Gareth Bezett

I was discussing some elecments of Chrisitan belief with an 8 year old boy recently, as I do in various children's ministry programmes from time to time. At some point, he said to me "So Jesus was God? How can he be God's son and God?" I might have been overreaching a bit when I tried to explain the Holy Trinity to him.

Let me point out that Trinitarianism is not an optional belief in The Church. The Nicene Creed states that Jesus is of the same substance of the father and the Athanasian Creed leaves no wriggle room on the matter. The Anlgican church (and most other catholic denominations) holds the Nicene Creed as fundamental and Athanasius' Creed as being a true and valid description of the Christian Faith. To be Christian is to be a Trinitarian. Other groups on the periphery of Christianity dissent from this view, Unitarians being the most obvious.

There is a great deal of history around this point in the first centuries of Christianity. The question came into open debate in when Arius, a priest in Alexandria, starting publicly arguing with his bishop. The Christians who thought that Jesus was a lesser being than God (though certainly still far greater than humans) were knows as Arians. The Council of Nicaea (325) formulated a doctrinal statement that was supposed to present an anti-Arian position. This was adopted with only 2 objections. However, Arianism still flourished and Arians were the majority in many churches. When the Emperor Constantine was baptised on his death bed, is was an Arian who performed the sacrement (good point for refuting the Da Vince Code). Eventually, the Council of Constantinople (381) adopted the Nicene Creed (somewhat modified from the 325 text) as an official statement of faith.

Arius has some flawed but persuasive arguments and I can see why so many faithful Christians would be swayed by them. For a start, the idea that Christ was a created being (albeit of an entirely different order to us) is an easier idea to grasp that the notion that God is Three and yet One.

I'm almost relunctant to engage in discussion on the point because the idea that God paid our penalty himself is essential to popular theology. Could a perfect being that wasn't God take our place on the Cross with the same effect? Someone once told me that to be a fundamentalist meant to believe that it was essential to believe in Christ Crucified and Risen, which begs the question "who was Christ?". Orthodox Trinitarian Christian belief answers empathically that Jesus was God Incarnate. This is what we celebrate at Christmas: God became human, the Word became flesh.

I'm strangley compelled to reassess my faith in light of the question "what if Arius was right?" Now, I don't think he was, but I'm a bit afraid to think too hard on the matter. Is Trinitarianism really essential? I think it might be, but what if the rest of my faith remains viable without it? Is the penalty for heresy still death?

Labels: theology