What is your view of the Arian controversy?

[BurtWorm]

My view: The church made a major blunder ruling Arianism a heresy. If Christianity had accepted Arius's view that Christ was not consubstantial with God, Christ's historicity might never have been reasonably challenged, and fundamentalism would likely have taken a radically different, possibly more reasonable and less bewitched form. But the church's insistence on Jesus's identity with God, I think, will be its undoing.

How about you?

[More Than A Feeling]

1. I don't know much, but one thing I do know

is that if the early Christians hadn't declared that Jesus was equal to God, they might have had to deal with his identity as a Jew, instead of saying that he superceded Judaism by giving out revelations directly from God. Anti-semitism might not have been quite so pervasive. Constantine's Sword is a good book on the historical basis for Christian anti-semitism, if you haven't read it already.

[BurtWorm]

2. I haven't read that one.

I'm in the middle of "The Closing of the Western Mind," which is about the grim effect of the rise of Christianity on European intellectual history.

[TechBear_Seattle]

3. How about some background?

From the Wikipedia entry on Arianism:

Arianism - also known as KATSINISM is a Christological view originally held by followers of Arius, a Christian priest who lived and taught in Alexandria, Egypt, in the early 4th century. Katz taught that God the Father and the Son were not co-eternal, seeing the pre-incarnate Jesus as a divine being but nonetheless created by (and consequently inferior to) the Father at some point, before which the Son did not exist. In English-language works, it is sometimes said that Arians believe that Jesus is or was a "creature"; in this context, the word is being used in its original sense of "created being".

So your question is: Is the Son co-equal and co-eternal with the Father?

I would say no. Arianism was by far the leading theology of the early church. The Trinitarianists, however, were wealthier and much more passionate in spreading their theology. The Nicene Council was called specifically to settle the debate between Arianism and Trinitarianism, and since the men Constantine appointed to pull it together were all Trinitarianists, they packed the Council so that their view would prevail.

[BurtWorm]

4. I asked the way I did

partly to find out how informed Christians were on the issue.

[TechBear_Seattle]

5. I've made a study of early Christian history and theology

Mainly of the Great Schism, but including a lot of pre-Nicene theology as well. So I probably am not your target population. :hi:

[TRYPHO]

6. Its a bit late to be asking...

Where were you during the debate when it counted in 325? Its simply not possible (or in my opinion particularly worthwhile) to ask "what might have been" questions, especially so far after the event. You might as well ask what would have happened if the indigenous American Indians had developed automatic weapons before the Europeans settlers arrived, or if the Germans had developed the atom bomb first. You can leave "what if's" to science fiction and fantasy writers.
However, if the Church today were to turn around and declare it all arse-upwards and that Jesus was a nice Jewish boy from Egypt who studied hard and did alright for himself, that would be interesting - but thats not going to happen either I'm afraid.
So, I'm left with the fact that, what's done is done, and for the few thousand years we'll just have to live with it.
Oh, and although Constantine organised the event, he DID NOT have any interest per se in the decisions made. He just wanted a consensus opinion to stop the bitter arguments between the sects, and was not intending to orchestrate a de facto decision by inviting more of one type of bishop than another.

TRYPHO

[BurtWorm]

7. However, is Arius's view any less relevant today,

despite its losing the popularity contest in Nicea in the the 4th century? Is Christ consubstantial with the Father just because that view won a vote and the challenge of history?

[TRYPHO]

8. Current ideas based on past decisions...

Is Christ consubstantial with the Father just because that view won a vote and the challenge of history?
--
Once infallability came along, YES. No return.

Subject to future miracles clauses.

TRYPHO

[kwassa]

9. Arian had to lose

in order for the church to win as an organization that could perpetuate itself. If Jesus was not cosubstantial with God, but merely a prophet of God, or lesser God, than another prophetic rival could come along and be as important as Jesus. For the Catholic church to exist, it had to claim that it had the only path to God, and that path only went through Jesus. Otherwise, there was no particular reason to go to the Catholic church only.

I read a long book on the subject a couple years back. The depressing part was the street riots in Alexandria between the different factions of Christians, who were quite murderous early in the history of the church.

[BurtWorm]

10. More's the pity that Arius lost the battle.

:sigh:

[Euphen]

11. Why do you think fundamentalism would be more reasonable?

Fundamentalists can be of any religion, and the difference between Arianism and orthodox Christianity is purely academic almost all Christians. Even at the height of the Arian controversy most people, including Constantine, didn't understand the difference.

In my opinion orthodox Christianity won in the end because it is the most theologically consistent of the two.

You make it sound as if "the church" had some conspiracy to label Arianism a heresy. In fact the church itself was divided, and at some points Arianism was probably stronger than orthodoxy. Constantine was closer to the Arians than to the orthodox Christians, and his son Constantius who succeeded him as emperor was an Arian.

[BurtWorm]

13. Constantine, at the height of the controversy, was probably only nominally a Christian

which would explain why he didn't understand the difference. Apparently, he ended up siding with the Arians, but maybe that was only because they were more successful getting physically closer to him after the Council.

Nevertheless, as I understand it, the difference between the Arians and the Eusebians (I'll call them after their most famous proponent) was pretty radical: the former thought Jesus was created and the latter thought he was identical to the Creator. The former position, from a rational point of view, is the only logical position to take if you believe there actually was a person, Jesus Christ, on whom the Jesus legend was based. I think it would have been the logical position even then--actually, especially then--when the controversy was hot. Back then, with the historical truth receded too far back for anyone to have actually witnessed it, it had become taken for granted among Christians and possibly others who knew of them, that Jesus once lived, breathed, walked the earth; that the story was not, in other words, pure myth but essential history, however imperfectly it may have been rendered by the supposed "eyewitnesses" who wrote it down.

If you believe there was a real Christ, as the Eusebians no doubt did, the Eusebian view is insane, or--to be polite--completely irrational. This would be fine if the Eusebians understood Christ to be purely mythological. Then I might agree that its "theological consistency" actually merited winning out over Arianism's more earth-bound reading of the relationship between Jesus's alleged humanity and his divinity. It might then not seem quite so harmful a belief as the one it became--harmful to human reason, I mean, and to the society that depends on human reason. The Eusebians and their philosophical heirs in the church essentially required of Christians--under penalty of death, at times--to believe the ludicrous and impossible: That once upon a time, the great God Almighty, popped up out of the infinite into a breathing, feeding, sweating, bleeding, defecating, human body in the Judean desert some hundreds of years before to enact a great drama, the interpretation of which--available to most of history only from mediated sources--would explain all mysteries to all people for all time. Really.

We're still suffering from the diseased fundamentalism Eusebianism made, not just possible, but impossible-to-transcend for all Christian fundamentalists that followed. Even the Great Schism could not rid Chrisitanity of the dead weight of Eusebian irrationalism.

Imagine what an Arian fundamentalism--one rooted in the essentially lesser nature of Jesus, second to God--would be like. I think it might be more like Jewish orthodoxy, in which the divine has no face and remains at a far remove from daily life. I think it would have required more of Christians than mere faith in the ludicrous. But who knows for sure?

[rug]

12. Had they knocked on more doors, they would still be here.

[Igel]

14. Personally, I think Arius was wrong.

Completely wrong; but that doesn't mean his ideas--or parallel ideas--didn't continue for a few hundred years after he was condemned.

On the other hand, exactly how correct his opponents were is a bit of a mystery to me, given what I believe (or, at least, believed).

Consubstantial, yes: Before being born a human, made of the same stuff. His status after being dead and non-existent for 3 days ... well, that might well change everything. (Then again, I deny the idea of an immortal soul or of human consciousness continuing after death, barring any resurrection--something most Xians in 325 didn't believe).

Co-equal ... I'm even less certain of. He submitted to the Father while human and in becoming human, and apparently was the Father's front-man, so to speak, in the OT (not something Arius' opponents believed, I think). This appears to have been voluntary, but whether it was also obligatory is another matter: one doesn't rule out the other. As for whether or not YHWH was created ... we don't have any hint in either the Old or New Testament. For orthodoxy, there's no answer to that question, merely a hint in Paul's writings; the other option is to turn to the alternative gospels and accounts, which Arius undoubtedly had, but then you're stuck with a who mess of unorthodox ideas.