First Council of Constantinople

“But when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me.”

— John 15:26

The First Council of Constantinople was the second ecumenical council, convened by Emperor Theodosius I and meeting at Constantinople in AD 381 with roughly 150 bishops present.¹ ² It completed the work the First Council of Nicaea had left unfinished fifty-six years earlier: where Nicaea’s creed had affirmed the Holy Spirit in a single bare clause, this council expanded that clause to confess the Spirit’s full deity against Macedonius and his followers, and it confirmed the church’s rejection of Apollinaris, who had denied that Christ possessed a complete human nature.³ ⁴

Confessional Witness

The Second Helvetic Confession names this council directly, receiving its creed alongside those of Nicaea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon as a faithful summary of “whatever things are defined from the Holy Scriptures concerning the mystery of the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.”⁵ The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession does not name Constantinople, but it states the same doctrine on both fronts the council defended: the Spirit is one of “three subsistences, the Father, the Word or Son, and Holy Spirit, of one substance, power, and eternity, each having the whole divine essence,”⁶ and Christ’s “two whole, perfect, and distinct natures,” divine and human, “were inseparably joined together in one person, without conversion, composition, or confusion.”⁷ A doctrine an ecumenical council settled in the fourth century and a Reformed Baptist confession restates in the seventeenth is the wider church’s shared inheritance, not a distinctively Baptist position.

Historical Development

The unfinished business of Nicaea

The Council of Nicaea in 325 had settled the Son’s full deity against Arius, but the Nicene Creed it produced disposed of the Holy Spirit in four bare words, “And in the Holy Spirit,” with no further elaboration.⁸ Charles Hodge calls this “the great deficiency in the Nicene Creed,” explained by the fact that “the doctrine concerning the Son… was then the absorbing subject of controversy,” leaving the Spirit’s own status largely unaddressed for a generation.⁸ Some of the disciples of Macedonius, bishop of Constantinople from 341 to 360, went on to teach that the Holy Spirit “was not Supreme God,” a position later called Pneumatomachian (“Spirit-fighting”).⁹ Provincial councils at Alexandria (362) and Rome (375) asserted the Spirit’s consubstantiality with the Father and the Son, but neither settled the wider controversy, and it was opposition to Macedonius’s teaching that led to the calling of a second ecumenical council.⁸ Even among the orthodox, the question remained genuinely unsettled up to the eve of the council: Gregory of Nazianzus remarked that a person could still be considered orthodox “if he were only slightly in error about the Holy Spirit.”³

The council and its condemnations

Theodosius I convened the council at Constantinople in 381 to condemn Macedonius’s doctrine.¹ Its surviving synodical letter, written the following year, states the settled faith in terms that answer both the Pneumatomachian controversy over the Spirit and the Apollinarian controversy over Christ’s human nature in a single breath:

According to this faith there is one Godhead, Power and Substance of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost… in three perfect hypostases, i.e., three perfect persons. Thus there is no room for the heresy of Sabellius by the confusion of the hypostases… thus the blasphemy of the Eunomians, of the Arians, and of the Pneumatomachi is nullified, which divides the substance, the nature, and the godhead, and superinduces on the uncreated consubstantial and co-eternal Trinity a nature posterior, created and of a different substance. We moreover preserve unperverted the doctrine of the incarnation of the Lord, holding the tradition that the dispensation of the flesh is neither soulless nor mindless nor imperfect; and knowing full well that God’s Word was perfect before the ages, and became perfect man in the last days for our salvation.¹⁰

Alongside the Pneumatomachi, the council’s condemnation reached Eunomius, whose extreme Arian subordinationism had denied the Son’s consubstantiality even more sharply than Arius himself,¹¹ and it confirmed the rejection of Apollinaris, “a distinguished bishop of Laodicea”¹² who had taught that the divine Logos itself supplied Christ’s rational mind in place of a genuinely human one. Charles Hodge writes that “the conviction of the Church was so strong that Christ was a perfect man, possessing within Himself all the elements of our nature, that the Apollinarian doctrine was condemned in the general council held in Constantinople, A.D. 381, and soon disappeared.”⁴ Berkhof adds that Apollinaris, in making the Logos replace the human “spirit” in Christ, “did so at the expense of the complete humanity of the Saviour.”¹³ The council’s own synodical letter answers that cost directly, insisting Christ’s human “dispensation of the flesh is neither soulless nor mindless nor imperfect.”¹⁰

To settle the Pneumatomachian question, the council expanded Nicaea’s bare reference to the Spirit into the fuller clause still confessed today: “the Lord and giver of life, who proceedeth from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets.”⁸ A. A. Hodge cautions that, although this expanded wording is universally attributed to the council, “there is no evidence that the changes were made by the Council of Constantinople” itself, as opposed to circulating already in formularies proposed by individual theologians before 381; what is certain is that they were in place by that date and were later “recognized by the Council of Chalcedon, A.D. 451.”¹⁴

A canon on ecclesiastical precedence

Beyond doctrine, the council also decreed that the bishop of Constantinople should take precedence immediately after the bishop of Rome, “because it was a new Rome.”¹⁵ The decision would outlast the council’s own generation: when the Council of Chalcedon made a similar decree seventy years later, Pope Leo I protested it sharply, and the disagreement over Constantinople’s standing relative to Rome’s remained a live source of friction between the Eastern and Western churches for centuries afterward.¹⁵

Opposing Views

Rome’s later objection to the council’s own precedence canon. Leo I’s protest against the Chalcedonian repetition of this council’s ecclesiastical ranking treated Nicaea’s original ordering of sees as permanently fixed. Calvin’s own verdict was that this was ambition rather than principle: “it is the dictate of common sense, that the decree was one of those which might be abrogated, in respect of a change of times,” and no Eastern bishop whose own see’s standing was affected raised the objection Leo did.¹⁵ Doctrinally, both Rome and the East received this council’s creed without dispute; the disagreement was confined to church order.

The Filioque controversy. The Latin church later added “and the Son,” the Filioque Clause, to this council’s own wording on the Spirit’s procession from the Father, a change Charles Hodge names as “one of the causes which led to the separation of the Eastern and Western Churches.”⁸

Objections and Responses

If, as A. A. Hodge concedes, there is no clear evidence the council itself drafted the expanded wording on the Holy Spirit, is calling this the “Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed” simply a mistaken tradition? Hodge’s caution concerns authorship of the specific phrasing, not whether the council settled the doctrine: the changes “were unquestionably made about that date,” and whatever committee or individual first framed the words, the ecumenical council that met at Constantinople in 381 is what gave them binding conciliar force, a status the Council of Chalcedon formally recognized seventy years later regardless of the earlier drafting history.¹⁴

Gregory of Nazianzus could still call a person orthodox while “only slightly in error about the Holy Spirit” on the eve of this council. Doesn’t that show the question wasn’t settled enough to need a whole ecumenical council? Gregory’s remark describes the state of opinion before 381, not the council’s own verdict. The fifty-six years between Nicaea and Constantinople were exactly the interval in which the question moved from unaddressed to urgent, as Macedonius’s followers pressed an explicit denial of the Spirit’s deity that Nicaea’s single clause had never been written to answer.⁸ The council’s synodical letter itself states the settled result in unambiguous terms, naming the Pneumatomachi’s position a “blasphemy” alongside the Eunomians and Arians rather than a tolerable variation.¹⁰

Related Doctrines

References

Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 7, “Creeds and Confessions,” 116. ↩ ↩²
Steven Tshombe Godet, “John Gill: Patristic Scholar,” in “The Trinitarian Theology of John Gill (1697-1771): Context, Sources, and Controversy” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015), 153, citing Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 42, Final Farewell: Delivered in the Presence of the 150 Bishops. ↩
Ronald E. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine: Introducing the Essentials of the Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), chap. 9, “And in the Holy Spirit,” 90-92. ↩ ↩²
Hodge, “Chapter III. Person of Christ,” 399. ↩ ↩²
The Second Helvetic Confession (1566), chap. 11, “Of the True Faith,” under “The Creeds of Four Councils Received.” ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 3. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 2. ↩
Charles Hodge, “Chapter VI. The Trinity,” in Systematic Theology, Volume I (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 452-453. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 9, “Holy Trinity,” 174. ↩
Darron Thomas Chapman, “Formulations of the Concept of Person Prior to Boethius,” in “The Concept of Person in Christian Theology: An Exposition and Defense of a Classical Boethian/Thomistic Definition of Person” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2026), 68-69. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Craig A. Carter, “The Biblical Character of Pro-Nicene Theology,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 7. ↩
Charles Hodge, “Chapter III. Person of Christ,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 398. ↩
Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 290-291. ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 7, “Creeds and Confessions,” 116-117. ↩ ↩²
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 4, chap. 7, para. 15, 376-377. ↩ ↩² ↩³