Arianism, Then and Now

every single sunday at mass we fight arius again because we recite the nicene creed right that comes up out of the council of nicaea and explicitly condemns the aryan position and states the orthodox position we think it's so important that every single week at our liturgy we catholics get up and say arius was wrong arius was wrong every sunday lest we forget now the problem is most people like even a catholic mass have no real idea of what we're doing when we recite that creed [Music] welcome back to the word on fire show i'm brandon vaught the host and the content director we've got some really good stuff for you today we're going to look at the results of a new survey on the state of theology we're going to explore an ancient heresy known as arianism and we're going to show why arianism remains appealing today but should nevertheless be rejected but before that i want to greet bishop barron the auxiliary bishop of the archdiocese of los angeles who is joining us from santa barbara bishop baron good to see you hey brandon good to see you it's mercifully a little cooler today in santa barbara so our studio is not quite as hot as it was what does cool mean for santa it's like in the mid 60s maybe this morning but last couple times we filmed it's been super hot here and as i've said there's no air conditioning in santa barbara so when it gets hot which is relatively rare things get really warm inside you know we were joking before we started recording here about some of the comments on a recent video you just posted you were commenting on pope francis's new encyclical and you were just sitting in your living room under uh these lights that you're actually not a big fan of because they're kind of i don't know gaudy they they kind of make everything look weird in the room anyway the comments in the video people said bishop why why do you keep dyeing your hair your hair looks blonde and we're joking because in other videos with other different lighting your hair looks black or your hair looks like dark brown um so so give us the facts bishop are you dyeing your hair before every episode i am not my entire hair care regimen consists of shampoo and water in the shower that's the entire hair care regimen uh it's funny though it's what it's just the lighting in different settings you know so we have kind of bright lights in here now in the studio if i'm outside like under just direct sunlight i look gray completely white uh other light it looks kind of reddish or so yeah please everybody i'm not dying my hair [Laughter] i'm not vain about my hair it's shampoo and water is the entire hair care whatever you're seeing is a product of of different lighting all right so we saved the heaviest theological discussion here for the world on fire show hair care yeah um okay let's go from there to the topic of discussion and i want to talk with you about this new survey that was just released by ligonier ministries ligonier is a reformed protestant ministry but they worked with a prominent social science group to commission this pretty big survey of american adults which they call the state of theology and if you go to the website the state of theology.com they have a really beautiful visualization of all this data where you can filter through by you know different factors religious background religious attendance frequency all sorts of stuff but beautifully graphically displayed so i encourage listeners to check it out the state of theology.com and the survey found lots of interesting things i think they asked there were the respondents over 20 questions but one that especially stood out and after the survey was released this is what all the media picked up on in their headlines was that most christians believed some very disheartening things about jesus so let me mention just a couple of them so uh what they would do is they would give people a statement and they would ask people do you strongly agree agree no opinion disagree strongly disagree that sort of thing so here's the statement jesus is the first and greatest being created by god now 59 of americans in general agreed with that 59 agreed that jesus is the first and greatest being created by god but here's what's alarming 66 of catholics agreed with that so more catholics than the general population agreed with that and we'll get into why that's problematic the second one i want to focus on is jesus was a great teacher but he was not god that was the statement 51 so about half of americans agreed with that but again 57 of catholics agreed with that so it's crazy to think that 57 of people who identify as catholic do not think that jesus is god um what's your initial impressions of that bishop well it's almost as despairing as my response to the pew form study about um belief in the eucharist we discovered that 70 of catholics don't believe in the real presence so the source and summit of the christian life according to vatican ii is now really massively either misunderstood or not believed in by the vast majority of catholics this one a central doctrine of our faith the divinity of jesus you take away the divinity of jesus christianity devolves immediately into a mildly interesting mythic or moral system that can be dispensed with you know like any other system of thought um if this is true and you know i've been on this for a while and people go after me and think i'm you know one-sided or i'm too intellectualistic or something but i've been saying for a long time brandon that our catechesis and our communication of the faith has been seriously wanting in the year since vatican ii again not blaming vatican ii mind you but there was a there was a near collapse in our catechesis i think you're seeing in surveys like this the bitter fruit of it i think you're going to suggest that what's happening is the revival of very ancient heretical positions that the church fought long ago and recognized in some ways as the standing and falling point of christianity um all sorts of church fathers are spinning in their graves at this finding that now a substantial majority of catholics hold essentially to these um ancient heretical positions so it's yeah disturbing now i can see the comment commenters lining up because so many people today are kantians as i've said that when it comes to religion isn't it all about ethics isn't it all about social justice about care for the poor and so if you're committed to all those good things then who cares what you believe but that's always been repugnant to our tradition our great tradition has been massively interested in doctrinal clarity especially about this central claim regarding jesus divinity so i think now again we have to be fair this is a survey as careful as it is you know we have to be attentive to the objectivities here is it in fact the case having said that i must say i'm not terribly surprised it would fit some of my own expectations so if it's true it's very concerning for the life of the church you mentioned that the church fathers would be rolling over in their graves because they combated a lot of these mis statements and misbeliefs about jesus in the first few centuries of the church at that time there was lots of different heresies swirling around that reduced jesus from god to just a mere creature one of the more popular ones and the one i want to spend time discussing here is known as arianism you could say that in the early church there was kind of two dominant heresies that got massive attention and following that would be arianism and gnosticism and we covered gnosticism in depth in a previous episode i think it was number 222 but let's talk about arianism today so arianism stems from arius who was a third century egyptian priest and theologian tell us a little bit more about arius who was he what should we know about him as you say a priest in alexandria which was a major cultural center at the time so the great origins from alexandria arius comes up out of this sort of richly textured intellectual culture and now to give him full credit many people in those first centuries are trying to make sense of too great data that the scriptures had given to them namely that in jesus we're dealing with humanity and we're dealing with divinity so we can point to all kinds of places in the new testament where both of those facts are revealed so some of the smartest people in the first several centuries tried to think that through and figure it out and articulate the best way to express the way divinity and humanity relate to each other so to be fair to someone like arias he's a brilliant priest preacher they even say songwriter he was a singer and songwriter and he expressed his theological ideas in popular songs so that people would sing them in you know public places and so on he was trying to think it through in a distinctive way the church in time and at a very decisive moment named with the council of nicaea said no to areas now here's one way brandon i would try to situate it you might say there are three great options that were available one is to hyper emphasize the divinity of jesus you call this monophysitism monophysitism fuses means nature so monophysis means one nature he's god with kind of a human appearance or a human vesture let's say that is a hyper stress on divinity on the other side you might have nestorianism which is the view that you've got really two persons in jesus there's a there's divine person and there's this fully constituted human person and the two of them are in relationship well you say well okay but that makes him sound like a saint like francis of assisi or mother teresa she's a human person relating to a divine person right so that's a hyper stress on the humanity now again to give him his do arius in a way represents a middle position because aria says the divinity incarnate in jesus is not the full divinity of the true god but rather he's the first of creatures the the father if you want the true god creates first his logos which is like this very very very high spiritual creature the logos becomes incarnate in a somewhat truncated human nature so not a complete humanity not a complete divinity but the two of them come together to form jesus so is he human yeah kind of is he divine yeah kind of it's a little bit of both right so you've got monophysitism he's god historianism is basically just a super saint arianism is like well you know what how about take a little bit of both he's kind of quasi-divine quasi-human what i find really interesting and i learned this from chesterton and newman and so many others is the church really said no to all three of those positions and that's if you look from nicaea through constantinople all the way to the council of calceton that's what you find the church doing the church saying both and right not one the other or a little bit of both it says fully divine fully human so i put aries there as kind of a middle position between monophysitism and historianism bishop we're reflecting here in the 21st century so you know eighteen hundred years ish after these third fourth century heresies after we've had many centuries of reflection refinement development of our theology so we look back on heresies like arianism or gnosticism and think how could anyone have held that like why would that have been appealing given the biblical data given the reflection of theologians and stuff like that so maybe help steel man the case for arianism because it was really pervasive why did so many people find it attractive well and instead that's what i was trying to do with brandon in some ways was to present arius as richly as possible that he it's wrong to see him as like well i think i'm going to become a heretic today and and cause trouble he was trying to think it through and as i suggest he saw his position as kind of a nice compromise here's something else about it i think it has a lot in common with the mythic imagination prevalent at the time so think of achilles or hercules these figures that were quasi-divine quasi-human like a hybrid of the two in a way arius represents the um theologization of these mythic ideas so i think for both those reasons he was an attractive figure and indeed aryanism in his own lifetime and then long after his death continued to be a very powerful force within the church now it's interesting and the reason you bring it up is that first formulation of the question in the survey that's arianism right is he the highest creature is jesus the first creature and that aerys would say yeah he is he's the incarnation of this highest creature namely the logos so it was attractive then it's attractive now too but i would say what intervene though brandon for us is that kantian move is i think for a lot of people today they'd say oh you know getting that language right about how the divine and human relate is kind of a lot of you know fussy fufu what really matters is you know social justice that would not have been the view in the ancient world they were extremely interested in getting the language right about who jesus is that's my fear that our time it's it's like we don't really care we're not we're not that interested in it as long as we're committed to social justice yeah help flesh that out a little more for us what are the implications of having a faulty christology why does it matter whether you're an aryan christian versus an orthodox christian why i was like what paul tillich said that um uh the the issue at the council of nicaea which is dealing with arianism was the gettysburg of christianity in other words it was the decisive battle if we had lost that war again i'm speaking from a northern perspective here if the union had lost gettysburg they would have lost the war if we had lost at nicaea we would have lost christianity as i say it would have devolved into you know one more mildly interesting mythic or you know moral system where you'd say well here's an interesting teacher and there's another one and yeah that's an interesting perspective and jesus sure he's got neat things to say about you know how to live your life spiritually well so what so what the claim of christianity is that god became human that humans might become god i'm using the old patristic formula the christian difference is that god entered into our human condition so as to save it and elevate it from within the divinity and humanity mind you of jesus are both essential to salvation without the incarnation rightly understood we won't understand what salvation is about from salvation come sacraments the mass the eucharist everything the church is about so if we had lost tilik is right now till it's protestant but i mean he's right about christianity there if we had lost that battle we would have lost the war which by the way i don't know if you're going to go there with another question brandon but which by the way is precisely why every single sunday at mass we fight aries again because we recite the nicene creed right that comes up out of the council of nicaea and explicitly condemns the aryan position and states the orthodox position we think it's so important that every single week at our liturgy we catholics get up and say arius was wrong arius was wrong every sunday lest we forget now the problem is most people like even a catholic mass have no real idea of what we're doing when we recite that creed all right so the nicene creed emerges from the council of nicaea that gettysburg event in the year 325 that's when the church really seriously engaged uh aryanism as the first ecumenical council of the church walk us through what nicaea decided and how it decided it how did the council of nicaea battle against arianism well it's a very interesting moment in the life of the church they say the year 325 so we're the early fourth century the the aryan view is being propagated in very very early fourth century uh in alexandria then he's exiled and as he propagates it elsewhere there are local synods that that deal with it but finally it was the emperor constantine himself who was consolidating his control of the roman empire and he wanted christianity to help him in unifying the empire what was bugging constantine who wasn't particularly pious but was wait a minute the thing i want to use to unite my empire they're now fighting with each other so i got to get these people united so i'd say god and his providence used constantine's political machinations he calls the council of nicaea brings the bishops together to adjudicate this problem i think brandon the key issue was what i was hinting at earlier if you don't say that jesus is fully human then we're not saved so the famous you know adage what has not been assumed has not been saved so if he's not truly human well then we're not saved by the same token if he's not truly divine we're not saved right because no philosopher or or poet or mystic can save us because they're in the same boat we are they can inform us and delight us or whatever you know philosophers do they can't save us though we can be saved only by a divine grace and so salvation hinges upon the simultaneous affirmation of the full divinity and full humanity of the lord in light of that the nicene father said arius just won't do it aries doesn't work and so they come up with that famous term and we recite it now in english but in the greek it was a neologism it was not a word that came up out of the bible it was not a word common in the philosophical tradition but it was adapted for that purpose they talked about the law goss who becomes incarnate in jesus as homo uzios with the father homo means same usia means substance so we say now in uh in our translation consubstantial with the father when i was growing up in the older translation we said one in being with the father which means the same thing they're both rendering homo uzios that's the hinge that's the hinge so next time when you're at mass and you're going through that creed you're like oh what do these words mean uh he's god from god light from light true god from true god what are all those arius you're wrong wrong wrong right he's not just a high creature he's god from god light from light true god from true god then begotten not made homo uzios with the father one in being with the father begetting and making another another technical distinction but all of that is designed to say no no no to areas the hinge thing is one in being and because he's one in being with the father he can save us that's why it matters all right i want to swing back to what initially prompted this discussion which was this survey and maybe we'll close with this i'm going to read each of these two statements from the survey again to you and i'd like to get your response to each one of them okay so the first one is jesus is the first and greatest created being excuse me jesus is the first and greatest being created by god yeah you can't say created because again we're talking about the logos that becomes incarnate in jesus is begotten not made and that's the distinction you and i are made everything in the universe is made that means created ex nihilo right what is begotten i'll get a little technical here comes from another but perfectly participates in that from which he comes that's the way saint athanasius put it so the son the logos comes from the father that's true he proceeds from the father we say right but he doesn't come from the father the way we do as creatures infinitely other he comes utterly participating in the one from whom he comes he's homo uzios one in being with the father begotten not made homo uzios with the father mind you through him all things were made see so the logos who becomes incarnate in jesus is the power through which you and i and everything else were made if we say that he's made then he's a creature like the rest of us and we're not saved now let me make one more little distinction is the human nature of jesus a creature yes in other words his humanity is a finite created reality sure but the law goss took to himself this created nature joining himself to it hypostatically that just means in the unity of his person right so who is jesus he's the second person the trinity who instantiates two natures divine and human so he uses the human nature as an iconic representation of his manner of being so you could say jesus humanity is a creature sure sure conditioned by time and space and everything else but is jesus a creature no because who is he he's the second person of the trinity who is homo uzios with the father all right how about this second statement and again 57 percent of catholics 51 of americans in general agree with this statement jesus was a great teacher but he was not god then the heck with him then who cares who cares i i think sufi mystics are great teachers and i think hillel is a great teacher and i think uh khalil gibran's a great teacher and who cares if that's all he is i know that's what liberal christianity wants him to be because then he's harmless that's the whole point he's harmless i can say oh yeah interesting fascinating and then turn to someone else or say you know what i've kind of grown beyond all these people i i you know they're all teachers sure they're great but i'm kind of beyond them all if he's only a teacher the heck with them christianity collapses in that measure but see that too brandon is kantianism so kant would basically argue that he's the great teacher of the moral life he's the exemplar of the moral life he's the archetype of the person perfectly pleasing to god that's kant but see that's nonsense christianity collapses under the weight of that nonsense and the church has fought it for that very reason now that so many catholics hold to this shows and i say it to our shame as i've said before we've done a pretty lousy job at catechizing and showing what matters let me tell you a quick story here from my pastoral experience many years ago i was talking to this a good guy a really good younger man who was teaching in the religious education program right teaching young kids good guy god bless him for volunteering and doing that work but he took me aside after mass one day and with the kind of you know this open spirit said to me hey you know father those words that we say every week in the creed you know god from god like consubstantial and history said to me do they do they really mean anything and he said it not like was a challenge it was like he was just really sincerely puzzled and and so i did with him what i just did with everyone here i took him on a quick tour through aries the council of nicaea and i said yeah they mean gettysburg we get this wrong we lose the war you know my point there is here's a good guy who's who's committed to teaching our young kids had no idea why those words matter that's a problem well it's time now for our question from one of our listeners if you'd like to send a question into bishop baron you can do it at the website askbishopbarren.com record your question on any device today we hear from jose in hot springs california he's got a question about the sacrament of confirmation here it is hi bishop baron my name is jose and i am from desert hot springs california and my question to you is regarding the sacrament of confirmation if confirmation is supposed to make us fiery defenders of the faith then why do some protestants have the same order for their faith or even more even though they don't have the sacrament thank you bishop baron god bless yeah thanks for that question again i'm reminded of my mentor cardinal george you know it said the catholic church has all the gifts that christ wants his people to have including all the sacraments but it doesn't mean that some non-catholic christian churches don't exercise some of the gifts better than we do so i might notice you know a protestant preacher is like out preaching a lot of catholic priests even though catholic priests have the great you know virtue of ordination i guess in a similar way that yes indeed confirmation is meant to convey it does in fact convey the gifts of the holy spirit it doesn't mean that the holy spirit of god can't operate outside of those official channels though that's through his own choice his usual means of communicating his life to us but yet the spirit is not constrained by the sacraments and can operate outside so you might hear a preacher think of of the young john henry newman who you know is really brought to his christian faith by a protestant preacher he heard when he was 15 years old well that wasn't negated by his becoming catholic his catholicism expanded and corrected certain things and all that but yet i'd say the holy spirit was operative in bringing the young john henry newman to christian faith through a protestant preacher fair enough so that can happen certainly it doesn't mean though that we relativize the sacraments or say well then who cares about sacraments no the sacraments are because christ wanted them not because i want them you know those they're the ordinary means by which he wants to communicate his life to us so we take them with utter seriousness well thanks so much for listening and watching this episode of the word on fire show about arianism then and now a few things before we wrap up first of all i hope you have had time to grab your copy of the word on fire bible i mentioned a couple episodes back that we have a limited quantity we're kind of expecting them to go pretty quickly probably before christmas and sure enough they're flying out of the warehouse so if you haven't got yours yet now is a good time to do it if you want to get one for yourself for christmas gifts now's a good time you can find it at wordonfire.org bible on that note we're also hosting an online summit all about the bible it's a free one week online summit we're going to be 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Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

Views: 125,564

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Id: oH6_ZPiay9g

Length: 30min 39sec (1839 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 09 2020