Here's an interesting item from "Root and Branch."

Frank Warren


by Vic Thiessen

The year is 325. Bishop Alexander of Alexandria and his secretary Athanasius are having a serious argument with a local priest named Arius about whether Jesus was coeternal with God the Father. Our good friend Constantine gets tired of the squabbling and decides that bringing unity to the church would be one way to consolidate the empire (obviously he had no idea how challenging that might be). So he brings bishops and church leaders together for the Council of Nicaea to settle the arguments about Jesus once and for all. The arguments are not about whether Jesus was divine - both sides accepted the divinity of Jesus as a given - but about what it means to say that Jesus was divine and how that relates to his humanity and to the nature of God. Constantine himself makes the final decision about the wording of the creed, which states that Jesus is "God of God . begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father. Those who say that there was when He [the Son] was not, and that He was not before he was begotten, and that He was made out of nothing . that He was created, that He was changeable . such a person [e.g. Arius], let him be anathematized by the Catholic church."

So the Nicene Creed resulted in the immediate exile of Arius and his followers, but it was repudiated two years later and, for most of the next 55 years, it was the Christology of Arius which was the accepted view of the Empire and it was the adherents of the Creed who were exiled. In fact, the most ecumenical and representative council of the fourth century, the council of Rimini-Seleucia in 359, attended by 500 bishops from the east and west, adopted the Arian creed. It was only in 431, 106 years after the Nicene Creed was written, that the Nicene Creed became authoritative dogma. 

While it is not clear what role Athanasius played at the Council of Nicaea, we do know he became the Nicene Creed's leading defender through much of the fourth century (having become bishop of Alexandria in 328), and that he is known as the "Father of Orthodoxy". So let's take a closer look at the arguments between Athanasius and Arius (and Arius' followers - Arius died in 336). 

Athanasius believed that Jesus was God and had always been God, was preexistent with God and was not created but creator. Only as God (the same substance as God) could Jesus' sacrifice redeem humanity. Only as God could Jesus be worshipped. 

Arius, on the other hand, believed that Jesus was created by God as a human and grew in wisdom and virtue and obedience to God (Arians later added: to the point where God adopted Jesus as his son), who raised him from death and granted him divine status. Jesus is similar to God, as closely attuned to God's wishes as is possible for anyone other than God, but is not God, for how could God experience temptation, how could God grow in wisdom and virtue, how could God resurrect himself? If Jesus was God, then he wouldn't have called God his father and said "My Father is greater than I" or cried out "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Jesus was an intermediary between humans and God, raised high above the level of prophets by his moral genius and the importance of his mission, but he was not God. For Arius, this was the only way Jesus could be seen as a model for us to follow.
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