2. Arianism and Other Ancient Heresies Deny the Full Deity of the Son and the Holy Spirit

a. The Arian Controversy

The term Arianism is derived from Arius (d. 336), a presbyter (elder) of the church in Alexandria whose views were condemned at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325. Arius taught that God the Son was at one point created by God the Father, and that before that time the Son did not exist, nor did the Holy Spirit, but the Father only. Thus, though the Son is a heavenly being who existed before the rest of creation and who is far greater than all the rest of creation, he is still not equal to the Father in all his attributes—he may even be said to be “like the Father” or “similar to the Father” in his nature, but he cannot be said to be “of the same nature” as the Father, according to Arian teaching.

1. Scripture Verses Used by Arians. The Arians depended heavily on texts that called Christ God’s “only begotten” Son (see John 1:14; 3:16, 18; 1 John 4:9 in NASB, NKJV, or KJV).²⁰ If Christ were “begotten” by God the Father, they reasoned, it must mean that he was brought into existence by God the Father (for the word beget in ordinary human experience refers to the father’s role in conceiving a child). Further support for the Arian view was found in Colossians 1:15, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.” Does not firstborn here imply that the Son was at some point brought into existence by the Father? And if this is true of the Son, it must necessarily be true of the Holy Spirit as well.

Proverbs 8:22 was also used by the Arians. One possible way to translate the verse is, “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old” (Prov. 8:22 RSV). Arians claimed that “Wisdom,” who was speaking in this chapter, was in fact the Son of God, and verse 22 taught that he was “created.” The Septuagint (which was for the ancient church their commonly used Greek translation of the Old Testament) helped the Arians, for it explicitly said, “The Lord created me” (Gk. kyrios ektisen me, using the verb ktizō, “create”).

2. Answers to Arian Interpretations. In response to Arianism, church leaders who defended the full deity of the Son concluded that whatever “only begotten” means in John 3:16 and elsewhere, it cannot mean “created” but must refer to something in the eternal relationship between the Father and the Son. This view found expression in the Nicene Creed in the words, “the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages … begotten, not made” (see discussion below).

Colossians 1:15, which calls Christ “the firstborn of all creation,” is better understood to mean that Christ has the rights or privileges of the “firstborn”—that is, according to biblical usage and custom, the right of leadership or authority in the family for one’s generation. (Note Heb. 12:16 where Esau is said to have sold his “firstborn status” or “birthright”—the Greek word prototokia is cognate to the term prototokos, “firstborn” in Col. 1:15.) So Colossians 1:15 means that Christ has the privileges of authority and rule, the privileges belonging to the “firstborn,” but with respect to the whole creation. The NIV makes this sense explicit: “the firstborn over all creation” (also the NKJV, NLT, and NET).

Proverbs 8:22 is best understood not to be speaking about the Son of God but about Wisdom, personified as a woman calling out in the street for people to follow her: “To you, O men, I call.… O simple ones, learn prudence” (Prov. 8:4–5). Wisdom in Proverbs 8:1–9:12 is set in contrast to “Folly,” also personified as a woman calling out in the streets in Proverbs 9:13–18: “The woman Folly is loud; she is seductive and knows nothing. She sits at the door of her house … calling to those who pass by … ‘Whoever is simple, let him turn in here!’ ” (9:13–16). So 8:22 is speaking about Wisdom, not about the Son of God.

3. The Nicene Creed. As I mentioned above, the texts that say that Christ was God’s “only begotten Son” were understood by early church leaders to refer to an eternal relationship between the Father and the Son. But the many texts affirming Christ’s deity were so strong that the early church concluded that whatever “only begotten” meant, it did not mean “created.” Therefore, the Nicene Creed in AD 325 affirmed that Christ was “begotten, not made”:

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, the only-begotten; that is, of the essence of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance (homoousion) with the Father.

This same phrase was reaffirmed at the Council of Constantinople in 381. In addition, the phrase “before all ages” was added after “begotten of the Father,” to show that this begetting was eternal. This begetting never began to happen but has been true of the relationship between the Father and the Son eternally. However, the nature of begetting has never been defined very clearly, other than to say that it has to do with the relationship between the Father and the Son, and that in some sense the Father has eternally had a primacy in that relationship.

In further repudiation of the teaching of Arius, the Nicene Creed insisted that Christ was “of the same substance (or same nature) as the Father.” The dispute with Arius concerned two words that have become famous in the history of Christian doctrine, homoousios (“of the same nature”) and homoiousios (“of a similar nature”). The difference depends on the different meaning of two Greek prefixes, homo-, meaning “same,” and homoi-, meaning “similar.” Arius was happy to say that Christ was a supernatural heavenly being, that he was created by God before the creation of the rest of the universe, and even that he was “similar” to God in his nature. Arius would agree to the word homoiousios.

But the Council of Nicaea in 325 and the Council of Constantinople in 381 realized that this did not go far enough, for if Christ is not of exactly the same nature as the Father, then he is not fully God. So both councils insisted that orthodox Christians confess Jesus to be homoousios, of the same nature as God the Father. The difference between the two words was only one letter, the Greek letter iota, and some have criticized the church for allowing a doctrinal dispute over a single letter (!) to consume so much attention for most of the fourth century AD. Some have wondered, “Could anything be more foolish than arguing over a single letter in a word?” But the difference between the two words was profound, and the presence or absence of the iota really did mark the difference between biblical Christianity, with a true doctrine of the Trinity, and a heresy that did not accept the full deity of Christ and therefore was non-Trinitarian and ultimately destructive to the whole Christian faith.

 Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine, Second Edition. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic, 2020), 285–288.