Theopedia

Arius

Overview

Arius (c. AD 256 - 336) was a presbyter of Alexandria in the early fourth century. His teaching that the Son was a created being, not eternal and not of one substance with the Father, gave Arianism its name and set off the controversy that produced the Nicene Creed.1 Athanasius spent much of his life opposing him.2

Life and Ministry

Arius served as a presbyter in Alexandria, Egypt, when he began criticizing the preaching of his bishop, Alexander of Alexandria, on how the Father and the Son are related. Alexander, following Origen, emphasized the Son’s eternal generation from the Father. Arius instead emphasized the uniqueness of the one unbegotten God and concluded that the Son’s divine status could not be a matter of shared substance.3 Hodge traces the line back further, through Origen and Origen’s student Dionysius of Alexandria, both of whom had already described the Son in terms Hodge judges inconsistent with his true divinity. Arius went further than either: he openly taught that the Son was not eternal but came after the Father, created “from things that are not” (ἐκ οὐκ ὀντῶν) and therefore not ὁμοούσιος (of one substance) with him, though existing before every other creature and used by the Father to make the world.1 The dispute grew large enough that the emperor Constantine summoned the First Ecumenical Council to Nicaea in AD 325 to settle it. The council condemned Arius’s teaching and wrote into its creed that the Son is “begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father.”1

Theological Contribution

Arius held that the three persons of the Trinity are not equal. Only the Father is God without qualification; the Son’s divinity, though real, is a result of the Father’s will rather than a shared essence. On this account the Son is changeable by nature and does not know the Father’s essence.3 A. A. Hodge describes the same teaching in Arius’s own conceptual scheme: the Godhead is “one eternal person” who, before the world existed, created “in his own image a super-angelic being… his only begotten Son.” Through the Son, the Father then made the Holy Spirit as the Son’s own first creature, and later the world itself; in the fullness of time this created Son became incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth.2 Hodge also distinguishes full Arianism from the milder Semiarian position that Eusebius of Caesarea and Eusebius of Nicomedia held instead, which made the Son’s essence merely “like to” the Father’s rather than a creature of a different order entirely.2 The fuller theological case Arius and his followers made from Scripture, and the confessional and biblical response to it, are treated at Arianism rather than repeated here.

Historical Significance

The controversy Arius began outlasted him. Carter describes it as occupying the whole fourth century, with Arius, Asterius, Eusebius of Caesarea, and Eunomius on one side against Athanasius, the Cappadocian fathers, and Augustine on the other, over whether the Father-Son relationship is fundamentally a matter of will or of shared substance.3 Nicaea’s condemnation of Arius in 325 did not end the dispute: the council’s own ὁμοούσιον language remained contested for decades before the Council of Constantinople reaffirmed it.3 Even Arius’s death became part of the church’s memory of the controversy. Athanasius wrote his own account of it in a letter, To Serapion, Concerning the Death of Arius, which the Baptist theologian John Gill later cited in his own writing.4

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Charles Hodge, “Chapter VI. The Trinity,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 452-453. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 9, “The Holy Trinity,” 196-197. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. Craig A. Carter, “The Biblical Character of Pro-Nicene Theology,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 7. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  4. Steven Tshombe Godet, “John Gill: Patristic Scholar,” in “The Trinitarian Theology of John Gill (1697-1771): Context, Sources, and Controversy” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015), 122-180. ↩