First Unitarian Universalist Society of Albany

“The Deification of Jesus”

Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore, December 5, 2004

Sermon

In today’s secular times, people’s eyes tend to glaze over if they hear Christians start discussing whether Jesus was co-eternal with God, the orthodox position, or created ex nihilo by God, the heretical position.Over sixteen hundred years ago, however, people rioted in the streets shouting, “There was a time when He was not!”Common tradesmen would debate the finer points of Christian theology as if their salvation depended on it.

I’m here this morning to tell you that this question is still vitally important for the future of Western civilization.In the fourth century, theologians were settling the Christian understanding of what Jesus was.How they settled that question created great misery in Jesus’ name around the world.Our Unitarian and Universalist understanding of Jesus was inherited from the losing side in the controversy.That understanding must be rediscovered and embraced by today’s Christians if we have any hope of living in a religiously pluralistic society.

Jesus was an enigma from the moment he was reported to have returned from the grave promising bodily resurrection and eternal life to his followers.Neither Jews, Greeks, nor Romans had a way to understand this miraculous event.His first Jewish followers believed he was the Messiah who was heralding salvation for the Jewish people.One had to become a Jew to become a Christian.The conversion of a Greek acculturated Jew named Saul of Tarsus changed that.Renamed Paul, he opened the Christian door to non-Jews who didn’t want to be circumcised and eat kosher foods.

For the Christian Jews, what separated Jesus from the other prophets was that he merited worship.But they were not about to give up their monotheism.From the beginning monotheism was central to Christianity.Christians followed in the long Jewish tradition of refusing to sacrifice to the Pagan gods.That meant that Jesus had to be greater than the Pagan gods.Even though he was born of a human mother, he was far greater than the children of Zeus like Helen or Hercules.If he wasn’t in some fashion also God then worshipping him would be blasphemous.But if Jesus was God, how could he also be human?Even more distressing, how could an omnipotent God die on a cross like a common criminal, a death of ultimate humiliation?

The Greeks and Romans had never liked the Jewish refusal to sacrifice to their gods and didn’t find this new Jewish sect any more likable for their repudiation of their gods.This unwillingness became a matter of national security when the German tribes and the Persians pushed the Roman Empire back.Sacrificing to the Gods was a civic duty that appeased them and created unity.To refuse to do so was not just a personal choice, it was treason against the Empire.

This lack of civic obligation motivated periodic persecution of Christians for the first three hundred years of their history.That started to end only after Emperor Constantine saw a flaming cross in the sky along with the words, Touto nika, by this conquer, as he marched his army toward Rome to seize it.A dream directed him to put the symbol of the cross on his Army’s shields.Rome’s walls had never been breached but his opponent, Maxentius, came out to meet him on the battlefield and was routed.Maxentius was last seen riding into the Tiber in a full suit of armor.

Constantine became a Christian and began making it the religion of Rome with the Edict of Milan in 313 ending persecution of Christians.After he united the Eastern half of the empire with the West in 324, he didn’t outlaw Paganism, but put his favor and money toward the Christian church.He hoped to draw his subjects into the new civic religion that could unite his people.The only disturbance in his imperial plan was the Arian Controversy roiling in Alexandria.

Arius, a tall, thin man about sixty at the time, was born in Libya and had been serving as a priest in the Baucalis district for about 10 years.He was a popular priest partly because of his habit of converting his sermons to poetry and singing them.His talent in creating popular ballads full of vivid imagery and enrapturing melodies meant that his thinking propagated quickly to other port cities around the eastern Mediterranean.Admired for his bravery during the most recent persecutions and praised for his personal purity, he was a favorite of sailors, dockworkers and young women.

Arius preached a theology that had been taught in Alexandria for at least a century.Origen, an early Christian theologian and prolific writer, believed Jesus was eternal like God, and united with God, but was separate from and less than God--what became known as the subordinationalist view.

Arius had taken Origen’s ideas further.He questioned the divinity of Jesus suggesting that he was not eternal in the same way God was.Arius preached that “Before Christ, God was not yet a Father.”Arius emphasized that he had earned his “adoption as Son and his promotion to divine status through moral growth and obedience to God.”Jesus was a savior by example.The good news Jesus brought was we, too, can follow him and attain eternal life by growing in wisdom and virtue.We are also potentially sons and daughters of God.Jesus was the highest and most perfected example but that didn’t limit us.We, too, could follow him and trust him to lead us to glory.

Arius’ bishop Alexander didn’t agree.A church council was called to repudiate Arius, which it did, but in the process, Arius found he had many allies.And thus the controversy gained energy.

Enter Athanasius, a small red haired man, who headed the bishop’s staff.Popular legend held the bishop met him on a public beach; a boy of a poor family with little education and no prospects, pretending to be a great preacher to the waves and sea gulls.Impressed with the boy’s ability, boldness and charm, he brought him into his household and raised him to fulfill his ambition of being a bishop.

The core of the controversy centered on the humanity of Jesus.Athanasius believed Arius was correct in rejecting the Sabellian view of God and Jesus being the same undivided reality.Arius’ mistake, Athanasius claimed, was to go to the other extreme and say Jesus was just a human. 

[Jesus] had to be both fully human and fully divine, argued Athanasius.Could the death of a mere human being redeem our sins, grant us immortality, and, eventually, resurrect our physical bodies?Of course not!But could Omnipotent God, the Beginning and the End, suffer for our sake without becoming human? The answer was equally plain.Therefore, whether or not it seemed “reasonable” to people schooled in Greek philosophy, Jesus Christ was both true man and true God. (pages 63-4)

Constantine’s religious advisor Hosius, having heard both arguments would have found Athanasius more convincing.Hosius’ concern was greater than what was more reasonable.Knowing intimately people’s propensity for sin, struggling to survive in a hostile environment, who could believe Jesus mortal?If Arius’ views held, the church’s role in people’s lives would be to advise, support and permit diverse and potentially divisive thought.Athanasius’ position could create more theological and political unity and uniformity by establishing one correct view throughout the empire.So the first church council of the Roman Catholic Church in Nicaea was called with the implicit agenda to suppress Arianism.

Constantine’s involvement aggravated the debate.No longer was the disagreement between Arius and Athanasius a theological dispute.With Constantine becoming involved, the implications for political unity were factored in.What mattered to Constantine is what is good for the Empire rather that what is good for the future of the integrity of the church and inter-religious harmony.

The Council brought together some two hundred and fifty bishops from across the empire to Constantine’s summer palace in May of 325.They met together for the next two months.The bishops marveled at their change in status.No longer persecuted, now they had their travel and living expenses paid by the emperor!The emperor’s patronage and speeches had a heavy influence on them though Constantine took a demure position on theological matters.Constantine’s goal for the council was to allow enough time for the bishops to settle their disagreements, reject Arianism, and leave united.Unexpectedly, it had the opposite effect of splitting the Church along Arian/anti-arian lines for the next fifty years.

Nicaea earned its place in history because the Nicene Creed was first authored there.In modified form, it is still repeated by hundreds of millions of people each week.The first version of the creed was drafted in a way that both Arian and anti-Arians could accept to validate their positions.This wouldn’t settle the controversy.Constantine suggested the use of the word homoousios to describe the relationship of the Son to the Father.Ousios means substance or essence.Homo means same.Thus the Son would be of the same substance or essence as the father.This offended those wishing a rational understanding of Jesus and could thus flush them out and ex-communicate them when they would not sign the creed.

While some Arians did reject the word, because it was a philosophical term, its many shades of meaning gave some room to interpret ousios as, reality, being or even type.Porphyry had written that the souls of humans and animals were homoousios.An extreme Arian might argue that we, too, are homoousios with God as we are made in God’s image.The Arians preferred the term homoiousios, which means similar but not the same.Much blood was let for the difference of one Greek letter!

By the time the council had finished its work, the creed was loaded with a whole paragraph rejecting core Arian ideas.Arius was excommunicated along with the bishops who didn’t sign the creed.

That should have ended the controversy but it didn’t.Constantine, a few years later, welcomed Arius back into the priesthood and encouraged Athanasius to give him back his pulpit, much to his chagrin.More councils were called.Some rewrote the creed to be Arian and then the next rewrote it to exclude Arianism.At one point Christians were about evenly divided between Arianism and non-Arianism, which exacerbated the conflict.Athanasius was banished and welcomed back five times during his life.What ended the Arian controversy was the fall of the East as the Roman Empire began collapsing with the death of the last Arian emperor Valens.

What defeated Arianism more than anything was a general loss of faith in human possibility.The advancing Huns and Visigoths and the rise of Islam put the Roman Empire on the defensive.

The heart of Arianism was the idea that radical improvements in human behavior need not await the apocalypse or be limited in this world to a cadre of religious specialists. With its popular base among city artisans and workers, sailors and merchants, monks, sodalities of virgins, and young people, it represented a radical impulse in Christianity: the drive to infuse worldly existence with the spirit of Christ, and so renew human society. [Valens' defeat] shocked the optimists and undermined their mass appeal by revealing that the "City of Man," as St. Augustine was soon to write, could not be secured. Only the "City of God"-the organized Church--could offer frail humanity compensation for the loss of its worldly hopes. (p218)

In the dawn of the 21st Century, and a feared decline of the American empire, we may be moving into a more pessimistic time.The optimism about human nature born of the late nineteenth century that energized our religious movement has worn down during the twentieth century through two world wars and one cold one.The optimism of new possibility with the end of communism is fading with the rise of worldwide fundamentalism.Fundamentalism and extremism thrive in a world of limited possibilities that looks beyond this lifetime for redemption.

What was the result of the turn away from Arianism?A violent campaign to impose the new order on those outside the Nicene orthodoxy.When church and state unite, the state becomes the enforcer of orthodox theology in the cause of social unity.The history of the Roman Catholic Church is replete with religious wars, crusades and inquisitions.

But the Arian tradition of reason in religion has not been lost.We are legitimate successors to the Arian tradition that encourages growth in wisdom and virtue.Believing in the human possibility for inner transformation in this world is vital to any hope that our future will not be decimated by weapons of mass destruction.Arian Christianity that sees Jesus as promoted not eternal makes room for the validity of other great religious leaders to also be Sons and Daughters of God.This non-exclusive, non-imperial Christianity can make peace with other religions rather than be driven to convert or annihilate them.

The Catholic Church made a wrong turn when it became absorbed into the Roman Empire and anathematized Arianism.It started turning back toward a healthier direction with the ecumenical movement of Vatican II.Meanwhile, Unitarians have kept the Arian tradition alive.Seeing Jesus as a beacon of moral progress can help our world move away from holy war.We pass this tradition on by demonstrating the value of growing in wisdom and virtuous action - through our example.


 

Benediction

Let us leave this morning with inspiration from Arius.

Whether co-eternal or created,
Whether true man and true God, or man promoted to God,
Jesus’ message for our lives is what matters the most.

Expand your love beyond yourself,
beyond your family, your neighbor, your tribe, your nation,
toward its ultimate source.

Care for those you believe to be less than you.
Feed them.Clothe them.Shelter them.

Live unattached to your wealth and possessions.
Share them.Give them away.

Work to create a world of justice, equity and peace on earth.

Let us grow in wisdom and virtue by following Jesus’ great example.

Copyright ©2004 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore.All rights reserved.

The historical data, and direct quotes for this sermon came from the book: When Jesus Became God : The epic fight over Christ's divinity in the last days of Rome by Richard E. Rubenstein, Copyright @ 1999 by HARCOURT BRACE & COMPANY New York San Diego London ISBN 0-15-100368-8