Of one Being with the Father

The Text

One word, in the Greek: ὁμοούσιον. One word, in the Latin: consubstantialem. In English it takes four — of one Being with the Father — and the older rendering used five — Being of one substance with the Father. The conciliar fathers chose a single technical adjective and made it the dogmatic keystone of the entire creed. Everything that has come before in the second article — only Son, eternally begotten, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God — converges on this term. Everything that follows — through him all things were made, the incarnation, the cross, the resurrection — rests upon it.

Homoousios. Of the same substance. Of one Being. Consubstantial.

The clause is not a confession of similarity. The Son is not like the Father, not very like the Father, not as much like the Father as a creature can be. The Son is what the Father is — not a second God of the same kind (for there is only one God), not a derivative or diminished version of the Father’s deity, but, with the Father, the one undivided divine being. The Father is God; the Son is God; the Spirit is God; and God is one. Homoousios is the conceptual instrument by which the church confessed this without dissolving the persons into a single subject or splitting the deity into three gods.

The clause is the dogmatic keystone in the strict architectural sense: remove it and the arch collapses. Without homoousios, the affirmations of the second article reduce to honorific predicates that an Arian or semi-Arian could speak with equal sincerity in his own diminished sense. With homoousios, the affirmations bind. The Son is God from God not as a king’s son is a king (by inheritance, by dignity, by office), but as the radiance from the source is the same light — one being, one substance, one God.

Translation Notes

Homoousios — of the same substance. The word is a compound: ὁμός (same — not ὅμοιος, similar) + οὐσία (being, substance, essence). The first half is the load-bearing element. The Arian-friendly party at and after Nicaea was willing to say that the Son was ὁμοιούσιος — of like substance — with the Father. A single Greek letter — the iota — separates the two words. Gibbon’s famous quip about the empire shaken by a diphthong has been retold so often that the dogmatic substance behind it can be lost. The difference is not pedantic. Homoiousios allows the Son to be a perfect copy of the Father, a being of the same kind but numerically other; homoousios requires the Son to be what the Father is, sharing the one undivided divine being. The first is similarity; the second is identity in respect of essence.

Ousia — being, substance, essence. The Greek word does not have a single English equivalent. In Aristotelian philosophy ousia names what something is — its substance, the answer to the question what is this? In ordinary Greek usage ousia can mean property, wealth, possessions (as in the prodigal son’s ousia in Luke 15:12 — his inheritance). In the patristic-conciliar use the term names the divine being itself: what God is, not who God is. (The word for who is hypostasis — the person, the subsistent particular.) The eventual Cappadocian settlement crystallized the distinction: one ousia, three hypostases — one being, three persons. Homoousios therefore says that the Son shares with the Father the one divine ousia, not that the Son is the Father (which would collapse the hypostases) but that the Son is what the Father is.

Consubstantialis — Latin calque. The Latin tradition rendered ὁμοούσιος with the new compound consubstantialis. The word was a deliberate technical coinage — Latin theological vocabulary built on the model of the Greek philosophical compound, with con- (with, together) translating ὁμο- and substantialis (of substance) translating -ούσιος. The Western tradition has used consubstantialis without significant variation for sixteen centuries.

Of one Being with the Father — consubstantial with the Father. Contemporary English liturgical use has two solutions. The ICET (1975) and ELLC (1988) chose of one Being with the Father — a translation, not a transliteration, of the Greek and Latin. The advantage is comprehensibility: the unformed hearer can take one Being in the natural English sense and arrive at substantially the right idea. The 2010 Roman Missal restored consubstantial with the Father on the principle that a technical Greek word deserves a technical English word, and that the dogmatic substance of homoousios is precise in a way that the loose English one Being cannot fully convey. (The English word being is too capacious; it can mean individual entity, mode of existence, fact of existing, or essence — and homoousios requires specifically the last.) The two solutions reflect a real pastoral-theological tension. The pastor who teaches the clause well will teach both: of one Being with the Father gets the parish into the dogmatic neighborhood; consubstantial names the precise dogmatic content.

*The BCP 1662 — Being of one substance with the Father. The older English rendering, which keeps the Latin substantia in English form and is dogmatically equivalent to consubstantial. The hymnodic and liturgical memory of much of English-speaking Christianity is shaped by this older phrasing; it remains worth knowing and worth teaching.

Historical Context

The history of the word homoousios is the history of the fourth-century church. No other single term has carried so much dogmatic, ecclesial, and political weight in the Christian tradition. Six episodes shape the clause as it stands in the 381 creed.

The pre-Nicene history. The word homoousios was not new at Nicaea. It had appeared, in the third century, in the writings of Origen (who used it once, in a fragment, of the Son’s relation to the Father) and, more consequentially, in the trial of Paul of Samosata at the Synod of Antioch in 268. Paul of Samosata, bishop of Antioch, had used homoousios in a monarchian sense — that is, in a sense that collapsed the distinction between the Father and the Son into a single divine subject who appears now as Father and now as Son. The Antiochene synod condemned Paul and also condemned his use of homoousios. This left the word with a suspect pre-Nicene reputation, and many Eastern bishops in the early fourth century would have remembered it as a condemned term. The Nicene rehabilitation of homoousios — its elevation from a condemned word to the dogmatic keystone of the creed — was therefore a high-stakes move, and the subsequent decades of resistance to it had this prehistory as part of their texture.

Arius and the Alexandrian controversy (c. 318–325). Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria, taught that the Son was a creature — the highest of creatures, the first of God’s works, but a creature nonetheless, made by the Father before time and used as the instrument through which God made the rest of the cosmos. Arius’s slogan was there was when he was not (ἦν ποτὲ ὅτε οὐκ ἦν) — the Son had a beginning, even if before time. Alexander, bishop of Alexandria, condemned Arius’s teaching; the controversy spread; the question rose to the imperial court. The Emperor Constantine, recently a Christian and concerned for the unity of the empire, summoned the bishops of the world to a council at Nicaea in the summer of 325.

Nicaea (325). Approximately three hundred bishops gathered, predominantly from the East. The early drafts of the creed (the so-called creed of Eusebius of Caesarea and several similar formulas) were doctrinally orthodox but verbally accommodating — they affirmed the Son’s divinity in scriptural language that an Arian could subscribe to in his own diminished sense. The council needed sharper language. Eusebius of Nicomedia (an Arian sympathizer) and his party objected to every dogmatically pointed formulation that was proposed; the council saw that the Arians were able to absorb almost any biblical-sounding language into their position. At some point in the proceedings — the precise mechanism is contested by historians — the term homoousios was put forward. Constantine, advised by his ecclesiastical adviser Hosius of Cordoba (a Westerner familiar with the Latin tradition of substantia language), supported the term. The Arian party could not subscribe to it. The council adopted it. The 325 creed reads: And we believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, only-begotten, that is, of the substance of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father… The crucial phrase that is, of the substance of the Father (τουτέστιν ἐκ τῆς οὐσίας τοῦ Πατρός) — present in 325, dropped in 381 — was a glossing of homoousios designed to forestall Arian misinterpretation.

The Arian century (325–381). The adoption of homoousios did not settle the controversy. For more than fifty years after Nicaea, the Eastern church oscillated between Nicene, Arian, and various intermediate positions. The reign of Constantius II (337–361) saw a series of imperially sponsored councils that rejected Nicaea and produced various alternative formulas — homoian (the Son is like the Father), anomoian (the Son is unlike the Father — the radical Arian wing), homoiousian (the Son is of like substance with the Father — a moderate position that wanted to preserve the substance language but feared the homoousion on grounds of its Sabellian susceptibility), and so on. Jerome’s famous remark — the world groaned and was astonished to find itself Arian (after the Synod of Rimini in 359) — captures the extent of the Arian success in this period. Athanasius of Alexandria, who had been a deacon at Nicaea and who became bishop in 328, was the central Nicene figure throughout this half-century. He was exiled five times under five different emperors; he spent something like seventeen years away from his see; he wrote prolifically in defense of homoousios. His Discourses Against the Arians, his On the Decrees of the Council of Nicaea, and his On the Council of Ariminum and Seleucia are the great Nicene apologetic works of the period.

The Cappadocian settlement. Athanasius’s defense of homoousios was magnificent but limited: the term, in Athanasius’s use, sometimes risks blurring the distinction between Father and Son, because Athanasius’s primary opponent was Arius and his primary concern was to insist on the full divinity of the Son. The next theological generation — Basil of Caesarea, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus, collectively called the Cappadocian fathers — undertook the further task of articulating how the Father and the Son can share one ousia while remaining distinct persons. The Cappadocian achievement was the conceptual distinction between ousia (substance, being, essence) and hypostasis (subsistent particular, person). One ousia, three hypostases. The Father and the Son share the one divine ousia (this is homoousios); the Father and the Son are not the same hypostasis (this is the distinction of persons). The settlement preserves both the unity (against Arianism, which made the Son a creature) and the distinction (against Sabellianism, which collapsed Father and Son into a single subject).

Constantinople (381). The Council of Constantinople, summoned by the Emperor Theodosius, ratified the Nicene faith with the revisions that produced the creed used today. The phrase of one substance with the Father was retained without the 325 gloss that is, of the substance of the Father (which had become unnecessary once the Cappadocian distinction had clarified the meaning of homoousios). The creed also expanded the third article on the Holy Spirit, who is named Lord and life-giver in language that asserts his divinity without using homoousios — a deliberate restraint, the so-called economy of Basil, that allowed the council to confess the Spirit’s full divinity in scriptural rather than philosophical language. The 381 creed is the form in which Constantinople passed homoousios down to all subsequent ages of the church.

The fifty-six years from Nicaea to Constantinople were the most consequential half-century in the history of Christian doctrine. The clause of one Being with the Father, recited every Sunday in the parish eucharist, is the bequest of that struggle. The exiles of Athanasius, the imprisonments of confessors, the writings of the Cappadocians, the imperial interventions, the synods and counter-synods — the entire fourth-century turmoil — is folded into this one word.

Lines of Interpretation

Patristic

Tradition: Athanasius, Discourses Against the Arians, On the Decrees of the Council of Nicaea, On the Council of Ariminum and Seleucia; Basil of Caesarea, Against Eunomius, On the Holy Spirit; Gregory of Nazianzus, Theological Orations (especially Oration 29 on the Son); Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius; Hilary of Poitiers, On the Trinity, On the Councils; Cyril of Alexandria, Thesaurus on the Holy and Consubstantial Trinity; Augustine, On the Trinity

The patristic theology of homoousios is the church’s most sustained dogmatic labor on a single word. Athanasius’s contribution was to make homoousios the touchstone of orthodoxy: anything that softens it surrenders the gospel. His arguments are biblical (the Son is worshipped in the New Testament, and worship belongs to God alone), soteriological (only the true God could save; if the Son is a creature, the gospel collapses), and metaphysical (the divine being is one and undivided; the Son must therefore share the one divine being, not have a similar-but-other divine being). The Cappadocian contribution was the distinction between ousia and hypostasis — the conceptual instrument by which homoousios could be confessed without dissolving the persons. Hilary of Poitiers brought the patristic settlement into Latin. Augustine’s On the Trinity is the great Western patristic synthesis: the divine substantia is one and simple; the three persons are distinguished by their relations (the Father by paternity, the Son by filiation, the Spirit by procession) within the one substance, not by any division of the substance itself.

Strengths

• The patristic tradition has held homoousios through every conceivable assault and articulated it with unsurpassed depth
• Athanasius’s soteriological argument — only the true God could save — remains pastorally decisive
• The Cappadocian ousia/hypostasis distinction is the conceptual achievement that has carried the doctrine for sixteen centuries
• Augustine’s On the Trinity gives the doctrine its mature Western form, articulated in terms of relations rather than divisions

Weaknesses

• The polemical context occasionally produced articulations sharper than the catholic substance required, and the heat of the controversy sometimes generated proof-texts and arguments more rhetorically pointed than exegetically sustainable
• The philosophical vocabulary (ousia, hypostasis, substantia, persona) requires careful translation for cultures unfamiliar with the Greco-Roman intellectual inheritance, and the translation into modern languages has been imperfect
• The Western and Eastern traditions have developed the doctrine in subtly different directions (the West emphasizing the unity of substance, the East emphasizing the distinction of persons within the unity), and the divergence has occasionally produced misunderstandings on both sides

Scholastic

Tradition: Anselm, Monologion, On the Procession of the Holy Spirit; Peter Lombard, Sentences I; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.27–43; Bonaventure, Commentary on the Sentences I; the later medieval Trinitarian tradition

The scholastic tradition received homoousios / consubstantialis as the dogmatic core of trinitarian doctrine and articulated it within the framework of the one divine essence possessed by the three persons. The Lombard’s Sentences I, the standard medieval theological textbook, makes the consubstantialis affirmation the basis of all subsequent trinitarian discussion. Aquinas’s articulation in Summa Theologiae I.27–43 is the mature scholastic synthesis. The divine essence is one and simple; the three persons are subsistent relations within the one essence. The Father is the relation of paternity (begetting the Son); the Son is the relation of filiation (being begotten); the Spirit is the relation of procession (proceeding from the Father and the Son). The persons are not parts of the essence, not modes of the essence, not separate essences — they are the one essence, possessed in three distinct relational ways. The homoousios affirmation is therefore the affirmation that the one divine essence is integrally possessed by each person.

Aquinas’s particular contribution: the distinction between the processions (the immanent acts by which the persons come forth within the divine being — the Son begotten of the Father, the Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son) and the missions (the temporal acts by which the persons are sent into creation — the incarnation of the Son, the outpouring of the Spirit). The homoousios clause refers to the processions: the Son is consubstantial with the Father in his eternal generation, before any mission.

Strengths

• The scholastic articulation gives homoousios its mature philosophical-theological form
• The relational-subsistence framework preserves both the unity of essence and the distinction of persons
• The distinction between processions and missions is permanently useful for trinitarian theology
• Aquinas’s articulation has been the common possession of catholic theology, East and West, in its dogmatic substance if not in every technical detail

Weaknesses

• The Aristotelian-essentialist vocabulary is not native to scripture and requires translation
• Some late-medieval scholastic articulations drifted toward speculative refinements that left the pastoral substance behind
• The Western scholastic preference for beginning with the essence (rather than with the persons, as the Cappadocians and the Eastern tradition have done) has occasionally produced misunderstandings with the East

Lutheran

Tradition: Luther, On the Last Words of David, Disputation on the Divinity and Humanity of Christ; Augsburg Confession, Article I; Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration VIII; Lutheran scholastic theology (Gerhard, Quenstedt)

The Lutheran tradition received homoousios / consubstantialis as catholic dogma and held it without modification. The Augsburg Confession (1530), Article I, Of God, repeats the Nicene faith verbatim. Luther’s late writings against contemporary anti-trinitarians (Servetus, the Polish Brethren) insist with great force on the consubstantialis affirmation: the Son is what the Father is, in the strongest possible sense, and any softening surrenders the gospel of justification. The pastoral integration is Lutheran-characteristic: the Christus pro nobis — the Christ who is for us in the gospel — could not bear the weight of human sin and reconcile the world to God unless he were truly and consubstantially God. A lesser Christ is a lesser gospel.

The Lutheran tradition also developed, more than any other Reformation tradition, the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum — the communication of properties between the divine and human natures in the one person of Christ — and this doctrine presupposes the full consubstantialis affirmation. If the Son is what the Father is, then in the incarnation the human nature of Christ is genuinely united to God, and the properties of the divine nature can be predicated of the one person of Christ even when he is acting according to his human nature.

Strengths

• The integration of homoousios with the gospel of justification is permanently valuable
• The doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum presses the consubstantialis affirmation into its full Christological implications
• The Lutheran confessional tradition has held the doctrine with great vigilance
• Luther’s late writings remain a vigorous pastoral defense of the dogma

Weaknesses

• The polemical context of the 16th century occasionally produced sharper articulations than the catholic substance required
• Some late Lutheran scholastic articulations of the communicatio idiomatum generated controversies with the Reformed tradition that have not entirely subsided

Reformed

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes I.13; Heidelberg Catechism QQ. 24–25, 33; Belgic Confession, Articles 8–11; Westminster Confession Ch. 2; Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology III; T. F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God

Calvin’s articulation in Institutes I.13 is the foundational Reformed treatment. Calvin affirms homoousios / consubstantialis in the strongest catholic terms — the Son is true God, of one essence with the Father, autotheos in his own person (a phrase Calvin uses pastorally to insist that the Son’s deity is not derived in the sense of being lesser, while still affirming the Father’s status as fount of the deity in the eternal generation). The Reformed confessional tradition consistently affirms the consubstantialis dogma without modification.

A particular Reformed strength: the integration of homoousios with the doctrine of revelation. If the Son is what the Father is, then the Son’s revelation of the Father is the true revelation of the true God, not a creaturely approximation. The God who is revealed in Jesus Christ is the God who is, not a god who is like him. This emphasis runs through Calvin, the Reformed confessions, and Karl Barth, who made the trinitarian homoousios the dogmatic foundation of his entire theology of revelation in Church Dogmatics I/1.

T. F. Torrance’s The Christian Doctrine of God (1996) is the great late-20th-century Reformed articulation of the doctrine and one of the major modern theological achievements on this clause. Torrance retrieves the Nicene-Cappadocian-Athanasian tradition with sustained attention to its philosophical and scientific implications.

Strengths

• The Reformed tradition has held homoousios with care and articulated it with distinguished theological work
• Calvin’s Institutes I.13 is a foundational Reformation treatment
• The integration with the doctrine of revelation gives homoousios its modern epistemological force
• Torrance’s The Christian Doctrine of God is one of the great recent achievements on the doctrine

Weaknesses

• The Reformed scholasticism of the 17th century occasionally pressed homoousios into refinements that exceed the New Testament’s warrant
• Some modern Reformed articulations have so foregrounded homoousios as the foundation of revelation that the doctrine has become almost epistemologically rather than soteriologically organized

Eastern Orthodox

Tradition: Athanasius and the Cappadocians as foundational; John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith I; Gregory Palamas, The Triads; the iconographic tradition; modern Orthodox theologians (Lossky, Florovsky, Zizioulas, Behr)

The Eastern Orthodox tradition has held homoousios / ὁμοούσιος as the dogmatic foundation of the entire Christian confession. The Eastern characteristic emphasis is on the Cappadocian settlement: one ousia, three hypostases. The Eastern tradition begins from the persons (the Father unbegotten, the Son begotten, the Spirit proceeding) and articulates the unity of ousia as that which the three persons possess in common; the Western tradition has historically tended to begin from the unity of essence and articulate the distinction of persons as relations within the essence. The two approaches are dogmatically equivalent in substance but differently weighted in articulation.

The Eastern tradition also presses homoousios into its full theological (in the Eastern sense — pertaining to theologia, the inner divine life) implications. The eternal communion of the Father, Son, and Spirit, sharing the one divine ousia, is the eternal life of God — and this eternal life is, by grace, what the believer is brought into through union with Christ. The doctrine of theosis (deification, divinization) presupposes the homoousios: only because the Son is consubstantial with the Father can the believer’s union with the Son be a union with the Father in the Spirit. Gregory Palamas’s Triads further developed this through the distinction between the divine essence (which remains incommunicable) and the divine energies (which are communicated to the believer in salvation) — a distinction the Western tradition has not received but which functions, in Eastern theology, to preserve both the transcendence and the salvific availability of the homoousios God.

The iconographic tradition makes homoousios visible. The icon of Christ Pantokratōr — Christ Almighty, the one true God, ruling from the dome of every Orthodox church — is the visual confession of the consubstantial Son. The icon of the Trinity (Rublev’s icon of the three angelic visitors to Abraham at Mamre, painted c. 1411) shows the three persons as one — three figures, distinct yet identical in form and posture, gathered around the eucharistic chalice. The viewer is invited to be the fourth, the empty fourth seat at the table.

Strengths

• The Eastern tradition has held homoousios with sustained dogmatic care
• The Cappadocian ousia/hypostasis settlement is the conceptual instrument that has carried the doctrine for sixteen centuries
• The integration with the doctrine of theosis gives homoousios its full soteriological depth
• The iconographic-liturgical embedding keeps the doctrine present as a living confession
• The eschatological-doxological register preserves the doctrine from rationalist reduction

Weaknesses

• The Palamite essence/energies distinction has not been received in the West and has been the source of ongoing East-West tension
• The detailed Eastern theological vocabulary requires translation for cultures unfamiliar with the patristic-monastic tradition

Wesleyan

(See Wesleyan Voice below.)

Modern Ecumenical

Tradition: Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1 §§8–12; Karl Rahner, The Trinity; T. F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God; John Behr, The Nicene Faith; Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea; Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy; Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition; Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology

The 20th- and 21st-century theological scene has seen a remarkable convergence on homoousios across confessional lines. Barth’s Church Dogmatics I/1 made the doctrine of the Trinity — and within it the homoousios affirmation — the foundation of all theological knowledge. Rahner’s The Trinity (1967) restored the doctrine to the center of Roman Catholic theological life after a period of relative neglect (the famous Rahnerian rule: the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity, and vice versa — there is no God behind the God revealed in the economy of salvation, and the God revealed in the economy is truly homoousios and triune).

Torrance’s The Christian Doctrine of God (1996) is one of the great modern statements. The historical-theological retrievals of Behr (The Nicene Faith, 2004), Ayres (Nicaea and Its Legacy, 2004), and Anatolios (Retrieving Nicaea, 2011) have transformed the academic understanding of the fourth-century controversies and recovered the homoousios affirmation with new philosophical and exegetical precision. Williams’s Arius (1987, revised 2001) is the major modern study of Arius and his theological context, and it has clarified what was actually at stake in the fourth-century debate.

The ecumenical convergence is striking. The 1982 Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry document of the World Council of Churches, the various bilateral dialogues (Lutheran-Catholic, Anglican-Catholic, Reformed-Catholic, Orthodox-Catholic), and the joint trinitarian declarations of the past forty years have repeatedly affirmed the homoousios substance of the Nicene faith. The Christian communions, after a millennium of division, agree on what homoousios means and that it is the dogmatic foundation of the Christian confession.

Strengths

• The 20th-century theological recovery has restored homoousios to its proper dogmatic centrality
• The ecumenical convergence on the substance of the affirmation is one of the most striking achievements of recent Christian history
• The historical-theological retrievals of Behr, Ayres, and Anatolios have refined the academic understanding without disturbing the dogmatic substance
• Barth’s foundational use of the doctrine has reshaped modern Protestant theology

Weaknesses

• Some modern reconstructions have so qualified the philosophical vocabulary of ousia and hypostasis that the dogmatic precision is at risk
• The recovery has occasionally been more an academic-theological than a parish-pastoral renewal, and the gap between the seminary and the pew remains a pastoral challenge

Wesleyan Voice

Wesley’s confession of the Son as of one substance with the Father is unambiguous, catholic, and central. The Methodist Articles of Religion (1784), Article I — Of Faith in the Holy Trinity — names the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as of one substance, power, and eternity. Article II — Of the Word, or Son of God — names the Son as the very and eternal God, of one substance with the Father. The phrasing is taken almost verbatim from the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (1571), which in turn took it from the Augsburg Confession and the patristic-medieval tradition. Wesley’s reception of the consubstantialis affirmation is therefore not a Methodist innovation but a deliberate, vigilant transmission of the catholic faith.

The pastoral substance of Wesley’s confession is integrated with the gospel of justification and the doctrine of Christian perfection. Sermon 5, Justification by Faith, turns on the dogmatic substance of the homoousios: the believer’s reconciliation with God depends on the true divinity of the mediator. Only the Son who is of one substance with the Father can mediate between God and humanity, because only he is fully on both sides of the relation — fully God (consubstantial with the Father) and fully human (consubstantial with us). The homoousios of the second article and the homoousios with us of the incarnation (Chalcedon’s later affirmation) together constitute the Christological foundation of the gospel.

What is distinctively Wesleyan is the further integration with Sermon 40, Christian Perfection and Sermon 43, The Scripture Way of Salvation. Sanctification — the transformation of the heart in love — is the work of God in the believer. If God were not truly triune — if the Son were not consubstantial with the Father, if the Spirit were not equally divine — then sanctification would be the work of a creature, or of a divine fragment, and the believer’s transformation would be incomplete. Because God is triune, with the Son and the Spirit each of one substance with the Father, the believer’s sanctification is the full work of the full God. Perfect love — the love that fulfills the law and casts out fear — is therefore a real possibility in this life, because the God who is at work in the believer is the one God in three persons, fully and consubstantially God in each.

Charles Wesley’s hymnody confesses the consubstantial Son on nearly every page. The great Trinity hymn Hail, holy, holy, holy Lord, / be endless praise to thee; / supreme, essential One, adored / in coeternal Three — names the one divine essence possessed by the coeternal persons in language that is the hymnodic form of homoousios. The Christmas hymn Hark! the herald angels sing names the consubstantial Son in the incarnation: Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, / hail the incarnate Deity, / pleased as man with man to dwell, / Jesus, our Emmanuel. The Easter hymn Christ the Lord is risen today presupposes the consubstantial divinity of the risen Lord throughout. The eucharistic hymns (the great Hymns on the Lord’s Supper, 1745) consistently address Christ as the true God, the one of one substance with the Father, present in the eucharist as God.

The pastoral Wesleyan posture: confess the Son as of one substance with the Father without modification; refuse every reduction of his consubstantiality that would undermine the gospel of justification or the doctrine of Christian perfection; receive the doctrine as the dogmatic foundation of the believer’s actual transformation in the love of the triune God. The Wesleyan tradition has not produced a major dogmatic-theological treatise on homoousios — Wesley was a pastor and field preacher, not a systematic theologian — but the Methodist confession, sermon, and hymnody are saturated with the dogmatic substance of the term. The classes, bands, and societies of the early Methodist movement met in the presence of the consubstantial God; the conversions, sanctifications, and deaths of the early Methodists were all set within the trinitarian frame; the Wesleyan integration of doctrine and life is, in this respect, exemplary.

Hymnody

The Methodist hymnody on this clause is the Trinitarian and Christological repertoire of the UM Hymnal in its dogmatic core.

“Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty!” (Reginald Heber, 1826; tune Nicaea) is the great English-language Trinity hymn and the most direct hymnodic confession of homoousios. The third stanza: Holy, Holy, Holy! though the darkness hide thee, / though the eye of sinful man thy glory may not see, / only thou art holy, there is none beside thee, / perfect in power, in love, and purity. The fourth: Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty! / all thy works shall praise thy name in earth and sky and sea; / Holy, Holy, Holy! merciful and mighty, / God in three Persons, blessèd Trinity. The tune name — Nicaea — is John Bacchus Dykes’s deliberate evocation of the council that gave us homoousios; the hymn is the parish’s living confession of the conciliar faith.

“Come, thou Almighty King” (anon., 1757) — addressed in stanza 1 to the Father, in stanza 2 to the Son (Come, thou incarnate Word, / gird on thy mighty sword), in stanza 3 to the Spirit, and in stanza 4 to the great One in Three — is a direct hymnodic enactment of trinitarian doxology grounded in consubstantial divinity.

“O come, all ye faithful” (Adeste, fideles, 18th c.; trans. Frederick Oakeley, 1841) paraphrases the Nicene Creed at Christmas: God of God, Light of Light, / lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb; / very God, begotten, not created. The very God of the hymn is the consubstantialis Son of the creed.

“Of the Father’s love begotten” (Aurelius Prudentius, 4th c.; trans. J. M. Neale and H. W. Baker, 19th c.) — written in the immediate aftermath of the Nicene controversy by a Roman Christian poet — is one of the great hymnodic articulations of the consubstantialis dogma. Of the Father’s love begotten, / ere the worlds began to be, / he is Alpha and Omega, / he the source, the ending he, / of the things that are, that have been, / and that future years shall see.

“Maker, in whom we live” (Charles Wesley, 1747) — a Wesleyan Trinity hymn — addresses the Father, Son, and Spirit in three stanzas and the Triune God in the fourth.

“Hail, holy, holy, holy Lord” (Charles Wesley) — the explicit Wesleyan confession of the one essence in three persons.

“Crown him with many crowns” (Matthew Bridges 1851, Godfrey Thring 1874) — names the consubstantial Son in his exalted glory.

For the Christological year: the entire Christmas, Easter, and Ascension hymnody participates in this clause. The Son who is of one being with the Father is the one whose nativity is sung at Christmas, whose passion is sung in Holy Week, whose resurrection is sung at Easter, whose ascension and reign is sung at Ascension and Christ the King. The consubstantialis dogma is not a single hymn but the entire hymnodic substance of the Christian year.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

Three pastoral tasks attach to this clause.

The first is recovering the audibility of the word. In congregations that use the ELLC of one Being with the Father — which is most United Methodist congregations — the phrase can pass through the Sunday recitation without ever being heard as a technical term. One Being with the Father sounds, in the modern English ear, like a vaguely spiritual phrase: of one purpose, of one mind, of one spirit. The pastoral task is to recover the dogmatic content. Of one Being does not mean of one purpose or of one mind or of one spirit. It means: the Son is what the Father is, sharing the one divine being, not a similar-but-other divine being. The Father is God; the Son is God; and there is only one God. The hearer who has the dogmatic content can pray the phrase with full conscience; the hearer who does not have the dogmatic content is praying a verbal fossil. The pastoral task is teaching, in adult-education and catechetical and pulpit settings, what the church means when she says of one Being.

The second is teaching the salvific weight of the clause. The homoousios affirmation is not a piece of remote fourth-century philosophy. It is the dogmatic foundation of the gospel. The Christian gospel is that, in Christ, God has done what only God could do — has reconciled the world to himself, has borne the weight of human sin, has raised the dead, has given the Spirit, has inaugurated the new creation. The clause of one Being with the Father is the church’s confession that the Christ of the gospel is truly God, not a divine-but-lesser intermediary, not a glorified creature, not a divinized man. If the Son is not consubstantial with the Father, then the work of Christ is the work of a creature, and the gospel cannot deliver what it promises. Athanasius’s argument has lost none of its force: only the true God could save. The clause is therefore not abstract dogmatic speculation; it is the foundation of the believer’s actual hope.

The third is forming the congregation’s worship within the trinitarian frame. The clause of one Being with the Father is the dogmatic warrant for the church’s worship of Jesus. The church prays to Jesus, sings to Jesus, kneels to Jesus, receives Jesus in the eucharist, and adores Jesus — and these are the worshipful acts that belong to God. If the Son were not consubstantial with the Father, this worship would be idolatry. Because the Son is consubstantial with the Father, this worship is the right and proper devotion of the Christian. The clause therefore underwrites the entire liturgical and devotional life of the church. The pastor who wants to form a parish in trinitarian devotion does not need a special program; he or she needs only to teach the congregation what they are already doing when they pray through Jesus Christ our Lord at the close of every collect, when they sing Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again at the eucharist, when they receive the body of Christ from the pastor’s hand. The worshipful life of the church is the lived confession of the homoousios.

For the preacher: when this clause comes around in the Sunday creed, do not let the congregation pray it as a piece of philosophical jargon. Pause, before the next preaching, and explain what the church is saying. Of one Being with the Father. The Son is what the Father is. The God we worship in Christ is the God, not a god. The gospel we proclaim is the gospel, not a partial gospel. The hope we hold for our dead, for our suffering, for our own salvation — this hope rests on the one consubstantial God who, in the Son, has come to save and, in the Spirit, has come to sanctify, and who in the Father is the origin and end of all that is. The clause is the dogmatic keystone. Without it, the arch collapses; with it, the whole architecture of Christian faith stands.

Further Reading

• Exodus 3:14 — I am who I am (the divine self-identification that homoousios presupposes)
• Deuteronomy 6:4 — Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one
• Isaiah 43:10–11; 44:6; 45:5–6, 21–22 — the radical monotheism that requires the Son’s full consubstantiality if he is to be worshipped as God
• Matthew 28:19 — the triadic baptismal formula
• John 1:1–18 — the Logos as God
• John 5:18; 10:30, 33, 38; 14:9–11; 17:5, 21–22 — the Son’s equality and unity with the Father
• John 20:28 — Thomas’s confession: my Lord and my God
• Romans 9:5; Titus 2:13; 2 Peter 1:1 — direct New Testament predications of God to Christ
• Philippians 2:5–11 — the Christ-hymn, presupposing the Son’s full deity
• Colossians 1:15–20; 2:9 — in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily
• Hebrews 1:1–14 — the Son as the radiance of the Father’s glory, the exact representation of his being
• Revelation 1:8, 17–18; 21:6; 22:13 — the divine titles applied to Christ
• Origen, On First Principles I.2
• Athanasius, Discourses Against the Arians (especially I.5–10, II.18–82)
• Athanasius, On the Decrees of the Council of Nicaea
• Athanasius, On the Council of Ariminum and Seleucia
• Basil of Caesarea, Against Eunomius; On the Holy Spirit
• Gregory of Nazianzus, Theological Orations (especially Orations 27–31, the Five Theological Orations)
• Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius; On Not Three Gods
• Hilary of Poitiers, On the Trinity; On the Councils
• Cyril of Alexandria, Thesaurus on the Holy and Consubstantial Trinity
• Augustine, On the Trinity (especially Books V–VII, XV)
• John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith I.8
• Anselm, Monologion; On the Procession of the Holy Spirit
• Peter Lombard, Sentences I
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.27–43
• Bonaventure, Commentary on the Sentences I
• Gregory Palamas, The Triads III
• Augsburg Confession (1530), Article I
• Belgic Confession (1561), Articles 8–11
• Heidelberg Catechism (1563), QQ. 24–25, 33
• Thirty-Nine Articles (1571), Articles I–II
• Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), Chapter 2
• Articles of Religion of the Methodist Church (1784), Articles I–II
• John Wesley, Standard Sermons, Sermons 5, 40, 43, 55
• John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament on John 1, John 10, John 17, Colossians 1, Hebrews 1
• Charles Wesley, “Hail, holy, holy, holy Lord”; “Maker, in whom we live”; “Hark! the herald angels sing”
• Reginald Heber, “Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty!” (1826)
• Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1 §§8–12
• Karl Rahner, The Trinity (Herder & Herder, 1967)
• Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (James Clarke, 1957)
• John Zizioulas, Being as Communion (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985)
• Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition (rev. ed., SCM/Eerdmans, 2001)
• T. F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith (T&T Clark, 1988)
• T. F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God (T&T Clark, 1996)
• Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy (Oxford, 2004)
• John Behr, The Nicene Faith, 2 vols. (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004)
• Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea (Baker Academic, 2011)
• Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology I (Oxford, 1997), ch. 4
• Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self (Cambridge, 2013)