Why’s there a pope in Rome?

A modern gathering sheds light on an ancient question: who brings the church together?

Jack Chisnall

Jack Chisnall is a former gag teller and Oxford Theology graduate, combining the two at Holy Fooling.

A pope wearing a white skull cap and white robe, viewed from behind

Coronel Gonorrea on Unsplash.

On 1st March, an event called Gather25 tried something which it described as “unprecedented”. It sought to unite, in a 25-hour worship broadcast, global Christianity. Each session was led by a different nation, and its top pastors sent out to bat. It was slickly organised, as well as technologically sophisticated; I wished the event well, and prayed for it. While in the more institutionalised church settings, people are waiting on new Archbishops of Canterbury, or praying for the Pope to recover, here was action.

It got me thinking, though: when can it be said that the Church has properly met? Who decides to meet? Who sends the invites? Who confirms the decisions? Anyone reading the Gather25 website will have noticed overtures about the ‘Council of Nicaea’. Nicaea was the first important gathering of the ancient Church, in 325 AD. By citing this, Gather25 positioned itself downstream of a very prestigious meetup. It perhaps hoped for itself that it would be similarly ecumenical (a Greek word to do with the whole household). Did Gather25 have the same Nicene status?

Sadly, no. Gather25 was openhearted and dynamic, but it was a very particular slice of Christianity meeting for a very historically specific form of worship. The difficulty is that it takes more than even the buzziest PR, or all our modern advances in communication and streaming, to truly summon something as untameable as the Church to order. What do we need to ensure we have a gathering at which the Church is truly represented, and able to officially act with the “mind of Christ” (as St Paul puts it)? Wouldn’t you need something, or someone, able to steer the entire thing?

At the Council of Nicaea in 325AD, nothing less than the most powerful man on the planet would do. The Emperor Constantine alone had the clout to draw in Christian leaders from around the world, make them sit together, and demand an official settlement of a difficult question: how exactly was God the Son, Jesus, linked to God the Father? Even with such heavyweight patronage, church leaders did not produce an absolutely finished answer at that time - it actually took a whole extra council, in Constantinople in 381 AD, to confirm the confession that is still known today as the Nicene Creed, and which begins “I believe in God, the Father Almighty”.

Yet a problem had been touched on. Should a Caesar really have this kind of upper hand over a sacred institution? Some lines of thought tried to think of the emperor as a kind of ‘living law’ who represents God to the Christian people he rules over. But this couldn’t jive with key parts of a tradition wherein Jesus had radically authorised servant leaders from among simple Galilean fishermen, known as the Twelve Apostles, or ‘sent ones’. Who should rule?

Was this a bit of overreading, designed to give a senior cleric a Scriptural trump card to play against a secular leader in a petty power showdown?

The problem has not really gone away. If we ignore this question of legitimacy, we are at the mercy of raw power. Either we seek an authoritative means of unifying Christians, or it becomes a case of who happens to have the most cash, or the most Instagram followers. It has never been the case that the Church has just organically ‘met up’ without a protos, a first name on the team sheet. Indeed, when has this ever happened, in any sphere of life? It would be like a parliament forming without the invitation of the sovereign.

It is against this bigger problem that the rise of the Christian leader in Rome must be viewed. Rome was, of course, the centre of an Empire during the first few Christian centuries, but it quickly gained distinctly Christian prestige. St Paul’s letter to the congregations there continues to be one of the most sizzling documents in the New Testament; he was also martyred there, along with his fellow leader St Peter, one of the original Twelve. Rome was a big deal, and sources from as early as the first century show the leading clergyman (or ‘bishop’) of Rome, a man called Clement, being asked to weigh in on a dispute over 600 miles away from his locale.

For Catholics like me, it is clear the Church was onto something. It would go on to discover that there was more to the Bishop of Rome than merely his occupation of a well-to-do area. There would be a development. Many church doctrines, after all, are the result of reflection, Scriptural deep dives, and the need for clearer unified doctrine and practice - the Trinity, for example.

And the Bishop of Rome’s role developed in a particular setting: while the figure of the emperor loomed ever larger in the East, a parallel momentum would gather around the leading cleric of a city where St Peter had passed on his mantle. For St Peter had, after all, been singled out by Jesus in his earthly ministry. In the Bible, the Gospel according to St Matthew depicts Jesus giving “the keys to the kingdom” to his follower Simon, who he then renames ‘Peter’, meaning rock, upon which he vows to build his church. Not only this - Peter is to strengthen his brothers (St Luke 22:32); to feed the Lord’s sheep (John 21). The Bishop of Rome was increasingly thought to have this Peter-like quality.

Was this a bit of overreading, designed to give a senior cleric a Scriptural trump card to play against a secular leader in a petty power showdown? It is an accusation hard to shake off completely, sinful humanity being what it is. In the Middle Ages, a decree was conveniently ‘discovered’ by the Roman Emperor that handed over all his power to the Bishop of Rome, the new pontifex maximus - it was, of course, a complete phoney designed to assert church power over secular rulers. But for Catholics, despite patchy moments, there has always been more to be said for the Pope (from Papa, ‘father’) as a legitimate consolidation of Jesus’ vision for the leadership of the Church he founded: a brotherhood, headed by a type of St Peter, the rock on which the Church is built.

Not headed by St Peter’s successor as a flawless demigod, it should be said. For it is also part of Christian tradition about St Peter that he was capable of tremendous human weakness - he betrayed Jesus on the night of his arrest and trial, and denied he ever knew him. Some Popes have sadly been downright wicked or self-serving. Nor is it headed by the Pope as a tyrant. St Peter confirms early doctrinal pronouncements for the Church - he declares that food laws should not prevent Israelites from enjoying table fellowship with other ethnic groups, for example. But he is also frankly challenged by other leaders during early meetings in Jerusalem. The Pope teaches not as a lone ranger, but always within a bigger fraternity of fellow bishops.

In 2024, a Vatican department released a new document pondering what role the Pope could play in bringing together the separated brethren of world Christianity. I hope this offer is taken seriously. Because what remains compelling for Catholics is a figure who makes it possible, at the most foundational level, to say that the Church is One, as per Jesus’ prayer in John 17:21, and all without needing to rely on good digital marketing. It is not just pious sentiment for a Catholic to say that they are genuinely connected to a global family of as many as 1.4 billion people, because they share a pastor who claims to serve the whole thing, the ‘servant of the servants of God’. Any critique of the Papacy - and there are many intelligible ones, raking over the sordid moments or disputing the Scriptural evidence - must, though, rankle with that: what really keeps us together, then? The Catholic insistence has always been that saying ‘Jesus’ or ‘the Holy Spirit’ really amounts to saying: “what I think Jesus wants; what I think the Holy Spirit is saying” - and that is, in effect, actually many popes instead of just one.

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Creed

3 January 2025

5 min read

Creator or creature – a centuries old question of identity

Why does a 1,700-year-old creed still matter?

Frances Young

Frances Young is Emeritus Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham.

An abstract depiction of The Creation shows an aperture in a cloud like formation over water.

The Creation, James Tissot.

James Tissot, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

2025 will be the 1,700th anniversary of the Nicaea Creed. In October 2024, Prof. Frances Young gave the inaugural lecture of the McDonald Agape Nicaea Project at St Mellitus College.

In the year 325CE the first ever “ecumenical” (= “worldwide”) council of bishops assembled at Nicaea near Constantinople (now Istanbul). It was summoned by Constantine, the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity and patronize the Church. Why does this seventeenth centenary of an obscure discussion around complex words matter to us today?

The outcome of the Council was agreement to the text of a creed, and banishment of a pesky priest named Arius, whose bishop disapproved of his teaching. Unfortunately, some other bishops remained sympathetic to something like Arius’ viewpoint, and for political reasons Constantine was desperate for Church unity. Argument over the issues went on for half a century, until another Council in 381CE reaffirmed the position established in 325CE and agreed the version labelled “the Nicene Creed” and still used in Church liturgies across the world today.

The controversy was basically about the identity of the pre-existent Word or Son of God incarnate in Jesus Christ. Nicaea established that the Son was “of one substance” (homoousios) with the Father – in other words, he was fully God in every sense of the word. But for many traditional believers at the time this was difficult to accept.

The common sense of the culture thought in terms of a “chain of being.” Most people in the Roman Empire were polytheists – there were loads of gods: Mars, god of war, Nepture, god of the sea, and so on. Each city, each ethnic group, had its own god, as did every family, every interest group, every burial society – you name it. But generally there was a sense that above all these was the Supreme God, who was worshipped indirectly through worship of these lower gods, and below them were all sorts of nature spirits, daemons, benign and malign, then souls incarnate in human persons, then animals, even vegetables as living entities, and finally inert matter like earth and stones, at the bottom of the hierarchy or chain of being.

Jews identified their God with the Supreme God and insisted the one God alone should be worshipped. But they also imagined a heavenly court of archangels and angels, then below that the souls of the righteous, and so on in a somewhat parallel hierarchy. No surprise then that Christians assumed a similar picture: God, then the Son of God, then the Holy Spirit, then archangels and angels, then souls, and so on in a hierarchical ladder.

But in the second century Christians had argued their way to the idea of “creation out of nothing.” Many non-Jewish thinkers, including some early Christians, followed Plato, conceiving creation as the outcome of Mind (the Demiurge or Craftsman) shaping Matter into whatever Forms or Ideas were in mind. But other Christian thinkers argued that God was not a mere Craftsman who needed stone or wood to work on like a sculptor – God produced the Matter in the first place. This then triggered a full-blown critique: God did not create out of pre-existent Matter or there would be two first principles; God did not create from God’s own self or everything would be divine; so God must have created out of nothing.

Now try to fit that to the chain of being: where do you draw the line between God the Creator and everything else made out of nothing? This was the issue which surfaced in the so-called Arian controversy. What we might call the “mainstream” remained wedded to the hierarchy, not least because of earlier controversies about God’s monarchia. The word did mean “monarchy” – single sovereignty; but arche could mean “rule” or “beginning,” so monarchia also referred to the single first principle of all that is. It was natural to attribute monarchia to God the Father, a view that worked OK with the hierarchy. But some had suggested that the one God 'changed mode', as it were, appearing now as Father, now as Son, now as Holy Spirit, taking different roles in the overarching scriptural story. This suggestion was mocked as all too similar to the pagan god, Proteus, who in mythology kept changing shape. It is even possible that that key word homoousios had been condemned along with this “Modalist” view.

Traditionalists were suspicious. The first historian of the Church, Eusebius of Caesarea, was present at Nicaea, and wrote a somewhat embarrassed letter to his congregation explaining how he had come to agree to this formula. Even Athanasius - the one who would come to be regarded as the staunch defender of Nicaea - largely avoided the term for a quarter of a century, though that does not mean he did not identify the principal issue. He campaigned hard and ended up in exile five times over. The fundamental issue was whether Christ was God incarnate or some kind of divinised superman, or a semi-divine mediating figure, a created Creator. Arius is supposed to have said, “there was a when he was not,” even though he was “the first and greatest of the creatures” through whom God created everything else.

So why does it still matter? Four simple reasons:

Because it was basically about identity, and the question of Christ’s identity still matters.

Because we still find people treating Jesus Christ as superhuman – not really one of us, or semi-divine – not God in the same sense as the God the Father. If we are to be ecumenical, across different denominations today but also across time, we need to affirm that God’s Son and Spirit are truly of the one God. As early as the second century the first great Christian theologian, Irenaeus, characterized the Word and the Spirit as God’s two hands – we can imagine the Trinity reaching out first to create and then to embrace us with God’s redeeming love.

Because it means we can look to Jesus and there catch a glimpse of God’s very own loving face - not just a dim image but the reality itself.

And because only God could recreate us in God’s own image and raise us to new life.

To find out more about the McDonald Agape Nicaea Project being held by St. Mellitus College in London, come and join the public lectures, or look out for other Nicene celebrations in 2025.

For more information or to register for these events, you can visit the Nicaea Project website

The Nicaea Project