Re: Do all Christians believe Jesus is God and or God's Son
Please correct me if I'm wrong in my understanding of nicence creed:
For millenia, through the messengers and prophets that He sent, God taught humans that God is ONE and then he also sent Jesus (pbuh), but after Jesus (pbuh) ascencion, 300+ years later, God is suddenly not ONE, but THREE in ONE.
God is and has always been Trinity, one in essence and undivided. The truth of the Trinity was only revealed in shadows and hints in the Old Testament- God only revealed it fully with the incarnation of the Son. The first full revelation of it was when Christ was baptized in the Jordan, and the voice of the Father was heard, and the Holy spirit descended upon the Son in the form of a dove.
The creed proclaimed by the Holy Fathers of Nicaea did not create any new doctrine but only confirmed in writing what had been taught by Christ and his apostles. For the first centuries of the Church most Christian doctrine remained unwritten, being passed by oral tradition, and was only later written down. The New Testament itself took a long time to be solidified and collected into one volume, and there was not full agreement as to exactly which books should be included. For example, there are some books such as the Shepherd of Hermas and the didache which were considered scripture by some Fathers but which did not end up in the final NT, though they are still considered profitable reading.
(On a side note, some secularists have recently claimed (e.g. Dan Brown in "The Da Vinci Code") that the New Testament canon was decided at Nicaea; in reality, the New Testament canon was not even an item on the agenda. The main goals of this council were: 1. Deciding the question of Arianism; 2. Resolving the calculation for Pascha. All parties involved already agreed on which books were scripture.)
The New Testament scriptures are the first parts of our tradition to be written down; later, in the face of heresies and misunderstandings, the Christian faith was further clarified in writing, through the works of the Holy Fathers, the creeds, the canons, and, perhaps most importantly, the hymns of the church. Many of our great theologians were also great hymnographers, and often the best expressions of Orthodox Christian belief are found in our hymns.
A beautiful ancient hymn, sung in every Orthodox liturgy, which is almost like a second creed, is the "Only-begotten Son":
Only-begotten Son and immortal Word of God, who for our salvation willed to be incarnate of the Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, who without change became man, and were crucified, O Christ our God, trampling down death by death, who are one of the Holy Trinity, glorified with the Father and the Holy Spirit- save us.
Christianity was never simply a "book" religion, though this is what some Protestant reformers have attempted to make of it. Christian teaching was always drawn from a combination of scripture and tradition. The fathomless depths of scripture could never be interpreted in isolation or solely through the application of human reason, but with the guidance of bishops, elders, and other teachers, the Church as a whole, and ultimately the Holy Spirit. In the dark period of Soviet atheism which produced so many martyrs, it was often illiterate grandmothers who were the best guardians of the faith, when priests and bishops could not act or even betrayed the Church, and this illustrates well the power of Tradition in God's Church.
A final point: Christ went to his death
voluntarily, though not without the very human aversion to death. So he says to the Father, in the garden: "If it be your will, let this cup pass from me. But not my will, but yours be done." So, while he had the natural fear of death in his human nature, he overcame it by his submission to the Father and gave us all an example of bowing to the will of God. So he ascended the cross willingly and accomplished the greatest act of love in history. Glory to God.
I am not making things up. I was just misunderstood.