Arianism was and is a theology which is built up around one’s own experience of the invisibility and intangibility of God. We long indeed for God to be close and evident, to have him tangible in the way we would like to have him tangible; to be able to identify the hot breath of the Spirit on our faces, to feel, really feel the closeness of God in the instances in which we live.

The mystery of God is a fundamental truth about the Christian God.

Like Judaism, Christianity is utterly and stubbornly monotheistic. God does NOT exist as part of the world he created, but rather has his existence apart from it. There is no-one equal to God; and he is beyond the human mind as he is beyond our eye. “No-one has ever seen God” says John. “O the mystery …’ says Paul. In 1 Cor 2:1—Paul calls his gospel “the mystery of God”; he is a “steward of God’s mysteries” in 1 Cor 4:1.

God is eternal, the world is not. God is uncreated, the world and we are not.

At the same time, Christianity claims that in Jesus Christ, God has decisively and completely and effectively revealed himself: No-one has ever seen God, yes, but God the one and only Son who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known. “In him, the fullness of the deity dwelt bodily.”

But what did this mean? How could we make sense of this, or hold these two truths consistently? One early Christian answer was modalism: God appears in three guises, wearing three hats.

In Alexandria, the city of the great library of the ancient world, this was not an intellectually respectable answer.

So Christian theologians had tried to find a way around the difficulty of having an eternal God become incarnate as a man and take on body and experience time.

Around 319 AD Arius (c.256—336), an Alexandrian minister, published his teaching that Christ is neither truly God nor perfectly man. Jesus embodied a divine principle by means of being divinely inspired. This seemed a neat way out of the bind—combining the concerns of pure monotheism with a way of claiming still something divine for Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was then an intermediate deity between God and humanity.

The Bible talked of Father and Son—If God was Father in essence, literally a Father, then he must be superior and pre-exist the Son, because that’s what Fathers are by definition. Since there ‘was when he was not’, Arius though that this Son was in some way a creature—a superior creature to the rest, granted—but not eternal.

Arius gained a following. Though expelled from the local synod in 321, he continued as a missionary for his theology. The rest of the 4^th century was a battle in the church over his teaching and teachings that resembled it. The crunch question: how was the order between the Father and the Son to be expressed? How was their relationship to be described? And what was at stake?

Three things made Arianism attractive:

a) it preserved the mystery and the distance and the glory and the transcendence of God. God was not then sullied by his interaction with the creation, he was kept utterly pure.

b) Arianism seemed to have the support of a number of biblical texts AND to able to synthesise them with the philosophy of the day. It was an intellectually respectable option for its time, and preached with sophistication.

c) it gave an account of Jesus Christ which made him highly exalted, but focused on the way in which he had earned this bestowal of divine favour and glory.

The rise of Arianism was the making of the career of one of the great advocates for orthodoxy: Athanasius. In 325 at the council of Nicea, the term homoousios was adopted as the word that best expressed the way in which the Father and the Son ought to be thought of in their unity: they shared ‘the same substance’ though they were not the same persons, or hypostases. They were divine in their sharing of substance. The Son was not created then, there was not when he was not, indeed: but the Son was begotten by the Father.

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