How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (45 page)

The controversy over Arius’s teachings broke out in 318
CE
.
⁴
We know about the dispute from a letter written in 324 by none other than the Roman emperor Constantine, who had converted to Christianity in the same year Arius was ordained (312
CE
) and who, in the years that followed, became increasingly committed to seeing that the Christian church should become unified, in no small measure because he saw the church as a potentially unifying force in his fragmented empire. By 324 the church was not at all unified, and much of the rancor and debate focused on the controversial teachings of Arius.

According to Constantine’s letter, Bishop Alexander had asked his priests for their opinions about the theology expressed in a particular passage in the Old Testament. Constantine does not indicate which passage this was, but scholars have plausibly argued that it was Proverbs 8, a text we have encountered on a number of occasions, in which Wisdom (whom Christians identified as Christ) is portrayed as speaking, indicating that she was a fellow worker with God in the beginning, at the time of creation.

Arius’s interpretation was one that may well have been acceptable in the theological climate of orthodox Christianity during the century or so before his day, but by the early fourth century it proved to be highly controversial. He, like other interpreters, understood the Wisdom of God to be the same as the Word of God and the Son of God—that is, the preexistent divine Christ who was with God at the beginning of the creation. But in Arius’s opinion, Christ had not always existed. He had come into existence at some point in the remote past before the creation. Originally, God had existed alone, and the Son of God came into existence only later. He was, after all, “begotten” by God, and that implied—to Arius and others who were like-minded—that before he was begotten, he did not yet exist. One further implication of this view is that God the Father had not always been the Father; instead, he
became
the Father only when he begot his Son.

In Arius’s view, everything except for God himself had a beginning. Only God is “without beginning.” And this means that Christ—the Word (Logos) of God—is not fully God in the way that God is. He was created in God’s own image by God himself; and so Christ bears the title God, but he is not the “true” God. Only God himself is. Christ’s divine nature was derived from the Father; he came into being at some point before the universe was made, and so he is a creation or creature of God. In short, Christ was a kind of second-tier God, subordinate to God and inferior to God in every respect.

As we have seen, Christological views such as this were not merely academic exercises but were connected at a deep level with Christian worship. For Arius and his followers it was indeed right to worship Christ. But was Christ to be worshiped as one who was on a par with God the Father? Their answer was clear and straightforward: absolutely not. It is the Father who is above all things, even the Son, by an infinite degree.

Bishop Alexander was not at all pleased with this response and considered such views heretical and dangerous. In the year 318 or 319 he deposed Arius from his position and excommunicated him along with about twenty other church leaders who were Arius’s supporters. As a group these exiles went to Palestine, and there they found several church leaders and theologians who were willing to support them in their cause, including a figure with whom we are already familiar: Eusebius of Caesarea.

Before explaining the alternative view embraced by Bishop Alexander, and describing the events that led up to the Council of Nicea that Emperor Constantine called to try to resolve these issues, I set forth Arius’s teachings in some of his own words. You may have noticed that we very rarely have the writings of the heretics themselves. In most instances we have to rely on what the orthodox opponents of heretics said, since the heretics’ own writings were generally destroyed. With Arius, we are in the happy position of having some of his own words, some of them in letters he wrote and others in a kind of poetic work he produced called the
Thalia.
Unfortunately, the actual text of the
Thalia
is not preserved for us in a surviving manuscript, but it is quoted by a very famous church father of Alexandria, Athanasius. And it appears that when Athanasius quotes these passages, he does so accurately. I present a few that show Arius’s particular views of Christ as not equal with God the Father but fully subservient to him:

           
[The Father] alone has neither equal nor like, none comparable in glory.

           
[The Son] has nothing proper to God in his essential property

           
For neither is he equal nor yet consubstantial with him.

           
There is a Trinity with glories not alike;

           
Their existences are unmixable with each other;

           
One is more glorious than another by an infinity of glories.

           
Thus the Son who was not, but existed at the paternal will,

           
Is only begotten God, and he is distinct from everything else.
⁵

Unlike the unbegotten Father, Christ, the Son of God, is the “begotten God.” He is greater than all else. But he is removed from the greatness of the Father by an “infinity of glories” and so is not “comparable in glory” to the Father.

In a letter defending his views to Bishop Alexander, Arius is even more explicit about his understanding of the relationship of God and Christ: “We know there is one God, the only unbegotten, only eternal, only without beginning, only true, who only has immortality. . . . Before everlasting ages he begot his unique Son, through whom he made the ages and all things. He begot him . . . a perfect creature of God, but not as one of the creatures—an offspring, but not as one of things begotten.”
⁶

And so, Arius maintained that there were three separate divine beings—which he calls by the technical name
hypostases
but which now, in this context, simply means something like “essential beings” or “persons.” The Father alone has existed forever. The Son was begotten by God before the world was created. But this means that he “is neither eternal nor coeternal . . . with the Father.” God is above, beyond, and greater than all things, including Christ.

W
E CONSIDER BRIEFLY THE
alternative view affirmed, with some vehemence, by Arius’s bishop Alexander, who was the head of the Alexandrian church during an eventful period, 313–328
CE
. He is best known for spearheading the ouster of Arius and his followers, not only from his own church of Alexandria but from communion with the orthodox communities throughout the Christian world.

We know of Alexander’s own Christological views from a letter he wrote to his namesake, Alexander the bishop of Constantinople, in which he complains, somewhat unfairly, of Arius and his colleagues because they allegedly “deny the divinity of our Savior and proclaim that he is equal to all humans” (
Letter of Alexander
, v.4).
⁷
This claim is exaggerated and not at all accurate: Arius affirmed Christ’s divinity and stated emphatically that Christ was superior to all humans. But when you’re in the midst of a hot argument, you don’t always present the other side fairly. For Alexander, if Christ came into existence at some point of time and was inferior to God the Father, then in both those respects he
was
like humans and not like God.

Later in the letter Alexander expresses Arius’s view more precisely when he says that Arius had declared “that there was a time when the Son of God did not exist” (
Letter of Alexander
, v.10). In response to this view, Alexander appeals to a passage in the New Testament, Hebrews 1:2, which says that it was through Christ that God “made the ages.” Alexander reasons that if Christ made the ages, then there could not be a time before which he existed, since he was the one who created time and age: “for it is also idiotic and full of every kind of ignorance to claim that the cause of something’s origin came to be after its beginning” (
Letter of Alexander
, v.23).

Moreover, Alexander wants to insist that God cannot change—since he is God—and this means that God could not “become” the Father; he must
always
have been the Father. But this in turn means that he must always have had a Son (
Letter of Alexander
, v.26). In addition, if Christ is God’s “image,” as scripture asserts (see Col. 1:15), then he must have always existed. For how could God exist if he didn’t have an image? Since God obviously always had to have an image, and since he always existed, then the image itself—that is, Christ—must have always existed (
Letter of Alexander
, v.27).

In sum, Alexander claims that Christ “is immutable and unchangeable like the Father, perfect Son lacking in nothing in resemblance to His Father, except for the fact that the Father is unbegotten. . . . We also believe that the Son has always existed out of the Father” (
Letter of Alexander
, v.47).

I
T MAY BE USEFUL
to explore the controversy between those who sided with Arius and those who sided with his bishop Alexander by giving, first, in brief, a broader historical context.

Since its inception, Christianity had periodically been persecuted by Roman authorities. For more than two hundred years, these persecutions were relatively infrequent and sporadic, and they were never promoted from the highest levels, the imperial government in Rome. That changed in 249
CE
, when the Roman emperor Decius sponsored an empirewide persecution to isolate and root out the Christians.
⁸
Fortunately for the Christians, Decius died two years later, and the persecution by and large ceased, for a brief time.

Some of the following emperors were also hostile to Christians, whose numbers were growing and whose presence was seen as a kind of cancerous growth threatening the well-being of the empire, which had been established for so many centuries on solid pagan principles. The so-called Great Persecution came with the emperor Diocletian, starting in 303. There were several phases to this persecution, as imperial decrees were passed that were designed, in part, to force Christians to renounce their faith and worship pagan gods.

Constantine the Great became emperor in the year 306. He was born and raised a pagan, but in 312 he had a conversion experience and committed himself to the Christian God and the Christian religion. Scholars have argued long and hard over whether this conversion was “genuine” or not, but today most maintain that it was indeed an authentic commitment on Constantine’s part to follow and promote the Christian God. The next year Constantine persuaded his co-emperor, Licinius, to issue a joint decree ending all persecution of Christians. From then on, things changed drastically for the Christian movement.

It is sometimes said—quite wrongly—that Constantine made Christianity the “official” religion of the empire. This is not at all the case. What Constantine did was to make Christianity a
favored
religion. He himself was a Christian, he promoted Christian causes, he gave money to build and finance Christian churches, and on the whole, it became a very good thing to be a Christian. The best scholarly estimates indicate that at about the time of Constantine’s conversion, something like 5 percent of the empire’s sixty million inhabitants called themselves Christian. When the church went from being a persecuted minority to being the hottest religious item in the empire, conversions increased dramatically. By the end of the century, something like 50 percent of the people in the empire were Christian.
⁹
Moreover, at that later point, under the emperor Theodosius I, Christianity did indeed become, for all intents and purposes, the “official” Roman religion. Pagan religious practices were outlawed. Conversions continued. All this led, ultimately, to Christianity being “the” religion of the West for centuries.

But back to Constantine. When I said that Constantine appears to have had a genuine conversion, I do not mean to say that he looked on the Christian faith from what we might call a purely “religious” perspective without a social or political element to it (I should stress that ancient people saw religion and politics so bound up together that they did not speak of them as different entities; there is actually no Greek word that corresponds to what we call “religion”). He was, above all else, the emperor of Rome, and no one at that time believed in what we today call the separation of church and state. Indeed, under all the preceding pagan emperors, there had very much been a sense of the unity of religious practice and state policy. During the reigns of all the earlier emperors it was believed that the pagan gods of Rome had made Rome great, and in response, the Roman rulers promoted the worship of the Roman gods. Constantine too saw the political value of religion. This does not mean that he did not really “believe” the Christian message, just that he also saw its social, cultural, and political utility. It was precisely this potential utility that upset Constantine when he learned that an enormous controversy was creating rifts in Christian communities. It all had to do with whether Christ was equal with God or was instead subordinate to him as a divine being who came into existence at some point in time.

Scholars have suggested several reasons why the emperor would have even the slightest interest in getting involved in these internal Christian debates. There can be no disputing the fact that he did so. A biography written by Eusebius of Caesarea,
The Life of the Blessed Emperor Constantine
, reproduces a letter Constantine sent to Arius and Alexander in which he tried to get them to see eye-to-eye on the theological issue dividing them. The letter suggests that Constantine understood Christianity as a potentially unifying force in his socially and culturally disunified empire. Looked at even from a disinterested point of view, Christianity could be seen as a religion that stresses unity and oneness. There is one God (not lots of gods). God has one Son. There is one way of salvation. There is only one truth. There is “one Lord, one faith, and one baptism” (Eph. 4:5). The creation is united with God, its creator; God is united with his Son; his Son is united with his people; and the salvation he brings makes his people united with God. The religion is all about oneness, unity.