Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 29:1 (Spring 2025)
Article: Augustine’s Maximally Nicene Texts
Author: James R. Wood

Augustine’s Maximally Nicene Texts

James R. Wood

James R. Wood is Associate Professor of Religion and Theology at Redeemer University, Ancaster, Ontario, Canada. He earned his PhD in Theology from the University of Toronto and a ThM from Princeton Theological Seminary. He has served as an associate editor at First Things Magazine as well as writing numerous articles in such journals as Religious Studies Review, Journal of Reformed Theology, Mere Orthodoxy, Ad Fontes, and so on. He is also a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church in America, a co-host of the Civitas Podcast with the Theopolis Institute and Mere Fidelity with Mere Orthodoxy, and a Commonwealth Fellow at the Davenant Institute. Dr. Wood is married to Clare and they have five daughters.

Introduction

While Augustine (354–430) is one of the most prominent church fathers who wrote on the Trinity in the century following the Council of Nicaea (325), rarely in his writings did he explicitly invoke the council and its creed. Augustine’s Nicene commitments are evident in earlier texts to some degree, but they appear most clearly in his late debates with the Homoian bishop Maximinus, where Augustine explicitly appeals to Nicaea and presents his most mature trinitarian theology. This essay explores how the Nicene Creed functions in Augustine’s debate with and separate response to Maximinus. Although Augustine devotes most of his labor to exegesis of scriptural texts, he clearly presupposes Nicene theology as essential for understanding these texts. He seeks to demonstrate that the scriptural witness can only be harmonized by assuming Nicene reasoning. The result is a set of texts that supply Nicene orthodoxy with abundant biblical proof-texts and lines of theological argumentation. These maximally Nicene writings in Augustine’s corpus helped secure the eventual triumph of Nicene orthodoxy.

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Background To The Debate

In the background of this debate is the Nicene opposition to Arianism and the anti-Nicene response to the Council. Arianism emerged from but is not synonymous with the views of the presbyter Arius (250–336). Even Augustine in his writings distinguishes between the views of Arius and later Arians.1 Arius, a presbyter in Alexandria, began publicly opposing his bishop’s teaching that the Son of God was unbegotten and eternal like the Father.2 Arius taught that the Father is uniquely divine and that the Son, a created being, has a derivative and subordinate nature capable of suffering, unlike the uncreated Father. Arius’s theology logically entailed different natures between Father and Son.

In Augustine’...