c. 320–325

Arius: the Son as a perfect creature, and Arian christology

Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria, clashed with Bishop Alexander over how to understand the divinity of Jesus. According to Arius, there is "one God, unbegotten, eternal, without beginning", while the Son is only-begotten, a perfect creature of God, "but not as one of the creatures": he has a beginning, was created "before the ages", and through him everything else was created. According to one interpretation presented by González, Arius was defending a view of salvation: the divinity of Jesus was conceived in terms of will, open to imitation, and the Son had to be Son by adoption so that we too could be adopted. Pelikan sums up: Christ ends up suspended between man and God, God interpreted deistically, man moralistically. Alexander convened a synod of nearly a hundred Egyptian bishops, which condemned and deposed Arius; he gained the support of Eusebius of Nicomedia and of part of Origen's followers.