# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1845 03 22_S58
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

...I have also observed that all error, heresy, idolatry, offense, abuse, and wickedness in the Church have arisen originally from this: that this article, or this part of the faith concerning Jesus Christ, has been despised or lost. And if one looks at it rightly, in the light, then all heresies fight against the dear article of Jesus Christ — just as Simeon says of him, that he is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel, and for a sign that shall be spoken against, and as Isaiah long before proclaimed him a rock of offense and a stone of stumbling.

It was this very article concerning our Lord Jesus Christ that Arius wickedly assailed, thereby becoming an obstinate and ruinous false teacher. The place from which the Arian plague went forth was the great city of Alexandria in Egypt, famous far and wide in Christian antiquity. Here Arius was a presbyter and pastor at the Baucalis Church, and distinguished himself as much by his high intellectual gifts as by a strictly moral way of life. Yet there was a restless and haughty spirit in him; because of this he had once already, as a deacon, been excluded from the Church for rebelling against Christian church discipline. Afterward, however, he confessed his guilt, and so was received back and advanced to the pastoral office named above. But it was not long before he fell into new errors of doctrine, still more dangerous.

For this he may indeed have been outwardly prompted by the example of certain Alexandrian church teachers who, abandoning the literal sense of the divinely inspired text of Scripture, sought increasingly to spiritualize the truths of the Christian faith and to develop them in a peculiar manner according to human rational wisdom. But whereas these teachers, for the most part, still tried to hold fast, with reverence toward the revealed Word of God, to the actual ground of the faith, Arius went a significant step further still, and raised his own reason to be judge over the truths of the faith; for what he ought only to have humbly believed as a divine mystery, he doubted in unbelief, and interpreted, both for himself and openly for others, according to vain human notions, contrary to God's Word. Because, namely, he could not comprehend how the Son of God could have been begotten from eternity out of the being of the Father, and thus be distinct from the Father in person, yet in essence equal to the Father — an eternal and almighty God — he supposed instead that there had once been a time when the Son of God

...departed in various ways. For here their aberrations are not denied, still less approved; yet such teachers themselves are also not condemned as false teachers, so long as, on the question of how a person corrupted and condemned by sin can become righteous and blessed, they point in the Word and the pure Sacrament to nothing else than the Son of God and of Man who died and rose again for us — in whom the sinner who despairs of himself need only believe steadfastly, in order to find forgiveness of sins, and thus new life and blessedness.

58

...had not yet existed at all, and that God had not yet been Father; that only at a certain time — though before all other creatures — had the Son been created by the Father; that the Son was therefore not of the same essence as the Father, not an eternal, almighty God, but a mere creature, and only an adopted Son of God, who otherwise had no advantage over other children of God except that all things had been made through him. Among several other blasphemous assertions, all of which contended against the article concerning Christ and the Holy Trinity, Arius also taught, wholly falsely, concerning the Holy Spirit, that he was created by the Son and was therefore lesser than the Son, and so lesser still than the Father, and so forth.

The Christian readers of this paper will themselves soon notice which passages of Holy Scripture the blinded Arius misused in defense of his errors, and what should be answered to them. But it would lead us too far afield here to go further into this. Every Christian who fears God's Word (Isaiah 66:2) and in humble submission gives God the honor of confessing that no one knows the Son but the Father only, and no one knows the Father but the Son only, and he to whomever the Son wills to reveal him (Matthew 11:27); yes, every Christian who gratefully and in faith receives this revelation of the triune God, given to us blind and foolish men out of infinite mercy, need only — alongside countless other passages of the Old and New Testaments — open the Gospel of John, where it is said, already in the very first verses, in a manner as clear as it is uplifting, that "the Word" (that is, according to verse 14, the true Son of God) "was in the beginning, and was with God, and was God himself, and was with God from the beginning." From this one glorious testimony alone it is sufficiently plain that the Father and the Son are one according to the eternal divine essence, yet distinct according to person — just as the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and from the Son, is, according to other clear statements of Scripture, likewise one with the Father and the Son as the third Person in the Godhead, and is equally an eternal and almighty God. (Compare 2 Samuel 23:2–3, with Luther's incomparable exposition of these last words of David; also John 15:26; Acts 5:3–4; 1 Corinthians 2:10; 1 John 5:7; and others.)

All of this his venerable and concerned bishop Alexander also testified to Arius, exhorting him earnestly and lovingly to abandon his delusion. But in vain! The bishop then summoned other witnesses to the truth, and finally his entire clergy, in order to warn the wayward man in their presence and lead him back to the foundation of the true faith. But when Arius persisted only ever more zealously in his error, and had already led astray and swept along with him a considerable number of other souls, he was, in the year 321, formally excluded from the Church, together with nine of his followers, by a synod of many neighboring bishops who had assembled at Alexandria.

"It is very easy to say" (remarks a Christian writer on this matter) "that silence and toleration in this affair would have been the best means of preserving peace in the Church on all sides" (just as the Emperor Constantine himself, in his inexperience, at first knew no other counsel to give, and just as the blind world today, in such cases, still knows no other language than that everyone ought simply to be left to his own belief); "but no true Christian can regard it as unimportant whether his Savior is looked upon as the Creator, or as a creature. It means too much for our soul that we should risk its salvation on we know not what; and to all humble Christians it was then clear that persisting in a blasphemy against God was, at the very least, just as practical an evil as persisting in drunkenness, or in theft."

One might therefore rather wonder how an Arius, even after being excluded as an apostate and impenitent seducer, could, even in his banishment, still infect and win over so many souls. For not only did he find open ears and friendly reception with the respected Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia and many other bishops, presbyters, and deacons, but also a great multitude of people in all parts of the Roman Empire — among them, not least, many hundreds of women who, on account of certain vows, had a reputation for particular piety — indeed, even many magistrates, and later the imperial court itself, allowed themselves to be increasingly dazzled and carried away by the deceptive will-o'-the-wisp of the new Arian rational wisdom.

But, apart from what we have already said in the first section about the circumstances of that time, there are three further reasons why one need not be surprised at this spread of Arianism. For, first, all people — even the godly, when they do not watch and pray — are, according to their corrupt hearts, easily deceived and overcome when the tempter, through some new, inflating knowledge, deludes them into thinking that by it they will attain to a higher understanding, indeed even "be as God" (Genesis 3:5). Second, almost all false teachers and seducers present a great outward show of self-denial, of intellectual acuity, and of zeal for godly love, by which the weak are easily deceived. So, too, a contemporary of Arius tells us that he likewise possessed not only a great sharpness of understanding, an unusual skill in disputation, and something very winning in his manner, but also, in his gaunt frame, with a pale, care-...

*) Milner, Church History, vol. II, p. 64.