Wherever there is truth, there will be a counterfeit designed to lead people astray.  Arianism like any and every heresy is an example of this. Three hundred years after Christ death Arius, a priest from Alexandria, propagated the idea that Jesus was not God. His teaching can be followed to its modern version in the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The nature of Christ is at the center of Christianity. This may seem to be an obvious statement. It should not be surprising then that the enemy often attacks this topic. In fact, Jesus’ claims to be the Son of God are what caused the most controversy. The Jewish leadership could not accept this son of a carpenter as deity. The debate over the Deity of Christ has never really disappeared, but for orthodox Christianity it came to a pinnacle at Nicea.  A church council was convened in A.D. 325 to discuss the teaching of Arius. Namely, his teaching that God had created Jesus and thus Christ was not deity. He reasoned that belief in Christ as God would mean that one would no longer be monotheistic. The council concluded the matter with what we refer to as the Nicene Creed.

We believe…in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten from the Father, only-begotten, that is, from the substance of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one substance (homoousios) with the Father, through Whom all things were made…

They used the word homoousios, which we translate as of one substance. This was the key language in the creed. The strong meaning of this word echoes clearly what scripture says in Philippians 2:6 “Who being in very nature God…”

The debate did not end at the council. The two sides continued to argue for six decades. The Arians were aided by the political power of Constantine’s son Constantius. The Council of Nicea and its creed was championed by Athanasius the Bishop of Alexandria, who like the Protestant reformers who would follow 1200 years later relied on the Scripture as completely sufficient for doctrine. The Council of Constantinople in A.D. 381 confirmed the earlier creed, not based on the authority of the Council of Nicea, but on the creed’s correspondence with the truth of Scripture.

Kevin Farmer, Phil Meade, Dana Arledge