How do we deal with Arianism

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"Tradition elucidates Scripture, and confirms its proper interpretation. Every fraud, every heretic, every false prophet who adorns himself in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly is a ravenous wolf, weaves his fleece out of ambiguous Scripture verses, quoting them to support his assaults against the true doctrine of the church. It is the tradition handed down from the apostles which fortifies us to resist such strained calumnies, and we do well to adhere to the teachings of those who, in succession to the apostles, are the repository of that tradition.

"The holy bishop Irenaeus of Lyons knew this; in his renowned work Against Heresies he notes: ‘Paul then, teaching us where one may find such, says, “God has placed in the church, first, apostles; secondly, prophets; thirdly, teachers.” Where,therefore, the gifts of the Lord have been placed, there it behooves us to learn the truth, from those who possess that succession of the church which is from the apostles, and among whom exists that which is sound and blameless in conduct, as well as that which is unadulterated and incorrupt in speech.’

“What, then, is the church’s tradition concerning the Son of God? From the very first, the apostles and those who received their doctrine directly from them have understood the pre-incarnate Christ to be both the Wisdom of God and the Word of God as portrayed in the Hebrew Scriptures. Their insistence on this fundamental identity was soon recorded, in gospel and in epistle, identifying Christ with these attributes of God. The saints of subsequent generations then preserved this identity, recognizing that as Word and Wisdom of God, Christ himself could thus be none other than true God. The venerable martyr Ignatius of Antioch, in his Letter to the Ephesians, writes of Christ as ‘God existing in flesh.’ Irenaeus of Lyons writes, once more in Against Heresies, that ‘He indeed who made all things can alone, together with His Word, properly be termed God and Lord.’ Hippolytus, in his renowned treatise Against Noetus, writes of ‘Christ Jesus the Son of God, who, being God, became man.’ The learned Clement, of my own city of Alexandria, writes in his Exhortation to the Heathen that ‘this very Word has now appeared as man, he alone being both, both God and man.’ Such has been our heritage, recognizing Christ as truly divine, as truly God."
 
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As all of the Arians are long deceased, I don’t think we really need to deal with them at all. There is enough information out there to get the basic gist of what the Arians are about- but very little from the heretics themselves, making the whole analysis process a bit difficult.
Clement of Alexandria and others undoubtably had a different view of these folks that they had of themselves. But the Arians viewpoints are lost, their books didn’t survive
 
Reliance on his detractors’ accounts of what he taught necessarily makes researching Arius somewhat difficult and uncertain—but not impossible. And we have some fragments, notably the Thalia.
 
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Where are you finding them? They’re pretty hard to find these days
 
I recommend R.P.C. Hanson’s The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God (1988), and Rowan Williams’ Arius: Heresy and Tradition (rev. ed. 2001) – each of which collects the sources.
 
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I prefer the St. Nicholas way.

Deck the heretical Arian! 😉

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Some details may be apocryphal, but I think Nicholas really did lose his temper and throttle the blasphemous Heresiarch Arius.
 
Aha!

Looks like I beat you to the… Punch

puts on sunglasses
 
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Duke Nukem voice

I’m here to punch heretics and chew bubblegum… And I’m all outta gum
 
Too much? 😬

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Yeah, way over the top. Arianism my be heretical, but on the surface it’s a more logical doctrine than classical Trinitarianism. For that reason, I don’t blame its adherents for thinking the way they do. It’s hard for strict monotheists to see how Father and Son might both be thought of as God, and yet as distinct, without doing violence to the tenet that God is One. As the Latin apologist Tertullian bemoaned well over a century before Nicaea, “The simple, indeed (I will not call them unwise and unlearned) who always constitute the majority of believers, are startled at the dispensation (of the Three in One) . . . They are constantly throwing out against us that we are preachers of two gods and three gods.”

Thinking of two beings as distinct, and yet as sharing the same substance or essence, the same ousia, presents no difficulty unless that substance or essence or ousia is itself the unique and absolute self-subsistence of the Mosaic “I AM”—for by definition only one being can have that as its essence. At least today we would see this as a definitional problem; then, it was viewed as a relational one. Efforts in Arius’s time to solve the dilemma—and the first three centuries of the Christian era were marked by an astonishing array of such efforts—are best understood from this perspective.
 
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