HERESY SERIES: PART 3
[Click here for the companion YouTube video]
QUESTION: John 3:16 famously reads, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son” (NKJV). The phrase “only begotten” (Greek monogenés) is also used to describe Isaac in Hebrews 11:17: “By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises offered up his only begotten son.” Is the meaning of monogenés in these two verses the same, something similar, or something completely different?
Arius of Alexandria was a priest in the middle of the third century. He was a very popular preacher, and one of the things that he believed was that when the Bible refers to Christ as having been begotten by the Father, if means that Christ must come into existence at some point. The fundamental belief of Arianism is therefore that Christ is a created being and not co-eternal with the Father. Arius was expelled from Alexandria for his beliefs (and eventually the Empire) but quickly wrote a letter to gain support of his good friend, Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia. Eusebius then gathered pro-Arian support from a large number of bishops, making the Arian controversy Empire-wide. The following is an excerpt from Arius’ letter to Eusebius.
READING: Since my father Ammonius is coming to Nicomedia, I thought it right to send you my greetings by him, and at the same time to tell you […] how desperately the bishop attacks, persecutes, and pursues us, so that he drives us from the city as if we were atheists because we do not agree with him when he publicly preaches: “God always, the Son always; at the same time the Father, at the same time the Son; the Son co-exists with God, unbegotten; he is ever-begotten, he is not born-by-begetting; neither by thought nor by any moment of time does God precede the Son; God always, Son always, the Son exists from God himself.” And Eusebius, your brother, Bishop of Caesarea, Theodotus, Paulinus, Athanasius, Gregory, Aetius, and all the other bishops of the East, have been condemned for saying that God existed, without beginning, before the Son; except Philogonius, Hellanicus, and Macarius, men who are heretics and unlearned in the faith; some of whom say that the Son is an effluence, others a projection, others that he is co-unbegotten. We cannot even listen to these faithless things, even though the heretics threaten us with a thousand deaths. But what we say and think we both have taught and continue to teach; that the Son is not unbegotten, nor part of the unbegotten in any way, nor is he derived from any substance; but that by his own will and counsel he existed before times and ages fully God, only-begotten, unchangeable. And before he was begotten or created or appointed or established, he did not exist; for he was not unbegotten. We are persecuted because we say: “the Son has a beginning, but God is without beginning.” For that reason we are persecuted, and because we say that he is from what is not. And this we say because he is neither part of God nor derived from any substance. For this we are persecuted; the rest you know. [A letter of Arius to Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia (c.321)]
Leave a Reply