Theopedia

Eusebius

Overview

Eusebius of Caesarea was a fourth-century bishop of Caesarea in Palestine and an influential participant in the controversy over Arius’s teaching, opposing Arius but “not so strongly as Athanasius.”1 He is remembered chiefly as the author of the Ecclesiastical History, the first sustained narrative history of the Christian church from the apostles to his own day.1

Life and Ministry

Eusebius served as bishop of Caesarea in the early fourth century and was among the roughly 220 to 300 bishops who assembled at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, called by the emperor Constantine to settle the dispute Arius’s teaching had provoked over the relationship between the Father and the Son.2 The council produced a creed, signed by nearly all the bishops present, stating that the Son is “of the same substance with the Father,” a phrase directed against Arius’s claim that the Son was made from nothing rather than sharing the Father’s own being.3

Theological Contribution

Eusebius’s own theological sympathies lay closer to the side of the controversy that resisted framing the Father-Son relationship in terms of shared substance. Craig Carter places him, alongside Arius, Asterius, and Eunomius, among the fourth-century figures who treated the question primarily as a matter of the Father’s will rather than of one shared being, over against Athanasius, the Cappadocian fathers, and Augustine.4 This puts him on the side Nicaea’s own creed was written to exclude, even though he was present at the council.

His theological work is historical and exegetical rather than polemical. The Ecclesiastical History traces the church’s own story from the apostles to Eusebius’s own time and became the primary source later generations depended on for the church’s first three centuries, including material that would otherwise not have survived at all.1 He also wrote biblical commentary: expounding Isaiah’s vision of the LORD “high and lifted up” (Isa. 6:1), Eusebius reads the prophet as seeing Christ’s own pre-incarnate glory:

“The prophet then, seeing our Savior sitting on his Father’s throne in the divine and glorious kingdom, and moved by the Holy Spirit and being about to describe next his coming among humanity and his birth of a Virgin, foretells that his knowledge and praise would be revealed throughout the whole world.”5

Historical Significance

Eusebius’s presence and signature at Nicaea, despite theological sympathies that ran the other way, illustrates how unsettled the fourth-century controversy still was even at the moment of its own creed: the council did not end the Arian controversy, which continued to be argued for decades afterward.6

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Ronald E. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine: Introducing the Essentials of the Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), 68. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine, 73. ↩

  3. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine, 74. ↩

  4. Craig A. Carter, Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 7, “The Biblical Character of Pro-Nicene Theology.” ↩

  5. Eusebius of Caesarea, Commentary on Isaiah, quoted in Samuel G. Parkison, “Irresistible Beauty: Beholding Triune Glory in the Face of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2021), 236-37. ↩

  6. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine, 75. ↩