The History of Arianism

As we all seem to wonder about how, when and why Arianism arose, you must first be able to understand the man who created such a branch of Christianity. His name was Arius and he was a churchman and noble scholar who was the founder of Arianism. It is believed that he came from Libya and it is estimated that he was born in 256. He also liked to refer to himself as a student of Lucian of Antioch. This aged man contended that Christ the Son, although the highest of all creatures, was still a creature (Arianism). His teachings where like a mixture of adoptionism and logos theology. His basic notion was the Son came into being through the will of the Father; the Son therefore had a beginning. Although the Son was before all eternity, he was not eternal, and Father and Son were not of the same essence, In Jesus who suffered pain and wept, the logos became human. A Strength of Arius’s position was that it appeared to safeguard a strict monotheism while offering and interpretation of the language of the New Testament- notable, the word Son- which was conformed to general usage of meaning. The weakness of his view was that, precisely because Jesus was capable of suffering as a human, it was difficult to understand how he could be fully divine and thus affect the redemption of humankind (Christology). So basically the main problem that he was trying to address was how the Son of the Father can be divine and human at once, or is he a little bit of both. The trouble with this issue is that no one really knows the true answer and there are many passages in the bible to support both sides of the argument.

Arius attracted a large following through a message integrating Neoplatonism, which accented the absolute ones of the divinity as the high...

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...s shortly came to an end a little after the sixth century.

Bibliography

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"Christology." 2009. Britannica Online. 11 April 2009 .

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Drobner, Hubertus R. The Fathers of the Church. Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers Inc., 2007.

Herrin, Judith. The Formation of Christendom. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton university Press, 1987.