Free The Case for God by Karen Armstrong

become “sons of God;” they too could become divine. 7 Alexander, bishop of Alexandria, and his brilliant young assistant Athanasius immediately realized that Arius had put his finger on an ambiguity in the Alexandrian view of Christ that needed to be cleared up. 8
    The debate was not confined to a coterie of learned experts. Arius set his ideas to music, and it was not long before sailors and travelers were singing popular songs proclaiming that the Father was God by nature and had given life and being to the Son, who was neither coeternal with him nor uncreated. Soon the controversy had spread to the churches of Asia Minor and Syria. We hear of a bath attendant who engaged the bathers in heated discussion about whether the Son had come from nothingness; a money changer who, when asked forthe exchange rate, held forth on the distinction between the Creator and his creation; and a baker who argued with his customers that the Father was greater than the Son. 9 People were discussing the question with the same enthusiasm and passion as they discuss football today, because it touched the heart of their Christian experience. In the past, the creeds and explanations of the faith had often been changed to meet pastoral needs. 10 The Arian crisis showed that they would probably have to be changed yet again.
    Over the centuries, Arianism has become a byword for heresy but at the time there was no officially orthodox position and nobody knew whether Arius or Athanasius was right. 11 Arius was anxious to safeguard the transcendence of God. God was unique, “the only unbegotten, the only eternal, the only one without beginning, the only true, the only one who has immortality, the only wise, the only good.” 12 His power was so overwhelming that it had to be mediated through the Logos at the creation, because frail creatures “could not endure to be made by the absolute hand of the Unoriginate.” 13 The immense and all-powerful God could not possibly have been in the man Jesus: for Arius that would be like cramming a whale into a can of shrimp or a mountain into a box.
    Athanasius wanted to safeguard the liturgical practice of the Church, which regularly referred—albeit imprecisely—to Jesus as divine. If, he argued, the Arians really believed Christ to be a mere creature, were they not guilty of idolatry when they worshipped him? 14 Like Arius, Athanasius had accepted the new doctrine of creation ex nihilo, but he argued that Arius did not understand its full implications. Creation ex nihilo had revealed an utter incompatibility between being itself and creatures that came from nothing. 15 The only things that we could know by our natural, unaided reason were the objects of the material world, which told us nothing about God. Our brains were equipped to recognize only finite realities created ex nihilo, so we had no idea what the substance
(ousia
) of the uncreated God was like. God was not like any immense thing in our experience, and Arius “should not think of him in [such] human terms.” 16 Further, being and nonbeing had absolutely nothing in common; it was impossible to speak in these human terms about the Logos, the agent of creation, “by whom all things were made”: “What sort of resemblance is there between things which are from nothing and the onewho rendered the things which are nothing into being?” 17 Jesus had not been linked to a very large and powerful being, as the Arians seemed to imagine; all that could be said was that there was an incomprehensible transcendence in Jesus that was entirely distinct from anything in human experience.
    The relationship between the unknowable God and the incarnate Logos, who had brought all things into existence, must, therefore, be entirely different from a relationship between two created beings. If, like the Arians, you simply thought of God as another being, albeit bigger and better than us, then it was absolutely impossible for God to become human. It was only