What is Semi-Arianism?

These two Greek words, homoiousian and homoousian, were used in this controversy in relation to the Person of our Lord. The former stood for SIMILAR in Substance with the Father; the latter for SAMENESS of Substance with the Father, thus claiming full equality of the Son with the Father. Similar stands for two things not the same, however close the similarity may be. Sameness means identity of Substance; mark well that word identity.

In the Bampton Lectures at Oxford in 1866, the late Canon Liddon, the Lecturer, said: “Ascribe to the Christ of Arius an antiquity as remote as you will from the age of the Incarnation, place him at a height as high as any you can conceive, above the highest archangel; still what, after all, is this ancient, this super-angelic being, but a creature who had a beginning, and who, if the Author of his existence should so will, may yet cease to be? Such a being, however exalted, is parted from the Divine Essence by a FATHOMLESS CHASM; whereas the Christ of Christendom is internal to that Essence: He is of one Substance with the Father; and in this sense, as distinct from any other, He is properly and literally Divine” (1.32).

Now Arius was not like the modern Unitarian who thinks that the Lord was a mere man. His system taught that the Lord was the first and greatest creature that God made, and the only creature that God made directly. To this great creature God gave the task of creating everything else, so all things, apart from Himself, were created by Him. He was God's representative, and expressed God to every other creature. As God's representative, He was entitled to worship, and as such was rightly addressed as God. One thing only Arius would not accept, and that was the truth that the Lord was of equal substance (or essence) to the Father. He said that he was of similar substance but not of equal substance to God.

These two expressions, "similar substance" and "equal substance", differing in Greek by only a single letter, became the great battleground on which the whole of Christianity depended. Athanasius was the great orthodox champion. Constantine the Emperor favoured Arius, and Athanasius had to go into exile. Only to the Scriptures did both protagonists turn. Every Scripture that showed that the Lord was God, that proved He is the Creator of all things, that showed He must be worshipped and honoured by creatures as though He were the Father, was accepted by Arius as agreeing with his system. What scripture then was left to prove that the Lord was of equal substance to the Father? Mainly the truth of Eternal Sonship — the bulwark of John 5:18, that His Sonship proved His equality to the Father, because of His eternal generation.

The Greek word, homoiousian, meaning similar in substance; applying the term to the truth of the Persons of the Father and Son, as set forth by Arius and his sympathizers, is destructive of the truth of our Lord’s adorable Person as the eternal Son of God.

Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria, died in A.D. 336. He taught that our Lord existed before His incarnation, but was created of God, the highest of His creatures, empowered to create all else; and, that as the highest and most ancient of God’s creatures, He is to be worshipped, but not in full measure as applied to God, the supreme Creator. This perversion of truth obtains more or less with Millennial Dawnists and its offshoot, Jehovah’s Witnesses.

So we see that Arius was willing to give to Christ all the honour due to Deity and to give Him the very Name of God and yet he refused to confess that He was of the same eternal substance (or nature) as the Father. True Christians therefore insisted that assent was given to the proposition that the Son was ‘homoousios theo', i.e., of the same substance with the Father, otherwise the Arians could talk as though they were quite sound in the faith.

Arius was the first to introduce the doctrine of the creation and non-eternity of the Son of God without denying His pre-existence. The Arians of the fourth century are followed in our day by the so-called Millennial Dawnists or Jehovah's Witnesses.

Thus, whilst Arius denied the true Godhead of the Saviour, he did so by launching his attack against His Divine and Eternal Sonship. He did NOT deny that He was the Son before coming into the world; he denied and opposed that the relation was essentially and intrinsically Divine. For, though humanitarian heresies had preceded, Paul of Samosata having been condemned and deposed in A.D. 270, it was this peculiar subtlety of Arianism that constituted its terrible evil. For the heresiarch not only acknowledged both a pre-existence and a pre-existent sonship of Christ, but was careful to use the word "only-begotten" of His relation to God. Indeed, had he not "embodied these facts in the doctrines he taught no one would have listened to him for an hour, least of all the learned Eusebius of Caesarea and the haughty Eusebius of Nicomedia. The truth that God had verily sent His Son into the world was to them, as to all, heretic and orthodox alike, the only possible meaning of the words of Scripture. The question at issue was, In what sense was this glorious Person the Son of God; was it only in a created sense, supremely great and wonderful, or was it in an essential Sonship, a relation in which He was both substantially and eternally one with the Father?

N*. I agree with you; but then how can the consent of the church secure the faith? Here was, if any be, a fundamental article — the true divinity of the blessed Lord — given up (save by some honoured and blessed confessors) by nearly the whole professing church, instead of its securing doctrine. But further. The pope himself, though for some time faithful, at last signed a semi-Arian formulary. Constantius had banished him from Rome because he would not be an Arian. In this he was to be honoured, and Felix was appointed pope in his place. The Emperor, on entering Rome to celebrate a triumph, found he was loved, saw him afterwards, and he signed a formulary which omitted the testing word, and got an acknowledgment from the prelates who were with Constantius that they should be condemned who said Christ, as to substance and in every way, was not like the Father, and then he was restored, and there were two popes till Felix's death. Further, was not Arius restored by Constantius' order to full communion at Jerusalem, and recalled from exile to Constantinople?

232 The late councils were, on the contrary, wholly Western, and of the Latin church. There were no Easterns. At Florence Pope Eugenius attempted it, but it was a complete failure; the assent a few Greek prelates did give was utterly repudiated by their church when they went home. All these late Western councils, save Pisa, Constance, and Basle, were assemblies called and managed by the popes for their own purposes, with, in general, a vast majority of Italian bishops. Pisa, Constance, and Basle, were the fruit of the struggles of the conscience of Christendom against the hopeless wickedness and oppression of the papacy and the popes. There has been no council since which represented East and West. It was attempted at Sardica, and failed; they split, and held two; the most complete one was Ariminium, under Constantius, where 400 bishops undid the work of Nice by dropping the words — "of one substance with the Father," though they rejected many statements of Arius: but it did not succeed; the Westerns had been dragged in, and afterwards protested.

Arius in the fourth century, as if seeking a remedy for the discordant notions floating within the arena of church profession, seems to have gathered them all under one head, discarding many of the absurdities, such as the "emanations," the "genii," and similar notions held by Gnostics in common with pagans, but retaining and making the inferiority of the Son to the Father the basis of his system. Not that other heresies co-existing with the beginning of Arianism were swallowed up by it, but that Arianism came to such prominence, (being either violently opposed, or espoused by the secular power, then nominally christian) that the lesser heresies (i.e. as regards the number of their adherents) were comparatively lost sight of. The religious world was ranged under two heads, the Arian and the orthodox. For many years the East was Arian, and also a great part of the West. The council of Nice was occasioned by their disputes. Persecution resulted from their bitter contests. At the commencement of the sixth century Arianism was triumphant in many parts of Asia, Africa and Europe; but it sank to nothing when the Vandals were driven out of Africa and the Goths out of Italy, though not extinguished in Italy till the close of the sixth century. Revived again in the West in the sixteenth century, it at length gradually yielded to Socinianism.

But, not only is it an unobjectionable term, and one which has been sanctioned by our greatest divines, as Owen, Goodwin, Bunyan, Gill, etc., but it expresses what could not be so well or so clearly conveyed by any other. Those who so strenuously object to it, may not, perhaps, be altogether aware either of the time of its introduction or of the reason why it was first introduced. It is, then, not only one of those concise and convenient expressions which divines in all ages have employed to communicate scriptural truth in a clear, definite form, but was first used for this very purpose by the ancient Fathers. The necessity for the use of clear and definite terms soon arose in the Christian church; for as errors and heresies sprang up at a very early period as so many tares sown by the enemy of souls among the wheat, men of God felt themselves compelled to meet the subtle wiles of the adversaries of truth by proofs drawn from the Word of God. But besides adducing exact scripture language, it was found necessary, as error assumed a bolder front, to adopt specific terms, in order to define the truth more clearly; for it was soon discovered that erroneous men sheltered their heresies under scripture phraseology, assigning to it all the while a meaning of their own distinct from its true and received, acceptation. When, then, Arius in the fourth century broached his doctrine of the Son’s being generated of the Father before time, but not from all eternity, and that, therefore, there was a period when the Son was not, the ancient Fathers made choice of the term “eternal generation,” to distinguish the proper and eternal filiation of Jesus from His generation in the sense of Arius, who admitted the generation of the Son, but not His eternal generation, and craftily used generation in the sense of making or forming, not begetting. He thus denied that the Son was co-equal, co-eternal and con-substantial of the same substance with the Father. To oppose, then, this fearful heresy, which was, in fact, a denial of the Deity of the Lord Jesus Christ, and degrading Him to a mere creature, the early Fathers employed the term “eternal generation” to express concisely what is stated more largely in the Nicene Creed, “Begotten of His Father before all worlds,” “begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father”-”begotten before all worlds,” in opposition to the Arian doctrine of a “begetting which was not eternal;” “begotten, not made,” in opposition to the interpretation of begetting as a being made; and “of one substance with the Father” in opposition to the Arian heresy that He was not of the same, but only of similar substance.