Arianism Past and Present

Arianism Past

Athanasius’ pastor and bishop, Alexander of Alexandria, delivered a faithful sermon on the Trinity around the year AD 320. Arius, a presbyter from the outskirts of Alexandria, who would give his name to one of the most persistent heresies in the history of the church, denounced the sermon for confessing the coequality and coeternity of Father and Son. This made no sense to Arius. He argued that the Son had a beginning, that there was a time when the Son was not, that the Father alone is true God and the Son a creation of the Father. Arius, like all false teachers, sought supporters for his false ideas. He sent letters to influential bishops complaining about Alexander’s sermon. He composed praise songs, which Athanasius tells us used effeminate and dissolute tunes, to further spread his false teaching on the Father and the Son.¹

The Emperor Constantine summoned the council of Nicaea in 325 to address the dispute between Arius and Alexander. The bishops condemned Arius’ teaching and published a statement of faith asserting the substantial unity and personal distinction of Father and Son. At the time no one could have anticipated the long and lamentable debate on the Trinity that would ensue. Courageous and faithful bishops like Athanasius, Hilary of Poitiers, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa, to name only a few, defended the teaching of Scripture that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are indivisibly one and irreducibly three. They are one in nature, power, and will, and yet eternally distinct and distinguished as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These men suffered hardship, exile, and even attempts on their lives for faithfully confessing and defending the Holy Trinity against those sympathetic to Arius and his ideas.

False teachers never tire of offering subtler arguments for their views. As Gregory of Nazianzus quipped, they “must have something to blaspheme or life would be unlivable.”² Arius’ false teaching developed in two distinct ways in the second half of the fourth century. It either became more explicit about the Son’s otherness to the Father, as argued by figures like Eunomius, or it became more subtle by affirming the Son’s likeness and eternal subordination to the Father, as confessed by the Homoiousians and Latin Homoians.

Faithful bishops gathered once again at the council of Constantinople in 381 and condemned Arianism in all its varieties. They reaffirmed the faith from Nicaea and added a comprehensive statement on the Holy Spirit. This creed, which the church refers to as the Nicene Creed, continues to be confessed by the faithful today. And yet this council and its creed did not end debate on the Trinity. Gregory of Nyssa, writing after the council, lamented the continued false teaching by everyone—from the bishops to the bakers, butchers, and candle-stick makers:

“For the entire city is filled with such people—the alleys, the markets, the streets, the wards, the clothing merchants, the bankers, those who sell us food. If you ask about the money, he gives you his philosophy on the begotten and the unbegotten. And if you inquire about the price of bread, ‘The Father is greater,’ he answers, ‘and the Son subordinate.’ And if you say, ‘Is the bath ready?’, he declares that the Son is from nothing.”³

Creeds, as important and as indispensable as they are for the faithful, never free us from defending the Scriptures against false teaching. For Luther that task falls to both pastors and capable lay people.⁴ We must all, as best we are able, learn to defend the Scriptures on all matters of faith. This is especially true for the Trinity and the atoning work of Jesus Christ, the very Son of God made man for us and our salvation. If the One on the cross is not true God and true man in one person, the very Lord of Glory, suffering and dying for you and for me, indeed for the sins of the world, and rising for our justification, then, as our Confessions put it, He would be a poor savior for me (SD VIII.40). Arius’ denial of Christ’s true and full divinity is a denial of the atonement and our reconciliation with the Father. Johann Gerhard put it simply: “If we are ignorant of or deny the mystery of the Trinity, we are ignorant of or deny the entire economy of salvation.”⁵

Arianism Present

Ambrose and Augustine, following the council of Constantinople in 381, encountered the subtler form of Arianism mentioned above. These Arians emerged from the council of Sirmium in 357. The bishops gathered at that council rejected Nicaea and all non-scriptural language. They issued a statement of faith that Hilary of Poitiers dubbed the blasphemy of Sirmium. Several responses to Sirmium followed. Basil of Ancyra and George of Laodicea argued for a middle position between Nicaea and Sirmium. They confessed that Father and Son were not same-in-substance (homoousios) but shared a likeness of substance (homoiousios). For them the Father acts with “supreme authority” (αὐθεντικῶς) and the Son “subordinately” (ὑπουργικῶς) and this conveys their likeness in substance rather than sameness.⁶ For Basil the creed from Nicaea obscured this difference between the “authority” (ἐξουσία) of Father and Son.⁷ Epiphanius, who preserves these writings for us, labels Basil and George “semi-Arians.”

The Latin Homoians confronted by Ambrose and Augustine were not half-hearted Arians. They stood resolutely in the tradition of Sirmium. They also insisted on the subordinationist language used by Basil and George. Palladius of Ratiaria, opposed by Ambrose and condemned at the council of Aquileia in 381, argued that the Father alone possessed “a unique and supreme authority” and that the Son does only what the Father commands Him to do.⁸ Nearly forty years later Augustine encountered these same arguments. In the fall of 419 he wrote a detailed response to an anonymous Arian sermon (Sermo Arrianorum) that had been sent to him. That anonymous sermon insisted that the Son acts only at the will and the command of the Father. These Arians appealed to John 5:19 and John 16:13 to show the Son’s eternal subordination to the Father’s authority and the Holy Spirit’s subordination to the Father and the Son.⁹ To say these things, insisted Augustine, is to posit a greater God and lesser God and that is paganism.¹⁰

Augustine frequently mocked his Arian opponents for their carnal-minded and childish ways of reading Scripture. These Arians, insisted Augustine, made the Son nothing more than an apprentice in the workshop of the Father.¹¹ For Augustine and the Nicene tradition of exegesis, a tradition received and taught by our Lutheran reformers and dogmaticians, the verses from the Gospel of John do not convey subordination but rather the eternal relation of the divine persons. The Son does nothing “from Himself” (Jn. 5:19) because He is not from Himself but eternally from the Father. Similarly, the Holy Spirit speaks nothing “from Himself” (Jn. 16:13) because He eternally proceeds from the Father and the Son. This scriptural language safeguards the unique oneness of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the very mystery of the Trinity. To say otherwise—to say, for example, that the Son does something by Himself and apart from the Father—would divide the nature, power, and will of the Father and the Son.¹²

The views promoted by Basil, George, Palladius, and the Sermo Arrianorum—views rejected by Hilary, Ambrose, and Augustine, among others—continue to be taught and insisted upon in our day. Bruce Ware, professor of systematic theology at the Southern Baptist Theological seminary, argues that “an authority-submission structure marks the very nature of the eternal Being of the one who is three.…The Father possesses the place of supreme authority…[T]he Son submits to the Father just as the Father, as eternal Father of the eternal Son, exercises authority over the Son. And the Spirit submits to both the Father and the Son.”¹³ Wayne Grudem, editor of the ESV Study Bible, similarly insists that “authority and submission between the Father and the Son, and between the Father and Son and the Holy Spirit, is a fundamental difference (or probably the fundamental difference) between the persons of the Trinity.”¹⁴ Ware and Grudem’s language repeats the anti-Nicene commitments of Basil, George, Palladius, and the Sermo Arrianorum.

These are not merely the views of a few misguided theologians. These same views appear throughout the ESV Study Bible, which is the product of ninety-five biblical scholars representing nearly twenty denominations. The publisher reports that over one million copies have been sold. Here’s the problem. The translators of the ESV mistranslate several verses on the eternal relation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They add the word authority, presumably supplying ἐξουσία, to verses like John 7:17, 8:28, 12:49, 14:10, and 16:13. Why would the ESV add the word “authority” to these verses when the Greek does not? The answer is found in the ESV Study Bible: “Not…on my own authority indicates again that the supreme authority in the Trinity belongs to the Father, and delegated authority to the Son, though they are equal in deity.”¹⁵ Equal in deity means equal in nature; authority and power belong to nature. For the ESV Study Bible the Father and the Son are both equal and unequal in nature.¹⁶ That’s either a subtler form of Arianism, or nonsense, or both.

Arius put his false teaching to music, and that false teaching continues to be chanted in our own day. At the time of the Reformation, Luther and our Lutheran fathers confronted anti-Trinitarians and sang a different song. They returned to the Scriptures and the faithful trinitarian exegesis of Hilary, Ambrose, Augustine, and the other defenders of Nicaea. We too must do the same today. Pastors and capable lay people must diligently attend to the Scriptures and boldly confess with Johann Gerhard that to deny or compromise in any way the mystery of the Trinity is to deny the entire economy of salvation and the atoning work of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.

1 Athanasius, Orations against the Arians, 1.2-4.
2 Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 31.2 in On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius, trans. Frederick Williams and Lionel Wickham (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladmir’s Seminary Press, 2002), 117.
3 Gregory of Nyssa, De deitate filii et spiritus sancti et in Abraham in Gregorii Nysseni Opera X.2, 121.3-12; translation in Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, Gregory of Nyssa’s Doctrinal Works: A Literary Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 221.
4  cf. Luther’s Works 73:473; 15:303-304
5 Johann Gerhard, Theological Commonplaces: On the Nature of God and on the Trinity, trans. Richard J. Dinda (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2007), Exegesis III, §7, 269
6 Epiphanius, Panarion 73.9.5 (Basil) and 73.18.4-5 (George) in Epiphanius III: Panarion haer. 65-80. De fide, ed. Karl Holl and Jürgen Dummer, Die Griechischen Christlichen Schrifsteller (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1985), vol. 37, 279-80 and 290-91.
7 Epiphanius, Panarion 73.11.9–10; GCS 37:283–284.
8 Palladius, Apologia 346r in Roger Gryson, Scolies ariennes sur le concile d’Aquilée, Sources Chrétiennes 267 (Paris: Cerf, 1980), 312.
9 Sermo Arrianorum 20 and 31 in Arianism and Other Heresies, trans. Roland J. Teske in Works of Saint Augustine I/18 (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1995), 135-36.
10 Augustine, In Johannis Evangelium Tractatus 18.4.
11 Cf. Augustine, Sermon 126.9 and 135.4; In Johannis Evangelium Tractatus 18.5 and 20.9.
12 Augustine, Answer to the Arian Sermon, WSA I/18, 159: “In accord with this, ‘the Holy Spirit does not speak on his own,’ because he does not come from himself, but proceeds from the Father. So too, the reason that the Son can do nothing of himself is that he too does not come from himself.” See also Augustine, In Johannis Evangelium Tractatus 20 (John 5:19) and 99 (John 16:13).
13 Bruce Ware, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Relationships, Roles, and Relevance (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2005), 21.
14 Wayne Grudem, Evangelical Feminism & Biblical Truth (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004), 47.
15 ESV Study Bible, ed. Wayne Grudem (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), 2050. Note the word “again” in the explanation. This teaching appears throughout the ESV Study Bible. See the notes for John 3:35, 5:19, 14:28; Matthew 28:18, Mark 10:40, Acts 2:33, 1 Corinthians 11:3 and 15:28; and Ephesians 1:4.
16 Cf. Martin Chemnitz, Loci Theologici, trans. J. A. O. Preus (St. Louis, MO: CPH, 2008), vol. 1, 109: “Heresy arises from the improper use of words.”