Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
On the Trinity 275
Christian faith: Is Jesus God or not? The problem, both logically and theologically, is this: How can one call Christ "God" and call the Father "God" and still claim to believe in one God? To pagan ears, Christians sounded not like monotheists, but ditheists.6 Arius sought to safeguard monotheism and insisted that "the Father alone is God." He added that Christ was no divine offshoot, no fragment of God's substance (for God is not divisible). Thus Christ could not be the same substance as God. Rather, God made the Son out of nothing, much as the universe would be made from nothing. But Arius's Christ was no God-inspired human being; rather, he was the Word who pre-existed and created the visible universe and who bridged a vast cosmic gap between our messy changeable material world and the unchangeable immaterial God. Arius's Christ, even though creator, was not eternal, but had a beginning before the beginning of the universe. Arius thus sidestepped the idea of two "unbeguns," two gods, in effect. Arius's denial of Christ's full divinity led to his excommunication by Alexander and a regional council of Egyptian bishops.
This local dispute quickly internationalized and divided churches around the Greek East. To address the crisis, Constantine, the first Christian emperor, called the Council of Nicaea in 325. The Council brought together some 300 bishops from around the Empire and approved a creed phrased so as to contradict Arius's key views. The bishops formally affirmed Christ's divinity, declaring Him to be "true God from true God, begotten not made, one-inbeing (homoousios) with the Father."7 These pivotal phrases have come to define Christian orthodoxy.
But in the aftermath of Nicaea, things were anything but simple. Arius himself was exiled, but the debate continued for decades and reached some degree of resolution only at the Council of Constantinople in 381. Older textbooks have traditionally referred to this debate as the "Arian Controversy" and portray it as a clash between two camps, Nicenes and Arians. That is simply not accurate. There was no clear-cut battle between orthodoxy and heresy, but rather a halting, contentious, and muddled "search for the Christian doctrine of God," to use R. P. C. Hanson's apt phrase.8
Immediately after Nicaea, controversy centered not on Arius, but on one also the new perspectives of Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
6. See, for example, Celsus, the 2nd-century Platonist philosopher, quoted in Origen, Contra Celsum 8.12 (SC 150:198).
7. Council of Nicaea, Creed. For the text, see Jaroslav Pelikan and Valerie Hotchkiss, eds., Creeds and Professions of Faith in the Christian Tradition (New Haven: Yale University, 2003), 1:155–59. For an analysis, see J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 3rd ed. (London: Longman, 1972), 205–54; Hanson, Search, 163–72; Ayres, Nicaea, 15–20, 85–104.
8. Hanson chose this phrase as his title for his magisterial study. For a discussion of the issue, see Hanson, Search, xvii–xix.