Nicaea: The Brothers Met Here Long Ago
The Legacy of Arianism, Part 3
Scout’s Anti-Arianist Manifesto
“I’m your huckleberry.” – Apostle Paul, paraphrase of Galatians 1:15
Here is another chapter on Arianism. (What did you think was going to happen?) I believe that God is Triune and is comprised of three co-equal God Persons who have a special existential unity with each other as a part of their nature. I may or may not conform in belief to the Nicene documents – I have never read them. I am still reading about how the brothers arrived at their conclusion back around 400 AD. For my part, I believe the God Persons are ontologically co-equal because I believe that the Beings who belong to the God category are absolute by virtue of Creatio ex Nihilo. They can create reality. Beings who can create reality from the outside are not bound by any of the real limits from the inside that we know. And you can’t compare absolute beings with each other. They are not measurable and relative as we are. Someone who is absolute can’t be more absolute than someone else who is absolute. There cannot be a greater God and lesser God. If a being is lesser, that being is not God. The Church of God Seventh Day, at the time HWA joined it, did not believe Jesus to be God. HWA acknowledged that Jesus is God but relegated him to a secondary role as if Jesus were a relative being like us. So, while Armstrongism asserts that humans will become God-as-God-is-God, it does not accord that same status to Jesus. I think that maybe Armstrongists believe, as I do, that God Persons are different in economy but not in ontology. But it is hard to say. You cannot find the words “ontology” and “economy” in Armstrongist writings about God. They never carried their Doctrine of God very far and now HWA is dead and his death pretty much fixed their theology at a certain point in history. If one goes by what Armstrongist authors have written, one would have to conclude that the Son is smaller than the Father both in ontology and in economy since no distinction is made. And to say that Jesus is smaller is another way of saying that Jesus does not really belong in the God category because being smaller makes him relative rather than absolute. For Arianists of different sorts, Jesus might even be angelomorphic. And the aspect of Arianism called Subordinationism (a little god subordinate to a big god), then, is held as true by Armstrongism. As for the Holy Spirit, Armstrongism makes him an impersonal attribute of God. (Whether an attribute of the Father or the Son, I don’t know. They are separate God beings in Armstrongism. The only unity in the Godhead that Armstrongism admits is that of a family relationship. And a human family is a biological collection of separate, non-consubstantial beings.) If the Holy Spirit is simply an inherent attribute of God, then when the Holy Spirit is mentioned in the OT and NT, he is just a redundancy. Like saying, “Ralph and his nose visited us.” You can just assume that if Ralph is there, his nose will be, too. And the redundancy converts the Bible into an example of really bad writing. In the last analysis, I reject Arianism and agree with what the brothers decided, as far as I know it, at the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople. I do believe that some of what the brothers concluded is conjectural. But, one day, Paul promises us, this will all be settled and we will no longer see through a glass darkly. And for this present shootout, Paul is our huckleberry.
