Around the year 313, a man was ordained priest in Alexandria. We hear various tales about his early life - perhaps he was from Libya, probably a scholar with a profound knowledge of scripture, possibly involved in a dispute about how strict the Church should be in allowing members to return who had renounced their faith - for the previous year had marked the end of a time of persecution. Within ten years, our man's views had the whole Roman Empire in ferment, and were being hotly discussed, it was said, on every street corner. His name was Arius.
We only have his opponents' reports of what he said, but it seems that Arius accepted Jesus as Son of God, and accepted him as Christ, the divine Word. But for Arius, being divine and being God were two quite different things. And the Word, like the human soul, was something God had created - "in the beginning" certainly, as the opening verse of John's Gospel proclaims, but (as with the heavens and the earth in Genesis) there was in the distant, dark past, a time when the Word did not exist. Had Jesus himself not said: "The Father is greater than I" (John 14:28)?
Alexandria was very much an intellectual centre at this time, and it was from a deacon there, called Athanasius, that a reasoned answer came. He used a word, homoousios, "of the same being", to describe Jesus. (The word may have been coined earlier, and a lot of trouble was caused later in the century by the corresponding Latin word, consubstantialis, not having exactly the same shades of meaning!) For Athanasius, and for most members of a synod which met in Alexandria around 320, Jesus and God the Father were "the same" in being.
Arius continued to preach, and the Empire was split. There were those like Arius, who saw the Word as a created being, "different" from the one true God. There were those who were prepared to compromise, and would accept the Word as "similar". There were those who insisted that Son and Father were "the same."
In 324, the Emperor Constantine reunited the Roman Empire, and, after failing to convince Christians that their argument was just a quarrel about words, he called the bishops of the church to meet in Nicaea the following year, and leant on them to agree - and the words we use today in our Creed: "Light from Light, True God from True God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father" are the result. The Son and the Father have "the same" being, and the Son was certainly not created.
Using light as an image may give trouble to the blind, but the idea of the Father and the Son being as indivisible as the sun and its light (others have said the spring and its water) is an image that recurs in scripture. God is light (I John 1:5), and Jesus is the Light of the World (John 8:12). It is John more than any other writer who returns over and over again to Jesus' true nature. "I and the Father are one" (10:30), "whoever sees me sees the One who sent me" (12:45), "I am in the Father and the Father is in me" (14:10).
For this reason, the Creed uses the word "begotten" - the Son was not made, not adopted, but a true child. And indeed the child "through whom everything was made", as our Creed reminds us, echoing the prologue to John's Gospel. We often forget that God's relationship with the world as Creator and Sustainer comes about through Jesus. It is difficult for our human minds to see the connection between God the Word, "without whom no created thing was made" and the child from Bethlehem, the teacher and healer of Galilee, who died on the Cross. Yet we have to believe that God entered into history, and was indeed "made flesh, and dwelt among us" - without this belief, our faith is empty.
HD