How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee

CHAPTER 9

Ortho-Paradoxes on the Road to Nicea

AFTER I STOPPED BEING an evangelical Christian, I worshiped for years in liberal Christian churches. Most people in these congregations were not literalists: they did not think either that the Bible was literally true or that it was some kind of infallible revelation of the word of God. And even though they said the traditional Christian creeds as part of their worship services, many of these people did not believe what they said—as I learned from talking with them. Moreover, many people never gave a passing thought even to what the words meant or why they were in the creed in the first place. For example, the famous Nicene Creed begins with the words:

We believe in one God,

the Father, the Almighty,

maker of heaven and earth,

of all that is, seen and unseen.

In my experience, many Christians who say these words have no idea why they are there. Why, for example, would the creed stress that there is “one God”? People today either believe in God or they don’t. But who believes in two Gods? Why say there is only one? The reason has to do with the history behind the creed. It was originally formulated precisely against Christians who claimed there were two Gods, like the heretic Marcion; or twelve or thirty-six gods, like some of the Gnostics. And why say that God had made heaven and earth? Because lots of heretics claimed this world was not created by the true God at all, and the creed was designed to weed such people out of the church.

The creed especially has a lot to say about Christ.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ.

Again, why say there is one of him? How many could there be? Here, too, it is because Gnostic Christians were saying that Christ was several beings, or at least two: a divine being and a human being who were only temporarily united. The creed continues with a long string of affirmations about Christ:

the only Son of God,

eternally begotten of the Father,

God from God, Light from Light,

true God from true God,

begotten, not made,

of one Being with the Father.

Through him all things were made.

For us and for our salvation

he came down from heaven:

by the power of the Holy Spirit

he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,

and was made man.

For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;

he suffered death and was buried.

On the third day he rose again

in accordance with the scriptures;

he ascended into heaven

and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,

and his kingdom will have no end.

Every one of these statements was put into the creed to ward off heretics who had different beliefs, for example, that Christ was a lesser divine being from God the Father, or that he was not really a human, or that his suffering was not important for salvation, or that his kingdom would eventually come to an end—all of them notions held by one Christian group or another in the early centuries of the church.

But these views tend to be far less important to liberal-minded Christians today, at least the ones in my experience. On several occasions over the past few years, when giving lectures in liberal and open churches throughout the country, I have said that of the entire creed, I can say only one part in good faith: “he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.” For me, personally, not being able to say the (rest of the) creed—since I don’t believe it—prevents me from joining such congregations. But members of these congregations—and even clergy—often tell me that this should not be an obstacle. A lot of them don’t believe it either! At least not in any literal way.

This would never have been true in the fourth-century context in which such expressions of faith were initially produced. For the church leaders who formulated them, not only the very basic literal meaning of these statements mattered (God exists; Christ is his Son; he was God; but he became a human; he died for others and rose from the dead; etc.); the deeper nuances mattered as well—every word was to be taken as literally true and important, and contrary statements were to be rejected as both heretical and dangerous. Heretics with slightly different views were in danger of eternal damnation. This was serious business in the theological environment of the fourth Christian century. With respect to Christology, as we will see in this chapter, it was concluded that Christ was a separate being from God the Father, who had always existed alongside God, who was equal with God and always had been equal with God, who became a human, not in part, but completely, while not abandoning his status and power as God. This view seems internally inconsistent and contradictory—how can Christ be God and God the Father be God if there is only one God? And how can Christ be fully divine and fully human at the same time? Wouldn’t he need to be partly human and partly divine?

Rather than seeing these statements as inherently contradictory, perhaps it is more useful to see them as the paradoxes that resulted from the debates over Christ’s being. And since they are the paradoxes that came to figure so prominently in specifically orthodox Christianity, I have coined a new term for them. I call them ortho-paradoxes. As a way of summing up our discussion to this point, I lay out these paradoxes in greater detail before looking at some of the important theologians in the early church who helped to shape them, leading up to the first major church council that met in order to resolve some of these issues, the famous Council of Nicea in 325 CE.

The Ortho-Paradoxes

THE PARADOXES OF ORTHODOX Christianity emerged from two brutal facts. First, some passages of scripture appear to affirm completely different views. Orthodox thinkers realized that it was necessary to affirm all of these passages, even though they appeared to be at odds with one another. But affirming these different passages, at one and the same time, necessarily led to paradoxical affirmations. Second, different groups of heretics stated views in direct opposition to one another, and the orthodox thinkers knew that they had to reject each of these views. This meant that the orthodox had to attack a view from one side as wrong while also attacking the opposite view as wrong. But both of two opposing views cannot be completely wrong, or nothing is right, and so the orthodox—in attacking opposing views—had to affirm part of each view as being right and the rest as being wrong. The result was a paradox that each of the opposing sides was wrong in what it denied but right in what it affirmed. It’s a little hard to get one’s mind around without concrete examples, so I now explain how both of these factors led to the resultant ortho-paradoxes—one having to do with the nature of Christ (that is, whether he was God or man or both) and the other having to do with the nature of the godhead (that is, how Christ could be God if only God the Father was God).

The Christological Ortho-Paradox

When it comes to the nature of Christ—the question of Christology—one can point to clear passages in scripture that say he is God. As we have seen, for example, in the Gospel of John, Jesus declares: “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58, invoking the name of God from Exod. 3); “I and the Father are one (10:30); “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (14:9). And at the end of the Gospel, doubting Thomas declares that Jesus is “my Lord and my God” (20:28).

But other passages of the Bible say that Jesus is human. And so, John 1:14 says that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” First John 1:1–4 claims that Christ can be seen, and heard, and handled. First John 4:2–3 indicates that anyone who denies that “Christ came in the flesh” is an antichrist. And, of course, throughout the Gospels of the New Testament Jesus is portrayed as human: he is born, he grows up, he eats, he drinks, he suffers, he bleeds, and he dies.

The resulting ortho-paradox was driven by the positions that the orthodox were compelled to stake out when opposing the contradictory views of their opponents and the biblical texts. The adoptionists were right to affirm that Jesus was human but wrong to deny that he was God; the docetists were right to affirm that Jesus was divine but wrong to deny that he was human; the Gnostics were right to affirm that Christ was both divine and human but wrong to deny that he was a single being.

And so, if you put together all the orthodox affirmations, the result is the ortho-paradox: Christ is God; Christ is a man; but he is one being, not two. This became the standard Christological affirmation of the orthodox tradition.

As we will see, this did not settle the issue of who Christ was for the orthodox. It instead led to more questions, and “false beliefs” continued to propagate—not against any of the standard orthodox claims, but against various ways of understanding these claims. As time went on, heresies became increasingly detailed, and the orthodox affirmations became increasingly paradoxical.

The Theological Ortho-Paradox

The theological debates more broadly dealt with the implications of orthodox Christology for understanding the nature of God—if Christ is God, and the Spirit is God, yet God the Father alone is God, then is God one being, or two, or three?

Here again, some scriptural passages seem to stand at odds with one another. Isaiah 45:21 is quite explicit: “There is no other god besides me, a righteous God and a Savior; there is no one besides me.” On the other hand, in some passages, God is spoken of in the plural. In Genesis, when God creates the first human, he says, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness” (1:26). But to whom is God talking when he says “us” and “our”? In Psalm 45:6, God is speaking to someone else and says, “Your throne, O God, endures forever and ever.” Who is this other God? In Psalm 110:1 we are told, “The LORD says to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.’” Is there more than one Lord? How can there be if, as Isaiah says, there is only one?

More specifically, if Christ is God, and God the Father is God, in what sense is there only one God? And if one adds the Holy Spirit into the mix, how does one escape the conclusion either that Christ and the Spirit are not God, or that there are three Gods? In the end, the orthodox settled for the paradox of the Trinity: there are three persons, all of whom are God, but there is only one God. One God, manifest in three persons, who are distinct in number but united in essence. This too became the standard doctrine of the orthodox tradition, and as happened with the Christological ortho-paradox, it also led to further disputes, heretical interpretations, and nuanced refinements.

For the rest of this chapter we examine some of the Christian thinkers who stood in the orthodox tradition to see how they worked out these various Christological and theological views in their writings. I do not try to cover every important orthodox theologian of the early Christian centuries, and I do not mean to suggest that the figures I discuss here were aware of each other’s work. But these thinkers all stand within the very broad stream of “orthodox” tradition. In the preceding chapter we saw how Hippolytus and Tertullian hammered out certain orthodox views. Now we look at a range of other thinkers standing in the same orthodox line. We start at a relatively early point, even before Hippolytus, in the mid-second century, and move from there through theologians all the way up to the famous Council of Nicea, convened by the emperor Constantine in 325 CE in order to resolve the outstanding theological controversies of his day.

Justin Martyr

JUSTIN CAN RIGHTLY BE considered the first true intellectual and professional scholar in the church. Before becoming a Christian, he was already trained in philosophy, and he himself narrates how he came to be a Christian in an autobiographical account in one of his surviving works. Originally from Palestine, Justin moved to Rome in the middle of the second century in order to set up a kind of Christian philosophical school, possibly around 140 CE. His surviving works include two “apologies.” In this context an apology does not mean “saying you’re sorry.” It comes from a Greek word that means defense and is used as a technical term to refer to an intellectual defense of the faith with regard to the charges leveled against it by its enemies. We also have from his hand a book called the Dialogue with Trypho, in which Justin records a conversation that he allegedly had—it is possibly fictitious—with a Jewish scholar over the legitimacy of the claims of the Christians that Jesus was the messiah anticipated by the Jewish scriptures.

Eventually Justin was arrested and condemned for his Christian beliefs and activities. We do not have a reliable account of his trial and execution, but it is clear that he was condemned and died around the year 165—earning him the sobriquet Martyr.

The orthodox of later times considered Justin to be a proponent of their views. As one would expect, his exposition of theology is highly intelligent—he was, after all, a philosopher—but by later standards it came to seem rather unsophisticated and unnuanced. Theology takes a long time to develop, and once it does, earlier views, even intelligently expressed ones, can appear unrefined and even primitive.

Here we focus on our central concern and consider what Justin had to say specifically about Christ and his character. Justin held to the view that Christ was a preexistent divine being who was, in his words, the “first begotten of God” (1 Apology 46).¹ Christ was begotten—that is, brought into existence—before the creation of the world (2 Apology 5), and in time he became a human being for the sake of believers and in order to destroy the evil demons who were opposed to God (2 Apology 6).

There are two principal ways that Justin understands Christ as a divine being, both of which harken back to earlier views we have already explored. Justin develops these views in more sophisticated ways than seen in the New Testament itself. He saw Christ both as the preincarnate Angel of the Lord and as the Logos (Word) of God made flesh.

Christ as an Angel of God

In several places throughout his writings Justin speaks of Christ as the Angel of the Lord who appeared in the Old Testament. In Chapter 2 we saw that there is some ambiguity in the famous passage of Moses and the burning bush: the “Angel of the Lord” speaks with Moses, but then the narrative shifts to indicate that in fact it is “the Lord” who is speaking with him. Justin is keen to explain this textual conundrum in Christological terms. The reason this divine figure is both the Angel of the Lord and the Lord, at the same time, is that it is not God the Father who is there in the bush, but it is Christ, who is fully divine. First Justin establishes that the angel is no mere angel, but God: “Do you not see that He whom Moses speaks of as an Angel who conversed with him from the fiery bush is the same who, being God, signifies to Moses that He is the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob?” (Dialogue 59). But then he argues that this “God” could not have been God the Father: “No one with even the slightest intelligence would dare to assert that the Creator and Father of all things left His supercelestial realms to make himself visible in a little spot on earth” (Dialogue 60). And so who was this God? It was Christ, the angel who later was to become human.

Christ was also one of the three angels who appeared to Abraham at the oaks of Mamre in Genesis 18, another passage we have considered. Because this “angel” is also a “man” but is called “the Lord,” it is clear to Justin: “There exists and is mentioned in Scripture another God and Lord under the Creator of all things who is also called an Angel.” This one “appeared to Abraham, Jacob, and Moses, and is called God, [and] is distinct from God, the Creator; distinct, that is, in number, but not in mind” (Dialogue 56). These patriarchs did not see God the Father but “God the Son . . . His angel” (Dialogue 127).

God the Son, then, is the one to whom God the Father is speaking in the Old Testament when he says, “Let us make humankind in our own image” (Gen. 1:26); he is the one to whom God speaks in the psalms when he says, “Your throne, O God, endures forever and ever” (Ps. 45:6); and he is the one to whom the text refers when it says “The LORD says to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand . . .’” (Ps. 110:1).

Christ as the Logos of God

For Justin, Christ was not only the Angel of the Lord, however; he was also the Word (Logos) of God who became human. It appears clear that Justin was influenced by the Christology found in the Gospel of John, a book that he rarely, if ever, actually quotes, surprisingly enough. But Justin’s Logos Christology is more advanced and philosophically developed than that found in the Fourth Gospel.

Justin maintains that the Logos of God is the “reason” that can be found within anyone who uses reason to understand the world (1 Apology 5). This means that all humans have a share in the Logos, since all humans use reason. But some have a greater share of it than others. Philosophers, in particular, are skilled in using their reason. But even philosophers do not have a full knowledge of God’s Logos. If they did, they would not spend so much time contradicting one another (2 Apology 10). Still, some philosophers were closely attuned to God’s truth, as revealed to them through the Logos within them; this would include above all that great Greek philosopher Socrates. For this reason, Justin maintained that a philosopher like Socrates should be considered to be a pre-Christian Christian (1 Apology 46).

Most important, though, this Logos was known to and proclaimed by the Hebrew prophets of the Old Testament (2 Apology 10). And it eventually became a human being, Jesus Christ (1 Apology 1.5). Christ, then, is the incarnate Logos that created the world and manifested itself in the world in human reason that seeks to understand the world. It is in Christ himself that “reason” is fully incarnate. Those who accept and believe in Christ, therefore, have a fuller share of Logos/reason than anyone else—even the greatest philosophers of antiquity. Moreover, since he is the incarnation of God’s own Logos, Christ deserves to be worshiped along with God (1 Apology 6).

Justin was especially concerned to deal with the question of whether Christ is in any sense a being distinct from God the Father, and if so, how one is to imagine the relationship of Christ, the incarnate Word, to God the Father himself. In one place Justin considers Christ as the Word in relation to words we ourselves use. When we speak a word, in some sense that word has an existence independent of us (as we discover when someone misunderstands a word we have spoken); on the other hand, the word we utter owes its existence entirely to us, since we are the ones who utter the word. The Logos of God is like that: it comes forth from God, and so belongs entirely to God, but it takes on its own kind of existence once it comes forth.

In another place Justin likens Christ’s relationship to God to a fire that is used to start another fire. The second fire exists independently of the first, but it could not have come into existence without the other. Moreover, when it is started, the new fire does not diminish anything of the first fire, making it less than it was to begin with. The first fire is just the same as it was before. But the second fire is just as fully fire as the first. And that’s how it is with God and Christ. Christ came forth from God and became his own being, and yet God was not diminished in the slightest when that happened (Dialogue 61). Thus Justin stresses that Christ is a separate being from God and is “numerically distinct from the Father” (Dialogue 129); but Christ is at the same time fully God.

One might suspect that Justin has moved into tricky waters with these explanations, since they could be taken to mean that Christ did not always exist (a view that later came to be declared a heresy) and that he was a kind of second God created by God the Father and who was, therefore, subordinate to God the Father (views also declared heresies). Justin is living before later theologians worked out the nuances of these views.

There is some question, in fact, about whether Justin can rightly be thought of as embracing a doctrine of the Trinity. He does not yet talk about the three divine beings, Father, Son, and Spirit, as being all equal and the “three” being “one.” He does say that God is worshiped first, the Son second, and the prophetic Spirit third (1 Apology 1.13). But this again seems to suggest a hierarchy of divinity, with God at the top and the others in lower places beneath him; and elsewhere Justin claims that God alone is “unchanging and eternal” and the Son is subordinate to the Father (1 Apology 13). So too he indicates that Christians worship God, the Son, angels, and the Spirit—clearly not a Trinitarian view (1 Apology 13). If nothing else, one can say that Justin represents a development toward the orthodox Christological and Trinitarian paradoxes.

Novatian

MOVING THE CLOCK FORWARD a hundred years to the middle of the third century, we come to the writings of a leader of the Roman church named Novatian (210–278 CE). Like Hippolytus, whom we met in the previous chapter, Novatian was the head of a schismatic movement in the church and was elected as a kind of antipope. His theology, however, was completely orthodox in its day. Novatian’s most famous work is a treatise on the Trinity, in which he foreshadows ideas that theologians after his time developed; he still has not worked out the implications of a Trinitarian view with the nuance that later thinkers would. He, like Justin before him, still understands Christ to be a divine being subordinate to God the Father. But his chief concern is to show that Christ is fully God and yet is not the same as the Father. In other words, he develops his views in relation to the heresies that were still affecting his own day, adoptionism and modalism.

In some ways these heresies were at the opposite ends of the theological spectrum, one of them claiming that Christ was not God by nature at all, but only human, and the other claiming that Christ was not only God, but was actually God the Father. At the same time, one could argue that the very same monotheistic concern was driving both of these very different Christologies. The adoptionists, who said that Christ was not by nature God, did so in part to preserve the idea that there was only one God; the same concern lay behind the view of the modalists—that Christ was indeed God by nature, because he was God the Father made flesh, so here too there was only one God. Novatian saw these two contrary views as fundamentally related, as flip sides of the same heretical coin. As he puts it, Christ himself was crucified between these two thieves (of heresy).

Novatian is quite explicit that he is opposing these views that were intent on preserving the oneness of God. At one point he states that when the heretics “perceived that it was written that ‘God is one,’ they thought that they could not otherwise hold such an opinion than by supposing that it must be believed either that Christ was man only or really God the Father” (Trinity 30).² And so both views were driven by those who objected to the idea that Christ could be a separate God from God the Father, since otherwise there would be “two gods.”

In response, Novatian wants to emphasize that Christ indeed is God, that he is distinct from God the Father, but that he is in perfect unity with him: “[Christ], then, when the Father willed it, proceeded from the Father, and He who was in the Father came forth from the Father; and He who was in the Father because He was of the Father, was subsequently with the Father, because He came forth from the Father” (Trinity 31).

The complete unity of Christ with God is qualified, however, because for Novatian, as for the orthodox before him (but not so much afterward), Christ is not actually equal with God, but is subordinate to him, a divine being who came into existence at a certain time, begotten by God at some point before the creation. This is because there cannot be, in Novatian’s view, two different beings who are both “unborn” or “unbegotten” and “without beginning” and “invisible.” Novatian’s reasoning has a certain force to it: “For if [Christ] had not been born—compared with Him who was unborn, an equality being manifested in both—He would make two unborn beings, and thus would make two Gods” (Trinity 31).

Very much the same thing can be said if he was “not begotten” like the Father, or was “formed without beginning as the Father” or “invisible” like the Father. In all these cases, Christ would necessarily be “equal” with the Father, which would mean that there would not be one God but “two Gods.” And that, for Novatian, cannot be. As a result, Christ is best seen as a subordinate divinity who was begotten by God the Father before the creation:

[Christ] therefore is God, but begotten for this special result, that He should be God. He is also the Lord, but born for this very purpose of the Father, that He might be Lord. He is also an Angel, but he was destined of the Father as an Angel . . . For all things being subjected to [Christ] as the Son by the Father, while He Himself, with those things which are subjected to Him, is subjected to His Father. He is indeed proved to be the Son of His Father, but He is found to be both Lord and God of all else. (Trinity 31)

Novatian was more or less driven to this view by his opposition to heresies that declared that since there can be only one God, then Christ either was not God or was God the Father himself. The natural solution, then, was to say that Christ indeed was God, but there are not two Gods because he was begotten by God (not eternal with him) and subordinate to him (rather than equal with him). In Novatian’s day, this view could count as orthodoxy. But it was not long before this orthodox position came to be declared a heresy. In its stead, the orthodox theologians of the fourth century asserted a more complete paradox: that Christ was fully, not partially, God; that he had always existed; and that he was equal with God the Father. But together they, along with the Spirit, made up just one God.

Dionysius of Rome

A STEP TOWARD WHAT was to become the established orthodox view can be seen in a short letter by the bishop of Rome, Dionysius, who was writing just about a decade after Novatian (ca. 260 CE). His letter was directed to a bishop of Alexandria, Egypt, who happened to have the same name. This other Dionysius had taken a strong stand against modalism—which he called by the name of the most famous of the later modalists, a man named Sabellius (so sometimes modalism was termed Sabellianism). But in opposing the Sabellian position that there was only one God in three modes of existence, Dionysius of Alexandria had gone too far in the other direction, at least in the opinion of Dionysius of Rome. He was in danger of claiming that the Father, Son, and Spirit were so distinct from one another that they could be seen as three different Gods. But any kind of polytheism—or in this case, tritheism—was a heresy to be avoided. So Dionysius of Rome wrote a letter to his namesake in Alexandria to help provide greater nuance to his theological views, affirming that Christ is God and is a separate being from God the Father, but is so united with him that they form an absolute unity.

Dionysius of Rome states the situation that he has heard about in the theological disputes occurring in Alexandria: “I learn that there are some of you . . . who are, one might say, diametrically opposed to the views of Sabellius; he blasphemously says that the Son is the Father and the Father the Son, while they [those who oppose Sabellius] in a manner preach three Gods, dividing the sacred Monad into three substances foreign to each other and utterly separate.”³ In response, Dionysius of Rome gives his own corrective, which stresses that the three are one: “The Divine Word must of necessity be united to the God of the Universe, and the Holy Spirit must have his habitation and abode in God; thus it is absolutely necessary that the Divine Triad be summed up and gathered into a unity, brought as it were to an apex, and by that Unity I mean the all sovereign God of the Universe.”

Three beings make up a “Divine Triad.” But they are so harmonious that they can be seen as a “unity,” and this unity is itself the “God of the universe.” This unity, for Dionysius of Rome, signifies that the Son of God is not a creature made or begotten by God, but that he is eternal with God and that he shares all the attributes of God the Father, as his Word, and Wisdom, and Power. For Dionysius of Rome the logic for this is compelling: “for if the Son came into being there was [a time] when these attributes were not; therefore there was a time when God was without them; which is most absurd.”

By refusing to “divide into three deities the wonderful and divine Monad,” and yet insisting that they are in fact three different beings united together into one, Dionysius reaches the desired theological result: “For thus both the Holy Triad and the holy preaching of the Monarchy will be preserved.”

Obviously, we are moving into some deep theological waters. There need to be three divine beings. But the three need to be one, not three. The question of how this can be became the major theological obsession of the fourth century. It all started with a controversy in Alexandria, in which a priest had serious disagreements on the matter with his bishop. The priest embraced a view that seems very similar to that endorsed earlier by the orthodox Novatian and others in the orthodox tradition, but it came to be condemned as one of Christianity’s most notorious heresies. This heresy was called Arianism, named after the priest with whom it allegedly originated, Arius.

Arius of Alexandria

ARIUS WAS BORN AROUND 260 CE, right about the time Dionysius of Rome and Dionysius of Alexandria were engaged in their back-and-forth over questions of Christology. Arius came from Libya but eventually moved to the city of Alexandria and became intimately involved with the vibrant Christian community there. In 312 he was ordained as a priest and was placed in charge of his own church. In that capacity Arius was answerable to the bishop of Alexandria, who, for most of his time there, was a man named Alexander.

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.

Alexander of Alexandria

WE 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).

The Arian Controversy and the Council of Nicea

IT 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.

The Role of Constantine

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.

As such, it could be used to bring unity to a fractured empire. So Constantine acknowledges to the two recipients of his letter: “My first concern was that the attitude towards the Divinity of all the provinces should be united in one consistent view” (Life 2.65).¹⁰ The problem was that there was no consistency in the church itself, because of the split over Arius’s teachings. The split especially affected the churches of Africa, to Constantine’s chagrin: “Indeed . . . an intolerable madness had seized the whole of Africa because of those who had dared with ill-considered frivolity to split the worship of the population into various factions, and . . . I personally desired to put right this disease” (Life 2.66). Constantine thus wanted to heal the theological division in the church in order to make the Christian faith more useful in bringing religious and cultural unity to the empire.

A second reason sometimes suggested for Constantine’s concern relates more closely to his pagan inheritance. It had widely been believed for many centuries that the gods oversaw the best interests of Rome when they were properly acknowledged in cultic practices of the state. Worshiping the gods in the proper and prescribed way earned their good favor, and their good favor was manifest in their kind treatment of the state—for example, in winning its wars and in prospering during times of peace. Constantine inherited this perspective and may well have brought it with him into his Christian faith. Now he worshiped not the traditional gods of Rome, but the God of the Christians. But this God too must be worshiped properly. If there are serious divisions in the worshiping community, however, this could not be pleasing to God. Christianity was far more focused on “theological truth” than traditional Greek or Roman religions and placed greater emphasis on “sacrificial practice.” It was important, in the Christian faith, to know and practice the truth. But widespread disagreements about the truth would lead to deep rifts in the Christian community, and God could not be pleased with that state of affairs. For the good of the state, which was overseen ultimately by God, it was necessary that these rifts be healed.

Constantine was not a trained theologian, and he found himself to be somewhat taken aback by the virulence of the debate between Arius and Alexander. To Constantine, the issues seemed petty. What does it really matter whether there was a time before which Christ existed? Is that really the most important thing? Not for Constantine. As he says in his letter: “I considered the origin and occasion for these things . . . as extremely trivial and quite unworthy of so much controversy” (Life 2.68). But contention there was. So he tried to encourage Arius and Alexander to resolve their theological differences so Christianity could move forward as a unified whole to confront the greater problems of the empire.

Constantine had the letter delivered by an important bishop of Cordova, Spain, named Ossius. After delivering the letter, Ossius returned from Alexandria by a land route that took him through Antioch of Syria, where a synod of bishops was being held to debate the theological questions raised by Arius. This synod devised a creedal statement (that is, a statement of faith) that contradicted Arius’s views. Everyone at the synod signed this creed, with three exceptions—one of them being Eusebius of Caesarea. It was agreed, however, that these three could be given a further chance to defend themselves and their Christological views at another meeting. And this is how the Council of Nicea was born.

The Council of Nicea

Originally, the council was supposed to meet in Ancyra (in Turkey), but for practical reasons it was moved to Nicea (also in Turkey).¹¹ This was the first of the seven major councils of church bishops that historians have called ecumenical councils—which means something like “councils of the entire world.” The term is not entirely apt in this case, since obviously the whole world did not participate in the council but only a group of bishops; moreover, these bishops were not widely representative of the entire world, or even of the world of Christendom. Hardly any bishops attended from the western part of the empire; most came from such eastern climes as Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, and Mesopotamia. Even the bishop of Rome, Sylvester, did not attend but sent two legates in his place. Historians differ on the number of bishops at the conference. Athanasius of Alexandria, who was a young man at the time (but who was eventually to become the powerful bishop of Alexandria), later indicated that 318 bishops were present. The council met in June 325 CE.

The key issue to be resolved by the council concerned the teachings of Arius and his supporters, including Eusebius of Caesarea. Eusebius began the proceedings by introducing his own creedal statement—that is, his theological exposition of what should be confessed as true and valid about God, about Christ, about the Spirit, and so on. Evidently, most participants at the council saw this creed to be basically acceptable; but it was ambiguous at key points, so most of the bishops were not satisfied because it did not directly refute the heretical claims of Arius. After hammering out their theological positions, the bishops finally agreed upon a creed. It consisted of terse theological statements: beginning with a very brief statement about God the Father (brief because no one was disputing the character or nature of God), followed in much longer order with statements about Christ (since that was the topic of concern), and concluding in almost unbelievably short order with a statement about the Spirit (since that too was not yet an issue). The creed ended with a set of anathemas, or curses, on people who made certain heretical declarations—these declarations all being claims connected with Arius and his followers. This creed eventually became the foundation of what is now called the Nicene Creed. Here it is, in full (readers who are familiar with the Nicene Creed as it is recited today will notice key differences—especially with the anathemas; the modern version represents a later revision):

We believe in one God, the Father, almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible;

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten from the Father, only-begotten, that is, from the substance of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father, through whom all things came into being, things in heaven and things on earth, who because of us humans and because of our salvation came down and became incarnate, becoming human, suffered and rose on the third day, ascended to the heavens, will come to judge the living and the dead;

And in the Holy Spirit.

But as for those who say, “There was when he was not” and “Before being born he was not” and that “He came into existence out of nothing” or who assert that the Son of God is of a different hypostasis or substance or is subject to alteration and change—these the Catholic and Apostolic church anathematizes.¹²

Many people have written entire books on this council and its creed.¹³ For our purposes, I emphasize just a couple of points. First, as I have already stressed, far more space is devoted in the creed to Christ than to the Father, and the Spirit is barely mentioned. It was important to get the teachings about Christ “right.” To assure these teachings, and to avoid any ambiguities, the anathemas are added.

In the creed itself, Christ is said to be “from the substance of the Father.” He is not a subordinate God. He is “of one substance with the Father.” The Greek word used to indicate “one substance,” which could also be translated as “same substance,” is homoousios. It was destined to become an important term in later disputes over the nature of Christ. As it turns out, and as we will see in the epilogue, neither the council nor the creed resolved all the issues surrounding the nature of Christ. In fact, the issues lived on; Arianism continued to thrive; and even after the Arian issue was eventually resolved, a whole set of other issues, increasingly detailed, nuanced, and sophisticated, arose. If Constantine did not much like the controversy of his own day, he would have despised what was to come.

But it is important that the creed emphasizes that Christ is of the “same substance” as God the Father. This is a way of saying that God and Christ are absolutely equal. Christ is “true God,” not a subordinate deity secondary to God the Father. And as the anathemas indicate, it is now a heresy to claim there ever was a time when Christ did not exist (or before which he did not exist), or to say he was created like everything else in the universe “out of nothing,” or that he does not share God’s very substance.

The Outcome of the Council

To make a long and complex story very short, there was widespread agreement among the bishops present about the details of the new creed, which was seen to be binding on all Christians. That is what the creed means when it states that it presents the view of the “Catholic and Apostolic church”: it is the view of the church that descended in direct lineage from the apostles of Jesus and that is found scattered throughout the entire world (“catholic” in this context means “universal”). Sometimes you will hear that at Nicea it was “a close vote.” It was not close. Only twenty of the 318 bishops disagreed with the creed when it was finally formulated. Constantine, who was actively involved with some of the proceedings, forced seventeen of those twenty to acquiesce. So only three did not eventually sign off on the creed: Arius himself and two bishops from his home country of Libya. These three were banished from Egypt. A couple of other bishops signed the creed but refused to agree to the anathemas at the end, which were directed specifically against Arius’s teachings. These bishops too were exiled.

So the story of how Jesus became God appears to end. But as we will see in the epilogue, it did not really end. Quite the contrary. But for the time being, Alexander and his like-minded colleagues won the day, and Constantine believed he had attained a unified church. The issues were, for the moment, resolved. Christ was coeternal with God the Father. He had always existed. And he was “of the same substance” as God the Father, himself truly God, from back into eternity.

The Christ of Nicea is obviously a far cry from the historical Jesus of Nazareth, an itinerant apocalyptic preacher in the backwaters of rural Galilee who offended the authorities and was unceremoniously crucified for crimes against the state. Whatever he may have been in real life, Jesus had now become fully God.