Theological Digest & Outlook

Selections from the March 2002 issue

NOTE: THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED IN THE SIGNED ARTICLES ARE THOSE OF THE AUTHORS AND DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT ENDORSEMENT BY CHURCH ALIVE.

• Editorial (Paul Miller)
• Theological Conflict: A Perspective from the Early Church (Gary Neal Hansen)
• John the Baptist and Jesus (Victor Shepherd)
• Being Transformed, A Book Review: "The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality" (Graham A.D. Scott)
• Soul Friends, A Book Review: "Soul Survivor: How my Faith Survived the Church" (Gail Dolson)

By Paul Miller

In the wake of the terrible events of September 11, our congregation, Grantham United Church, decided that the most helpful thing we could do was to get to know some Muslim people.

Right in the heart of St. Catharines, a conservative and rather non-multicultural city, stands Masjid an-Noor, a large white mosque, replete with arched windows and domed minarets. It is a place of mystery, coming to life on Fridays and Saturdays but often looking deserted at other times.

But, in an effort to build bridges with the wider community after 9/11, the local Islamic Society held an open house on a Sunday afternoon in October. And I decided that I needed to be there.

Rushing from another meeting, I arrived to find the parking lot almost completely full. As I entered, I was greeted by a beaming young man who looked to be of African descent. "My name is Ismail," he said. "Welcome to our mosque. Please place your shoes here in one of the cubicles provided." (Fortunately I had put on socks without holes that morning.)

I proceeded upstairs where I was again greeted with genuine and unfeigned warmth by several more young men who introduced themselves by name and invited me to sign their guest book. It occurred to me that our churches could learn a thing or two about hospitality from them.

I was directed to a large meeting room which, to my surprise, was filled. I recognized several colleagues in the crowd. I found a seat just as proceedings were getting under way.

A distinguished looking gentleman, obviously a leader in the community (whose name, unfortunately, I did not catch), thanked everyone for coming. He then delivered a thoughtful speech on the true nature of Islam and all true Muslims' abhorrence of terrorism. After all, he said, the very word "Islam" is etymologically related to the Arabic word for peace. Further remarks were made by the president of the Islamic Society and one or two other individuals. And then the floor was opened for questions.

None of the questions was particularly profound. One or two bordered on being rude: "If you claim that men and women are equal, why do the women have to sit on one side of the room and the men on another?" a woman asked petulantly, sounding for all the world like someone who would be right at home at certain church-sponsored women's conferences I have heard about. With patience and grace, the speakers attempted to communicate the roles of men and women in Islam, after which a very self-confident and articulate young Muslim woman explained why she in no way felt oppressed by Muslim traditions. The original questioner did not seem convinced; but hearing the Muslims explain their faith and traditions, I got the impression that, unlike Christians who are so often angst-ridden and confused, they have a strong sense of who they are.

The meeting meandered on.

"What's the difference between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims?" someone asked. An ageing hippie with a long grey ponytail and an English accent (a professor at Brock University, it turned out) felt compelled to inform the crowd-as if it were a matter of the utmost interest-that though he, himself, didn't believe in God, he was nevertheless simply delighted to be part of such a marvellous gathering.

And then another gentleman popped out of his chair, evidently with something tremendously significant to say. "Yes," he said fervently, "but who wrote the Koran?"

He was white-haired and intense, a no-nonsense sort of fellow who clearly intended to cut to the heart of the matter with no beating around the bush (to mix metaphors). I imagined him the sort of person who would be deeply committed to all sorts of causes for the betterment of the world and who thought that religion was all well and good, so long as it contributed to those aims. "I know all about your legends and tales," the unspoken subtext of his question seemed to say, "But let's be honest. Everyone knows that somebody wrote great religious texts, even the ones that are supposed to come straight from God. I've read my Spong. I'm up on the Jesus Seminar. What every thinking Christian knows to be true of the New Testament you must surely know to be true of the Koran. We're both intelligent people. You can be straight with me."

And I instinctively wondered to myself, "How would I respond to such a question if it were me up there?" I caught a mental image of myself, floundering about like a fish on a line, trying to come up with some explanation of a particular Christian belief that would satisfy the curiosity of some cultured despiser. It had happened to me many times, and I immediately wondered how our host would handle it.

But our host spoke without hesitation. "The Holy Qur'an," he said, "is the direct revelation of Allah, praised be his name, to our prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him. All other books are the product of human endeavour, but the Qur'an is the voice of God. In the Arabic. All translations are human interpretations."

That was his answer. And I directed his way a tiny silent cheer. "Good on ya, mate," I wanted to cry. For just as the questioner's question implied more than it said, so the response had a fullness and weight that went beyond the words in which it was delivered.

"My dear sir," he seemed to be saying, "you have come here to this place of worship, to our home, if you will. You are our guest and we are honoured to have you here. But while you are here, you will see us for who we are-Muslims. I know what you are asking, sir. And I am sorry, but I will not step outside of Islam to some supposedly objective standpoint from which I can view my faith with detachment. To be a Muslim is to see the Qur'an as direct communication from God; and it is through the daily influence of this Holy Qur'an that I am formed as a Muslim. You may think that our traditions regarding the delivery of the Qur'an to our prophet are myth. Perhaps so, but it is our myth. And I respectfully decline to embrace your secular myth of a universally neutral place in which all differences of belief disappear and from which human reason alone sits in judgment on all religious truth."

Of course, he was much too polite to say this, but that is what I imagined him to be saying.

And I thought, once again, that we could learn a thing or two from these people. Christians have been more or less on the defensive for 200 years, backed into a corner by the all-pervasive prejudices of Enlightenment rationalism: Religion is all well and good, so long as it is kept private and so long as nobody takes it too seriously. Religion is useful insofar as it bolsters the assumptions of modern secularism. At this Muslim gathering, however, here were people who were evidently at home in the modern world, but were also unrepentantly unapologetic about-well, about being Muslims..

The place of Christianity in a world of many faiths is one of Western culture's most pressing issues. One thing was confirmed for me, however: As Christians, we will only be able to confront the empirical fact of a plurality of religions with integrity, not by subordinating our Christian faith and identity to some grand, overarching secular meta-narrative, which redefines all religious faith into categories alien to its essence-social, psychological, political, economic, sexual-and reduces religion to an example of some other phenomenon. We, like our Muslim brothers and sisters, will have to be less defensive when we participate in dialogue and conversation with those who are different from us.

Our United Church's response to the many world faiths seems to be a combination of politicized self-flagellation-"Christianity is responsible for all the world's ills," cross-cultural reductionism-"all religions are basically the same" and conceptual relativism-"no religion can lay claim to absolute truth." We could perhaps take our cue from great ambassadors for the Christian faith like E. Stanley Jones or Bishop Lesslie Newbigin, who knew the importance of interacting with the rich and chaotic world of Indian religion from a firmly fixed identity-as Christians. Generally speaking, adherents of other faiths respect Christians who are confident about who they are as Christians.

Despite the many things I admire about Islam, one of the frustrations I've experienced in my recent dialogue with Muslims is that though they are more than willing to affirm the similarities between us, they seem less willing to honestly acknowledge the differences. "There is no difference between us," they say. "We worship the one God and call him Allah. You worship the same God. You revere Jesus. We too revere Jesus. You abhor terrorism. So do we." Several times I expressed my interest in knowing how Islam was different from Christianity, how their outlook on the world and their faith differed from my own. I had to concede that what seemed to be going on here was an embattled minority struggling to be taken seriously, and that perhaps such affirmations of common ground are necessary for them.

From my all-too-brief encounter with members of the local Islamic community, what I most benefited from was not some vague sense that, "after all, we're the same," but, rather, from their witness and courage in being themselves in a culture rather hostile to what they believe in. I found myself praying that as we Christians recognize our minority status in North America, we will learn the same art-that of simply being, unashamedly, who we are.

Theological Conflict: A Perspective from the Early Church

By Gary Neal Hansen

We are in a time of theological conflicts in the Church. People on opposite sides of contentious issues look at the Church and are shocked. The Church, we think, should be a community marked by peace and love, but bitter words are spoken and hatreds brew in our midst. The Church, we think, should be a community marked by sound biblically-based theology, but each side of each issue has a hard time identifying the opposing side and their ideas as Christian. The Church, we think, should be a community marked by faithfulness, holiness, righteousness, and justice, but each side accuses the other of falling down in just these crucial ways.

Some Christians believe that the time for drastic action has come: the other side, each side says, has gone too far and we can no longer live together as the Church. The time for division has come, they say. Some call for an "amicable divorce" borrowing a tragic practice from our culture and claiming it as a virtue. Some see division as presenting no problem, since they say the other side, whichever side is "other," has ceased to be the Church by its theological and behavioral failings. Others choose to practice "resistance" or "civil disobedience" effectively disregarding the discipline of the Church.

We seem to assume that the current situation of tension and conflict over profound issues is unusual. It is not. What is unusual is that because of conflict of a few decades' duration many of us are ready to abandon the unity of the Church.

Conflict has always been a part of the life of the Church. It should surprise no one that we differ and argue, even on the most basic issues. However, Christ remains the Lord of the Church. It is Christ's Church, far more profoundly than it is our Church. Our task is to remain faithful, to argue and work in Christ-like ways for the peace, unity and purity of the Church, and to trust that through it all Christ will lead us and guide us. The rest of this article will look at two examples of lengthy conflicts from long ago: the Donatist controversy and the Arian controversy from the early centuries of Christianity. We will see that the Church fought hard battles, that the battles were on the most foundational issues imaginable, that the battles lasted not merely for years but for centuries, and that God remained the faithful shepherd of the Church throughout.

In the early centuries there was a great deal of unity or consensus in the Church, even if the structure of the Church's unity was less formally articulated than in a modern denomination. However, the Christians were spread across a vast area and both travel and communication were difficult. Thus conflicts that seemed worldwide to those involved were largely focused on one region or another. The most important regional distinction was between the Latin-speaking West, centered in the ancient capital city of Rome, and the Greek-speaking East, centered in the new capital city of Constantinople.

The Donatist controversy was primarily an issue for the Latin-speaking West. It came about in the aftermath of persecution. For the first three centuries of the Church's existence, Christians had no legal right to practice their religion. The government was sometimes suspicious of the Christians because they would not join in the worship practices of pagan Rome. The Christians seemed impious, if not outright seditious, since they would not make the required offerings to the gods or to the emperor. The Christians did little in public to clarify their stance, since worship services were held in private: even if non-Christians came to worship, they had to leave before the Lord's Supper was celebrated. All of this led to distrust and suspicion of the Christians, and on many occasions there were outright persecutions. The general practice, and sometimes the formal policy of the government, was something like "don't ask, don't tell." Christians were left alone as long as they didn't go public. When Christians were publicly accused and brought before the authorities, they were told to renounce Christ and to make religious offerings to the gods or the genius of the emperor. Their calm and peace as they faced reprimand, torture, and death rather than deny their Lord bore witness to Christ's transforming power in their lives. Those who died were called "martyrs," which simply means "witnesses."

In the middle of the third century and the beginning of the fourth, certain emperors began to crack down on the Christians in more formal and systematic ways. The important event for our story here is that in 303 the Emperor Diocletian issued an edict intended to repress the Christians without resorting to bloodshed: the Churches were to be burned down and copies of the Bible were to be handed over for burning.

It was in this persecution that some of the bishops in North Africa got into trouble.They did not deny Christ outright, but they did hand over the Holy Scriptures for burning. Some tried to fool the police, handing over books of heretics and other non-sacred volumes but saying they were burning Bibles. All such acts left their status in doubt. To some this was the sin of "traditio" or "handing over," and those who did it became "traditors," "traitors" or "collaborators" who had lost all spiritual authority. After all, even if they did not openly deny Christ, they did not act heroically like the martyrs. Their cooperation with those who would destroy the Church dishonored the martyrs and seemed clearly a betrayal. Their sin placed them outside the Church and the sacraments could only be administered within the Church. They had lost the Spirit, and could no longer administer the sacraments which are spiritual acts.

Around 311, the Bishop of Carthage in North Africa died and a group of bishops gathered to consecrate a man named Caecilian as the new bishop. One of the bishops consecrating Caecilian was believed to have been a traditor. Some questioned whether a traditor had the spiritual authority to consecrate a bishop. Surely a bishop whose consecration was invalid could have no spiritual authority. Such a bishop was no bishop, and his sacraments no sacraments.

A group of bishops who believed Caecilian's consecration was invalid gathered and consecrated a man named Majorinus as a rival bishop for Carthage. Thus there came to be two rival churches in North Africa, one following the bishops in the line of Caecilian, and one following the line of Majorinus and his successor Donatus. It is from Donatus that this branch of the Church came to be called "Donatists," though they were just calling themselves "Christians." So committed were they to their identity as the only true Church and the only bearer of valid sacraments in North Africa that when Catholics wanted to join the Donatists they had to be rebaptized.

The issue at stake seems quite legitimate to many even today. Can the Church be led effectively by people who have committed grave sins? The Donatists said, "No." Does something in the work of the Church depend on the piety, the purity, of those who are ordained? The Donatists said, "Yes." For the Donatists, the true Church was the Church of the pure. It was found in the line of ministers who had not committed apostasy in the great persecution. This was the Church of the martyrs who lived and died in their true confession of the Lordship of Christ. It is called the holy Catholic Church, after all.

Caecilian's part of the Church looked at the situation differently. They, and the rest of the Western Church, emphasized that the Church is the one holy Catholic Church, meaning it is the unity and universality of the Church which matters. These people pointed out that it is our union with Christ that makes us holy, and not the other way around. And they pointed out that the Donatists were historically pure only of one kind of sin: apostasy under persecution. They were no cleaner than anyone else in other respects.

The Church remained divided well into the next century. Church councils ruled against the Donatists, but no reconciliation followed. The Emperor Constantine tried to use force to repress the Donatists, but the movement grew. On the one hand persecution enhanced the Donatists' view that they were the Church of the martyrs. On the other hand it resulted in violent reprisals against the Catholics by Donatist factions. No one's hands were quite clean.

When Augustine became Bishop of the city of Hippo in North Africa in 395, he became the chief spokesman for the Catholic party against the Donatists. Augustine argued that it is not the personal holiness of the minister that makes the Church's sacraments valid. It is Christ who in the most profound way administer the sacraments, and it is Christ who makes them valid. The minister is merely the instrument, so the minister's sins do not invalidate the sacraments. The Church is always a mixture of good people and bad, the loving and the insincere. All those in the Church have wickedness in them, and good can be found even in people who are called wicked. One cannot choose to separate one's self from the evil people in the Church; on ought instead to attend to the evil in one's own heart. Certainly Augustine worked hard for the theological integrity of the Church and for the piety of both clergy and laity, and he certainly did not oppose Church discipline. However, Augustine knew that the Church is always the field full of both wheat and tares. To break the unity of the Church was far worse than holding unity with people who may be wicked:

He summarized his message to those who would divide the Church in two pithy phrases: "Love peace, we say in our turn, love unity" and "Love peace, love Christ."

Augustine argued long and hard for decades. His arguments won the day so far as the official teaching goes. He shaped the Western understanding of the nature of the Church, its ministry and its sacraments. However, the West's attempts at reconciliation with the Donatists were marred by the use of political power and force. Augustine's arguments certainly did not bring the Donatists to reconciliation. There were still Donatist Churches in North Africa at Augustine's death in 430, over a century after the debate began. One might say that the failure of Augustine's arguments, and the inappropriate use of force, actually prove his point that the Church will always live on in a mixed state, full of both good and wicked people, with both sides always mixed in their motives. The Donatists as a separate Church disappeared during the next hundred years when North Africa was ruled by the Vandals rather than by Christian Romans. This should give us pause on two fronts. We need to learn again Augustine's lessons on the Church as a mixed body, and not insist that we can only belong to a "pure" Church with "pure" ministers. And we need to be more godly in our methods than the authorities of Augustine's day, fighting Christian battles with Christian means rather than by force.

One of the most traumatic and dramatic theological conflicts in the Greek-speaking East was the Arian conflict. In brief, the issue was whether the Son of God, who walked the world in human flesh as Jesus Christ, was really and truly divine. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance and the difficulty of this debate in the life of the Christian Church. It was on the most essential of Christian teachings. It led to great hatred and bitterness, even the exile of great Christian leaders. It divided the Church into different parties, and led to formal divisions as well. And it lasted a long, long time. It was a conflict of such magnitude and duration that a close look may help put our current issues in perspective.

It started early in the fourth century. The Christian Church was at the end of its centuries of persecution. It was a new age for the Church, as well-educated leaders wrote about the faith in more sophisticated ways than had ever been possible before. As they read each other's works, or heard about them through the grapevine, they began to see where they disagreed, and where they believed each other's ideas were dangerous.

Around the year 319, a deacon from the Egyptian city of Alexandria named Arius began to be known for his teachings on the Son of God. He held a number of views that seemed to be well founded in Scripture and common sense. To paraphrase his teachings: There is only one God; this God has one Son; we all know that fathers are on the scene before their sons arrive; as the Arians liked to say, there was a time when the Son was not. Therefore, the Father existed before the Son existed. It is important to observe here that all of this has to do with God's eternal nature, completely apart from the incarnation of the Son as Jesus. Arius was talking about who God was before there was a world for Jesus to be born into. From all eternity there was one God, and at the very first point in creation, the God had a Son. Then, long into human history, this Son was born of Mary as Jesus of Nazareth. The Son is divine, according to Arius. But the Son is a little less divine than the Father, because the Father is the one eternal God. The Son is the very first thing that was created.

Arius and his followers drew on commonly accepted Biblical evidence for this. References to "Wisdom" in the Bible were taken as references to Christ, especially since Paul taught that Christ is the Wisdom of God. The Arians placed a lot of weight on a passage of Proverbs where Wisdom spoke in person and proclaimed "The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago." So Christ himself, in his Old Testament voice, seemed to proclaim that the Son was created, a little less than God, even if much more divine than anything else in creation.

This was about the eternal nature of God, but it applied to the coming of Jesus: if the Son is created, then clearly the incarnate Son, Jesus, is subordinate to the Father. Of course Jesus is divine - just as divine as the Son of God. But since, for the Arians, the Son is not eternally divine, Jesus is not either.

Arius' ideas made sense to many people. And he had clever ways of spreading his teachings. Apparently he put them in poetry and set them to music so that they could be sung and remembered - and we all know how the music we sing works into our memories and shapes the way we think. Clever, apparently winsome, and certainly pious, Arius' life gave credence to his teaching.

These ideas may have seemed Biblical and sensible to Arius, but not to another Alexandrian deacon named Athanasius, Athanasius wrote a great treatise on the topic called On the Incarnation of the Word. Athanasius focused on the teaching of John's Gospel where the one incarnate in Jesus is the very Word of God. The concept of the Word had important meanings to those who were trained in philosophy. The Word is not merely the message that comes out from one's mouth. The Word is the ordering principle of creation, the very rationality of God. As God's own rationality, the Word is not something created or something that came later than God. The Word is fully, and eternally divine, and so, therefore, is Jesus.

For Athanasius this was not just abstract theory. Our very salvation hung on the issue. To paraphrase some of Athanasius' argument: The Word is the Image of God; we were created according to the image of God, rather like a painting made from a living subject; in our sin, we have damaged the image of God - the painting is smeared and unrecognizable. Athanasius looked at the consequences of our fallen, sinful lives and saw that in this world all things tended towards destruction. Our lives go to disorder, ending in death, and we even decompose. The tendency of life in a fallen sinful world is just the opposite of God's rational order. That is the smudge on the image. The true Image needs to sit before the painter again and let the Artist restore the painting. That is what happens in the Incarnation. The Word who comes down is the very Image of God, and human nature is restored according to the image.

This is where the different views of Arius and Athanasius on the full eternal divinity of the Son become important. If all creation is damaged by sin, and the one who is incarnate in Jesus is created (as Arius would have it), then when the Artist restores the image, it will be still a smudged image; we will still tend all our lives toward destruction because of sin. For the image to be truly restored, the eternally divine Word must be incarnate in Jesus, just as Athanasius taught. Only if God, the eternal God, has come to earth incarnate as Jesus, will our damaged flesh be drawn up to God, healed and restored. As Athanasius put it, God became human that we might become divine. The damage is reversed. Athanasius has a great deal to say about the cross of Christ as well, but he is adamant that the very fact of the incarnation is absolutely crucial to our salvation.

For Athanasius and his followers, if the Arians were right about Christ we are not really saved - a created Christ would have no power to save us from the destruction to which all sinful people are heading. For these people theology mattered. It is not simply an effort to be right and to prove it against all comers. One might say that they took seriously the experience and conviction that we have, in fact, received salvation, and that they proceeded to examine what the fact of that salvation implied or required to be true in the world. One might also say that they began with the record of Scripture and proceeded by examination of that record according to the philosophical categories of the fourth century. In any case, the argument was vehement because from Athanasius' perspective, the Arians' opinions negated our salvation. If the Church's proclamation were to lead to faith and the salvation of the world, the Church's teaching had to have integrity. At the very least it had to support views that, if true, would show that salvation is real and obtainable.

Now let us look at the course of the conflict and some of the things that the two sides did along the way. By doing so I hope to show that the events of today are by no means extreme. The issue came to a head in 325. The Emperor Constantine was sympathetic to the Christians, if not already converted himself, and he called a council of bishops to settle the theological argument. This was the First Council of Nicea, the first of the "ecumenical" or worldwide councils whose statements still have authority for most churches in the East and the West. The bishops presented their views, including examples of creeds in use in local churches at the time. They debated the issue at the heart of the matter: The relationship of the Father to the Son. They adopted positions very much in line with those of Athanasius, who was present at the council though not yet a bishop. The Father and the Son were, in the technical Greek term, "homoousios" or "of one substance." The word is also translated "consubstantial." They made a strong declaration of the point in this earliest version of the Nicene Creed:

There was basic unanimity about God the Father, so the first clause is brief. The final clause on the Holy Spirit is even briefer, because controversy over the Spirit's divinity would not arise for some years yet. However, they could hardly be more emphatic in their assertion of the full and eternal divinity of the Son incarnate in Jesus. This is not all that they said, though. As well as this positive assertion they were bold in their negative judgment on Arius' views:

The statement again could hardly be stronger: Arius is not named, but his views are detailed, and those who hold these views are cut off from the body of the faithful. Then, as now, Christians in conflict resorted to harsh words and harsh acts.

So far it sounds like a pretty tidy job. The conflict began around 319 and was settled by 325. The bishops of the world had made a unified statement that had the authority of the emperor behind it. Would that it were so simple.

A reality of conflict in the Church is that official decisions do not change people's hearts. People's convictions are not so loosely held that the mere fact of a decree can change their minds, even if the decree itself is wise, orthodox and fully authoritative. What followed was a tale of ecclesiastical politics on a grand scale. Those who held Arian views continued to do so, quietly at first, while the Nicene Creed was enforced as the standard of orthodox Christianity. But then the Arians began to work their way back to prominence and power. Arius himself was allowed to receive communion by a sympathetic bishop, though Constantine then sent that bishop into exile. That bishop was Eusebius of Nicomedia, and he went to work for the Arian cause against Athanasius and others. Athanasius, since 328 bishop of Alexandria, was no gentle pastor in opposing those judged heretical by the council. Eusebius' followers brought charges against Athanasius for the harsh way he treated his opponents. In 335 Athanasius was deposed, excommunicated, and sent into exile for this, though he was impeccably orthodox.

At Emperor Constantine's death in 337, his son Constantius came to rule the eastern part of the Empire. Though his father had favored the Nicene party, Constantius favored the Arian Eusebius of Nicomedia, and Eusebius became bishop of the capital, Constantinople. The conflict began to threaten the unity of the Church across the Empire: the West was prone to suspect the East of Arianism while Eusebius was in leadership, and both sides had other reasons for mistrust. Under imperial pressure for unity, the East was forced to accept Athanasius back to his role as bishop of Alexandria in 346. A few years later Constantius was sole emperor, and his close theological advisor was an Arian bishop named Valens, a staunch opponent of Athanasius. Athanasius' chief support was in the West where he had lived as an exile, but by 352 Constantius had pressured the bishops of the West to condemn him. In 356 Athanasius was ousted by the army and fled to the Egyptian desert, where he was protected by the early monks.

Clearly Arianism was now on the ascendant. The Arian views were articulated in a couple of ways. Some said that rather than being of one substance (homoousios) with the Father, the Son was actually of an unlike substance (anomoios.) More said that they were not one and the same substance, but were of a similar substance (homoiousios.) A council in Constantinople in 360 adopted a creed that used the latter language, and the Arian side seemed to have won.

The apparent victory of the Arians spurred the Nicene party towards the finish line. Athanasius continued to write, and three younger, well-educated bishops from the region of Cappadocia carried on the work after him. These were Basil of Caesarea, Basil's brother Gregory of Nyssa, and Basil's friend Gregory of Nazianzus. Through their preaching, lecturing and writing, these "Great Cappadocians" brought theological learning to a new height and gained much ground for the Nicene party.

You will have noticed that the religious party of the moment tended to be the one favored by the emperor in power. It continued to be so. After Constantius, the Church lived under a succession of emperors who were, in turn, neutral, Nicene, and Arian in their leanings. It was Theodosius I who tipped the scale for the Nicene party in a lasting way. He came to power in 379, and he came from the West. He told the Arianizing easterners that to be recognized as an authority in the Church one had to submit to the Nicene Creed. Theodosius called another worldwide council to meet in Constantinople in 381. There the Nicene Creed was reshaped into the form it is used today in Eastern Orthodox churches - it is used in the west as well with very slight differences.

Again, it seemed that the cause of Athanasius had won. This did, in fact, make the end of Arianism as a movement with the potential to be the official doctrine of the Church as a whole. But Arian missionaries had gone out earlier in the century, and they had had much success in their work. The Goths and other tribes in the North had been converted to Christianity - but it was Arian Christianity. It was not until 496, a century after Theodosius, that the Franks were converted to the Nicene form of the faith, and from then Arianism disappeared over time.

It took 177 years - almost two centuries - if we take 319 as the beginning point and 496 as the end. At times the Nicene party seemed to have won, and at times the same could be said of the Arians. For either side to have proclaimed victory at any point along the way would have been misguided.

Was even that the end of Arianism? No, like every idea that has led to great conflict in the Church, Arianism grew from very legitimate questions and problems, and from certain points of view it made sense. The people who pushed for Arianism were neither bad people nor entirely sloppy theologians. Arianism has arisen in later generations, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England, and then in America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Personally, I suspect that if one could survey the theological views of people in mainline pews today, we would find any number who believe that the Son of God came later in time than God the Father, that the Son is subordinate to the Father, that Jesus is more fully human than he is divine, and other views historically linked to Arianism.

Theological conflict has always been part of our experience as the Church. In fact one could say it is a natural result of the nature of the Church. Jesus certainly assumed that strong differences would exist in the Church, if not outright conflict. He is quite clear on this in the parable of the wheat and the tares. There Jesus described the kingdom as a field in which God sowed good seed to grow good wheat. Then by night the devil sneaked in and sowed the seeds of a nasty weed. Everyone was surprised as the plants grew to find that weeds were mixed with the wheat. They were all ready to go in and pull the weeds, but the Master said no, wait until the harvest. They would do more damage to the good wheat by pulling up the bad weeds than by letting both grow together.

The parable is rich with implications. First, the fact is that there are two kinds of plants in the field. It is not that both are good and useful. Rather, some are weeds and some are wheat. This is not a post-modern farm where everything that grows must be of equal value in its own right. Second, the fact that there are two kinds of plants does not mean that it is any less the Master's field. It does not even surprise the Master that these two kinds of plants are present. It is only the workers who are surprised. God knows the Church and God holds the Church's future. Third, we individual Christians seem to have two roles. On the one hand we are the laborers, and God is the Master. Our task is to humbly water the field and nurture it until harvest rather than jumping in with our self-appointed weeding program. On the other hand, we also are the plants in the field. In this role we need to give our attention to making sure that we are, in fact, living and growing as wheat, not as weeds. Whether as laborers or as wheat, we must attend to nurturing healthy faith and Christian life. In neither case are we called upon to take individual action to divide wheat from weeds. It is in our corporate role as a Church that disciplinary action should be carried out when necessary, and even then it should be to bring about the restoration of individuals to the body and for the peace and unity as well as the purity of the Church.

A major theme of Reformation theology is also important in our understanding of conflict in the Church: the doctrine of sin. In the sixteenth century John Calvin taught that sin's influence has a deep and lasting effect on each of us: "… this perversity never ceases in us, but continually bears new fruits … just as a burning furnace gives forth flames and sparks, or water ceaselessly bubbles up from a spring." It is not all bad news: Luther taught that each Christian person is "simul iustus et peccator" or "at one and the same time righteous and a sinner." We are truly forgiven and made righteous in Christ. But it is not as if by finding faith we are simply made perfect. No, each of us, though forgiven by God's grace, is still broken and prone to sin to the very end of life. Each of us is always in need of forgiveness.

If this is all so, and the Reformers had the strongest personal and biblical grounds to say it is, then it has important implications for the nature of the Church. The Church is made up of individuals who are broken, prone to sin, imperfect, in need of forgiveness. This is true of each member of every local church. It is true of our moral lives and of our theological reasonings. This should lead us to approach our life together with some humility. If we are truly aware of our own sinfulness we should search out and admit our own mixed motives, and we should seek out and affirm what we can see to be good and true in our opponents' views. We should pause before we claim sole ownership of the truth, even as we work hard to argue for the truth as God has revealed it.

At the very least, Christians at the beginning of the twenty-first century have a deep need to steep ourselves in all of Scripture and the lessons of past conflicts. We need to develop a much tougher skin for the conflicts of our present day. We have not been fighting all that long really. We have stuck together surprisingly well in a culture where Christianity is largely an individualistic thing. We need to nurture a sounder understanding of the Church as God's enterprise, Christ's body, into which we are grafted by the Spirit's power. We have no authority to divide it and we have no right to leave it.

When we see conflict arise, and when we see conflict go on for years, there is no reason for shock or surprise. We are not the first to face divisive questions - ecclesiology and christology have been fought over before. There is no reason to expect quick solutions. After all, if Arianism and Donatism took over a century to settle, and live on in the assumptions of many Christians even today, we should not think that our great dividing issues will be laid to rest in a year or by an amendment of our polity.

On the other hand, there is every reason to expect God to be at work in all parties to our conflicts. Our task is to remain faithful to Christ as individuals and as churches and presbyteries to the best of our abilities. That includes faithfully fighting it out. It is God's Church after all. It is God whom we must trust as we use our best wisdom to argue our way toward clarity.

What is not a legitimate option is to deny the parable of the wheat and the tares. Many today seem to want to live out the opposite of the parable: neither pulling weeds nor waiting for harvest, they would pull up and transplant unripe grain. Let us seek instead to live as God's people, and to nurture the fruits of the Spirit even as we debate over the long, long haul.

1. The Gospel was communicated, and the Church grew, through the integrity of the loving lifestyle of the Christians and through conversations they had with their friends and acquaintances about their Lord. See Alan Kreider, Worship and Evangelism in Pre-Christendom, Joint Liturgical Studies 32 (Cambridge: Grove Books Limited, 1995.)

2. For a more thorough treatment of Donatism, see the articles in Allan D. Fitzgerald, ed., Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999) s.v. "Donatus, Donatism," "Anti-Donatist Works" and "Church"; and Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), esp. pp.212-243.

3. Augustine of Hippo, "Psalm 119: The Ascents of the Christian" in Augustine of Hippo: Selected Writings, trans and intro. by Mary T. Clark, with a preface by Goulven Madec. The Classics of Western Spirituality (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1984), pp.210-211.

4. Ibid., 211.

5. 1 Corinthians 1:24.

6. Proverbs 8:22 (NRSV.)

7. Athanasius, "On the Incarnation of the Word," in Christology of the Later Fathers, Edward Rochie Hardie, ed., Library of Christian Classics, Ichthus Edition (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), pp. 55-110. The work is still read by each new generation of seminary students.

8. Ibid, p.107.

9. "The Letter of Eusebius of Caesarea Describing the Council of Nicea" in Hardie, Christology of the Later Fathers, p. 338.

10. Ibid.

11. For a more detailed discussion of the later course of the conflict see Henry Chadwick, The Early Church in the Pelican History of the Church (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1967), pp.133-151. The rest of this discussion is largely dependent on Chadwick's treatment.

12. Matthew 13: 24-30 and 36-43.

13. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion ,The Library of Christian Classics, vol. 20 (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960), 2.1.18, p.251.

14. See Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), pp. 240-245.

This article is first appeared in Theology Matters (A Publication of Presbyterians for Faith, Family and Ministry) Vol. 7, No.5 (September/October, 2001.) It is reprinted, with minor changes, by permission.