What is the meaning ofhomoousious?

The conflict raged round two words, which differed only in one letter, yet their meanings when applied to this matter were as far apart as the poles. In that single letter the whole of Christianity was at stake.

The Greek word, homoousian, meaning identity or sameness of substance, applying the term to the truth of the Persons of the Father and the Son, was the word Athanasius stood for, that the Son was in full and complete equality with the Father in the Unity of the Godhead.

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.

The controversy raged for years round the meaning of two Greek words, differing only by a single letter, yet that small difference in the lettering of the two words revealed that which was of vital importance in regard to the Christian faith. One word as applied to our Lord stood for the truth, a matter of supreme importance. The other word as applied to our Lord contained blasphemous error, undermining the very foundations of the Christian faith, striking a fatal blow wherever it obtained a foothold.

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.

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.

It was at that time that the Arian controversy was fought out. Arius denied the eternity of the Word. John says, "In the beginning was the Word" -- He always existed. When everything that had a beginning began, the Word was. Arius declared that the Word was the greatest of all beings that ever emanated from God. His opponents insisted that the Word was one with the Father, in one eternal Trinity -- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: one God in three Persons. It was the most tremendous issue the church had ever been called to face, and, for over a century, it was the burning question that provoked heated controversy everywhere. For years the church was almost rent asunder over two words, "homoiosian" and "homoousian." The one word meant "of like substance," the other "of the same substance." The first was the battle-cry of the Arians; the second of the orthodox, headed by Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria. So irreconcilable were the contending parties that Constantine at last decided to take a hand in the matter himself, and he called a great church-council, which convened in the city of Nicea, and there debated the question as to what the apostolic teaching really had been. Was Jesus truly God, or was He only the greatest being that God has every brought into existence? Over three hundred bishops met together, and Constantine, sitting on a golden throne, presided as the acknowledged head of the Christian church, at the very time that he still bore the title Pontifex Maximus, or High Priest of the Heathen -- the same title that the Pope bears at the present time.

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.

At first the Emperor did not realise the vital importance of the controversy, and he issued an edict that as the words "similar substance" and "equal substance" were not in the Scriptures, the contention was to cease as being an insoluble question. This, however, was not obeyed. How like was Constantine's stratagem to those today, who say that as the term "Eternal Sonship" is not in Scripture, they will neither affirm nor deny the doctrine!

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.

“I believe in One Lord Jesus Christ, the Only-begotten Son of God, Begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, Begotten not made, Being of ONE SUBSTANCE WITH the Father; by Whom all things were made, Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made Man.”

Deny that the Lord was of the same Substance as the Father, and you have completely shattered and destroyed the Christian Faith.

292 The doctrine of the Trinity suffered in proportion; although when Arius would have defiled these expressions in a way which affirmed that Christ was a creature, the instinctive faith of Christians resisted and repelled the abomination. Yet the famous ὁμοούσιος, by which the Arians were formally set aside, in spite of their subtleties, had been as formally condemned as Sabellianism by a previous council, so that the Emperor Constantine, who had given the character of generality to the Nicene one, being impressed with the danger of using a word thus condemned, restored Arius; and Athanasius was deposed by the council of Tyre. Marcellus, one of his opponents, is generally judged to have fallen into Sabellianism; and Arius, received as orthodox, died in the communion of the Catholic church. I have a perfect horror of his doctrine.

The system of the pedant is by no means a new thing. It is as old at least as Arius the Libyan, whom stout old Athanasius withstood. Arius was indeed the very high priest of pedants. He analysed and reconstructed till he presented the church with a Christ so like the real Christ that many till this day cannot tell the difference. But it was not the same. To use his own pedantic language, it was homoiousian but not homoousian. Arius however was undoubtedly a man singularly devout, venerable, and learned. That is not the case always with the learned pedant; but, to compensate for the absence of these three qualities he has "l'audace, encore l'audace, et toujours l'audace" that is usually sufficient to found and lead a new school on.