2. Arius

1. the necessity of heresy

‘Theology needs its Ariuses’ – today we look at Arius – often called the archheretic…. Reminded that in the history of Christian thinking about God, it has often been the heretics who have asked the right questions, who have forced the clarification of fluffy thinking. The heretical problem has not often been merely saying the wrong thing in the first instance; but saying too much, or of simplifying the truth for easier digestion such that the truth itself disappears. And we should not then at this stage forget exactly what is at stake: what Bishop Allison has called the ‘cruelty of heresy’ – that distorting the truth is not just a matter of not crossing the theological Ts and dotting the theological Is, but rather is something that has devastating spiritual and pastoral consequences for ordinary believers such as ourselves. It is no paltry matter to get this business right.

Remember: heretics don’t set out to be heretics… The heretics for the most part genuinely believed they were teaching orthodoxy and that they could establish the biblical grounds for their teaching.
Even calling them heretics is done with the benefit of hindsight. But that doesn’t diminish the seriousness of correct sight.

2. The mysteriousness of God
The mystery of God is a fundamental truth about the Christian God; like Judaism, Christianity is utterly and stubbornly monotheistic. God does NOT exist as part of the world he created, but rather has his existence apart from it. There is no-one equal to God; and he is beyond the human mind as he is beyond our eye. His invisibility is a kind of un-symbol of his unknowability. “No-one has ever seen God” says John. “O the mystery …’ says Paul. 1 Cor 2:1 – Paul calls his gospel the mystery of God; he is a steward of God’s mysteries in 1 Cor 4:1 God is eternal, the world is not. God is uncreated, the world and we are not. At the same time, Christianity claims that in Jesus Christ, God has decisively and completely and effectively revealed himself: No-one has ever seen God, yes, but God the one and only Son who is at the father’s side, he has made him known.’ ‘In him, the fullness of the deity dwelt bodily’.

But what did this mean? How could we make sense of this, or hold these two truths consistently? One Christian answer was modalism: God appears in three guises, wearing three hats.

In Alexandria, the city of the great library of the ancient world, this was not an intellectually respectable answer. In the pagan world – polytheism vs Platonism.
So Christian theologians had tried to find a way around the difficulty of having an eternal God become incarnate as a man and take on body and experience time. One way: creation is not eternal/and Christ is not eternal. Origen: creation is eternal and Christ is eternal. – ie, Christian confusion.

3. Enter Arius (c.256 – 336)
Around 319 AD Arius, and Alexandrian rector, published his teaching that Christ is neither truly God nor perfectly man. Rather he embodied a divine principle by means of being divinely inspired (as we see in some episodes in the gospel). This seemed a neat way out of the bind - combining the concerns of pure monotheism with a way of claiming still something divine for Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was then an intermediate deity between God and humanity.

The Bible talked of Father and Son – If God was Father in essence, literally a Father, then he must be superior and pre-exist the Son, because that’s what Fathers are by definition. Since there ‘was when he was not’, Arius though that this Son was in some way a creature – a superior creature to the rest, granted - but not eternal.

Arius – popular, gained a following. Though expelled from the local synod in 321, he continued as a missionary for his theology. The rest of the 4th century was a battle in the church over his teaching and teachings that resembled it. The crunch question: how was the order between the Father and the Son to be expressed? How was their relationship to be described? And what was at stake?

4. The attraction of Arianism
3 things made Arianism attractive:
a) it preserved the mystery and the distance and the glory and the transcendence of God. God was not then sullied by his interaction with the creation, he was kept utterly pure.

b) Arianism seemed to have the support of a number of biblical texts AND to able to synthesise them with the philosophy of the day. It was an intellectually respectable option for its time, and preached with sophistication.

c) it gave an account of Jesus Christ which made him highly exalted, but focused on the way in which he had earnt this bestowal of divine favour and glory.

5. Athanasius, Nicea and Orthodoxy
The rise of Arianism was the making of the career of one of the the great advocates for orthodoxy: Athanasius. His turbulent life (he was exiled 7 times) was evidence that this debate aroused great passions, and that it was not easy to resolve. In 325 at the council of Nicea, the term homoousios was adopted as the word that best expressed the way in which the Father and the Son ought to be thought of in their unity: they shared ‘the same substance’ though they were not the same persons, or hypostases. They were divine in their sharing of substance. The Son was not created then, there was not when he was not, indeed: but the Son was begotten by the Father. (see the nicene creed).

This was not the end of the matter at all: over the next few decades, people tried to sneak Arian ideas back in, suggesting that the Son had ‘like substance’ with the Father, for example.

Athanasius’s gift was that he could see exactly what was at stake: he recognised what was being lost in the Arian way of putting things. His passion was for human souls, and for their salvation, primarily. So this was not an abstract debate for him: he could see that salvation itself was what mattered.

Four things:
1) God is mystery, but God reveals himself, in Christ Jesus.
2) God reveals himself in Jesus to truly save. If you took the Arian seriously, what account could you give of the salvation of human people? (see quote)..Athanasius once said ‘God became man in order that we might become God’ – that is, that we might share in the life of God himself, God become one of us. (see 1 John 3:2 - ‘we shall be like him’). If Christ was not fully God, how could we ever be assured of God’s saving of us? How could we ever know God in a saving way?
3) God dies for us on the cross. Athanasius could also see that the cross itself does not work if you describe it Arian terms. If on the cross we have a lesser God then how we can not say that there we see nothing but divine child abuse, a torturing of the innocent Son by his commanding Father? Rather, if we understand the cross according to orthodox teaching, then we will understand that the victim was a willing participant in the salvation of the world in his own death. The Son submitted, but did so from a position of free equality with the Father.
4) The love of Christ is truly God’s love. This has huge pastoral ramifications of course, but also practical ones: because here in the submission of the Son to the Father without a loss of equality of being or dignity we see in essence the nature of Christian love. [See Allison quote] The love that Christ expressed on the cross was divine love: and it is the love we are called to echo in our relations too.

Athanasius was a curmudgeonly genius: perhaps we ought to say, that much as we ‘need’ our Ariuses, those who will ask the right questions, we also need our Athanasiuses: those who will remind us that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself; and that in Christ we truly and fully have the eternal God.

6. Arianism Today?
Is there an Arianism today? Certainly you will find actual Arians in the Jehovah’s Witness movement claiming that Christ is a second ranked deity.

But the more tempting and dangerous Arianism is the Arianism of our apparently orthodox Christianity.

Arianism was and is a theology which is built up around one's own experience of the invisibilty and intangibility of God. We long indeed for God to be close and evident, to have him tangible in the way we would like to have him tangible; to be able to identify the hot breath of the Spirit on our faces, to feel, really feel the closeness of God in the instances in which we live.

The tangibility that God offers us - his entry into our world is rather disappointing in comparison to this. God the only begotten Son has made him known, walking among us for a short stretch some time ago now. However much the witnesses to him say they are passing on to us that which they have seen with their eyes and touched with their hands, it seems a long way removed from us. It is easy to stare at the flat page of the Bible, to sit through the dull sermon and the uninspired singing, to pray prayers into a remorseless ceiling, and fail to be convinced that God really is with us and active to save.

Arianism is a counsel of despair, then. It keeps the eternal God at an arms length, because he sure feels like he is at arms length. We even create dogmas that convince us that this is true: that because we feel it to be the case, it ought to be the case. Deity could not and would not live among us - it would be a travesty if it did so. We cannot be so arrogant as to claim to have true knowledge, of a personal kind, of the divinity himself. We can only gaze at this Christ, this bridge built - yes made - across the chasm between us and the true God, which we have to steel ourselves to somehow step onto, not ever assured than when we set out on the journey we have stepped into the heart of God himself.

It is despairing: but it is also, attractively, a way to remove the suggestion that God is uncomfortably near - that he is breathing down our necks. It is frightening to think that, if the true God is really among us in Jesus Christ, then the consequences of mistreating his manifestations will be extremely grave. It is frightening to think that the person next me in the pew, whom I have ignored these long years and even secretly despised, actually has life in God himself. It is worrisome to consider that that church that I helped to divide is not only the body of Christ, but that the body of Christ is itself included in God.

In fact, the ethics of the New Testament is a rebuke to us in this. When ever Paul speaks of the Christian life and our acts of love for one another, he speaks of them as being the work of God in us. He calls us the temple of the Holy Spirit because in us God himself lives. We can live and move secure in the knowledge that our lives are hid with God in Christ - that in Christ we enter into the highest place itself. We can know as temporal beings whose bodies decay and melt away that we do have a more long term future, because we are bound with Christ into the eternal God himself. We can know that, though God himself is unknowable and transcendent and remote from us, he – and it really IS him - has come near to us in Jesus Christ.

We need our Athanasiuses

The rejection of Arianism may have made Christian language more complex; but at least it has militated against an intellectual complacency in the face of the unsettling effects of the gospel…Theology continues to need its Ariuses. – Rowan Williams, 1983


Athanasius’s gift was that he could see exactly what was at stake: he recognised what was being lost in the Arian way of putting things. His passion was for human souls, and for their salvation, primarily. So this was not an abstract debate for him: he could see that salvation itself was what mattered.

Four things:
1) God is mystery, but God reveals himself, in Christ Jesus. The unknowability of God is no longer simply inaccessible. As Williams says, 'there is no overplus of 'unengaged' and inexpressible reality, nothing that is not realized in and as relationship, in God'. In Jesus we are given God, not merely a piece of him. If we are to hold God as mysterious and respond in awe and wonder and speechlessness, it is to be from our worship and thankfulnes: a kind of visceral negative theology, far from the rational negativity of Arius.

2) God reveals himself in Jesus to truly save. If you took the Arian seriously, what account could you give of the salvation of human people? (see quote)..Athanasius once said ‘God became man in order that we might become God’ – that is, that we might share in the life of God himself, God become one of us. (see 1 John 3:2 - ‘we shall be like him’). If Christ was not fully God, how could we ever be assured of God’s saving of us? How could we ever know God in a saving way?

3) God dies for us on the cross. Athanasius could also see that the cross itself does not work if you describe it Arian terms. If on the cross we have a lesser God then how we can not say that there we see nothing but divine child abuse, a torturing of the innocent Son by his commanding Father? Rather, if we understand the cross according to orthodox teaching, then we will understand that the victim was a willing participant in the salvation of the world in his own death. The Son submitted, but did so from a position of free equality with the Father.

4) The love of Christ is truly God’s love. This has huge pastoral ramifications of course, but also practical ones: because here in the submission of the Son to the Father without a loss of equality of being or dignity we see in essence the nature of Christian love. [See Allison quote] The love that Christ expressed on the cross was divine love: and it is the love we are called to echo in our relations too.

Athanasius was a curmudgeonly genius: perhaps we ought to say, that much as we ‘need’ our Ariuses, those who will ask the right questions, we also need our Athanasiuses: those who will remind us that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself; and that in Christ we truly and fully have the eternal God.

The attractions of Arianism

What made Arianism so attractive, and might make it so in its modern versions?

Arianism can be exegetically convincing; and certainly, it was consistent to the form of rationality that pervaded in its own time.

But more than this: Arianism was and is a theology which is built up around one's own experience of the invisibilty and intangibility of God. We long indeed for God to be close and evident, to have him tangible in the way we would like to have him tangible; to be able to identify the hot breath of the Spirit on our faces, to feel, really feel the closeness of God in the instances in which we live.

The tangibility that God offers us - his entry into our world is rather disappointing in comparison to this. God the only begotten Son has made him known, walking among us for a short stretch some time ago now. However much the witnesses to him say they are passing on to us that which they have seen with their eyes and touched with their hands, it seems a long way removed from us. It is easy to stare at the flat page of the Bible, to sit through the dull sermon and the uninspired singing, to pray prayers into a remorseless ceiling, and fail to be convinced that God really is with us and active to save.

Arianism is a counsel of despair, then. It keeps the eternal God at an arms length, because he sure feels like he is at arms length. We even create dogmas that convince us that this is true: that because we feel it to be the case, it ought to be the case. Deity could not and would not live among us - it would be a travesty if it did so. We cannot be so arrogant as to claim to have true knowledge, of a personal kind, of the divinity himself. We can only gaze at this Christ, this bridge built - yes made - across the chasm between us and the true God, which we have to steel ourselves to somehow step onto, not ever assured than when we set out on the journey we have stepped into the heart of God himself.

It is despairing: but it is also, attractively, a way to remove the suggestion that God is uncomfortably near - that he is breathing down our necks. It is frightening to think that, if the true God is really among us in Jesus Christ, then the consequences of mistreating his manifestations will be extremely grave. It is frightening to think that the person next me in the pew, whom I have ignored these long years and even secretly despised, actually has life in God himself. It is worrisome to consider that that church that I helped to divide is not only the body of Christ, but that the body of Christ is itself included in God.

[thanks to Kosta Milkov!]

Rowan Williams on Arius

I have heard Arius labelled a 'biblicist' in the past, and his case as evidence that exegesis will never decide anything. I have also heard the opposite: that here was a rationalist par excellence, determined to squash biblical material into his Middle Platonist framework.

Rowan Williams writes:
One thing which should be noted immediately is that none of this exegetical material, as described or implicitly characterized by Arius' enemies, really supports the idea that Arius was a 'literalist'. It is not literalism to take the Psalms as spoken in persona Christi or to identify the 'Wisdom' of the OT with Christ...Athanasius' objection to Arius' exegesis is not that it is negligent of a 'spiritual sense', that it is 'Judaizing' in character, but that it is arbitrary...

As Williams goes on to explain, Arius was aiming to be both biblically based AND rationally consistent. That is why he and Athanasius went toe-to-toe on exegetical matters; and in the end, perhaps it was a hermeneutical method that seperated them...

Necessary Heresy 2: Arius, or, do we really know God?

Arius is perhaps the most famous heretic of them all - not the least because of his formidible opponent, Athanasius! I belong to an Anglican diocese that has been accused of Arianism: of subordinating the Son to the Father. As always, a terminological difference is part of the problem, I think. I would be ready to drop the word 'subordinate' in exchange for 'ordered' so as to indicate to all that I believe the Son is vere Deus, vere homo... Of course one of the ugliest dynamics of being called a heretic, is that when you are called so by the vituperative and quote-twisting kind of person we were called it by, you start to believe that the heresy must be orthodox. It does your head in! (Of course, as Williams shows, it is doubtful if Arius himself was actual Arian, but never mind that...)

G.L.Prestige writes:

Christianity and monotheism alike were imperilled by the Arian attack on Athanasius and the doctrine of the Trinity; for if Christ were not truly God, salvation through His cross remained a purely human, subjective and imperfectly realised aspiration; and if He were in the strict sense a 'second God' - as certain even among those of substantial orthodoxy somewhat loosely called Him - then there was an end to all faith in one controlling ruler of the universe and one undivided object of worshipful devotion.' p. 76

The stakes are very high on this one.

Arius was incapable of uttering an apparent contradiction and revolted from the supposition that vast, intricate problems might present more than one aspect. His two-dimensional mind regarded the divine mystery of revelation in the flat, foreshortened, without depth or background, like a diagram in Euclid...

For heresy, rationalistic short-cuts are almost always the downfall. As Athanasius clarified it:

If you contemplate the Father, who is one distinct presentation of the deity, you obtain a mental view of the one true God. If you contemplate the Son or the Spirit, you obtain a view of the same God; though the presenation is different, the reality is identical. p. 89

But what was the peculiar attraction of Arianism?