Become a Heretic for a While

I recently spent several hours trying to convince a class that Arius was right, the Son is not equal with the Father, and Athanasius blew it.

So we looked at all the biblical data suggesting that the Son is subordinate to the Father. We discussed Greek philosophy and how the Nicene view of three persons (hypostases) in one substance (ousia) necessarily entails either modalism–i.e. the one substance (God) just manifested himself at different times as different persons (Father, Son, and Spirit)–or tritheism–i.e. the one substance (deity) gets expressed in three distinct beings (Father, Son, and Spirit) just like our one human nature gets expressed as many particular humans. And, most importantly, we talked about the Cross, how Athanasius’ overly divine Son downplays the real human suffering on the cross that is a necessary part of any true atonement.

In short, we presented a pretty compelling argument for the truth of Arianism. Indeed, when we were done and had summarized all the strongest arguments for Arianism on the board, I asked the class to refute them. And they were stuck. They still felt intuitively that Arianism had to be wrong, but they couldn’t find the chinks in the armor. It looked so compelling.

That’s when I knew we’d arrived.

You see, the point of the class wasn’t to understand heresy. This was actually a class on the Greek Fathers for the ThM program at Western Seminary. So a good chunk of it focused on people like Athanasius and Gregory of Nyssa, people who were directly involved in responding to Arianism. But I’ve noticed over the years that students have a hard time truly appreciating the beauty and power of the response because they can’t see the beauty and power of the problem. Orthodoxy shines less brightly when you think heresy seems so obviously wrong.

So, if you want to understand heresy, here are at least three things you need to do. Read more