The First Council of Nicaea

The Arian controversy began with an Alexandrian presbyter, Arius, and was addressed at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE.

The First Council of Nicaea in 325 condemned the Arian position.

Present at Nicaea in 325 in the bishop of Alexandria's retinue as a deacon, not as a voting bishop. His part in the council grew in the telling afterwards.

Constantine convoked the council, paid for the bishops' travel on the imperial post, attended in person and opened the proceedings.

He was present at Nicaea in 325 and signed the creed with visible reluctance.

His calendar reform was framed as restoring the spring equinox to the date the council had assumed when it settled the rule for calculating Easter.

The Articles of Religion require that nothing be taught contrary to the ancient creeds, and the Nicene Creed is one of the three the Church of England holds to be proved by most certain warrants of holy scripture.

Received as the first of the three councils the Armenian church numbers, and the Armenian catholicos Aristakes is recorded among those present.

The Church of the East receives Nicaea, and the two Greek councils of the fourth century are the only ecumenical councils it numbers.

Baptist churches confess the Nicene faith in substance while holding that no council has authority over a gathered congregation, so the creed is received as testimony and never imposed as a term of communion.

Reformed churches receive the Nicene faith as a true summary of what scripture teaches about the Son, while denying that any council is a rule of faith in its own right.

Received as the first council, and the Coptic church reckons its own patriarch Alexander and his deacon Athanasius among those who carried the argument against Arius there.

The first of the seven councils the Orthodox Church receives, and the one whose creed, in its Constantinopolitan form, is sung at every liturgy.

Received as the first of three councils, and the Nicene faith is the ground the Tewahedo church shares with the churches it later separated from.

The Lutheran confessions open by affirming the decree of the Council of Nicaea, and Lutheran churches receive it as scripture faithfully summarised rather than as an authority standing beside scripture.

Received as the first of the three councils the non-Chalcedonian churches number, and the ground of their Christology no less than of the imperial church that later separated from them.

Received in the Westminster tradition as a sound statement of the Christian doctrine of God, subordinate to scripture and revisable by scripture alone.

Friends require no subscription to a creed, so the Nicene faith reaches Quakerism as part of an inheritance rather than as a test that any member is asked to pass.

Rome numbers Nicaea the first of the ecumenical councils and reads its confession of the Son as of one substance with the Father as the fixed measure of Christian belief about Christ.

Seventh-day Adventists confess the Trinity in the terms Nicaea settled, having moved to that position over the movement first decades.

Jehovah Witnesses hold that the council imported a Greek philosophical term into Christian teaching and that the resulting doctrine of the Son as of one substance with the Father is not what the apostles taught.

Latter-day Saints refuse the Nicene definition of the Godhead, holding that the Father and the Son are separate embodied persons, and the founding narrative of the church names the creeds themselves as the point of departure.

His teaching on the Son was the question the council was convened to judge; he was condemned and exiled.

Issued by the council of 325 together with its anathemas and canons.

The council of 381 reaffirmed Nicaea and extended its logic to the Holy Spirit.