Arianism

Is the Son the highest creature?

Around 318 Arius (c. 256–336), a presbyter in Alexandria, set out to guard the confession that God is one. Only the Father, he held, is unbegotten and without beginning; if the Son shared the Father's being, there would be two Gods, or God's being would be divided. So he taught that the Son was a perfect creature, made from nothing by the Father's will before all ages, and that through him God made everything else. His teaching was summed up in a phrase the Council of Nicaea would later condemn: ‘there was when he was not’.

Arius read Scripture closely. Wisdom says, "The LORD created me as His first course" (Proverbs 8:22); the Greek Old Testament of his day read the verse the same way, and Arius took it of the Son. He read "the firstborn over all creation" (Colossians 1:15) as first-made, and Jesus' words "the Father is greater than I" (John 14:28) as proof that the Son is not the Father's equal.

The church's judgment

The church judged that his account blurred the line Scripture draws between the Creator and everything he made. John does not say the Word came to be in the beginning, but that he was, and he sets him outside all made things:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

John 1:1

"Through Him all things were made, and without Him nothing was made that has been made" (John 1:3). God says, "I will not yield My glory to another" (Isaiah 42:8), yet the church had worshipped Christ from the beginning; if Arius was right, it was worshipping a creature. Augustine put the point sharply: "if there is a greater God, and a less God, (the Word being God,) we worship two Gods, and not one" Augustine. Athanasius added that no creature can join us to God: only if the Son is truly God can his becoming man save us Athanasius, Orations against the Arians.

In 325 the council confessed the Son to be homoousios, of one being with the Father. The struggle went on for more than half a century, and in 359 councils in East and West signed creeds saying only that the Son is ‘like’ the Father. The Nicene Creed that came through Constantinople in 381 confesses him "begotten, not made". The story is told in Nicaea: is the Son truly God?

What came after

Beyond the empire the Arian faith lasted longer. Ulfilas, who took the gospel to the Goths in the fourth century and translated the Bible into Gothic, taught the view that the Son is ‘like’ the Father, and so Germanic peoples such as the Goths and the Vandals held it for generations. The Visigothic kingdom in Spain turned to the Nicene faith at the Council of Toledo in 589.

Today the Orthodox, Catholic and nearly all Protestant churches confess the faith of the Nicene Creed. Jehovah's Witnesses, who teach that the Son is God's first creation, stand close to Arius. Arius was no despiser of Scripture but a man who took God's oneness seriously; the church judged that his account could not keep faith with the triune God of Scripture or with the gospel of a God who saves. Before the risen Jesus, Thomas confessed, "My Lord and my God!" (John 20:28); see also the Trinity.