As indicated earlier, the narrative of the Ascension is peculiar to Luke-Acts, but other parts of the New Testament may refer to it. Such a reference may be made in the fourth chapter of the Letter to the Ephesians (verses 8–10). However, many interpreters hold that, for Paul, Resurrection was identical with Ascension. That, they maintain, is why he could speak of the appearance of the risen Christ to him in continuity with the appearances to others (1 Corinthians 15:5–8) despite the fact that, in the chronology of the creed, the Ascension intervened between them. Session at the right hand of the Father was apparently a Christian interpretation of the first verse of Psalm 110. It implied the elevation—or, as the doctrine of preexistence became clearer, the restoration—of Christ to a position of honour with God. Taken together, the Ascension and the session were a way of speaking about the presence of Christ with the Father during the interim between the Resurrection and the Second Advent. From the Ephesians passage it is evident that this way of speaking was by no means inconsistent with another Christian tenet, the belief that Christ was still present in and with his church. It was, in fact, the only way to state that tenet in harmony with the doctrine of the Resurrection. From thence he shall come to judge the living and the dead
The creed concludes its Christological section with the doctrine of the Second Advent: the First Advent was a coming into the flesh, the Second Advent a coming in glory. Much controversy among modern scholars has been occasioned by the role of this doctrine in the early church. Those who maintain that Jesus erroneously expected the early end of the world have often interpreted Paul as the first of those who began the adjustment to a delay in the end, with John’s Gospel as a more-advanced stage of that adjustment. Those who hold that the imminence of the end was a continuing aspect of human history as Jesus saw it also maintain that this phrase of the creed was a statement of that imminence, without any timetable necessarily implied. From the New Testament it seems that both the hope of the Second Coming and a faith in the continuing presence of Christ belonged to the outlook of the apostolic church, and that seems to be what the creed meant. The phrase “the living and the dead” is a summary of passages on the Second Coming from several of Paul’s letters, particularly 1 Corinthians (15:51–52) and 1 Thessalonians (4:15–17).
In order to complete the confession of the creed regarding the glorification of Christ, the Nicene Creed added the phrase “of His kingdom there shall be no end.” That was a declaration that Christ’s return as judge would usher in the full exercise of his reign over the world. Such was the expectation of the apostolic church, based upon what it knew and believed about Jesus Christ. The dogma of Christ in the ancient councils
The main lines of orthodox Christian teaching about the person of Christ were set by the New Testament and the ancient creeds. But what was present there in a germinal form became a clear statement of Christian doctrine when it was formulated as dogma. In one way or another, the first four ecumenical councils were all concerned with the formulation of the dogma regarding the person of Christ—his relation to the Father and the relation of the divine and the human in Christ.
Such a formulation became necessary because teachings arose within the Christian community that seemed to threaten what the church believed and confessed about Christ. Both the dogma and the heretical teachings against which the dogma was directed are therefore part of the history of Jesus Christ. The Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople Early heresies
From the outset, Christianity has had to contend with those who misinterpreted the person and mission of Jesus. Both the New Testament and the early confessions of the church referred and replied to such misinterpretations. As the Christian movement gained adherents from the non-Jewish world, it had to explain Christ in the face of new challenges.
The misinterpretations touched both the question of his humanity and the matter of his deity. A concern to safeguard the true humanity of Jesus led some early Christians to teach that Jesus of Nazareth, an ordinary man, was adopted as the Son of God in the moment of his baptism or after his Resurrection; that heresy was called adoptionism. Gnostics and others wanted to protect him against involvement in the world of matter, which they regarded as essentially evil, and therefore taught that he had only an apparent, not-real body; they were called docetists. Most of the struggle over the person of Christ, however, dealt with the question of his relation to the Father. Some early views were so intent upon asserting his identity with the Father that the distinction of his person was lost, and he became merely a manifestation of the one God. Because of that idea of Christ as a “mode” of divine self-manifestation, proponents of that view were dubbed “modalists”; from an early supporter of the view it was called Sabellianism. Other interpretations of the person of Christ in relation to God went to the opposite extreme. They insisted so strenuously upon the distinctness of his person from that of the Father that they subordinated him to the Father. Many early exponents of the doctrine of the Logos were also subordinationists, so that the Logos idea itself became suspect in some quarters. What was needed was a framework of concepts with which to articulate the doctrine of Christ’s oneness with the Father and yet distinctness from the Father and thus to answer the question put forth by Adolf von Harnack:
Is the Divinity which has appeared on earth and reunited men with god identical with that supreme Divinity which governs heaven and earth, or is it a demigod? Nicaea
That question forced itself upon the church through the teachings of Arius. He maintained that the Logos was the first of the creatures, called into being by God as the agent or instrument through which he was to make all things. Christ was thus less than God but more than a human being; he was divine, but he was not God. To meet the challenge of Arianism, which threatened to split the church, the newly converted emperor Constantine convoked in 325 the first ecumenical council of the Christian church at Nicaea. The private opinions of the attending bishops were anything but unanimous, but the opinion that carried the day was that espoused by the young presbyter Athanasius, who later became bishop of Alexandria. The Council of Nicaea determined that Christ was “begotten, not made,” that he was therefore not creature but creator. It also asserted that he was “of the same substance as the Father” (homoousios to patri). In this way it made clear its basic opposition to subordinationism, even though there could be, and were, quarrels about details. It was not equally clear how the position of Nicaea and of Athanasius differed from modalism. Athanasius asserted that it was not the Father or the Holy Spirit but only the Son who became incarnate as Jesus Christ. But in order to assert that, he needed a more-adequate terminology concerning the persons in the Holy Trinity. So the settlement at Nicaea regarding the person of Christ made necessary a fuller clarification of the doctrine of the Trinity, and that clarification in turn made possible a fuller statement of the doctrine of the person of Christ. Constantinople
Nicaea did not put an end to the controversies but only gave the parties a new rallying point. Doctrinal debate was complicated by the rivalry among bishops and theologians as well as by the intrusion of imperial politics that had begun at Nicaea. Out of the post-Nicene controversies came that fuller statement of the doctrine of the Trinity which was needed to protect the Nicene formula against the charge of failing to distinguish adequately between the Father and the Son. Ratified at the Council of Constantinople in 381 but since lost, that statement apparently made official the terminology developed by the supporters of Nicene orthodoxy in the middle of the 4th century: one divine substance, three divine persons (mia ousia, treis hypostaseis). The three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—were distinct from one another but were equal in their eternity and power. Now it was possible to teach, as Nicaea had, that Christ was “of the same substance as the Father” without arousing the suspicion of modalism. Although the doctrine seemed to make problematical the unity of God, it did provide an answer to the first of the two issues confronted by the church in its doctrine of the person of Christ—the issue of Christ’s relation to the Father. It then became necessary to clarify the second issue—the relation of the divine and the human within Christ. The Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon