia and let's ignore all dozens of other councils that occurred that disagree with us.

25:12 Sean Finnegan
We're going to cherry pick a minimalist list of the ones that we think are the most significant.

25:18 Sean Finnegan
And that's just revisionist history.

25:20 Sean Finnegan
And it's shocking that as modern people, we're just blithely going along with this.

25:26 Sean Finnegan
When we have access to the information, it's right there, like you said, on Wikipedia or your friendly chatbot.

25:32 Sean Finnegan
This is not hidden.

25:33 Sean Finnegan
You don't need to learn some foreign language.

25:35 Sean Finnegan
You don't need to learn Latin to read some dusty tome.

25:39 Sean Finnegan
This is just out there.

25:41 Sean Finnegan
Richard Rubenstein's famous book, When Jesus Became God, is a very, very readable, easy explanation of this whole period.

25:50 Sean Finnegan
And I recommend that book to anyone who's interested in the 4th century, but isn't ready to go fully in depth.

25:58 Sean Finnegan
If you want to go fully in depth, you got to read the original sources.

26:04 Sam Tideman
Or RBC Hansen's The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God.

26:08 Sean Finnegan
Yes.

26:08 Sean Finnegan
That's sort of.

26:09 Sean Finnegan
Hansen's book is about as close as you can get to a secondary source that's like giving you the truth, the unvarnished truth.

26:16 Sean Finnegan
I don't know if I can say it that way, but he's very balanced.

26:19 Sam Tideman
A plus level scholarship.

26:21 Sam Tideman
But a lot of these things, a lot of these documents are just publicly available on the internet now.

26:25 Sam Tideman
You know, they're not hidden under a rock and they're not controversial.

26:28 Sean Finnegan
What do you think about that website, 4thcentury.com?

26:31 Sean Finnegan
You ever use that?

26:32 Sam Tideman
I actually love 4thcentury.com.

26:33 Sam Tideman
I use that a lot.

26:35 Sam Tideman
It's super helpful, pretty well organized, good translations.

26:40 Sam Tideman
I sometimes wish it was a little bit better organized, but I use 4thcentury.com a lot, so I'd recommend that one too.

26:46 Sean Finnegan
All right, so those are some resources if you're watching this and you're just interested in going deeper, but please continue the tale.

26:53 Sam Tideman
Continue the tale.

26:54 Sam Tideman
So I won't get into every single emperor and when they died and when they lived, partially because I don't have all of those dates perfectly accessible off the top of my mind.

27:03 Sam Tideman
But let's just say that during the 4th century was a pretty bloody period, especially like the 360s,

27:10 Sam Tideman
where there were a lot of emperors who would come and then they would either get killed in battle or die from some other way.

27:17 Sam Tideman
Sometimes there was 2 emperors, one in the east, some in the west.

27:20 Sam Tideman
Sometimes one emperor would unite the whole thing.

27:23 Sam Tideman
And then there was civil wars.

27:25 Sam Tideman
There was battles with the Persians, battles with the Goths, battles with various other things.

27:30 Sam Tideman
So it was a pretty tumultuous time.

27:32 Sam Tideman
And oftentimes an emperor would pick either the pro-Nicaea team to support or the pro-Aryan

27:39 Sam Tideman
inside to support.

27:41 Sam Tideman
And it was sort of whipsaw back and forth that way.

27:44 Sam Tideman
And really the western part of the empire centered in Rome, and then that would include sort of the areas that Rome was in charge of, which would be mostly like France and Spain and Italy, and also places like Tunisia and Algeria, what we would call them now, were mostly Latin speaking pro-Nicea.

28:04 Sam Tideman
And then the

28:04 Sam Tideman
eastern part of the empire, which would be like the Balkans and Greece and Turkey and Syria and Israel, or Palestine as they called it back then, were pro-Aryan.

28:16 Sam Tideman
And then Egypt was kind of a swing vote that was going back and forth and was a very important center of philosophy and theology.

28:26 Sam Tideman
The city of Alexandria plays a very important role in the story.

28:31 Sam Tideman
If you were to say, Sam, when is the first time and who comes up with the doctrine of the Trinity?

28:38 Sam Tideman
And if I were to define the doctrine of the Trinity to be that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all equally divine, yet distinct in some way that isn't modalism,

28:48 Sam Tideman
but kind of count as one God together and they're all eternal.

28:54 Sam Tideman
I think that these ideas shape up in the 350s AD, especially the latter 350s, and the two most important people are Saint Hilary of Poitiers, like I already mentioned, who is a bishop from Western France, and then Athanasius.

29:12 Sam Tideman
So Athanasius, as people know, is one of the most famous theologians of the 4th century.

29:17 Sam Tideman
He was from Alexandria.

29:19 Sam Tideman
He was at the Council of Nicaea, but people think that he was important at the Council of Nicaea.

29:22 Sam Tideman
That's not true.

29:23 Sam Tideman
He was in his early to mid 20s at the Council of Nicaea.

29:27 Sam Tideman
He was a secretary or like a page or an assistant or something like that, a protege of his bishop Alexander at that time.

29:34 Sam Tideman
But he was there at the council and I'm sure that shaped his views and gave him a really formative experience.

29:40 Sam Tideman
And then he becomes the bishop

29:41 Sam Tideman
of Alexandria for a very long time.

29:44 Sam Tideman
But during these periods when the emperor is changing sides a lot, when the emperor is against him, he'll often go in hiding in the desert.

29:51 Sam Tideman
Sometimes he gets banished because Athanasius was not a good dude.

29:55 Sean Finnegan
He was a gangster.

29:56 Sam Tideman
He was a gangster.

29:57 Sam Tideman
He had

29:58 Sam Tideman
minions and thugs that he would use to intimidate his opponents.

30:03 Sam Tideman
There was a time where he was on trial, I think somewhere in Lebanon, and that he sent ruffians to disturb the court proceedings so that they couldn't have an actual proper court date where they would convict him of a crime.

30:16 Sam Tideman
There's a very famous scene where he's on the docks of Constantinople.

30:21 Sam Tideman
So there's that trial that he sent his ruffians to mess up, and then he sails straight to Constantinople to have a face

30:28 Sam Tideman
face-to-face meeting with Constantine to get him to overturn his convictions.

30:33 Sam Tideman
So Athanasius's boat shows up on the docks of Constantinople.

30:37 Sam Tideman
The emperor is down there at the docks talking with Athanasius.

30:40 Sam Tideman
Eusebius, who's his main opponent, his boat shows up like, I don't know, an hour later.

30:46 Sam Tideman
And Eusebius joins the conversation and they're hurling accusations back and forth at each other in front of the emperor.

30:52 Sam Tideman
And Eusebius says, this

30:55 Sam Tideman
SOP, he threatened to withhold the grain supply from the Aryan parts of the empire.

31:02 Sam Tideman
Egypt was a grain exporter of the Roman Empire, so huge amounts of the Roman Empire depended on Egypt for their food supply, which was, of course, it was basically like the oil of its day.

31:17 Sam Tideman
And so Constantine banishes him to banishes Athanasius to Trier, Germany.

31:23 Sam Tideman
And so Athanasius has a very tumultuous career, but he spends a lot of his career banished in Rome, where he's sort of consorting with the other Western theologians.

31:32 Sam Tideman
I really think it's that period in the 350s where he's interacting with Hilary of Poitier and other Western theologians that they start to respond to some of the Arian criticisms that, you know, if you make the son just as divine as the father, you have two gods

31:47 Sam Tideman
gods or they're the same God and then you're just a modalist.

31:51 Sam Tideman
And so they're trying to answer these criticisms from the Arians and their opponents and they're starting to articulate how the Father and Son and now additionally the Holy Spirit as well are all fully divine and it's all one God but it's not modalism.

32:05 Sam Tideman
And those writings in the late 350s are really, I think, the beginnings of what you could now recognize as the actual doctrine of the Trinity.

32:16 Sean Finnegan
I thought you were going to talk about the Cappadocians.

32:18 Sean Finnegan
So you went to Athanasius and Hillary.

32:22 Sean Finnegan
Yes.

32:22 Sean Finnegan
How do the Cappadocians, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Basil the Great, how do they fit into all this?

32:30 Sam Tideman
So yeah, so the Cappadocians are a very important part of this story.

32:33 Sam Tideman
And so the Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa are brothers.

32:38 Sam Tideman
They're from a very famous Christian family in Cappadocia, which is sort of like South Central Turkey.

32:44 Sam Tideman
And they grow up pretty wealthy, like they have a pretty big landed estate from their parents.

32:50 Sam Tideman
They get really good educations, like Basil the Great goes to school in a very fancy philosophy school in Athens, which is like in an Ivy League education by the standards of his day.

33:02 Sam Tideman
I think that they had 10 kids, nine of which lived to adulthood, and at least five of them are canonized saints in the Catholic and Orthodox Church.

33:13 Sam Tideman
So I think

33:13 Sam Tideman
that they have the largest number of saints in one household of any household in history.

33:18 Sam Tideman
And honestly, I actually feel like they're pretty amazing people.

33:22 Sam Tideman
Like this family, I bet would have been a hoot to meet and good to go to their dinner parties.

33:26 Sam Tideman
I bet that their dinner tables, they were talking about theology and all those sorts of things and that they had a lot of really high achieving kids.

33:34 Sam Tideman
And their family, actually their sister was a very influential member of the family.

33:39 Sam Tideman
Macrina is her name.

33:40 Sam Tideman
And they sort of found, they take their family estate

33:43 Sam Tideman
sell a lot of their wealth.

33:45 Sam Tideman
And they create basically a monastic charity center, which has what is arguably the first hospital in history.

33:54 Sam Tideman
They have a homeless shelter.

33:56 Sam Tideman
They have a food pantry.

33:58 Sam Tideman
They have like a jobs training center for poor people to learn job skills to get better jobs.

34:04 Sam Tideman
And a lot of these institutions that we would find shockingly recognizable and modern even today are sort of invented by this family.

34:13 Sam Tideman
I think Athanasius is a thug and he will have a lot to answer for on Judgment Day.

34:19 Sam Tideman
Many of the Cappadocian fathers and their siblings, I admire their Christian walk and their Christian fruit.

34:25 Sam Tideman
And so I'm not just like a complete diehard anti-Trinitarian who thinks they're all rotten people.

34:31 Sam Tideman
I actually think that there's a lot to be impressed with regarding the Cappadocian fathers.

34:35 Sam Tideman
And then there's also Gregory of Nazianzus, who was not a member of that family, but he was a friend of Basil in college or school in Athens, and then sort of gets almost like an adopted member of that family.

34:49 Sam Tideman
And so these three will end up becoming, I won't tell the whole story because it's long and complicated,

34:54 Sam Tideman
they end up becoming bishops in the realm of what we would now call central and eastern Turkey.

35:00 Sam Tideman
And they are trying to meet the theological challenges of their day.

35:07 Sam Tideman
And like I said, most of the Eastern Empire is Aryan, so they're sort of deep within Aryan territory, but they are sympathetic

35:15 Sam Tideman
to the teachings of the kind of pro-Nicenes.

35:20 Sam Tideman
They're aware of Athanasius and Hillary and all these sorts of other people.

35:23 Sam Tideman
They're very theologically and philosophically well trained.

35:26 Sam Tideman
And I think that it is the three of them, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus, who start to develop the language and philosophical precision that Athanasius and Hillary didn't quite get.

35:44 Sam Tideman
I would say Athanasius is smart, but he's not like a grade A philosopher theologian that could fully articulate a complex doctrine.

35:54 Sam Tideman
There are a lot of ways that you could criticize this theology in many ways, but the Cappadocians are like, all right, let's take these pieces.

36:02 Sam Tideman
We've got three persons.

36:03 Sam Tideman
We need to have one God at the other end of this.

36:06 Sam Tideman
We have all these scriptural things that we need to consider and all this historical development that we need to consider.

36:14 Sam Tideman
And they really articulate for the first time this idea that there is one ousia, which is like what you were saying earlier, Sean, and that there are three hypostases.

36:26 Sam Tideman
And that hypostasis previously in Trinitarian theology meant basically the same thing as ousia, like essence or stuff, but they decide that it's now going to mean what makes an individual distinct within the Trinity.

36:41 Sam Tideman
and that it's more like a unique instantiation of an essence.

36:45 Sam Tideman
Like Sean is a unique instantiation of human essence.

36:49 Sam Tideman
Sam is a unique instantiation of human essence.

36:52 Sam Tideman
I presume many of the people listening might also be unique instantiations of the human essence, but there is still one, we still have the same, we're all humans, so we share that human nature, human essence together.

37:05 Sam Tideman
And that this is an analogy for the Trinity, that there is one divine essence

37:11 Sam Tideman
and then there are three who instantiate the divine essence, but also they work on articulating the doctrine of the relations or the processions.

37:19 Sam Tideman
Basically the idea that God the Father is unsourced and He is God in and of Himself and that He begets the Son.

37:29 Sam Tideman
This is an eternal beginning, but there is still a causal relationship where the Father causes the Son to exist in eternity past or outside of time.

37:40 Sam Tideman
And then the Father breathes out or spirates the Holy Spirit.

37:46 Sam Tideman
And that the reason why the Son and the Holy Spirit are different is that they are caused to exist by different causal powers.

37:54 Sam Tideman
The Son is begotten, so there's a causal power of begetting, and the Spirit is breathed, so there's a causal power of breathing, and that's why the Son and the Spirit are different.

38:04 Sam Tideman
And then they have all sorts of various philosophical arguments of why they should all count as one God, not all of which I'll say I find the most convincing, but one of their most enduring is that there is one activity or one energy in the Trinity.

38:19 Sam Tideman
And so that whenever any member of the Trinity acts, there is only one center of action and that they basically act as a united front.

38:29 Sam Tideman
So anything that one member of the Trinity does is just all three of them as a Trinity acting singularly.

38:37 Sam Tideman
And whereas that's a difference where if Sean does something, he's his own center of activity.

38:43 Sam Tideman
And if I do something, I'm my own center of activity.

38:46 Sam Tideman
So that's how it's a little bit different.

38:48 Sam Tideman
And so all of these things, which are still part and parcel

38:53 Sam Tideman
of Trinitarian orthodoxy, especially if you're Eastern Orthodox, but also in many cases if you're Catholic, a lot of what they formulated and articulated are still the formal bounds of orthodoxy and articulations of the doctrine of the Trinity.

39:07 Sam Tideman
And they mostly do that in the 370s AD, is the period where they're sort of reflecting on some of the Trinitarian stuff that's already been happening, using their powers of rhetoric and philosophy to make this more precise, answer objections.

39:23 Sam Tideman
launch attacks on their opponents and answer the attacks of their opponents.

39:27 Sam Tideman
Yeah.

39:28 Sean Finnegan
I appreciate you going through that.

39:30 Sean Finnegan
What I hear is development.

39:34 Sean Finnegan
Development, development, development.

39:36 Sean Finnegan
You know, we have Alexander in Alexandria around the year 318 talking about the sun being eternal.

39:46 Sean Finnegan
And one of his priests saying, hey, that's not the teaching we've received.

39:50 Sean Finnegan
You know,

39:52 Sean Finnegan
I have not been teaching that these decades in ministry.

39:56 Sean Finnegan
We're not receiving that.

39:57 Sean Finnegan
And then that starts this controversy, right?

39:59 Sean Finnegan
So to me, that's a development.

40:01 Sean Finnegan
And then the decision at Nicaea in 325 that introduces this new word of the same being, homousios.

40:11 Sean Finnegan
And then as we march forward, we have clearer articulations by Hillary and Athanasius

40:19 Sean Finnegan
of the binitarian nature, the co-equality.

40:23 Sam Tideman
It's also Athanasius and Hillary who add in the Holy Spirit for the first time.

40:27 Sean Finnegan
Okay, and they bring the Holy Spirit in.

40:29 Sean Finnegan
But then with the Cappadocians, these really genius level philosophers with all the resources they need and the education to really pontificate and do the creative, constructive work to

40:43 Sean Finnegan
balance the threeness and the oneness, if I can say it like that, and sort out a way of thinking about that.

40:50 Sean Finnegan
And so we're in the 370s when that happens, and we're marching towards this momentous event of 381 where everything gets clearly articulated and there's no controversy thereafter, right?

41:03 Sam Tideman
Unfortunately, that's not exactly what happens.

41:06 Sean Finnegan
Okay, well let's talk about Theodosius.

41:08 Sam Tideman
Sure.

41:09 Sam Tideman
So in 378 AD,

41:13 Sam Tideman
So the Huns, who are a tribe of warriors from Central Asia or Mongolia, that sort of area, some Asiatic steppe barbarians, as the Romans would call them, are attacking the eastern part of Europe.

41:29 Sam Tideman
And the Gothic tribes that live in this eastern part of Europe are being terrorized by these Huns that are riding loose on the steppes.

41:39 Sam Tideman
And so they are seeking refuge within the Roman Empire to be protected from these Hunnish horse riding, arrow shooting, terrifying people.

41:48 Sean Finnegan
Let me just pause you there.

41:50 Sean Finnegan
This is like one of the most hysterical events in Roman imperial history or Byzantine history, however you want to say it, because the Goths had been the boogeymen.

42:01 Sean Finnegan
The barbarian tribes have been like the, you know, the bad guys that the Romans are afraid of.

42:08 Sean Finnegan
And here the terrifying barbarians are actually more scared of these other barbarians, the Huns, and they're like, oh.

42:19 Sam Tideman
My gosh, we're getting run away.

42:20 Sean Finnegan
So it's just like a really funny moment in history where like the barbarians have scared of people that are more barbarian than they are.

42:28 Sam Tideman
Whereas the Goths, Gothic was actually a Germanic language.

42:32 Sam Tideman
The Goths were probably basically a group that originated somewhere in Scandinavia and spoke a proto-Germanic kind of language that then migrated through.

42:43 Sam Tideman
northern and central and then into southern Europe.

42:46 Sam Tideman
So they were kind of almost like proto-Vikings and they were no cowards themselves.

42:50 Sam Tideman
So when they're getting scared of the Huns, the Huns must have been really terrifying.

42:55 Sam Tideman
And what's interesting is many of the Gothic tribes had actually been evangelized to Christianity by a missionary named Wolfolas, which means little wolf in Gothic.

43:06 Sam Tideman
And he was a Aryan

43:08 Sam Tideman
missionaries.

43:09 Sam Tideman
So he taught the Goths Aryan form of Christianity.

43:13 Sam Tideman
So they've actually mostly already been Christianized.

43:16 Sam Tideman
And the fact that they're Aryan is relevant to this next part of the story.

43:21 Sam Tideman
So there is an emperor named Valens, who's the emperor of the East at this time.

43:26 Sam Tideman
And he accepts these Gothic refugees, I guess is probably the right word, into the Roman Empire and offers them protection.

43:35 Sam Tideman
He is also probably thinking that he can use them to protect himself.

43:38 Sam Tideman
himself from the Huns.

43:39 Sam Tideman
he doesn't want to get attacked by the Huns either.

43:42 Sam Tideman
And so if he accepts the Goths as allies and members of the empire, they'll be like sort of like a buffer, especially like the countries, probably this is happening in like Bulgaria and Romania, like that sort of area.

43:55 Sam Tideman
And maybe he can hire them as mercenaries to help fill the ranks of his army.

43:59 Sam Tideman
So that could be pretty useful.

44:00 Sam Tideman
But as Europe knows, not every refugee resettlement works out very well.

44:06 Sam Tideman
And so these Goths are sort of left on the fringes.

44:09 Sam Tideman
They don't really have any land to farm or jobs.

44:12 Sam Tideman
And the local populations are not very excited that they're there.

44:15 Sam Tideman
And so they're sort of getting poor and desperate and hungry.

44:18 Sam Tideman
And they start making kind of bands of warriors that go around raiding the Roman Empire.

44:24 Sam Tideman
And so

44:25 Sam Tideman
This is a problem.

44:26 Sam Tideman
So Valens decides he needs to lead his army to defeat the Goths, who he had tried to resettle in his empire, because they're basically becoming a problem of their own.

44:35 Sam Tideman
And so there's a battle in 378 AD called the Battle of Adrianople, where the Emperor Valens himself leads the Roman Empire's army out to meet the Goths.

44:44 Sam Tideman
And the Goths actually win a surprise victory, and the emperor is killed in battle, which is one of the...

44:51 Sam Tideman
There's a couple times where it had happened.

44:53 Sean Finnegan
It's not completely rare, right?

44:55 Sam Tideman
Julian the Apostate had been killed in battle against the Persians.

44:58 Sam Tideman
And then there was one other emperor.

45:00 Sean Finnegan
I think Valerian was the other fellow, right?

45:02 Sean Finnegan
Yes.

45:03 Sam Tideman
So there's maybe two or three at most examples of Roman emperors getting killed in battle.

45:08 Sam Tideman
And so Valens adds himself to that list.

45:11 Sam Tideman
Although most of the times that an emperor gets killed in battle, they're fighting the Persians, which are at least like respectable peers.

45:19 Sam Tideman
This guy dies fighting these tribes that he had tried to resettle in his own empire.

45:24 Sean Finnegan
Yeah, he just mismanaged it.

45:25 Sam Tideman
And so then the Goths are like running all over because they're now unchecked.

45:29 Sam Tideman
They had just defeated the army in that area.

45:32 Sam Tideman
And so they're actually pillaging the suburbs of Constantinople.

45:36 Sam Tideman
Constantinople is inside a wall so they can't get inside the main city.

45:39 Sam Tideman
But they're raiding villages and doing probably unspeakable things that we won't mention on this podcast, but causing just general terror for the local population.

45:49 Sam Tideman
So the empire is like, man, this is a crisis.

45:51 Sam Tideman
This is an absolute crisis.

45:53 Sam Tideman
Our own capital is getting raided by these barbarians.

45:56 Sam Tideman
So they hire this general who had been a successful general on the western part of the empire named Theodosius.

46:05 Sam Tideman
He was from Spain.

46:06 Sam Tideman
He was not of royal blood, really.

46:08 Sam Tideman
He was just sort of a guy who had

46:11 Sam Tideman
risen through the ranks of the military and had a good military track record.

46:15 Sam Tideman
And they're like, we need someone with a good military track record to get these Gothic barbarians back under control.

46:21 Sam Tideman
So they put Theodosius in as emperor.

46:24 Sam Tideman
And so he moves to Thessalonia or Thessaloniki.

46:28 Sam Tideman
That city tends to change name over time, but it's the same city that the letters of the Thessalonians are written to in northern and on the northern shores of the Aegean.

46:38 Sam Tideman
And so he's fighting

46:40 Sam Tideman
a bunch of battles from there and sort of starts to get the Gothic situation under control and win some victories.

46:46 Sam Tideman
Although I suspect that he also probably bribed some of them.

46:50 Sam Tideman
I think that was, I don't think he just beat them militarily.

46:52 Sam Tideman
I think that he also probably gave some of them money and cut some deals to get them to settle down.

46:58 Sam Tideman
But he is a pro-Nicene Trinitarian because like I said, the western part of the empire tended to be pro-Nicea.

47:06 Sam Tideman
And I think that

47:08 Sam Tideman
One thing that's a little bit fuzzy during this period of time is what exactly is the distinction between someone who is pro-Nicene and someone who really believes in the full-fledged doctrine of the Trinity?

47:19 Sam Tideman
Because even the Cappadocian fathers in the early writings, they still often talk about the one true God is God the Father.

47:27 Sam Tideman
right?

47:27 Sam Tideman
There's still this idea in their head that the God, capital T, capital G, is God the Father, and that the Son and Spirit are maybe equally divine and are sort of like close to him, but maybe like his right and left hand or something like that.

47:41 Sam Tideman
But there's still something about God the Father that is the identity of God.

47:45 Sam Tideman
And it's kind of blurry in this period.

47:49 Sam Tideman
Is the one true God, God the Father who has these two other divine persons, or is the one true God the Trinity as a whole?

47:56 Sam Tideman
And

47:57 Sam Tideman
fuzzy and you get kind of sometimes you get different answers from different people.

48:01 Sam Tideman
Sometimes you get different answers from the same person.

48:03 Sam Tideman
Even then to say Trinitarian in the 370s and 380s is it's still a difficult label to use precisely.

48:13 Sean Finnegan
But I do anachronistic perhaps?

48:16 Sam Tideman
Anachronistic or it's at least, this is the early phase of this idea.

48:20 Sam Tideman
This idea is still pretty new and you can imagine that the old idea still has a little bit of leverage and purchase in a lot of people's minds.

48:28 Sam Tideman
But I do think that Theodosius is.

48:31 Sam Tideman
He's not a theologian himself.

48:33 Sam Tideman
Constantine was really smart.

48:35 Sam Tideman
Constantine was very philosophical.

48:36 Sam Tideman
Theodosius wasn't nearly well-educated like Constantine was, because Constantine grew up in a royal family and had the best scholars and tutors.

48:45 Sam Tideman
This guy is more of a military dude.

48:47 Sam Tideman
And he's been taught some by Ambrose of Milan, who is a very important bishop in northern Italy.

48:54 Sam Tideman
And so he is sort of picking the Trinitarian side.

48:58 Sam Tideman
And I think his thinking is,

49:00 Sam Tideman
is that, look, we've had all of these councils.

49:03 Sam Tideman
We've gone back and forth so many times, and we never seem to settle the issue.

49:08 Sam Tideman
These bishops all disagree with each other.

49:11 Sam Tideman
These theologians all disagree with each other.

49:13 Sam Tideman
What we need finally in this situation is a good firm hand.

49:17 Sam Tideman
And if dialogue doesn't solve it, if church councils don't solve it, well, then I know darn well what will solve it.

49:24 Sam Tideman
And it's some good old-fashioned muscle and force and some top-down authority

49:29 Sam Tideman
He enters the city of Constantinople for the first time in 381 AD.

49:34 Sam Tideman
And what's interesting is he had been emperor for two years, I think, at this point, and he is a little bit scared to enter his own capital because Constantinople is very pro-Aryan and he is well known for being an anti-Aryan.

49:49 Sam Tideman
And so when he enters his own capital for the first time, he has a military guard.

49:54 Sam Tideman
and that the people of Constantinople are throwing rocks at him and stuff like that and booing at him and hissing at him.

50:01 Sam Tideman
So imagine like, that seems like a pretty bold thing to do to your own emperor, but it shows how politically contested this theological debate really was and that it was affecting, the minds and behaviors of ordinary citizens to the point where they didn't even like their own emperor.

50:22 Sam Tideman
I should also say that Gregory of Nazianzus, one of the Cappadocian fathers, the one who is not a brother, but sort of like the adopted brother, had gone into Constantinople the year before or a little bit before.

50:34 Sam Tideman
And he had started a underground home church that was a pro-Nicene church inside Constantinople.

50:42 Sam Tideman
And he had to do this in secret because the Arians would have persecuted him.

50:46 Sam Tideman
And in fact, one Easter Sunday, I think this is Easter 381 AD or maybe

50:52 Sam Tideman
that a bunch of Arians busted into his church right as he was about to baptize some new members on Easter Sunday and busted up his church service and scared everyone off.

51:02 Sam Tideman
And so this was like a very tense, even dangerous and violent situation between the Arians and the pro-Nicenes.

51:10 Sean Finnegan
Yeah, and I bet if you ask your average modern person today, oh, what do you think it was like in 381 when they had the Council of Constantinople?

51:19 Sean Finnegan
They'd be like, the Trinity idea had been around for a long time.

51:24 Sean Finnegan
Everybody already believed in it.

51:25 Sean Finnegan
And it was just sort of like the final, they're putting like the final dots on the I's and crosses on the T's.

51:32 Sam Tideman
Icing on the cake.

51:33 Sean Finnegan
Icing on the cake.

51:34 Sean Finnegan
And you know, the Cappadocian father, Gregory of Nazianzas, everybody loved him.

51:40 Sean Finnegan
Everybody recognized his authority.

51:42 Sean Finnegan
You know, there was no, but in reality, we're dealing with, we got the Huns coming.

51:47 Sean Finnegan
We got the Goths going crazy.

51:49 Sean Finnegan
Theodosius is in charge because he's a tough guy who can get stuff done militarily over against the Goths.

51:58 Sean Finnegan
He's not well-loved.

52:00 Sean Finnegan
The city itself is overwhelmingly subordinationist.

52:03 Sean Finnegan
Overwhelmingly sees the father as superior to the son.

52:07 Sean Finnegan
This is the capital of the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople itself.

52:12 Sean Finnegan
And Gregory, who is this great doctor of the church, as he's remembered,

52:17 Sean Finnegan
by all accounts, like a decent guy and really brilliant thinker, is the underdog who's hiding and unable to even run his church services without getting interrupted.

52:28 Sean Finnegan
I mean, none of this is known, Sam.

52:29 Sean Finnegan
This is, I mean, it's not a conspiracy.

52:32 Sean Finnegan
It's not a secret.

52:33 Sean Finnegan
Anybody can find this information out if they look at the sources.

52:36 Sean Finnegan
And there are secondary sources that talk about this too.

52:39 Sean Finnegan
There's that 381 book.

52:40 Sean Finnegan
What was that?

52:41 Sean Finnegan
Friedman.

52:43 Sam Tideman
Pretty good book.

52:44 Sam Tideman
I wouldn't put it at the top of the list, but it's good for some important historical details for this period.

52:51 Sam Tideman
But yeah, I mean, you can just kind of go on various websites, whether it's new Advent or 4th century, and just like go through the Cappadocian's writings.

52:59 Sam Tideman
And there are a lot of times where they'll despair that it seems like their side is losing, or they almost feel like Elijah, where, you know, who hasn't bent the knee to the prophets of Arias, like that sort of, they have a clear

53:12 Sam Tideman
sense that they're in the minority and there are various times where they're despairing because it seems like their side's losing or on the verge of being wiped out.

53:20 Sam Tideman
So this idea that Trinitarianism was the majority is not quite true.

53:24 Sam Tideman
I would say that it's the majority in the West

53:27 Sam Tideman
But there are so few theologians from the West in this period writing in Latin that we really only have samples from Rome and a couple other, like Milan and a couple other highfalutin bishoprics.

53:40 Sam Tideman
I think most of them were sort of like, we believe in the Nicene Creed.

53:44 Sam Tideman
I guess you asked me to articulate it.

53:46 Sam Tideman
I don't know.

53:48 Sam Tideman
I bet that there was a lot of

53:51 Sam Tideman
vague wishy-washiness in the West, but they generally had a pro-Nicene sentiment.

53:56 Sam Tideman
Their leaders were pro-Nicene.

53:57 Sam Tideman
Their leaders were starting to adopt this new Trinitarian vocabulary.

54:01 Sam Tideman
I'm not sure what the average person on the street was like, but the real theological contest was in the East.

54:08 Sam Tideman
That's where a lot of the highly educated bishops were.

54:11 Sam Tideman
A lot of the theological writing is from the eastern part of the empire.

54:15 Sam Tideman
And that we have like dozens or even hundreds of people who are writing at this time on this topic

54:20 Sam Tideman
that part of that.

54:22 Sean Finnegan
And you also have a language difference, Latin in the west and then Greek in the east.

54:27 Sean Finnegan
And a lot of these turn on little Greek.

54:31 Sean Finnegan
grammatical differences, right?

54:34 Sam Tideman
But yet the people in the streets in the eastern part of the empire would go have a riot and throw rocks at their own emperor over these sorts of questions too.

54:43 Sam Tideman
So even while the differences might be small, I think that there was a very strong popular sectarianism and polarization

54:52 Sam Tideman
in the eastern part of the empire over these questions, even down to the grassroots.

54:57 Sean Finnegan
Yeah, I remember that quote Rubenstein pulled from, I think it was Gregory of Naziazus about how.

55:03 Sean Finnegan
You go to buy some bread and they're like, the father is co-equal or is begotten.

55:09 Sam Tideman
Yeah, you get a haircut and your barber's telling you about how the son's generated from the father.

55:14 Sean Finnegan
Right, Like this was a very much a live issue among just like a lot of different people.

55:20 Sean Finnegan
They were into it.

55:20 Sean Finnegan
They were curious.

55:22 Sean Finnegan
They took positions, kind of like the way people do with sports teams, right?

55:27 Sam Tideman
Yeah, Or political questions, right?

55:30 Sean Finnegan
Like, yes, politics.

55:33 Sam Tideman
It's like if there were Fox News at the time, this is what Fox News would have been talking about.

55:37 Sam Tideman
And that it's getting down to the popular imagination that way.

55:41 Sean Finnegan
Let's get to the moment, the moment of the council.

55:44 Sam Tideman
All right, so Gregory of Nazianzus has gone.

55:47 Sam Tideman
He's starting this church because he's basically trying out to be the Trinitarian Bishop of Constantinople.

55:52 Sam Tideman
That's why he's trying to start that church, because he knows that this new emperor is his theological ally.

55:58 Sam Tideman
So he's trying to position himself to become the Bishop of Constantinople, which is one of the most important positions in the church, obviously, because it's the bishop of the emperor himself in the capital.

56:08 Sam Tideman
Theodosius has moved into the city.

56:10 Sam Tideman
It's very contentious.

56:12 Sam Tideman
He has deposed the previous Arian

56:14 Sam Tideman
Constantinople.

56:16 Sam Tideman
Gregory of Nazianzus is the Bishop of Constantinople.

56:20 Sam Tideman
And so Gregory calls a council.

56:23 Sam Tideman
I honestly go back and forth.

56:24 Sam Tideman
I don't think he viewed this council as like a new Nicaea.

56:29 Sam Tideman
I think he viewed this kind of more as like a regional thing for him to try and demonstrate and assert his dominance over the eastern part of the empire, which was resistant to his theology.

56:45 Sam Tideman
And so I think the main reason he's calling this is to ratify his new choices bishop in front of all the other bishops and to figure out who his allies are and develop sort of a new network of bishops that are on his side in this kind of hostile Aryan territory.

57:02 Sam Tideman
I think that's his main goal at this council.

57:06 Sam Tideman
And I don't think he viewed it really even as

57:10 Sam Tideman
authoritative or ecumenical or global as some of the councils that had come before.

57:16 Sam Tideman
And one thing that kind of tells this is that it's not a very big council.

57:20 Sam Tideman
I think, what is it?

57:21 Sam Tideman
180 bishops, I think, are there.

57:24 Sam Tideman
It's less than 200.

57:25 Sam Tideman
It's in the 100 somewhere.

57:27 Sam Tideman
And he handpicks the people who are there.

57:29 Sam Tideman
It's not like he's inviting any and every bishop.

57:32 Sam Tideman
He pre-invites bishops who he already knows agree with him.

57:36 Sam Tideman
And this is a very important part of the council.

57:38 Sam Tideman
And so Gregory of Nazianzus is the kind of presider over the council, the church official above the council.

57:45 Sam Tideman
The Emperor Theodosius is there, of course.

57:48 Sam Tideman
And then what happens is that right away, there are these Macedonians that they're called, they're not from Macedonia, they follow a teacher named Macedonius,

57:57 Sam Tideman
who are basically binitarians who believe that the Father and Son are co-equal and one God together, but that the Holy Spirit is not part of it.

58:04 Sam Tideman
They are labeled by the Cappadocians as pneumatomachians, which means spirit fighters because they resist the inclusion of the Holy Spirit in the Godhead.

58:14 Sam Tideman
And so they get there and they realize, oh man, this DAC is stacked against us.

58:18 Sam Tideman
We'll have no good hearing there.

58:20 Sam Tideman
They're going to anathematize us.

58:21 Sam Tideman
Let's best leave and protest.

58:23 Sam Tideman
So like in the first couple days, some of the people who've been handpicked to be there

58:27 Sam Tideman
because he thought they would be their theological allies, leave in protest because it seems like a rigged game.

58:33 Sam Tideman
And then there is also this division between the Egyptian faction

58:39 Sam Tideman
And the, what I'll call the Turkish faction, even though obviously they didn't call them that, but the people who are from what we would now call Turkey.

58:47 Sam Tideman
And they disagreed over who the official bishop of Antioch was.

58:52 Sam Tideman
And if you look on a globe, Antioch is like halfway between Egypt and Turkey.

58:58 Sam Tideman
Even though the Egyptians are pro-Nicene and generally pro-Trinitarian to the extent that that's the right word at this period in time, they still disagree about who the rightful bishop of Antioch is.

59:08 Sam Tideman
And so Gregory of Nazianzus tries to throw the Egyptians a bone and say, all right, we'll make your guy the official bishop of Antioch.

59:16 Sam Tideman
But the Turkish bishops and the Greek bishops rebel and say, no, we can't do that.

59:21 Sam Tideman
And Gregory of Nazianzus, who doesn't seem like he's a great politician, he's like trying to get them to agree.

59:27 Sam Tideman
And he says, if you guys won't agree, then I'm going to resign in disgust.

59:32 Sam Tideman
And they're like, all right, go ahead and resign in disgust then, Mr.

59:35 Sam Tideman
Gregory.

59:36 Sam Tideman
That's so funny.

59:38 Sean Finnegan
The most classic blunder, right?

59:40 Sam Tideman
Yeah.

59:42 Sean Finnegan
He should have reversed it.

59:43 Sean Finnegan
He should have said, if you agree, I'll resign.

59:47 Sam Tideman
Then at least you get the result he wanted.

59:49 Sam Tideman
Right.

59:50 Sam Tideman
And so he gives this scathing exit speech.

59:53 Sam Tideman
We still have his exit speech from the Council of Constantinople, where he resigns in disgust and calls a bunch of people a bunch of names and then leaves.

1:00:01 Sam Tideman
And so then they have to appoint a new person to be bishop of Constantinople. There's all these names and they're fighting over it, right? You can imagine that is a very contentious thing. And so they give the emperor a list of names and he goes to the bottom of the list and he's like, I don't recognize this name. Who's that? And we're like, I don't know how he ended up on the name. He's like, well, what does he believe? He's like, oh, well, he's just kind of an important aristocrat here in Constantinople. He doesn't really know any theology. He's actually not even baptized. And Theodosius is like, let's pick him.

1:00:31 Sam Tideman
Perfect. So they baptize him at the council and then two or three days later, ordain him as the Bishop of Constantinople.

1:00:40 Sean Finnegan
Ridiculous.

1:00:40 Sam Tideman
And honestly, there was actually a little bit of intelligence to this because, like I said, the people of Constantinople were very Aryan and very suspicious of this council. And the fact that he did not have strong theological knowledge or allegiance was kind of an asset. And the emperor was like, well, he'll be loyal to me because the only reason he's there is because of me.

1:01:01 Sam Tideman
So kind of everyone gets a little bit of what they want, even though he was not even a baptized Christian at the time that he was picked from the list. So that's just how messy this council is.

1:01:12 Sam Tideman
Then they decide some other stuff and they appoint the Bishop of Constantinople to be the second most important bishop in the church after the Bishop of Rome, who wasn't even there. This is another thing. Bishop of Rome, the Pope, quote unquote, not even at the Council of Constantinople. He had a delegate, but he's not there. And so the idea that this is some super duper super official council

1:01:36 Sam Tideman
even in the reckoning of the Catholic Church and the Bishop of Romans and even there, like I said, his goal was to establish a local network in Aryan territory of pro-Nicene bishops that he could trust and then start to point into all the important positions and to ratify his new Bishop of Constantinople and just sort of do a show of force that he's sort of in charge and that he's affecting church politics and you need to get on board or watch out. And so that I think is really what

1:02:06 Sam Tideman
the Council of Constantinople is. And then here's the thing that just blew my lid, Sean, when I'm researching the Council of Constantinople. I'm waiting for the Constantinopleton Creed to show up as I'm doing this research.

1:02:18 Sean Finnegan
Right. Where's the Creed? That was my next question. Let's talk about the Creed. Where is it?

1:02:22 Sam Tideman
If you go to the Wikipedia page or if you ask one or two questions about where the Nicene Creed comes from, they'll say, well, it's actually the Nicene Constantinopletan Creed because they updated and expanded it at the Council of Constantinople in 381. And that's why I'd always been taught. That's why I'd always heard. So here I am. I'm researching the Council of Constantinople. I'm like, all right, so when did they discuss the Creed and what to add and what to delete out? And there is no record that they did any such thing. And in fact, the first canon,

1:02:52 Sam Tideman
the first sort of law, or I guess you could say the first canon announcement from the Council of Constantinople, is we reaffirm the faith of the 318 at Nicea. And so they reaffirm the Nicene Creed in its original 325 form.

1:03:11 Sam Tideman
word for word. They all recite it and they say, here we so believe. And that is the first decision of the Council of Constantinople. So I'm like, but where's the new creed? They don't talk about it. They don't discuss it. There is no evidence that there was a creed issued from the Council of Constantinople that is a new expanded creed or is the text of what people now recite in church when they say they're reciting the quote unquote Nicene Creed.

1:03:39 Sam Tideman
I'm doing a bunch of research. I'm looking around. I'm like, I can't be the first person who's noticed this. And it turns out RPC Hansen notices this and a bunch of other researchers noticed this. And what's interesting, so I'm going to have to fast forward through a couple decades of history here. I won't go through the whole details. But fast forward to 431 AD. There's the Council of Ephesus.

1:04:03 Sam Tideman
And this is also considered one of the quote unquote ecumenical councils by the Orthodox and the Catholics and many Protestants besides. And they excommunicate Nestorius at the Council of Ephesus and say that Nestorianism is wrong. So that's when that schism happens. But at the Council of Ephesus in 431 AD, they also recite the Nicene Creed, the 325 word for word original Nicene Creed.

1:04:33 Sam Tideman
And then they add, no one is allowed to make up any new creeds. This is the official creed of the church for the rest of time. No editing or modifying it. So help us God. Wait a minute. What's going on? Where is the creed that everyone actually recites in church? Because it's not at 381 AD. 431 AD seems to forbid such a document even being created.

1:05:00 Sam Tideman
All right, fast forward 20 more years to the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD. And this is really, I think, honestly the most important council in church history. And more determinative of theology than any of the councils before or since, especially regarding this question. And it's actually a very large council with a lot of representation in 451 AD.

1:05:25 Sean Finnegan
And probably the statement or definition with the most abstruse language.

1:05:30 Sam Tideman
Yes. So they issue the definition, not a creed, the definition of the two natures Christology that we all know and love to this day, not confusing the essences, but united in one person, all of that sort of language that you can still read and is still the definition of Chalcedonian Christology is from the Council of Chalcedon.

1:05:53 Sam Tideman
But they have an issue where I think that they wanted a creed that was more specific than the Nicene Creed, because moderate Arians, all sorts of other groups had gotten pretty used to reciting the Nicene Creed by now. And so it wasn't strict enough or filtered enough to filter out their undesirable theological enemies.

1:06:18 Sam Tideman
And so, but they also know that 20 years earlier at the Council of Ephesus, they forbade the creating of new creeds. So what they do is the deacon representing Constantinople at the Council of Chalcedon is digging through the quote unquote file cabinet of the proceedings of the Council of Constantinople. And he pulls out a document that he says is the creed of

1:06:46 Sam Tideman
the people at the Council of Constantinople. And so they recite at the Council of Chalcedon 2 creeds back to back, original 325 creed.

1:06:57 Sam Tideman
and creed from the filing cabinet being attributed to the Council of Constantinople at 381. And they say both of these creeds are valid. And the reason why it gets around the law against new creeds at 431 is because theoretically this is from 50 years before that embargo on new creeds. So where did this creed actually come from? We have no historical records of this being

1:07:26 Sam Tideman
recited or issued from the Council of Constantinople, but we don't have complete historical records. So I think there are a couple possibilities. You said to warn the audience when Sam is venturing into speculative land, I am now venturing into speculative land, but in all honesty, all historians are venturing into speculative land at this point in time because the documentary evidence is a little bit confusing.

1:07:51 Sam Tideman
So one possibility is that this creed that's now called the Nicene-Constantinopletan Creed was discussed at the Council of Constantinople. Maybe they were discussing the status of the Holy Spirit and some bishop was like, well, here's the creed that my church uses in baptism.

1:08:10 Sam Tideman
maybe that was relevant for some discussion that they were having at some point in time and was put in the filing cabinet of the records of the Council of Constantinople and then later brought out and issued as a creed that had been issued by the Council of Constantinople, even though the Council of Constantinople definitely did not issue it as a new official creed. That's one possibility. Maybe the Council of Chelsea and thought that they had,

1:08:37 Sam Tideman
But I suspect that is too generous of a interpretation. Another possibility is that they found some older creed that could have been from who knows where or who knows how it ended up in their records. And someone at the Council of Chalcedon, I'm not saying everyone, I think maybe just one individual or a few individuals conspired to have this creed falsely attributed to the Council of Constantinople so that they could then recite it at Chalcedon

1:09:07 Sam Tideman
And that's how it became the official Nicene Creed. There is a very important letter from a bishop named Epiphanius, who is a bishop of Bishop in Solomis, yeah, on the island of Cyprus. And he in a letter had talked about his own church's creed that is almost word, it's like 95% word for word identical with the final Nicene Constantinopleton Creed. So this letter is from 374

1:09:37 Sam Tideman
And so I suspect, if I had to guess, there was some creed that was either very close or all the way to what we now call the Nicene-Constantinopleton Creed that had been used at some local church somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean that they had updated and expanded during the later stages of the Aryan crisis, because it does say the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father, the Lord and giver of life,

1:10:05 Sam Tideman
who together with the Father and Spirit is worshipped and glorified. So that is pretty Trinitarian sounding. It's not explicitly Trinitarian, but it's pretty close. And so I suspect that this creed had been written or edited by some church in the 370s. And then somehow this gets pulled out at Chalcedon, and I suspect that someone did some funny business.

1:10:30 Sam Tideman
in that someone somewhere knew that this wasn't from the Council of Constantinople, but they wanted a more specific creed, but they knew it needed to be something old that predated Ephesus. So they pulled out this creed. Someone probably intentionally lied about where it was from. And the people, there are records of the people at Constantinople being like, what's this? We've never seen this before. I'm not saying I disagree with it, but

1:10:58 Sam Tideman
What is this? And here's the other thing, Sean. It's just crazy. Other than that letter, other than Epiphanius's letter, which is not from the Council of Constantinople, it's from 374, it's from seven years prior to the council, which is evidence that it wasn't produced at the council. There is no record of this creed until Chalcedon. And you and I, Sean, know that this late 4th, early 5th century time, we have tons of stuff that is written by the church.

1:11:28 Sam Tideman
Augustine is writing all of this stuff. Jerome is writing this stuff. Chrysostom. You know, lots of the biggest, most prolific authors in the church history are writing during this period of time. And the amount of documents from that period could fill up multiple libraries. In all of those multiple libraries worth of documents, there are zero citations.

1:11:51 Sam Tideman
the final version of the Nicene-Constantinopleton Creed. So I think that literally there's a very strong chance that the Nicene Creed, someone forged the origins of it at the Council of Chalcedon to solve and meet some political purpose at the time. Alternatively, there was a

1:12:14 Sam Tideman
act of mistaken identity. That they thought that this was a mistake.

1:12:19 Sean Finnegan
Honest or dishonest mistake. Either way, it's a mistake. Mistaken attribution.

1:12:23 Sam Tideman
So it's at best a mistake or at worst, literal forgery. Literal, active, intentional manipulation of falsely attributing the paper trail of a document to achieve a desired political end, which meets every definition of forgery.

1:12:39 Sean Finnegan
There's just so many rotten apples in the jar here or in the barrel.

1:12:44 Sean Finnegan
Epiphanius is someone we actually know quite a bit about because he wrote a book called The Penarion and it survives. It's A heresy hunter catalog of all the Christians that Epiphanius didn't like over time and why they're all wrong. And it's interesting because we get a good sense of Epiphanius' character and skill

1:13:09 Sean Finnegan
His Greek is very simple. It's not very sophisticated, not like the Cappadocians at all, not in their league at all. But we also see with Epiphanius that he is absolutely desperate to make his enemies look as bad as possible. And he's not above bending or shading or putting spin on different historical events in order to make ancestral connections

1:13:37 Sean Finnegan
for the purposes of exposing A heresy. So what I mean by that is so-and-so was influenced by so-and-so who was influenced by so-and-so, these sort of like heretical genetic fallacies. Yeah. And yeah, the genetic fallacy. You know, he's not, he's not well regarded by church historians, Epiphanius. So like, could he have come up with this? I don't think so. But like, could he have falsely attributed it? Absolutely.

1:14:02 Sean Finnegan
because he was a very pragmatic fellow. And what I'm saying is he had a very strong agenda and bias in his time.

1:14:10 Sam Tideman
But even his letter isn't exactly word for word identical with the final creed. There's still a couple differences.

1:14:16 Sam Tideman
So someone might have found a letter of Epiphanius at Chalseedon and maybe even edited it a little bit. it'd be like, it would be a little bit better if it said this, a little bit better if it said this, and then presented that at the council or something like that. It's unclear exactly what happened.

1:14:33 Sean Finnegan
Yeah, I'd be curious where Epiphanius got it from.

1:14:36 Sean Finnegan
If we could trace that down.

1:14:37 Sam Tideman
Yeah, it might have. I think there some people think that it was maybe the local baptismal creed of Jerusalem or maybe somewhere on the island of his own church on the island of Cyprus. But like I said, that it's not like every church used the Nicene Creed.

1:14:52 Sam Tideman
There was still a lot of local variation in baptismal creeds and that sort of thing. So I bet it was a local baptismal creed from the eastern Mediterranean somewhere that somehow ended up in a filing cabinet that then was opened up and brought out falsely or mistakenly attributed to the Council of Constantinople at 451 AD. That was then given the authoritative stamp of church orthodoxy for all time, and that's why people recite it.

1:15:21 Sam Tideman
call it the Nicene-Constantinopleton Creed, but it's neither of those things. At best, it should be called the Chalcedonian Creed, but they can't call the Chalcedonian Creed because it would have been illegal for Chalcedon to issue a new creed because of the canons from the Council of Ephesus.

1:15:36 Sean Finnegan
Right. And now 1600 years later, if you don't agree with this dubious creed, then you can't get your book published

1:15:47 Sean Finnegan
by many Christian book publishers. You can't get a degree from many grad programs at least, and maybe

1:15:54 Sam Tideman
even- You can't participate in interdenominational charity activities sometimes.

1:15:59 Sean Finnegan
I mean, it's just like unbelievable that this is the shibboleth. This is the litmus test by which Christians are excluded and treated badly. This very questionable statement that nobody even knows the origin of

1:16:16 Sean Finnegan
But we know it was used politically within civil wars of Christianity, Christians fighting Christians. And it's all mixed up with politics and the emperors and what was really happening in 381 with the Huns and all this political unrest. You have Gregory flaming out at the event itself. And then you have all the controversy in 451, which we don't have time to get into today. But that's a whole nother

1:16:46 Sean Finnegan
story where I think it was Pope Leo's tome that eventually gets accepted, but like there's all kinds of political intrigue in that 5th century situation as well. For people that then to say, oh, this is authoritative, I think is incredibly wrong-headed.

1:17:05 Sam Tideman
I agree.

1:17:05 Sean Finnegan
You don't have any kind of happy story or like divine origin or inspiration.

1:17:11 Sam Tideman
And in fact, you might have literal lies and forgery and illegal, it could be the case that it could be shown that the Nicene Creed was uncanonical by the own standards of church canon law.

1:17:25 Sean Finnegan
Yeah. Sam, this might need to become a book. I'm just going to throw that out there. I know you probably don't have time, but the Da Vinci Code has nothing on this. is the true version of what they were trying to do.

1:17:42 Sam Tideman
Although Jesus didn't get married, but yeah.

1:17:46 Sean Finnegan
But they went back to Nicaea and there's just so much misinformation and my goodness, like if people knew this, the questionable history of this august language that many liturgical churches will actually have their people cite on a weekly basis, if not certainly an annual basis on Trinity Sunday, what would people do if they knew the truth?

1:18:10 Sam Tideman
Yeah, I mean, the Athenation creed is kind of falling out of style because it's been shown to be a forgery and a later, pseudo-epigraphal thing and didn't have proper church authority to, at the time, blah, blah, blah. And that's starting to get more and more well known and it's fallen out of favor both with the Catholic Church and many Protestant denominations are don't look at it as fondly as they used to. But I think the same thing with proper inspection and proper knowledge could happen

1:18:40 Sam Tideman
even with the quote-unquote Nicene-Constantinopleton Creed itself too. But part of me is like, Sean, so what do you think if someone listened to our conversation or if we were to present the facts as best as we could in 10, 15 minutes to a pro-Nicene Creed Protestant?

1:18:59 Sam Tideman
Part of me is like, I'm just so jaded at this point in time of how many times I've tried to persuade people of stuff that I feel like A, they wouldn't trust me because I was a Unitarian. And B, even if I just like, I'm like, look it all up, source, source, source, source, do your own homework. I almost feel like there's just this frustrating wall of apathy about this that I find so discouraging.

1:19:26 Sean Finnegan
Tim Keller once talked about in his book, Reason for God, that people make change based on different reasons. So even the same person will have multiple reasons. So some of them will be sociological, some will be emotional, some will be logical. And I think in particular, the sociological pain of

1:19:50 Sean Finnegan
of diverging from the Trinitarian idea as Orthodox and everything else that people just can't allow themselves to go there because that's very much going to alienate you from your community of faith. It'll alienate you from your academic institutions and it's really going to damage your career in most cases, unless you're in a biblical Unitarian church, in which case it helps your career. But I would say that sociological pain is very severe, but like the question that you asked about, like what is

1:20:20 Sean Finnegan
Protestant to do.

1:20:20 Sean Finnegan
It's like, I honestly cannot come up with, like the only move you can make is the William Lane Craig move, which is to say, okay, well, I don't need any of that.

1:20:31 Sean Finnegan
I can just use biblical language to derive the doctrine of the Trinity.

1:20:35 Sean Finnegan
But like, when you see him actually do it, you're like, dude, come on.

1:20:40 Sean Finnegan
Like, you're totally reading that in.

1:20:44 Sean Finnegan
It's not, it's eisegesis, not exegesis.

1:20:47 Sam Tideman
And then it's like, but why does your church still use it?

1:20:50 Sam Tideman
why is it still on your church website?

1:20:52 Sean Finnegan
Yeah, and why should churches still use it?

1:20:54 Sean Finnegan
Why should it be statement one on everybody's church website that we affirm the doctrine of the Trinity, God is 3 persons, one essence or substance?

1:21:04 Sean Finnegan
You know, it doesn't make sense, but you know, this is a loose thread and we need to keep pulling it.

1:21:08 Sean Finnegan
We need to raise awareness.

1:21:10 Sean Finnegan
This is some really good research that you've done here, Sam.

1:21:13 Sean Finnegan
I really appreciate you

1:21:15 Sean Finnegan
going into detail on all this and doing it in a way of integrity, not just like trying to be salacious or whatever.

1:21:24 Sean Finnegan
So appreciate that.

1:21:26 Sean Finnegan
Anything else we should say as we close down?

1:21:28 Sean Finnegan
What if people want to follow your work?

1:21:29 Sean Finnegan
How do they find you?

1:21:30 Sam Tideman
Well, they can find me on the Transfigured YouTube channel and Transfigured podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.

1:21:38 Sam Tideman
This work really came out of my, I have a regular church fathers series on my podcast with my friend Hank, who's Catholic.

1:21:45 Sam Tideman
for the record.

1:21:46 Sam Tideman
I didn't seek out to undermine the historicity of the Nicene Creed.

1:21:51 Sam Tideman
For all I knew that the original story that it was from Constantinople was true.

1:21:55 Sam Tideman
It's just I was doing my research for my episode on the Council of Constantinople.

1:21:59 Sam Tideman
I was like, what?

1:22:01 Sam Tideman
Where is it?

1:22:02 Sam Tideman
Where is it?

1:22:05 Sam Tideman
And that's all that this was.

1:22:07 Sean Finnegan
Yeah, we have to wait 70 years for it to show up.

1:22:09 Sean Finnegan
So

1:22:10 Sean Finnegan
I think a lot of us are used to saying, okay, it's not the Nicene Creed, it's the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed or just the Constantinopolitan.

1:22:17 Sean Finnegan
Now we have to say, no, it's actually the Chalcedonian Creed.

1:22:20 Sean Finnegan
So somebody comes at you and says, well, the Nicene Creed, be like, excuse me, do you have any historical evidence prior to Chalcedon in 451?

1:22:28 Sean Finnegan
No, okay, well then it's the Chalcedonian Creed, it's 5th century, middle of the.

1:22:32 Sam Tideman
Nicene, Epiphanian, Constantinopleitan, Chalcedonian Creed.

1:22:39 Sam Tideman
I do think it was written in the 370s.

1:22:41 Sam Tideman
I don't think it's from 451 as a date and time of when it was composed.

1:22:46 Sam Tideman
I don't think they wrote it from scratch.

1:22:48 Sean Finnegan
That's when it gets ratified as official statement of the church.

1:22:53 Sean Finnegan
All right, Sam.

1:22:54 Sean Finnegan
Well, thanks so much for your time today.

1:22:56 Sam Tideman
All right.

1:22:56 Sam Tideman
Thank you very much, Sean.

1:23:02 Sean Finnegan
That brings this interview to an end.

1:23:03 Sean Finnegan
What did you think?

1:23:04 Sean Finnegan
Come on over to restitudio.org and find episode 662, the Nicene Creed is a forgery, and leave your thoughts and comments there.

1:23:14 Sean Finnegan
On episode 659, how important is that doctrine with Michael Hughes?

1:23:18 Sean Finnegan
Ethan wrote in saying, this conversation between you and Michael, along with the papers he's written no doubt, are not only extremely interesting, but I genuinely believe could mark the beginning of an incredible new unity moving forward.

1:23:33 Sean Finnegan
Figuring out how to unite despite different beliefs has been troubling me for a long time.

1:23:40 Sean Finnegan
It's difficult to parse out what doctrines are important, what is less important, and how we should handle these differences.

1:23:47 Sean Finnegan
I am so impressed with how Michael has given the Bible, particularly the New Testament, the final say in what the most important doctrines are.

1:23:57 Sean Finnegan
It's interesting to me how some things seem less vital and other things more vital than I would have guessed personally.

1:24:04 Sean Finnegan
As someone who grew up in a religious cult, I'm curious to see how this can be applied properly.

1:24:10 Sean Finnegan
I'm interested in how standards can be held without leaders starting to arise as enforcers of doctrine and a cult-like system developing.

1:24:19 Sean Finnegan
A system as Bible-based as this may be the best answer to that concern, since it's not until you go beyond what is written

1:24:27 Sean Finnegan
that the opinions of an individual can become important separately from what the scriptures say in an appropriate way.

1:24:33 Sean Finnegan
I'm just going to pause you there, Ethan.

1:24:37 Sean Finnegan
Thanks for writing in and thanks for the very kind words to Michael Hughes.

1:24:42 Sean Finnegan
I'm sure he will appreciate hearing them.

1:24:45 Sean Finnegan
For those of you who didn't listen to that episode, that's 659, how important is that doctrine?

1:24:50 Sean Finnegan
Michael lays out a whole system to rank doctrines in levels of importance.

1:24:58 Sean Finnegan
And this is something that he derived directly from how explicitly something is stated in scripture and whether that doctrine is also associated with salvation or damnation in scripture.

1:25:12 Sean Finnegan
And so it provides an external decider for the importance of doctrine beyond the denomination or the church or the individual, who of course were all biased.

1:25:23 Sean Finnegan
But when Ethan says he grew up in a cult, I...

1:25:27 Sean Finnegan
I just can't help but wondering what are we talking about, Ethan?

1:25:31 Sean Finnegan
What is a cult?

1:25:32 Sean Finnegan
Are you talking about the Jehovah's Witnesses?

1:25:36 Sean Finnegan
Are you talking about some other group that just gets slandered with the C word?

1:25:41 Sean Finnegan
Because typically I personally would not use the word cult to describe most religious groups, even if they do require higher levels of agreement on doctrine, I wouldn't define that as a cult.

1:25:54 Sean Finnegan
For me to call a group a cult, I'm looking at a group that seeks to control how its members think, limit any contact with information outside the group, and to exert an inappropriate level of influence controlling people's lives.

1:26:10 Sean Finnegan
So that's what I would call a cult or also called a high control group.

1:26:15 Sean Finnegan
I think a lot of groups that get called cults today are not actually cults.

1:26:18 Sean Finnegan
They're just groups that have strong standards and people are free to leave at any time.

1:26:25 Sean Finnegan
I think the Jehovah's Witnesses do kind of border on a cult and people do certainly have cult experiences, although others seem to not have those kind of experiences.

1:26:35 Sean Finnegan
So I think there's a spectrum there.

1:26:37 Sean Finnegan
But be that as it may, I'm now dying to know, Ethan, what is the cult that you grew up in?

1:26:44 Sean Finnegan
And Ethan continues, I really look forward to and hope for more updates as to how these ideas work in practice.

1:26:51 Sean Finnegan
Over time, I could see these ideas of doctrinal importance beginning to mesh with the biblical view of leadership and the larger mission of the church to become something far closer to the 1st century under the apostles than I ever thought possible before.

1:27:05 Sean Finnegan
Well, in response Ethan, I think doctrinal policing is something that is actually appropriate for church leadership.

1:27:12 Sean Finnegan
The question is which doctrines to police?

1:27:15 Sean Finnegan
Say you have the doctrine that you can sleep with any of the ladies in the congregation that you want to, regardless if you're married or not.

1:27:23 Sean Finnegan
That is a doctrine that church leadership rightly should police and should say, hey, if you're going to continue in this behavior, you're going to be kicked out of this church.

1:27:33 Sean Finnegan
Or let's say you are promoting a doctrine over against the belief of the church and you're trying to cause division in the church.

1:27:42 Sean Finnegan
then that obviously would be another case where church leadership appropriately would step in and say, look, you don't belong here.

1:27:49 Sean Finnegan
You should go to a church that holds your beliefs rather than promoting them here at this church.

1:27:53 Sean Finnegan
And I think we should be respectful.

1:27:56 Sean Finnegan
I recognize that many of you out there hold different beliefs from what your church holds, but I think

1:28:02 Sean Finnegan
there's a way to do that respectfully and a way to talk to leadership.

1:28:06 Sean Finnegan
And sometimes leaders do change their minds.

1:28:08 Sean Finnegan
I have certainly heard of cases where a whole church, in fact, will change their minds if the pastor switches on this or that subject.

1:28:16 Sean Finnegan
So I think it is worthwhile to do, but to do it in an appropriate way as opposed to secretly going around to the congregation and canvassing a bunch of people onto your side and then causing a division.

1:28:26 Sean Finnegan
This is just not the way of going about it.

1:28:31 Sean Finnegan
And again, I don't know Ethan's experience.

1:28:32 Sean Finnegan
I don't know if that's what he's talking about or if he is talking about a legit cult where they are trying to control every aspect of your life way beyond what the Bible gives authority to church leaders to do.

1:28:45 Sean Finnegan
So we'll have to leave it there and wait to hear back more from him.

1:28:49 Sean Finnegan
On last week's episode, 661, Monotheism, Heresy and the Bible with Dale Tuggie,

1:28:56 Sean Finnegan
A number of folks wrote in on YouTube, GK Love Peace said, nice, Dale has been a tremendous influence for me.

1:29:02 Sean Finnegan
I intend to get this book.

1:29:05 Sean Finnegan
Carrie wrote in saying, just ordered the book.

1:29:08 Sean Finnegan
Jost wrote in saying, I had a problem with this idea of a Trinity thing as a kid.

1:29:13 Sean Finnegan
Now as an adult, I am so unbelievably grateful to have found the truth.

1:29:18 Sean Finnegan
Gospel Online UK said, the problem with philosophy is that the truth of any argument depends on the truth of the premises of that argument.

1:29:26 Sean Finnegan
The conclusions of philosophy thus depend on the data that the philosopher takes account of and the assumptions that are made in the course of the argument.

1:29:36 Sean Finnegan
In the Greek world at the time of the Gospels and for some centuries afterwards, the philosophers made assumptions which are not compatible with scripture and which therefore led to conclusions which are also dubious.

1:29:48 Sean Finnegan
Sometimes they assume their conclusions and work backwards to see what needed to be true to produce the conclusion.

1:29:55 Sean Finnegan
One can produce a valid argument, i.e.

1:29:57 Sean Finnegan
one which is internally consistent without generating a true conclusion if one starts with a poor set of premises.

1:30:04 Sean Finnegan
Well, you make some good points there.

1:30:07 Sean Finnegan
Logic is not the cure-all for

1:30:11 Sean Finnegan
false doctrine.

1:30:13 Sean Finnegan
It is a tool, just like any other tool, like reading the Bible is a tool to inform you of the raw data.

1:30:20 Sean Finnegan
Logic is a tool to assess the reasoning, the implications, and the validity of how you interpret the data.

1:30:32 Sean Finnegan
So is historical context.

1:30:33 Sean Finnegan
Learning about the historical context helps us to situate the sentences and the concepts within the thought world of the time rather than idiosyncratically or anachronistically reading in our modern assumptions and thought processes into an ancient text.

1:30:50 Sean Finnegan
If you'd like to learn more about analytic theology, I did an episode 646.

1:30:56 Sean Finnegan
It was part of my restoration theology class.

1:30:59 Sean Finnegan
Episode 646, analytic theology and logical evaluation, where I go through the history in a very brief way, just hitting some of the major influencers in analytic theology and analytic philosophy over the last century so that you can get an understanding of what it is and how it works and how you can use it.

1:31:20 Sean Finnegan
I think we should all be using logic in appropriate ways.

1:31:24 Sean Finnegan
And last of all, I wanted to mention that at the end of last week's episode, I put out a request for a debate on the subject of the devil and demons.

1:31:36 Sean Finnegan
And I have had several Christadelphians get in touch saying they'd be happy to debate their position, that the devil is merely your inclination toward evil rather than an external person.

1:31:48 Sean Finnegan
As I said last time, that's not the trouble.

1:31:51 Sean Finnegan
The hard part is finding a non-Christadelphian who is willing to argue that the devil is an external reality.

1:31:57 Sean Finnegan
And I know that the vast majority of Christians hold this view, but they just don't want to debate it.

1:32:02 Sean Finnegan
So if that's you, if you believe that the devil truly exists outside of yourself and outside of humans,

1:32:10 Sean Finnegan
then you're the one I'm looking for.

1:32:13 Sean Finnegan
If you wouldn't mind taking on this subject and preparing for a debate with a Christadelphian, please get in contact with me.

1:32:19 Sean Finnegan
I think it'd be great to have this debate happen.

1:32:22 Sean Finnegan
And as I said, I have quite a few Christadelphians who are lined up and ready to go.

1:32:28 Sean Finnegan
So props to the Christadelphians for rallying and for not being afraid or ashamed or intimidated in this belief that they cherish.

1:32:38 Sean Finnegan
If you want to get in touch with me, you can do that by emailing me, sean at restitudio.org, or coming on today's episode, which is episode 662, the Nicene Creaties of Forgery with Sam Tiedemann, and dropping a comment there on the website.

1:32:51 Sean Finnegan
Thanks everybody for listening in to the end.

1:32:54 Sean Finnegan
If you'd like to support us with a monthly donation, we would so appreciate that.

1:32:58 Sean Finnegan
You could do that at restitudio.org.

1:33:01 Sean Finnegan
There's a donate button there.

1:33:03 Sean Finnegan
Thanks so much to those of you who are doing it, making this possible to continue this work and spread the message far and wide.

1:33:11 Sean Finnegan
And last of all, remember, the truth has nothing to fear.