Wednesday, April 24, 2024

Jared Ortiz and Daniel A. Keating on the use of ὁμοιούσιος (homoousios) Before the Council of Nicea

  

We have only a piecemeal knowledge about the use of the term homoousios (consubstantial) before 325. It first appears in Gnostic writings of the second century, where it communicates a kind of emanation of one divine being from another, with the derived deity possessing part of the divinity from which it emanated. This reflects a conception of God foreign to Christian faith and plainly was not acceptable to describe the relationship between the Father and the Son as found in the Scriptures. In the third century, homoousios was used positively on occasion to describe the relationship between the Father and the Son—that the Son was homoousios with the Father. In general, when used positively, homoousios tended to communicate the sense of “the same order of being.” But at the same time, the term was condemned at the Council of Antioch in 268. The exact reason for this condemnation is unclear, but it was probably condemned as communicating a kind of materialistic emanation of the Son from the Father—the idea that the Son possessed part of the Father’s being. Thus, before 325 the term homoousios itself had a mixed heritage in the Christian tradition. (Jared Ortiz and Daniel A. Keating, The Nicene Creed: A Scriptural, Historical and Theological Commentary [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2024], 92)