We don’t argue about doctrine these days. Sometimes I wish we did. Why? Because bad theology leads to bad behavior.
Sincerity is no arbiter of truth. You can be very sincere in your convictions and very, very wrong. Think about it. Every super villain in the Marvel universe is convinced that he or she is justified in their evil actions by a just cause. Thanos wanted people to thrive, but he didn’t think there was enough resources to go around. His solution was to randomly eliminate half the sentient beings in the universe.
Such a thought process can be sneaky. When it first came out, I thought the WWJD fad was kind of neat. When faced with a moral question, why not ask, “What would Jesus do?” The problem is that the vast majority of people wearing WWJD bracelets never really bothered to find out who Jesus actually is and what Jesus actually did. The result is that all too often WWJD became a way to justify bad behavior by recreating Jesus in one’s own image to fit one’s own preferences. Bad theology leads to bad behavior.
The early Church had a deep appreciation for the need to articulate the Faith in a way that reflected, as best as humanly possible, the divine realities what were revealed to us.
So it was that 1700 years ago, in 325 that the first Ecumenical Council met at Nicaea to come up with a way to suitably articulate the nature of Christ. Simply put, the controversy was this. We Christians say that “Jesus is Lord!” But how do we say that Jesus is Lord? One group, led by Arias, overemphasizing the transcendence of God, said that Jesus was the first of God’s creation and leads us to the Father. Thus, Christ was not to be worshipped. This did not sit well with Arias’s bishop, Alexander, who rightly upheld the divinity of Jesus. The controversy spilled out into the whole Church. Apparently there were even a few bar fights about the divinity of Christ in the streets of Alexandria. So, the Emperor Constantine, who had recently legalized the Church, called the bishops to his summer palace in Nicaea to work it out. It was at this first ecumenical council that the bulk of the statement of faith we now know as the Nicaean Creed was pounded out. One of the canons of the Council of Nicaea was that the creed it produced would be recited at every Mass throughout the world for all time. That is why we recite the Nicaean Creed every Sunday.
On this Trinity Sunday, we should take time to really pay attention. When we understand the Creed, we understand what it means to say that Jesus is Lord. Good doctrine leads to good behavior. I don’t recommend getting into any bar fights, but I do pray it helps us to be more charitable and credible witnesses of the Gospel.