Arian Controversy

The Arian meaning is Christian. The Arian controversy was a chain of Christian disputes about the character of Christ that started out with a dispute among Arius and Athanasius of Alexandria, Christian theologians from Alexandria, Egypt. The most critical of those controversies involved the connection between the substance of God the Father and the substance of His Son.

Emperor Constantine, via the Council of Nicaea in 325, tried to unite Christianity and set up a single, imperially accredited model of the religion. Ironically, his attempt was the cause for the deep divisions created by the disputes after Nicaea.

These disagreements divided the Church into diverse factions for over 55 years, from the time before the First Council of Nicaea in 325 till after the First Council of Constantinople in 381. There was no formal schism.

Inside the Roman Empire, the Trinitarian faction eventually won the upper hand via the Edict of Thessalonica, issued on 27 February AD 380. This edict made Nicene Christology the national religion of the Roman Empire, and via stringent enforcement of that edict. 

On this page, we will understand more about the Arian controversy and the council of Nicaea and the interesting historical facts on the Arian controversy timeline.

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Disagreements Regarding the Christological Model 

The ongoing disagreements about which Christological model was regarded as normative burst into the open in the early 4th century during the Arian controversy, probably the most severe and most consequential theological dispute in early Christianity. 

The protagonists, Arius (c. 250 - 336) and Athanasius (c. 293 - 373), differentiated subjects of theology, however, have been quite similar in temperament and personality - learned, self-confident, and unyielding. Both have been from Alexandria, Arius a prominent churchman and scholar, and Athanasius a remarkable theologian.

In 325 AD, the First Council of Nicaea was inaugurated by Christian bishops in the Bithynian city of Nicaea by the Roman Emperor Constantine I, to settle the controversy. The council condemned Arius as a nonconformist and issued a creed to protect “orthodox” Christian beliefs.

What After Disagreements? 

Though disagreements were the cause of the clash and the strict enactment of the Christian religion, however,  outside the Roman Empire, Arianism, and different types of Unitarianism endured to be preached for a few times (without the blessing of the Empire), however, it was subsequently killed off. The modern Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church, as well as most other modern Christian sects, have usually followed the Trinitarian formulation, even though each has its own particular theology on the matter.

Now, let us understand what is Arius Christology.

Arius Christology

Arius’s Christology was a combination of adoptionism and logos theology. His fundamental perception was that the Son came into being through the will of the Father; the Son, therefore, had a beginning. Although the Son reached eternity, he was not eternal, and father and son never had an identical essence. In Jesus, who faced pain and wept, the logos became human.

One strength of Arius’s position was that it was regarded to protect a strict monotheism while offering the language interpretation of the New Testament—noteworthy, the word Son - that conformed to trendy utilization and meaning. The weakness of his view was that accurately because Jesus was able to struggle as a human, it was tough to understand how he could be completely divine and thus impact the redemption of humankind.

Belief for Christianity 

According to Athanasius, God had to form a human so that people turn to divinity. Thus, the heart of Athanasius’s Christology was non secular referring to a speculative concern. 

Further, this led him to summarise that the divine nature in Jesus was equal to that of the Father and that Father and Son have identical substance. He relied on the requirement for the Nicene homoousios to describe  Son’s unity with the Father.

The controversy did extra than significantly agitate and bitterly divided the Christian community; it additionally threatened the political balance of the Roman Empire. Eager for a resolution, Emperor Constantine inaugurated and presided over the Council of Nicaea, which formed the Nicene Creed, declaring the Athanasian role. Constantine, in step with his biographer Eusebius of Caesarea, had sought to reap a rapprochement among the 2 aspects with the aid of using suggesting the usage of the phrase homoousios, which turned into regularly occurring with the aid of using all in attendance excluding Arius and  Libyan bishops. 

The Western bishops, who like most of the bishops in a sequence were not given an awful lot concept to the issue, had been now no longer afflicted with the aid of using Constantine’s term, which they understood as equal to the Latin phrase substantia, which Tertullian had used to explain the 2 substances of Jesus. The Nicene Class states that Jesus is:

Eternally begotten of the Father,

God from God, Light from Light,

true God from true God,

begotten, not made, one in Being with the

Father.

The council rejected the opinion of those who argued, as Eusebius put it in a famous letter, that Once he was not, or he was not before his generation, or he came to be out of nothing, or…he, the Son of God, is of a different hypostasis or ousia (Greek: “essence”), or that he is a creature, or changeable or mutable.

Arian Controversy Timeline: Facts and Information

Below is the chronological order for the timeline of the Arian Controversy: 

From our topic,  Arian controversy and the Council of Nicaea, we understand that the Arian controversy was a sequence of Christian conflicts about the nature of Christ that started with a clash between Arius and Athanasius of Alexandria, two Christian theologians from Alexandria, Egypt.