The Case for God by Karen Armstrong

I recently finished The Case for God. It's an interesting book and well worth reading. However, there were places where I disagreed with Karen Armstrong. Maybe disagree is too strong a word. I believe she skimmed over some things - made them more simplistic than the complicated events going on.

I particularly noticed this in her description of the fourth century, since I've done research on that time myself. She talks about the big controversy of the time which we now call the Arian Controversy, which was a debate between two groups of Christians, with Arius on one side saying that Jesus was a created being, and therefore not equal to the Father, and Athanasius' group on the other, claiming Jesus was equal with God. To put it simply, the controversy was whether or not Christ was God in the same way God the Father is God, or whether or not Jesus was divine.

This may seem odd to modern ears, where many people would consider the belief that Jesus is God to be a litmus test of a person's Christianity. But the fact is, for the first three centuries, you did not need to believe this to consider yourself a Christian. In fact, it is likely the earliest followers of Christ - and Christ himself - would have been appalled to have it suggested to them that Jesus was God. For the Jewish Christians, Jesus was a prophet.

The Council of Nicaea was called in 325 CE to consider this very question. Constantine had recently declared Christianity to be the religion of the Roman Empire. I'll save the long explanation for another time, but basically, the two empire-wide institutions operating at this time were the church and the army, and the army was getting pretty fractured. So Constantine turned to the church to hold the empire together. But in order for it to do as he required, the church needed to be a single system with a single belief. So he called the Council to hash out the biggest controversy splitting the church at that time.

Anderson says about this: "Unfortunately, Constantine, who had no understanding of the issues, decided to intervene... Athanasius managed to impose his views on the other delegates, and the council issued a statement that Christ the Word had not been created, but had been begotten..."

Now I wouldn't say it quite like this. Constantine had as his advisors those bishops who were around Rome. The belief in the divinity of Christ was fairly well split geographically, with the European Christians believing in his divinity, and those in Asia Minor and north Africa not. So Constantine made sure the Council went the way of the Roman bishops, as those were the ones he needed to have on his side. I think he didn't care about the theological implications of either view, but he understood the issue all right - at least as far as it affected him and the empire he was trying to strengthen. I hope to write later about the tragedy of Constantine on the Christian Church, but that's enough for here.

On the plus side, Armstrong confirmed for me what I had long suspected, but had not been able to verify, that the Trinity was a Greek invention. I knew it had to be, but had not tracked down the source, probably because my researches pretty much end with the Council in 325. A generation later, Basil of Caesarea (the brother of Gregory of Nyssa) postulated it, and it entered into church doctrine. A century after that, Augustine of Hippo gave us the doctrine of original sin, a doctrine which nicely increases the power of the church - if you are a sinner by nature and can only be saved by the church, they have a distinct power over you.

I wonder what church history would be like if the fourth century had never happened? What could we have avoided?