Fiery Debates That Flame On Today
U.U. Congregation of Oxford, MS
February 2, 2014
So, my mom calls me and says, “Sun, I don’t know how to handle this.” I don’t remember if she was arguing with a member of my family or one of her friends, but they were concerned for her soul because she had not yet been saved in the blood of Jesus Christ. She had gotten into an argument with them and at some point said, “How is believing in the holy trinity not polytheism?” As you might imagine, it didn’t go over well.
Now, I am used to my mother calling me and asking me thea/ological questions, but that is a big one, right? “How is the trinity not polytheism?” How many of you have asked that question? I know I have. Now, I do want to own to the fact that we do have Unitarian Universalists who believe in the trinity and I’m not going to belittle that. What I do want to do get to is what has been the history of our denomination and how to answer that question for my mother and, quite frankly, how to answer it for ourselves. I think it is important to understand it partially because if we are ever going to get anywhere in having really solid dialogue with people- especially with who are very conservatively religious- then we need to be able to understand some of the differences in thea/ology. There are some legitimate reasons that people believe what they believe and I struggle when I hear, for example, someone say, “well, they are ignorant” or “they don’t what they are doing” or “they just believe and they don’t use logic.” It’s fine for it to not work for you, but to belittle someone else for it working for them is a little problematic.
So, I am trying to get my head around this how do answer this question in a way that my mother can respect this friend or family member that she’s talking to? Well, for this, I have to do a little bit of history work. The first thing I want to say is that for those who do not know much about the trinity, the trinity means three things. One is the God, one is the holy spirit, and one is Jesus. What is important to understand about the Holy Spirit is that it sanctifies the word of God. The Holy Spirit is God’s action in the world. God can’t come down from heaven and impregnate Mary himself, so the Holy Ghost does it.
Mary, of course, then gives birth to Jesus. The question that arose from this a long time ago, that I will talk about it a minute, is- is Jesus God? And if Jesus is literally born from God, then is he a little less God than God and a little more God than humans? I don’t know. And what about the Holy Spirit? Where does the Holy Spirit fit in all of this? This is what we are talking about today.
And, I am telling you there should be an HBO series made out of this story. I certainly hope there is. Think about that story. Constantine is going off to battle and he and his entire army see in the sky emblazoned- the cross! I mean isn’t that great television? I really think that is the image, we just need the music. All joking aside, he was truly transformed by this experience because there was no reason, in his mind, that he could have won that battle as easily as he did. And, to have that image and to have Jesus come to him in his sleep- the only way he could explain it was by saying ‘this was divinely sent.’ Then to go on and to win the battles that he won and then to take over both Western and Eastern Rome as quickly as he did really sanctified it for him.
What I find interesting is that he didn’t actually become baptized until he almost died, about fifty years later. The reason was that he couldn’t do some of the things he needed to do as emperor if he was a Christian. So, he didn’t become baptized until just before he died so that he could do all of the things that other Christians weren’t allowed to do. Interesting little loophole, but there it is.
Arius by all rights was the first Unitarian. Now, he believed in Jesus and he believed in the divinity of Jesus and believed in the Holy Spirit and he believed in the divinity of the Holy Spirit, but he didn’t believe that they were of the same level as God. In Arius’ view, there was God and then there was Jesus and the Holy Spirit and then there were people. What is interesting and what got him called a heretic back in the day was that he said that Jesus started out as fully human and had to earn the right to become divine through his life and his work. Now many of the Christian Bishops of his time were not comfortable with this notion. ‘He’s fully human and he had to earn the right??? No…no…no…he was born of God and therefore he was God.’
Athanasius is the person he will argue a lot with and I will come back to him. I first want to focus on Emperor Diocletian. Emperor Diocletian was emperor two or three emperors before Constantine. He was the most significant because the emperors in between lived about six months a piece, so we are going to skip them. Diocletian is important because of his influence on the events in the Christian church that would happen later. He won a battle and went to this town to celebrate and to do sacrifices to determine if his winning was a blessed event.
Every time they did the sacrifices weird things were happening with the animals. Some of them had three livers, some of them had two hearts, they were splotched- there were all of these problems which meant a bad omen for these pagan followers. What they noticed after some time, or so the temple priest suggested, was that some people in the room were making the sign of the cross during the sacrifice. Diocletian says, ‘oh, this is our problem. It’s those wacky Christians.’
So, he persecuted them to high heaven (so to speak J). I am not going to describe how, but, eventually, the wounds that Christians took during that time became battle markers later- they became symbols of strength for their faith. The result was the opposite of what Diocletian wanted. Instead, he strengthened the Christian cause so that by the time Constantine comes in, the Christian community is growing. So, they were pretty strong, but they had been struggling to exist for so long, they had never had to debate theology.
Now, they are at a time when Constantine has made it the religion of his family and he has given primacy of power to Christian bishops throughout the kingdom. In fact, if you see a stole- such as the one I am wearing today- you should know that originally that was a sign from the emperor that they had the full authority of the empire to speak and act lawfully.
So, this is the beginning of our story. To continue we remember the reading from earlier. Constantine sends Hosius into Alexandria where there is this great theological debate that wasn’t really possible until the time of Constantine when they had some freedom to debate. When Hosius went out to do his investigation, what he thought he would find was just some debate between bishops and that he would be able to easily mediate the conflict. What he actually discovered was a debate that might actually split the Church. And, it was this question that I mentioned earlier- this belief that Jesus was not as divine as God. This is what Arius was saying and he accused Bishop Alexander of preaching the wrong kind of word of God.
Many of you have heard of the Council of Nicaea. Emperor Constantine says, ‘we have to deal with this because if we don’t deal with this notion of the divinity of Jesus, or not, and the divinity of the Holy Spirit, or not, it is going to split the church apart. So, he invites 250 bishops and priests from all over Rome to come to Nicaea and debate and decide what is it that Christians believe? They needed a unity. For Constantine, the deal was that if we didn’t have a unity of religion it would split up the empire. Ultimately the people who believed in the Trinity said the same thing- that if they didn’t have a unity of belief it would split up the church and the empire. I think today we live in the United States where we have church and state, for the most part, and the notion that church and religion have to be tied up together is perhaps odd, but during this time these two entities were absolutely together.
So, for the people who believed in the Trinity- the Athanasians- to believe that there was God and then the Holy Spirit and Jesus as separate- to have people believe that within the Church along side with people who didn’t would split the Church and would therefore be a problem. So, the people who believed this had to be kicked out.
So, Bishop Athanasius, who became bishop of Alexandria after Bishop Alexander had passed on, basically went on a spree to try and get Arius ousted. Now, Arius had initially been ousted, but then he convinced the emperor that he was ok, so they let him back in. So, they went to the Council of Nicaea and the Council voted that the Arian view, the Unitarian view of God, was heresy and ousted him again. Then he used his political clout to get on the good side of Emperor Constantine and succeeded and then convinced the emperor that the Trinitarians were dangerous and so Athanasius and the Trinitarians were pronounced heretics and had to run for their lives. Then Athanasius went to the Emperor and used his power and had Arius pronounced a heretic again and they were ousted. This back and forth of each man and group being declared heretics happened about six times in the period of twenty-five years.
So often I hear that there was the Council of Nicaea and it solved all the problems and there were one decree of belief and everybody agreed on the same thing. In reality, it took about 150 years before there was a solid, ‘we believe this.’ Those years included every kind of backstabbing and negotiation and power play that you can imagine. This is why I say it was the great soap opera and I could talk about it for some time, but I want to move on to something more important.
Why does this story matter today? Well, one of the key things is that what the Arians believed back then, we still believe today. Whether you believe in a God or not, whether you believe in Jesus or not, we believe in this church community that we as individuals have a responsibility to make the world better through our own daily living. We generally believe that it’s through our works in this world, not in the afterlife, that matters.
These are all things that Arius believed. He basically said that Jesus, not being God, was an example of how we should live our lives. Most of the Christians in this room would agree that their belief, their commitment to understanding Jesus Christ as important in their lives is because they need to do their best to emulate and model a better and peaceful world- that the love of Jesus is thing that is most important.
Now, our Trinitarian cousins in this day and age struggle with that. I think the thing that really hit home for me was this notion that empire- that country and religion- should be the same because with that similarity more people are saved. See, for Trinitarians, belief is the most important thing and if you can’t understand that notion that belief is the most important thing, then you are really going to have a hard time, right? How many people here believe that belief is the most important thing for them? A few people- I see that- but by and large, most of the people in this room it is not. This is an important reminder that there are people in this community for whom belief is the most important thing- so, if that is not true for you, be aware. Now, in talking to our very conservative cousins, that value and belief in unity and the notion that discord can destroy Paradise is core to how they understand the world.
For us, it is a little bit different. We believe in paradise here and now and working for it and changing it. Doing what Jesus did- going out in the world and doing the good work. So, this notion of the divinity of Jesus actually ends up continuing on to this day whether you believe in Jesus or not, the core values that were held in Arius’ time were passed on to our Transylvanian cousins in Europe and they hold those values today. It was passed on into England in one branch and was born in the United States through another branch of inheritance.
When I had to answer my mother this question, you can see the long and winding path to get there. What I told her was that if she wanted to debate whether Jesus was God and whether you can find salvation through Jesus, all she had to do was ask one question. Ask her conservatively religious friends and family to prove it in the Bible. Prove that God and Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are of one essence in the Bible. The thing is, you can’t do it which is how our Unitarian ancestors have won this debate time in and time out. In particular, our Transylvanian cousins in the 1500s would say, ‘sure we will debate with you about the Trinity of God, but you have to use the Bible.’
The Holy Spirit and Jesus are in the Bible and occasionally together, but there is nowhere in the Bible that says explicitly that those three beings are God and are of equal level which is why I think this debate was so painful back then and why it is still painful today- because it is still left to personal interpretation. Either you have to believe that it is true and trust that the Council of Nicaea knew what they were talking about which many of our religious cousins do or say ‘I have the power to read this and think about it in the way that I should.’
As Unitarian Universalist we believe in the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. We believe it is our own individual jobs to do that search and our cousins don’t which makes it difficult to have healthy conversations. So, what I told my mother was, that at the end of the day you’re not going to agree. All she can do is to tell them she loves them and that God loves them and that God loves her and that they just to have faith that she is going to be ok.
It is hard to watch some of my family and friends because they really are afraid that my mother and I won’t be with them in the next life. They are really afraid of that and this is hard. What my mother is afraid of is that they won’t be with her in this life and that’s hard. When we are talking about this kind of conversation, it is that kind of existential pain that we are talking about. We have such different beliefs about what matters in the world.
I don’t have an answer for you about how we can hear it. I don’t have an answer for how I can hear my family and friends other than I hold my love for them in front of me and that sometimes it is painful. It hurts to know that we are not at the same place, but that love and that grace that IS the Holy Spirit. Now, in our heritage, just because people were Unitarians does not mean that they did not believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit- they did. Our ancestors as recently as a hundred years ago said that the Holy Spirit is what keeps us connected. It is what gives us that grace and that love with one another. In fact, if you say ‘I am spiritual, but not religious’, that Holy Spirit is where that got started, just so you know. It’s that spirit within us that keeps us connected.
So, I leave you with this question today. Knowing that history, knowing that we are a direct cousin to Arius and that he suffered so that we could keep that story alive, so that we could keep that notion that theology is not a closed book, revelation is not sealed, and that each of us has a gift to give. But, even greater than that, that we are one sacred community and that we have a responsibility to stay in connection and relationship with our religious cousins no matter how conservative they may be, no matter how much they want to damn us to wherever they want to damn us to. Until we find a way to hear one another, the same battle that has been happening for two thousand years is going to keep happening again and again and again. So, may you believe in whatever you believe in, but may you listen with holy and open ears. Blessed be. Amen.
Now, I am used to my mother calling me and asking me thea/ological questions, but that is a big one, right? “How is the trinity not polytheism?” How many of you have asked that question? I know I have. Now, I do want to own to the fact that we do have Unitarian Universalists who believe in the trinity and I’m not going to belittle that. What I do want to do get to is what has been the history of our denomination and how to answer that question for my mother and, quite frankly, how to answer it for ourselves. I think it is important to understand it partially because if we are ever going to get anywhere in having really solid dialogue with people- especially with who are very conservatively religious- then we need to be able to understand some of the differences in thea/ology. There are some legitimate reasons that people believe what they believe and I struggle when I hear, for example, someone say, “well, they are ignorant” or “they don’t what they are doing” or “they just believe and they don’t use logic.” It’s fine for it to not work for you, but to belittle someone else for it working for them is a little problematic.
So, I am trying to get my head around this how do answer this question in a way that my mother can respect this friend or family member that she’s talking to? Well, for this, I have to do a little bit of history work. The first thing I want to say is that for those who do not know much about the trinity, the trinity means three things. One is the God, one is the holy spirit, and one is Jesus. What is important to understand about the Holy Spirit is that it sanctifies the word of God. The Holy Spirit is God’s action in the world. God can’t come down from heaven and impregnate Mary himself, so the Holy Ghost does it.
Mary, of course, then gives birth to Jesus. The question that arose from this a long time ago, that I will talk about it a minute, is- is Jesus God? And if Jesus is literally born from God, then is he a little less God than God and a little more God than humans? I don’t know. And what about the Holy Spirit? Where does the Holy Spirit fit in all of this? This is what we are talking about today.
And, I am telling you there should be an HBO series made out of this story. I certainly hope there is. Think about that story. Constantine is going off to battle and he and his entire army see in the sky emblazoned- the cross! I mean isn’t that great television? I really think that is the image, we just need the music. All joking aside, he was truly transformed by this experience because there was no reason, in his mind, that he could have won that battle as easily as he did. And, to have that image and to have Jesus come to him in his sleep- the only way he could explain it was by saying ‘this was divinely sent.’ Then to go on and to win the battles that he won and then to take over both Western and Eastern Rome as quickly as he did really sanctified it for him.
What I find interesting is that he didn’t actually become baptized until he almost died, about fifty years later. The reason was that he couldn’t do some of the things he needed to do as emperor if he was a Christian. So, he didn’t become baptized until just before he died so that he could do all of the things that other Christians weren’t allowed to do. Interesting little loophole, but there it is.
Arius by all rights was the first Unitarian. Now, he believed in Jesus and he believed in the divinity of Jesus and believed in the Holy Spirit and he believed in the divinity of the Holy Spirit, but he didn’t believe that they were of the same level as God. In Arius’ view, there was God and then there was Jesus and the Holy Spirit and then there were people. What is interesting and what got him called a heretic back in the day was that he said that Jesus started out as fully human and had to earn the right to become divine through his life and his work. Now many of the Christian Bishops of his time were not comfortable with this notion. ‘He’s fully human and he had to earn the right??? No…no…no…he was born of God and therefore he was God.’
Athanasius is the person he will argue a lot with and I will come back to him. I first want to focus on Emperor Diocletian. Emperor Diocletian was emperor two or three emperors before Constantine. He was the most significant because the emperors in between lived about six months a piece, so we are going to skip them. Diocletian is important because of his influence on the events in the Christian church that would happen later. He won a battle and went to this town to celebrate and to do sacrifices to determine if his winning was a blessed event.
Every time they did the sacrifices weird things were happening with the animals. Some of them had three livers, some of them had two hearts, they were splotched- there were all of these problems which meant a bad omen for these pagan followers. What they noticed after some time, or so the temple priest suggested, was that some people in the room were making the sign of the cross during the sacrifice. Diocletian says, ‘oh, this is our problem. It’s those wacky Christians.’
So, he persecuted them to high heaven (so to speak J). I am not going to describe how, but, eventually, the wounds that Christians took during that time became battle markers later- they became symbols of strength for their faith. The result was the opposite of what Diocletian wanted. Instead, he strengthened the Christian cause so that by the time Constantine comes in, the Christian community is growing. So, they were pretty strong, but they had been struggling to exist for so long, they had never had to debate theology.
Now, they are at a time when Constantine has made it the religion of his family and he has given primacy of power to Christian bishops throughout the kingdom. In fact, if you see a stole- such as the one I am wearing today- you should know that originally that was a sign from the emperor that they had the full authority of the empire to speak and act lawfully.
So, this is the beginning of our story. To continue we remember the reading from earlier. Constantine sends Hosius into Alexandria where there is this great theological debate that wasn’t really possible until the time of Constantine when they had some freedom to debate. When Hosius went out to do his investigation, what he thought he would find was just some debate between bishops and that he would be able to easily mediate the conflict. What he actually discovered was a debate that might actually split the Church. And, it was this question that I mentioned earlier- this belief that Jesus was not as divine as God. This is what Arius was saying and he accused Bishop Alexander of preaching the wrong kind of word of God.
Many of you have heard of the Council of Nicaea. Emperor Constantine says, ‘we have to deal with this because if we don’t deal with this notion of the divinity of Jesus, or not, and the divinity of the Holy Spirit, or not, it is going to split the church apart. So, he invites 250 bishops and priests from all over Rome to come to Nicaea and debate and decide what is it that Christians believe? They needed a unity. For Constantine, the deal was that if we didn’t have a unity of religion it would split up the empire. Ultimately the people who believed in the Trinity said the same thing- that if they didn’t have a unity of belief it would split up the church and the empire. I think today we live in the United States where we have church and state, for the most part, and the notion that church and religion have to be tied up together is perhaps odd, but during this time these two entities were absolutely together.
So, for the people who believed in the Trinity- the Athanasians- to believe that there was God and then the Holy Spirit and Jesus as separate- to have people believe that within the Church along side with people who didn’t would split the Church and would therefore be a problem. So, the people who believed this had to be kicked out.
So, Bishop Athanasius, who became bishop of Alexandria after Bishop Alexander had passed on, basically went on a spree to try and get Arius ousted. Now, Arius had initially been ousted, but then he convinced the emperor that he was ok, so they let him back in. So, they went to the Council of Nicaea and the Council voted that the Arian view, the Unitarian view of God, was heresy and ousted him again. Then he used his political clout to get on the good side of Emperor Constantine and succeeded and then convinced the emperor that the Trinitarians were dangerous and so Athanasius and the Trinitarians were pronounced heretics and had to run for their lives. Then Athanasius went to the Emperor and used his power and had Arius pronounced a heretic again and they were ousted. This back and forth of each man and group being declared heretics happened about six times in the period of twenty-five years.
So often I hear that there was the Council of Nicaea and it solved all the problems and there were one decree of belief and everybody agreed on the same thing. In reality, it took about 150 years before there was a solid, ‘we believe this.’ Those years included every kind of backstabbing and negotiation and power play that you can imagine. This is why I say it was the great soap opera and I could talk about it for some time, but I want to move on to something more important.
Why does this story matter today? Well, one of the key things is that what the Arians believed back then, we still believe today. Whether you believe in a God or not, whether you believe in Jesus or not, we believe in this church community that we as individuals have a responsibility to make the world better through our own daily living. We generally believe that it’s through our works in this world, not in the afterlife, that matters.
These are all things that Arius believed. He basically said that Jesus, not being God, was an example of how we should live our lives. Most of the Christians in this room would agree that their belief, their commitment to understanding Jesus Christ as important in their lives is because they need to do their best to emulate and model a better and peaceful world- that the love of Jesus is thing that is most important.
Now, our Trinitarian cousins in this day and age struggle with that. I think the thing that really hit home for me was this notion that empire- that country and religion- should be the same because with that similarity more people are saved. See, for Trinitarians, belief is the most important thing and if you can’t understand that notion that belief is the most important thing, then you are really going to have a hard time, right? How many people here believe that belief is the most important thing for them? A few people- I see that- but by and large, most of the people in this room it is not. This is an important reminder that there are people in this community for whom belief is the most important thing- so, if that is not true for you, be aware. Now, in talking to our very conservative cousins, that value and belief in unity and the notion that discord can destroy Paradise is core to how they understand the world.
For us, it is a little bit different. We believe in paradise here and now and working for it and changing it. Doing what Jesus did- going out in the world and doing the good work. So, this notion of the divinity of Jesus actually ends up continuing on to this day whether you believe in Jesus or not, the core values that were held in Arius’ time were passed on to our Transylvanian cousins in Europe and they hold those values today. It was passed on into England in one branch and was born in the United States through another branch of inheritance.
When I had to answer my mother this question, you can see the long and winding path to get there. What I told her was that if she wanted to debate whether Jesus was God and whether you can find salvation through Jesus, all she had to do was ask one question. Ask her conservatively religious friends and family to prove it in the Bible. Prove that God and Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are of one essence in the Bible. The thing is, you can’t do it which is how our Unitarian ancestors have won this debate time in and time out. In particular, our Transylvanian cousins in the 1500s would say, ‘sure we will debate with you about the Trinity of God, but you have to use the Bible.’
The Holy Spirit and Jesus are in the Bible and occasionally together, but there is nowhere in the Bible that says explicitly that those three beings are God and are of equal level which is why I think this debate was so painful back then and why it is still painful today- because it is still left to personal interpretation. Either you have to believe that it is true and trust that the Council of Nicaea knew what they were talking about which many of our religious cousins do or say ‘I have the power to read this and think about it in the way that I should.’
As Unitarian Universalist we believe in the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. We believe it is our own individual jobs to do that search and our cousins don’t which makes it difficult to have healthy conversations. So, what I told my mother was, that at the end of the day you’re not going to agree. All she can do is to tell them she loves them and that God loves them and that God loves her and that they just to have faith that she is going to be ok.
It is hard to watch some of my family and friends because they really are afraid that my mother and I won’t be with them in the next life. They are really afraid of that and this is hard. What my mother is afraid of is that they won’t be with her in this life and that’s hard. When we are talking about this kind of conversation, it is that kind of existential pain that we are talking about. We have such different beliefs about what matters in the world.
I don’t have an answer for you about how we can hear it. I don’t have an answer for how I can hear my family and friends other than I hold my love for them in front of me and that sometimes it is painful. It hurts to know that we are not at the same place, but that love and that grace that IS the Holy Spirit. Now, in our heritage, just because people were Unitarians does not mean that they did not believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit- they did. Our ancestors as recently as a hundred years ago said that the Holy Spirit is what keeps us connected. It is what gives us that grace and that love with one another. In fact, if you say ‘I am spiritual, but not religious’, that Holy Spirit is where that got started, just so you know. It’s that spirit within us that keeps us connected.
So, I leave you with this question today. Knowing that history, knowing that we are a direct cousin to Arius and that he suffered so that we could keep that story alive, so that we could keep that notion that theology is not a closed book, revelation is not sealed, and that each of us has a gift to give. But, even greater than that, that we are one sacred community and that we have a responsibility to stay in connection and relationship with our religious cousins no matter how conservative they may be, no matter how much they want to damn us to wherever they want to damn us to. Until we find a way to hear one another, the same battle that has been happening for two thousand years is going to keep happening again and again and again. So, may you believe in whatever you believe in, but may you listen with holy and open ears. Blessed be. Amen.