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. His invisibility is a kind of un-symbol of his unknowability. “No-one has ever seen God,” says John (John 1:18). Paul calls his gospel the mystery of God (1 Corinthians 2:7). He is a steward of God’s mysteries in 1 Corinthians 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, 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” (John 1:18). “In him, the fullness of the deity dwelt bodily” (Col 2:9).

But what does this mean? How could we make sense of this, or hold these two truths consistently?

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

Around 319 AD Arius (c.256 – 336), an Alexandrian rector, 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 talks of Father and Son—if God is 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 thought 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 4th century was a battle in the church over his teaching and teachings that resembled it.

The crunch questions: 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:

1. 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.
2. Arianism seemed to have the support of a number of biblical texts AND was able to synthesise them with the philosophy of the day. It was an intellectually respectable option for its time, and preached with sophistication.
3. 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—there was not a time ‘when he was not’, indeed: but the Son was begotten by the Father.

Athanasius’ gift was that he could see exactly what was at stake: he recognised what was being lost in the Arian way of putting things. His passion was for human souls, and for their salvation. So this was not an abstract debate for him: he could see that salvation itself was what mattered.
Four things were established:

1. God is mystery. But God reveals himself, in Christ Jesus.
2. God reveals himself in Jesus to truly save. If you took Arianism seriously, what account could you give of the salvation of human people? Athanasius once said ‘God became man in order that we might become God’—that is, that we might share in the life of God himself, God become one of us. If Christ was not fully God, how could we ever be assured of God’s saving of us? How could we ever know God in a saving way?
3. God dies for us on the cross. Athanasius could also see that the cross itself does not work if you describe it using Arian terms. If on the cross we have a lesser God, then we leave ourselves open to the criticism that the cross is mere divine child abuse, a torturing of the innocent Son by his demanding Father. Rather, if we understand the cross according to orthodox teaching, then we will understand that the victim was a willing participant in the salvation of the world in his own death. The Son submitted, but did so from a position of free equality with the Father.
4. The love of Christ is truly God’s love. This has huge pastoral ramifications of course, but also practical ones: because here, in the submission of the Son to the Father, without a loss of equality of being or dignity, we see in essence the nature of Christian love. The love that Christ expressed on the cross was divine love: and it is the love we are called to echo in our relations too.

Is there an Arianism today? Certainly you will find actual Arians in the Jehovah’s Witness movement claiming that Christ is a second ranked deity. But the more tempting and dangerous Arianism is the Arianism of our apparently orthodox Christianity.

Arianism was and is a theology which is built up around one’s own experience of the invisibility and intangibility of God. Indeed, we long 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 tangibility that God offers us—his entry into our world—is rather disappointing in comparison to this. God the only begotten Son has made him known, walking among us for a short stretch some time ago now. However much the witnesses to him say they are passing on to us that which they have seen with their eyes and touched with their hands, it seems a long way removed from us. It is easy to stare at the flat page of the Bible, to sit through the dull sermon and the uninspired singing, to pray prayers into a remorseless ceiling, and fail to be convinced that God really is with us and active to save.

Arianism is a counsel of despair, then. It keeps the eternal God at an arms length, because he sure feels like he is at arms length. We even create dogmas that convince us that this is true: that because we feel it to be the case, it ought to be the case. Deity could not and would not live among us—it would be a travesty if it did so. We cannot be so arrogant as to claim to have true knowledge, of a personal kind, of the divinity himself. We can only gaze at this Christ, this bridge built—yes, made—across the chasm between us and the true God, which we have to steel ourselves to somehow step onto, not ever assured that when we set out on the journey we have stepped into the heart of God himself.

It is despairing: but it is also, attractively, a way to remove the suggestion that God is uncomfortably near—that he is breathing down our necks. It is frightening to think that, if the true God is really among us in Jesus Christ, then the consequences of mistreating his manifestations will be extremely grave. It is frightening to think that the person next to me in the pew, whom I have ignored these long years and even secretly despised, actually has life in God himself. It is worrisome to consider that the church I helped to divide is not only the body of Christ, but that the body of Christ is itself included in God.

In fact, the ethics of the New Testament is a rebuke to us in this. Whenever Paul speaks of the Christian life and our acts of love for one another, he speaks of them as being the work of God in us. He calls us the temple of the Holy Spirit because in us God himself lives. We can live and move secure in the knowledge that our lives are hid with God in Christ—that in Christ we enter into the highest place itself. We can know as temporal beings whose bodies decay and melt away that we do have a more long term future, because we are bound with Christ into the eternal God himself. We can know that, though God himself is unknowable and transcendent and remote from us, he—and it really IS him—has come near to us in Jesus Christ.

Image: flickr_Nick in exsilio