What did the early Church confess about who Christ is?

The first confessions are already in the New Testament

Some of the earliest Christian statements about Jesus are short confessions preserved inside the letters of Paul. In Romans 10:9 Paul writes that salvation comes "if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus" (KJV), joined to belief that God raised him from the dead.

Philippians 2:6 to 11 goes further. It describes Christ as "being in the form of God" (KJV), choosing to take "the form of a servant," humbling himself to the cross, and then being exalted so that every tongue confesses him as Lord. The passage moves down and then up, from equality with God to death and back to glory.

In 1 Corinthians 15:3 to 5 Paul says he passed on what he had himself received: that Christ gave himself for sins, was buried, and "rose again the third day according to the scriptures" (KJV), then appeared to Peter and the twelve. Paul presents this as a received summary, older than his own letter. These texts did not yet use the technical vocabulary of later centuries. They do show that worship of Jesus, and speech about him in terms reserved for God, began very early.

Nicaea chose one word to settle a hard question

The first great dispute concerned whether the Son was eternal or created. Around 319, Arius, a presbyter in Alexandria, taught that the Son had been made by the Father and so had a beginning; the Catholic Encyclopedia summarizes his position as saying that the Son "once had not existed" [1]. His bishop, Alexander, condemned him, and the quarrel spread across the eastern churches [1].

The Council of Nicaea in AD 325 answered by adopting the Greek term homoousios, usually translated as consubstantial or of one substance, to say that the Son shares the very being of the Father [1]. Arius was condemned and only a handful of bishops dissented [1]. Athanasius, who attended as a young deacon, became the leading defender of the Nicene position after he succeeded Alexander as bishop in 328 [11].

The creed most Christians know as the Nicene Creed was most likely issued by the Council of Constantinople in 381 [2]. Britannica notes that scholars once treated it as an expansion of the Nicene text, but later research suggests it was an independent document that probably drew on an existing baptismal creed [2]. It kept the language of one substance with the Father, and the Council of Chalcedon in 451 was the first to name Constantinople as its source explicitly [2].

Ephesus and Chalcedon described one Christ in two natures

Even as arguments over the Son's divinity continued, a further question arose: how divinity and humanity are joined in one Christ. Nestorius preferred to call Mary Christotokos (Christ-bearer) rather than Theotokos (God-bearer) [3]. The Council of Ephesus in 431 condemned his objections and affirmed Mary as mother of God, on the ground that Christ is one person [3]. For the churches that accepted the council, the title was a statement about Jesus more than about Mary: the one born of her is God the Son.

Twenty years later the Council of Chalcedon took up the opposite concern, the teaching associated with the monk Eutyches that Christ had only one nature [4]. The council adopted the position of Pope Leo I's letter known as the Tome, which taught that Christ has two natures, fully divine and fully human, united in one person [4].

Some ancient churches confess the same faith in other words

The churches that did not accept Chalcedon are known today as the Oriental Orthodox family: the Coptic, Syrian, Armenian, Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Malankara (Indian) Orthodox churches [5]. The World Council of Churches describes them as churches that recognize the first three councils, Nicaea, Constantinople, and Ephesus, but not Chalcedon [5].

Their opponents long called them monophysite, meaning they believed Christ had only one nature, the divine. They reject that description. Their own term is miaphysite, from the Greek for single nature, and it follows Cyril of Alexandria's formula of "one incarnate nature of the Word" [6]. In their understanding the humanity of Christ is fully present and real within that one united nature [6]. What they rejected at Chalcedon was the two-natures wording, which they heard as dividing Christ.

Modern dialogue has narrowed this gap. On 10 May 1973 Pope Paul VI and Pope Shenouda III of the Coptic Orthodox Church signed a declaration confessing Christ as "perfect God with respect to His divinity, perfect man" [7]. In 1989 and 1990 a joint commission of the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches agreed that both families had kept the same faith while using terms differently, affirmed that the natures are united without confusion, change, division, or separation, and recommended that past condemnations be lifted [8]. Each side also accepted the other's way of speaking: the Eastern Orthodox said they distinguish the two natures in thought, and the Oriental Orthodox affirmed that the Word is of one being with the Father and with us [8]. The statement leaves it to each church to decide how that lifting is carried out [8], and full communion between the two families has not been restored.

The Church of the East never received the Council of Ephesus [9]. It confesses two natures and two qnome, a Syriac term for a concrete instance of a nature, in the one prosopon, or person, of the Son [9]. The historian Sebastian Brock traces the two-qnome language to the theologian Babai the Great, whose teaching became the church's official position [9]. Brock records that the church rejects the label "Nestorian" and never adopted Theotokos, out of concern to protect the full humanity Christ took from Mary [9]. On 11 November 1994 Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV signed a common declaration in which the Church of the East addresses Mary as "the Mother of Christ our God and Saviour" and each church recognized the other's title for her as a legitimate expression of the same faith [10].

East and West later divided over one phrase in the creed

A later disagreement between Eastern and Western Christians concerned the Holy Spirit rather than Christ. Beginning in the sixth century, Western churches gradually added the Latin word filioque (and the Son), so that the creed says the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son [2]. The papacy probably accepted the addition in the eleventh century [2]. Most Catholic, Anglican, and Protestant churches retain it, though some Anglican churches now permit its omission, while the Eastern Orthodox churches have rejected it as a theological error and an unauthorized change to a shared text [2].

Even so, the creed itself remains common ground. The Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and major Protestant churches accept it as authoritative [2]. In the West it is used mainly at the Eucharist; in the East it is said at baptism and at the Eucharist [2]. Many congregations that never mention Nicaea by name still confess with it, at worship, that the Son is of one substance with the Father.

What this means for the reader

The early Church did not invent its confession about Christ at a single meeting; it worked outward from short New Testament statements to precise definitions under pressure from real disputes. If you hear Christians describe Christ in different terms, it helps to ask what each tradition was trying to protect. Several of the modern joint statements described here concluded that churches long divided had held a common faith expressed in different words, even though those churches are not yet in full communion.