The run-up to Nicaea: Athanasius versus Arius

Among the three or four most significant theological controversies in the history of the church is the fourth-century struggle with Arianism.

At the very heart of the Arian controversy was the question of the identity of Jesus Christ and His relationship to God. How was the deity of Christ to be reconciled with the indisputable heritage of monotheism from the house of Israel in the Old Testament Scriptures?

One answer in the early third century had been modalism, which argued that there are no personal distinctions between the Father and the Son. They, and the Holy Spirit, are actually all one person. But this creates serious problems for understanding the text of the New Testament which assumes the real “threeness” of the persons. For instance, how can the Son offer himself to the Father as a propitiation for sin and that through the power of the eternal Spirit, as Hebrews 9v14 asserts, if there are no personal distinctions between the three members of the Godhead?

Responding to the heresy of Arius

The year of our Lord 318 is the usual date that is posited as to when Arius (c.260‒c.336), a Libyan elder in charge of the Church of Baucalis in a suburb of Alexandria, publicly denied the eternality of the divine Son. Between Arius’ going public with what must be regarded as an innovative theology and the Council of Nicaea (325) that provided an initial decisive response to his innovations, there were a number of other replies to the burgeoning crisis.

One of the earliest of these replies was the Alexandrian encyclical Of One Body. Although it has been transmitted as a work of Alexander (c.250‒350), the bishop of Alexandria, there is a long-standing argument that the encyclical was actually written by Athanasius (c.299‒373), who was Alexander’s diaconal assistant in the early 320s. If Athanasius indeed did write this encyclical, he did so in his early twenties and it stands as the earliest text that we have from his hand. What follows assumes Athanasian authorship.

A tract by Athanasius

Of One Body was probably written after a regional synod in Alexandria that had been attended by a hundred or so Egyptian and Libyan bishops and which had been called by Alexander in either 321 or 322. In no uncertain terms, this synod anathematised the views of Arius, of his followers in Egypt and Libya, and of others who had rallied support for Arius.

Of One Body succinctly captured the Arian argument about the Godhead. According to Athanasius, Arius and his supporters had asserted that “God was not always the Father”, since He had created the Son at some point prior to the fashioning of the universe and the Son had then created time and the rest of creation. Arius took the Biblical description of the Son as having been begotten by the Father to mean that he was a created being.

But Athanasius affirmed that the generation of the Son was eternal and therefore the Son must be fully God, one in being with the Father. For Arius, on the other hand, the generation of the Son meant that he was not “like the Father in essence”. Athanasius understood Arius to mean that the Son was a mutable being and one whose knowledge of the Father was limited. In actuality, Arius’ conception of the Son was more nuanced. Arius believed that, while the Son was a creature, he was unlike the rest of the visible creation in that the Father had granted him immutability. Driving Arius’ overall conception of God was a deep-seated fear of modalism, which, as noted above, had been a major issue during the third century.

Athanasius’ response to this teaching echoed the Alexandrian synod that had met to deal with the Arian threat. That synod had anathematised Arius and his supporters and “declared them to be outside the catholic church and faith”. The drastic step of anathematisation had been taken since Arius’ teaching was, in Athanasius’ words, not merely a heresy, but tantamount to an “apostasy which one might reasonably consider and label the forerunner of the Antichrist.” Later in this encyclical letter, Athanasius intimates that Arianism may even be the Antichrist.

In hindsight, Athanasius’ language here might seem somewhat exaggerated. Yet, he was very conscious that those who embraced Arius’ teaching were involved in “resisting God”, by which he meant the rejection of God’s revelation of Himself in the Scriptures. As such, they were cutting themselves off from a saving knowledge of God and constituting themselves “destroyers of souls”. In other words, salvation hangs upon the answer to this question: “Do you believe in the full deity of the Lord Jesus Christ and that He shares to the full all of the attributes of the Father?”

Picture caption: The Lighthouse of Alexandria was built circa 300 BC and stood for an estimated 1,600 years, including while Athanasius and Arius debated there.