Justin Baeder recently put me on to Richard Rubenstein’s highly readable account of the Arian controversy — When Jesus Became God (1999). The focus of the book is on the historical narrative of the dispute. It does a wonderful job of showing how theological enquiry at the time was not an abstract but a thoroughly political and, more surprisingly, populist undertaking. The power of the state was a crucial factor at all points in the process, but public opinion and mob rule were equally important in determining the outcome of the controversy. The narrative approach also helps us to reconnect modern theological orthodoxy with the church as it emerged from the eschatological crisis of the first two centuries. The story of the transformation from ‘persecuted sect’ to ‘potential state church’ is fascinating and constitutes an appropriate extension of the retelling of the New Testament story that many are pursuing.
I am not in a position to judge how fair and accurate Rubenstein’s reading of the Arian controversy is (Arianism in wikipedia), but it struck me how in many respects the emerging church could be interpreted as a swing back in the direction of the Arian position. I have listed a number of general points of similarity in thinking and ethos between the emerging church and Arianism as Rubenstein has characterized it. Others may wish to add to, subtract from, qualify or contradict these statements. This is certainly not intended as an informed judgment on the orthodoxy or otherwise of the emerging church, or of Arianism for that matter; it is merely intended to provoke thought.
1. The work of theologians such as NT Wright has encouraged the emerging church to relocate Jesus in a plausible historical context. Inevitably this has brought the human, Jewish Jesus sharply back into focus and has raised again the question of how we make the lengthy theological transition from apocalyptic prophet to second person of the trinity. As we come to understand more fully the worldview and motivation of Jesus the Jew, it becomes harder to think of him as somehow almighty God in human form. I recognize that to some extent this shift of emphasis is offset by more recent interest in relationality and community within the trinity (see this discussion).
2. It is common now to hear people deliberately describe themselves as disciples or followers of Jesus. That has a strongly human orientation – you don’t ‘follow’ the second person of the trinity.
3. Rubenstein emphasizes the fact that Arianism represented a degree of continuity with Judaism, whereas the anti-Arian position, seeking to establish Christianity as a new religion for the Roman world, were anxious to break with the past and ‘update’ Christianity:
From the perspective of our own time, it may seem strange to think of Arian “heretics” as conservatives, but emphasizing Jesus’ humanity and God’s transcendent otherness had never seemed heretical in the East. On the contrary, subordinating the Son to the Father was a rational way of maintaining one’s belief in a largely unknowable, utterly singular First Cause while picturing Christ as a usable model of human moral development. For young militants like Athanasius, however, ancient modes of thought and cultural values were increasingly irrelevant. Greek humanism and rationalism were shallow; Judaism was an offensive, anti-Christian faith; and while admirable figures like the hermit, Antony, could try to perfect themselves in the desert, most people’s primary need was the need for security. Only a strong God, a strong Church, and a strong empire could provide helpless humans with the security they craved. (74)
4. Nicene orthodoxy is much more closely associated with the rise of the state church. Perhaps Arianism was only saved from this fate by its political failure – for some years until Valens’ ill-fated attack on the Visigoths at Hadrianopolis in 378, the Roman empire had been Arian. But still the impression remains (at least, Rubenstein gives this impression) that Nicene Christianity won the argument largely because it better suited the spiritual and political requirements of an emerging Christendom.
5. Many in the emerging church will have more sympathy for the Arians’ interest in Jesus as ‘a loving advocate and friend’ than in the Nicene Christians need to present him as ‘a powerful, just ruler’ (146).
6. Rubenstein, who is Jewish, argues that Nicene theology, particularly as it was developed by the Cappodocian fathers, had the effect of finally differentiating the Christian ‘Godhead’ from the ‘monolithic God worshiped by Jews, radical Arians, and, later on, by Muslims, Unitarians, Bahais, and others’ (209).
…Christians who accepted this triune God, distributed over three Persons, no longer shared Jehovah with their Jewish forebears or the Supreme Being with their pagan neighbors, nor could Jews or pagans claim to believe in the same God as that worshiped by the Christians.
The emerging church is inclined to look for common ground with other faiths and is likely to be uncomfortable with a definition of the godhead that enforces so sharp a separation.
7. The Arians are characterized as being, on the whole, more tolerant and open-minded than the anti-Arians – qualities much prized by postmoderns. Rubenstein speaks of the Arians’ ‘capacity… to tolerate a variety of theological perspectives without declaring their opponents agents of the devil; and their modest disinclination to claim knowledge of matters beyond human understanding, like the precise relationship between the Father and the Son’.
8. Arianism emerges as a more optimistic, down-to-earth, grassroots and socially-minded form of Christianity:
The heart of Arianism was the idea that radical improvements in human behavior need not await the apocalypse or be limited in this world to a cadre of religious specialists. With its popular base among city artisans and workers, sailors and merchants, monks, sodalities of virgins, and young people, it represented a radical impulse in Christianity: the drive to infuse worldly existence with the Spirit of Christ, and so renew human society.
This description will resonate with many in the emerging church movement who dislike the pessimism about human nature inherent in orthodoxy (the doctrine of original sin, for example) and the excessive power and authority given to clergy and other dominant personalities in the ‘modern’ church.
You can find a review of the book by G. Richard Wheatcroft on the website of The Center for Progressive Christianity.
Point number 5
I think I disagree with point number 5
To be fair I have not read this book and I would love to hear the reasons supporting this point, but for now I will mention a few points in opposition, it largely has to do with definitions of modernism and postmodernism as cultural movements. One of the main tenents of modernism was it’s reliance on rational thought, science, and research. By definition as postmodernism begins to move beyond modernism, I believe, based on the reading I’ve done about postmodernism, that people who are thinking in a postmodern way are looking for something beyond the rational, empirical, scientific world to answer the questions of life. This leads me to believe that they will cling to the trinitarian God that they can’t quite grasp, versus the simplified Buddy Jesus who was a person just like them, who experienced everything human, and then suffered and died. I think they will rejoice in an emphasis on his amazing resurection and his role as the second person as the trinity.
Perhaps I go a little too far to tie the emerging church so closely to postmodernism or even to assume postmodernism’s emergence that some may doubt. But in my experience with a younger generation I see a glimmer of truth in those associations that causes me to watch them closely.
As I said I would love to hear some of the reasons supporting the position that the emerging church will look toward a human advocate and friend kind of Jesus, over a more transcendent view of Christ as part of the trinity. Thanks!
How about both/and?
This is an interesting topic and response. I think who we are talking about makes a big difference. If we are talking about youth who have had church experiences where Jesus was presented as buddy and faith seemed too simplified, then I would agree with your statements above that they want to cling to the mystery of God which is not neat and is complex and has to be experienced. If we are talking about someone who has had no experience with church and sees the church as irrelevant and a power structure, there is more of a search for faith that is practical and lived out in an observable way that integrates life. Even as I write this, it is too simplistic and does not take into account the complexities of trying to categorize people into neat boxes.
So I think I see a little of both in the emerging church movement. There is a desire not to over define who God is and to emprace mystery and experience God, but there is also a desire to live the christian life in tangible practical ways that are more wholistic instead of the fragmented way faith has been presented. So I think there is this tension which I think is a good tension as long as we do not swing too far in either direction. I think too often we want to spend our time at the extremes instead of holding tensions in tension.
What sort of Jesus?
I agree that the emerging church is attracted to trinitarianism because it emphasizes both relationality and mystery. Perhaps, then, this is more a christological than a trinitarian issue. From my limited perspective, there does seem to be greater interest in the Jesus who can be followed out into the world (not necessarily an over-familiar ‘buddy’ Jesus) than in the Jesus who rules at the right hand of the Father (implicitly through the hierarchy of the church). But I’m not claiming any great expertise here. Todd’s ‘both/and’ point is also well made - that where we locate Jesus on the spectrum between the human and the divine, the mundane and the mysterious, may have a lot to do with where we’re coming from. It reminds us that the development of a theology is never a purely rational process - it is contextual at both ends. Indeed, it should continually reflect and respond to the changing experiences of believers.
Does story solve the problem of extremes?
You make a good point here about theology being contextual on both ends. It seems that we end up with problems or limited theologies when we live at the extremes. It starts out with either a reaction to a previous theological experience that outlives it’s time as the context has changed underneath it and/or a desire to bring light or focus to an area that has been underdeveloped. I wonder if a narrative approach to undergird our theology will keep us from living on the extremes and keep the picture in balance?
I guess it depends on how we tell the story but I can’t help but think that maybe this will help us to stay rooted to the past while attempting to shape the future of theology (not throwing out the baby with the bathwater so to speak but shaving off the excesses and telling the story in a way that speaks to our current cultural context). I wonder if this helps?
Huff, puff, gotta run to catch up
Only 16 months behind. Compared to where I have felt myself to be, philosophically, for most of my now long life, that ain’t so bad.
I hope that one who identifies himself as a philosopher ( with only an M.A., to go with my B.D.) and as a Christian may find intellectual companionship among you. My favorite theologian, at the moment, is Paul Ricoeur who, for me, resists the criticism that he is theologically light and philosophically heavy. His emphasis, in his middle period of writing, on narrative certainly informs the subject matter addressed here but it is his subsequent development that interests me.
Should anyone be interested, in philosophy at the moment there is a-building a confluence between Anglo-American analytic philosophy and French-German continental philosophy. Both seem to find themselves drawn toward the same questions and learning from one another, as hard as that is to believe for anyone who has followed those traditions in the 20th Century.
The significance for theology is the conceptualizations taken for granted for centuries are now up for grabs. "Consciousness," "mind," "concept", etc. are being re-examined. The curious development is that with such things in science as "neutrinos" and "quarks," etc., science is dealing with entities that are unobservable. That doesn’t make them spiritual, but it means that philosophy of science now must deal with issues that theologians have long wrestled with — a "force" may be a description of nothing more than an event, whose cause is unknown. "Certainty" in philosophy of science has been replaced with "corroboration."
I am not aware that there is as yet any common understanding of "post-modern," even in the arts and literature where the designation first arose. Depending on who you may be reading, some already dismiss it as a passing fancy. I think it acknowledges the degree of fluidity that characterizes advanced thought today.
I am responding at this location on the site, because I served for a quarter of a century as a Unitarian (and later Unitarian Universalist) clergyman. In my denomination, the issue of Jesus has escalated to the question of whether to continue to seek recognition from mainstream Christianity. In addition to the fact that many secular Jews have found hospitality in the more liberal UU churches and the shrinking of global distances has promoted sympathies with world religions, UUs have undergone a sustained internal dialogue with secular humanism.
The result is now an absence of interest in theology (except if vaguely referenced by an amorphous ‘spirituality’) and a focus on humanitarianism. To be sure, one cannot decry the latter. But the wallowing in theological confusion exacts a price. UU is a place for those reared in some restrictive faith background to kick off the traces. Well, and good, but children in such families then have little continuing interest.
Yes, the ties to Arius and Origen are described in UU history. But few have any sense of what that might mean. Pace
An Arian Emerging Church?
This is my first post to this site, though I’ve been lurking here for quite some time, and I’ve found nearly all the conversations stimulating and encouraging. This article to me is fascinating as well, though I must say having read this article that this portrait of emerging church is somewhat different from what I have encountered so far, even though I’ve only encountered it in bits and pieces. A few thoughts come to mind as I read this, and I’d like to offer them as an attempt to better understand the dynamics of emerging church:
1) N. T. Wright may well be recovering for us a "human, Jewish Jesus," but even he, I think, would not advocate a "lengthy theological transition from apocalyptic prophet to second person of the trinity." For me, anyway, the glory of the gospel is that transition is stood on its head. God has acted in history in the person of Jesus the apocalyptic prophet. Israel’s prophets (Eze. 34) and poets (Ps. 23) looked to God as a Shepherd to lead them, not only through paths of righteousness, but out of exile into a restored Israel. The theology of the Gospels, as N. T. Wright himself writes, is that Jesus is God acting to restore Israel (Mark 6:34; John 10).
2) I view myself as a follower of Jesus, the second person of the Trinity. That may be a mysterious thing to say, but I don’t see why that would be problematic in the emerging church.
3) I have a hard time reconciling Arianism’s supposed continuity with first century Judaism with a portrait of Israel’s God as a "largely unknowable, utterly singular First Cause while picturing Christ as a usable model of human moral development." I don’t think any first century Jew would view his/her God as a "singular First Cause" or the Messiah as a "usable model" of anything, let alone moral development. N. T. Wright, I think, has gone to great lengths to undermine the misrepresentation of Judaism as a moralistic religion.
4) Christians professing the Nicene Creed have sung "What a Friend We Have in Jesus," but I thought the emerging church would have a fuller, more robust interest in Jesus as a "just ruler" as well. It is precisely that notion that ought to feed our concern for social justice and ending oppression.
5) Tolerance and open-mindedness may be prized by postmoderns, but they are by moderns as well. They are as old as the enlightenment. Besides, I’m not sure that we want to simply identify the emerging church’s values with those prized in postmodernity. If we do, the emerging church will cease to be counter-cultural in any significant way.
6) I have no problems with the desire to see our mission on earth to be the renewal of human society, with the church as "the new humanity," so to speak, but in order to do that, we have to acknowledge the world as it is, desperately fallen and depraved. If we are truly to engage in this fallen world with the gospel to see that renewal take place, we must open our eyes to the depravity all around us—muslims being killed in Iraq, girls raped by the hundreds in Ethiopia, terror and oppression in Sudan, and the list is endless. That’s not to mention rampant drug use, pornography addiction, adultery, alcoholism and domestic violence in the nice little suburbs of America. The world looks like this because human beings live in it. Paul saw a "crooked and depraved generation" and called us to shine like stars in it (Phil. 2). Yet we must first admit the darkness both out there in the world and within our human nature.
My impression has been that it was the emerging church that has been more willing to acknowledge the darkness, while traditional evangelicalism has been too willing to pretend its not there. Amy I mistaken in my understanding of what’s going on in the emerging church? Thanks again for the stimulating article.
Scott