Arianism

Arianism is the teaching, named for the fourth-century Alexandrian presbyter Arius, that the Son of God is not eternal or of one essence with the Father but a created being, brought into existence by the Father before the world and therefore inferior to him.¹ It denies the deity of Christ as historic Christianity has confessed it: on this view, Christ is not God in the way the Father is God, but the highest of God’s creatures.

Historical Origin

Arius taught in Alexandria in the early fourth century, and his position built on an earlier adoptionist Christology associated with Paul of Samosata, who had denied Christ’s preexistence and deity outright.¹ Arius’s own concern began from a particular account of God’s oneness: because God is “unbegotten” and without beginning, Arius reasoned, he is absolutely unique, so whatever the Father brings into being to serve as an intermediary in creation cannot itself share that same unbegotten, uncreated status.¹ The dispute grew large enough, especially after the conversion of the emperor Constantine, that the church convened the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 to settle it, producing the creed that confessed the Son “begotten, not made, being of one substance (homoousion) with the Father.”²

Core Tenets

Arius taught that before creating the world, the Father brought into being an intermediary through whom he made all things, an entity Scripture calls “Wisdom,” “Son,” “Logos,” and “image of God.” Because this entity had a beginning, “there was a time when he did not exist,” even though he was created “before the times and ages,” prior to the world itself. This Logos, on Arius’s account, is not consubstantial with the Father but a separate being, mutable and capable of choosing evil as well as good; he became human, taught the truth, and secured redemption, and for this is worthy of honor, but not of worship, since worshiping him would mean the existence of two gods.¹ Arius and his followers appealed to real biblical texts to support this reading: passages affirming God’s oneness (Deut. 6:4; John 17:3), describing the Son’s birth or origin (Prov. 8:22; Col. 1:15), his subordination to the Father (John 14:28; 1 Cor. 15:28), his limited knowledge (Mark 13:32), and his exaltation to lordship after his earthly life (Acts 2:36; Phil. 2:9).¹

Confessional and Biblical Response

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states the doctrine Nicaea defended in nearly identical terms: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are “of one substance, power, and eternity, each having the whole divine essence, yet the essence undivided.”³ Scripture gives the Son titles and actions Arianism cannot account for on its own terms: “the Word was God” and “the Word became flesh” (John 1:1,14), Christ is “the exact imprint of his nature” who “upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3), and “all things were created through him and for him,” so that he cannot be numbered among the created things he himself made (Col. 1:16). Bavinck argues that using terms like homoousios, absent from Scripture’s own wording, was not an addition to Scripture’s teaching but a defense of it: the church found such language necessary “to draw warranted inferences” from the biblical text and mark the boundary within which faithful reading of Scripture must proceed, precisely because Arius’s own reading, though built from real texts, arrived at a conclusion Scripture as a whole does not permit.¹

Modern Forms

Bavinck traces Arianism’s reappearance across later centuries rather than treating it as settled by Nicaea alone: various forms of subordinationism, English Arianism in the post-Reformation period (John Milton held that the Son and Spirit were created by the Father’s free will before the world and called “God” only by virtue of their office), and Socinianism, which held that the Son was a created human being with no preexistence before his conception, honored as an example but not worshiped as God.¹

Related Doctrines

References

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 9, “The Triune God and His Counsel.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 7, “Creeds and Confessions,” 112-128. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 3. ↩