Nicaea and Augustine, Antidotes for Our Age

Are we living at the Hour of the Fathers? Today, talk of early church theologians and ancient church wisdom is all around us. One could argue this has been the case for some time. In the orthodox Protestant world, the late Thomas Oden pioneered a form of theology that listened carefully to patristic voices. The recovery by Reformed theologians over the last decade of orthodox Trinitarianism and a classical understanding of God’s attributes has largely resulted from a careful reading of ancient and medieval sources. Something patristic has been stirring even in Protestantism for some years. But 2025 has intensified this interest, partly because it is the 1700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea, and now because the newly elected pope comes from the Augustinian Order (something he shares, of course, with the great Martin Luther). This institutional allegiance has provoked speculation on how much Augustinian thought will shape papal policy. When my colleague Francis X. Maier expresses hope with regard to the Augustinian connection in his Christendom College commencement address, something significant is afoot.

There are many lessons to be drawn from Nicaea and from Augustine. Indeed, they are to orthodox theology what Picasso is to modern art. One cannot do theology by going around them or ignoring them. One has to go through them. On the doctrine of God, Nicaea is the gateway, and Augustine’s On the Trinity is the most masterly exposition. On predestination, love him or hate him, Augustine sets the terms of debate for subsequent interpretations of Paul. One can agree with his analysis or, like Karl Barth, find it problematic. But one cannot avoid engaging with it. 

Beyond their specific theological content, Nicaea and Augustine teach us what the true priorities of the Christian church should be. Many of the men gathered at Nicaea in 325 would have had firsthand knowledge of the persecution of the church that characterized the earliest years of the fourth century. They knew suffering. They knew what it was to live in a hostile political environment. And they knew that the policy of toleration pursued by Constantine meant an end to all of that. Yet they were willing to risk the outward unity of the church and the comfortable relationship for a narrow point of doctrine that would seem to lack immediate practical relevance and depend upon fine distinctions. Indeed, those distinctions were so fine that it would take the church more than half a century after the Council of Nicaea to hone an agreed vocabulary by which to express them. Using modern terminology, we might say that if ever there was a moment when Christianity might have felt the temptation to degenerate into moralistic therapeutic deism, this was it. Instead, the Nicene Fathers pressed into the doctrine of God. The Nicene moment captures so beautifully that which Fran Maier stated in his Christendom speech: “Our job isn’t to succeed, but to witness.”

Moralistic therapeutic deism, infantile as it is, comes in various forms, from the “God as life coach” books that populate the religion section at Barnes & Noble to the “God as justifying my ressentiment” of the “very online” political radicals, left and right. What all forms share in common is the subjection of theological categories to this-worldly concerns, specifically that sense of disconnection or anger in the face of a world that seems unfair or isn’t delivering on the sense of psychological well-being that modern man considers his birthright. Whether we blame it on our own negative thoughts or on “them”—the people out there who live simply to ruin our lives and our world—theology becomes the salve that justifies us not in God’s eyes but in our own.

In such a world, the theology—and the priorities—of the Nicene Fathers and of a figure like Augustine is an important antidote to such falsehoods. They were not interested first and foremost in what worked to achieve some immanent goal. They were focused on how they might apprehend and then proclaim transcendent truth. Their preoccupation with the doctrine of God is therefore salutary and, particularly in the form of the Nicene Creed, something of an antidote to our modern self-absorption. And as we move from Nicaea to Constantinople in 381, Ephesus in 431, and Chalcedon in 451, the unfolding logic of God revealing itself in Christology can only deepen our wonder. What God is this?

When we recite the Nicene Creed in worship, our eyes are drawn from this world to the portals of eternity. As with Dante at the end of Paradiso, we are called to gaze upon that which cannot be comprehended, yet in contemplating this mystery, our hearts and minds are transformed. It should leave us hungry to know more of this God, even as we know we can never know him fully. The same applies to the theology of Augustine. On the Trinity is a work that has a twofold effect: It makes one’s head spin as it rises to the dizzying heights of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; and it drives one to worship as one senses something of the teaching of Job 28, where the incomprehensibility of God is set forth as the foundation of fear of the Lord and thus the beginning of wisdom. Both Nicaea and Augustine help cultivate that virtue that is so lacking in our culture today: a modest, self-effacing humility in the presence of glory.

If this is the Hour of the Fathers, we have much cause to be hopeful. Our task is indeed to witness—and to do so primarily by worshiping God with fear and trembling. It’s therefore time to set aside the childish, deistic things of our day and feast on real doxological meat.