A few weeks later, Arius and a group of sympathizers sailed off t rally support in Asia Minor and the East.

Arius and Eusebius were contemporaries who shared a similar theological bias. Eusebius was a superb politician (who had learned not to push his ideology to the extent of the more volatile Arius) and was, arguably, the premier leader of the Greek-speaking Church. In an age when scurrilous attacks were typical of religious and political combat; not even his enemies could find anything to use against him. Eusebius convened a church council of his own. In 319 or 320, the bishops of Bythia met in Nicomedia to verify that Arius’ views were within the range of ideas acceptable for Christians to hold. The hand of Eusebius" was evident on Arius’ behavior. The priest dispatched a conciliatory letter to Alexander omitting some of his more radical ideas and holding to the major issues: the Father’s superiority to all other beings, and the Son’s indisp4nsable roles as intermediary, Savior, and exemplar.

The Bythian bishops had little difficulty in declaring Arius acceptable and admitting him into communion. They addressed a strong letter to Alexander demanding that he do the same. For the first time, one council of bishops had met specifically to reverse a decree of excommunication pronounced by another council. The odd result was that a priest denied co0mmunion with other Christians in one city was welcomed to church in another! Arius, then, began a campaign throughout the provinces drumming up further support before, finally, returning to Alexandria.

Bishop Alexander refused his request for a meeting and the street battles resumed. More important to the Empire, however, was the schism that now divided the Eastern Church. Alexander’s deacon, Athanasius, in a letter circulated amongst the "faithful" now took up the battle. In it, Athansius dramatically accused Arius of "rending the robe of Christ." (65) Alexander and Athanasius secured two hundred signatures for it (most of them Egyptian) in an effort to counteract the impression that their views were that of a small minority.

This is where matters stood in 325, when Hosius arrived in Alexandria with Constantine’s letter. If, at this point, the matter had been put to a vote of the eastern bishops, the Eusebian party would probably have won. But the reaction of the defeated anti-Arians would surely have been violent. Already, Alexander was characterizing Arius’s philosophy as a heretical attack on Jesus’ divinity, and Athanasius had compared the Arians to the crucifiers of Christ. This sort of language was an invitation to the kind of violence now freely expressed on the streets of "Metropolis."

The real truth of the matter was that, no matter how many bishops supported Arius, Constantine was more likely to support Alexander. His natural tendency was to uphold authority against rebellion, and Bishop Alexander, after all, was supposed to have full authority over all the priests of Egypt and Libya. Moreover, as a Latin-speaking Westerner, Constantine had little patience for Greek theological niceties. So far as he was concerned, the Christ who had appeared to him in a dream led him to victory, and given him an empire to govern was God. The Roman Empire depended upon the hierarchy of government; a state religious system based upon the same model could only be stabilizing.

On the other hand, to patriarchal Romans the very titles of Father and son implied a relationship of superiority and subordination. The idea of a hierarchy of power and glory in Heaven matched what people saw on earth, as well as what they read in the Gospels. "I can do nothing on my own authority," Jesus had told his disciples. "As I hear, I judge; and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but the will of Him who sent me." (14) The idea of representation was a familiar idea in the Empire, where authority descended in carefully graded stages from higher to lower officials. An imperial officer was not equal to the Emperor. Without that superior power there wold be no authority to represent. He was not a free agent either, in the sense of being free to do his own will. Nevertheless, the representative’s subordinate role did not imply powerlessness; quite the contrary. Neither Jesus nor a great official could be considered a mere automaton or a theatrical mask through which some actor’s voice spoke. (15)

It would have been easier if Christianity had come neatly labeled with one set of ideas labeled "orthodox" or "heterodox," but such was not the case. Today, most literal fundamentalists consider Arianism and obvious heresy, but such was not the case in the first three centuries following Jesus’ crucifixion. That the Savior was separate from God and subordinate to Him was not particularly shocking. In Rome’s hierarchy, a Caesar was considered inferior to an Augustus, but no one would deny a Caesar was infinitely more powerful than an ordinary man and entirely deserving of obedience. Was Jesus, then, God’s Caesar? No, the Arians replied, he was more than that. An ordinary official might act outside the scope of his authority. No one cold know with certainty it was his master’s will he represented and not his own. But Christ was "the exact Image" of the Father. (16) Obviously, exact image did not imply that Jesus resembled God in his human appearance, but that he was as closely attuned to God’s wishes as anyone who was not himself God. As a completely obedient and reliable servant, the Son was always in agreement with the Father. (When Jesus Became God, Rubenstein pg. Chapt.1)

Athansius accurately pointed out the weakness of the Arians. They had become prisoners of Greek logic, thinking in terms of either / or; either one point was correct or the other. That is why they accused Alexander of Sabellianism: a heresy asserting that God and Jesus were simply aspects of the same undivided reality. This merging of the Father and Son implied that the Son was not really human, or, perhaps, that only his body was human while his mind was divine. Arius was right to reject this thinking, Athanasius said; but, in so doing, had fallen into the opposite trap. The Arians could not conceive that he might be both, and so the tendency of their thought, though denied, was to turn him into a man – or some sort of third creature, and angel or demigod.

Yet Christ had to be both fully human and fully divine. 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 sakes without becoming human? The answer was equally pain. Therefore, it was plain that God could, and did, take on fleshly form to fulfill His own plan of salvation without ceasing for a moment to be God.

Hosius had to find this exposition convincing. His people would not accept a Jesus who was too much like them – less than divine. They longed for a High God – a Christ who could save them from their weaknesses by His Grace and comfort them through the ministrations of His Church. Arian theology reduced the role of the institutional Church. If Jesus’ life and character were supposed to serve ordinary Christians as a usable model of behavior, the principle mission of the clergy would be to help people transform themselves, not maintain theological and political unity through out the empire. This was another reason Constantine would probably favor the doctrine of Alexander and Athanasius over Arius. The Church he needed was one that would help him keep order among ordinary folk: people who would never become immortal unless God decided for reasons of His own to save them.

Hosius made up his mind. He would write immediately to tell the emperor that compromise was impossible. The Arian heresy could neither be tolerated nor accommodated. It had to be suppressed. At the same time, he would recommend a strategy to end the division in the Christian community as quickly and decisively as possible. The bishops of the East had been talking for some time about the need for a great council to deal with a number of issues troubling the rapidly growing Church. Hosius would recommend that Constantine convene such a council in the spring, preferably in a city not far from his own headquarters – perhaps in Ancyra, whose bishop, Marcellus, was a passionate opponent of Arius and Eusebius. The emperor could use the council to persuade the assemble bishops to condemn Arianism. Not only was the cause just, but Hosius judged that few churchmen would dare oppose the wishes of Rome’s supreme ruler – the man Eusebius of Caesarea called "God’s dearly beloved," and "the savior and chief bastion of the Church." (67)

NEXT: Eusebius learns a lesson in vulnerability.