John 1:1-18, Colossians 1:15-20, Philippians 2:5-11, Hebrews 1:1-14
This one is not open in the way the other questions in this hall are. Every major Christian tradition answers yes, and has since the Council of Nicaea in 325 and the Council of Chalcedon in 451: fully God and fully man, one person in two natures, without confusion, change, division, or separation. , , Anglicans, Lutherans, Reformed, Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals, and the overwhelming majority of everyone else confess it. Groups that deny it, such as Jehovah's Witnesses and Unitarians, are outside that consensus by their own account as well as by everyone else's.
So this page is built differently from the rest. Rather than pretend the church never decided, it sets out what is , then gives the rejected alternatives their strongest case, because they were held by intelligent and devout people who were reading the same Bible, and because you cannot understand what the is protecting until you see what it is ruling out. The arguments below took three centuries and were not obvious at the time.
Where everyone agrees
What is confessed, and what the alternatives below were all measured against: Jesus Christ is truly God and truly man, of one being with the Father, not made, through whom all things were made, who for us and for our salvation came down, was crucified, and rose. That is Nicaea and Chalcedon, and it is the position of essentially the whole church.
Arianism, rejected at Nicaea in 325
The Son is the highest of all created beings, made before time and through whom everything else was made, but not eternal and not of the same being as the Father.
What it claims
Scripture calls the Son firstborn of all creation, says the Father is greater than I, describes him as the beginning of God's creation, and shows him praying, not knowing the day or hour, and being sent. If God is one and indivisible, then a second eternal person compromises that oneness, and the honest reading is that the Son is the supreme creature, worthy of enormous honour and not of the worship due to God alone. This preserves monotheism without the philosophical machinery of later councils.
Who holds it
Arius of Alexandria and a great many bishops in the fourth century, at moments the majority of them. Held today by Jehovah's Witnesses and by some Unitarian groups, and by no mainstream Christian tradition.
The texts it stands on
Colossians 1:15 Firstborn of all creation, read as first in the order of created things
John 14:28 The Father is greater than I
Mark 13:32 Nor the Son, but only the Father, knows that day
Strongest case
It takes the subordination language seriously rather than explaining it away, and it protects the oneness of God in the plainest possible sense. It was not a fringe position; for a stretch of the fourth century it was close to winning.
Hardest question
Three things are hard to answer. The New Testament takes passages about the LORD and applies them straight to Jesus. He accepts worship that faithful Jews and even angels refuse elsewhere. And John says all things were made through him, which leaves nothing for him to have been created within. On firstborn, Nicaea replied that the word means rank and priority, as it does of David in Psalm 89, and not being made. Athanasius pressed the sharpest point of all. If the Son is a creature, then a creature saves us, and no creature can.
Holding the map
The point of laying out the rejected views at their strongest is not balance for its own sake. It is that each one is a reasonable attempt to protect something true, and each one loses something else in the process. protects God's oneness and loses a saviour who is God. Modalism protects oneness and loses the relationship at the heart of the Gospels. Adoptionism protects the humanity and loses the pre-existence. The creed is the refusal to buy any of those simplifications.
A practical note. Almost every casual explanation of the you will hear in a church foyer is one of these, usually modalism, offered with no ill intent by someone reaching for a picture. Recognising them is more useful than policing them.
EKLI serves Christians across traditions. On questions where churches differ we explain how each one sees it and leave the deciding to you.
