Religion Fact of the Day

Belief in the Trinity as most Christians currently know it was not always so clear cut. Arius was a Christian pries in Egypt in the late 3rd/early 4th centuries. He stirred up a lot of controversy by claiming that Jesus did not exist from the beginning with God, but was created later and by implication less than the Father. Athanasius was the major opponent of Arianism as it became called. The Council of Nicaea in 325 was an attempt to resolve this dispute, but the wording of the Nicene Creed, specifically the word homoousios ("same essence"), only served to inflame the conflict. It wasn't until 381 when the creed was rewritten that the dispute was settled with Arianism losing out.