Dear Friends in Christ,

This weekend is the final weekend before Ash Wednesday. We are just a few short days away from beginning the holy season of Lent in which we will prepare ourselves through prayer, fasting, and almsgiving for the celebration of Our Lord’s Paschal Mystery at Easter. For me, I know that Lent gives me the opportunity to reflect on my relationship with Jesus and calls me to remove those obstacles that are hindering my ability to give myself entirely to Him. I pray that this Holy Season allows you to seek for Jesus more zealously, and to accompany Him on the road to his Passion, Death, and Resurrection.

In this week’s letter, we are concluding our series on early Church history before we enter into a new series during Lent, and I invite us to learn about the effects of the heresy of Arianism upon the early Church. As I mentioned in my previous letters, this heresy debated the identity of Jesus and His relation to the Father. Today, we will go more in-depth into this heresy, and see how it challenged the Church to defend its position on who Jesus is. 

The heresy of Arianism began from a priest named Arius who was a priest who lived in Al-exandria, a city in Northern Egypt that was a center for culture, learning, and commerce in the early 300s. Arius lived a very ascetical life, meaning that he observed much prayer and fasting in his everyday life, but he was puzzled by the origins of Jesus in the Christian Faith. Around the year 318, Arius began preaching that the Son of God, Jesus, was created by the Father at the moment of the Incarnation. His position centered upon a short saying, “There was a time when he [the Logos/Son/Jesus] was not.” From this position, Arius believed that Jesus did not exist eternally with the Father, and that he was merely creature like you and me.

Arius further believed that Jesus’s relation to the Father was rooted in the will and not in his essence. What does this mean? If Jesus was only connected to his Father through his will, then he would exist simply as a manifestation of the Father’s power and domination instead of a manifestation of the love that exists between the Father and the Son. This position of Arius drove him to conclude that the Son and the Father are not related to one another in their nature but are connected to one another by the Father’s superiority over the Son, who is simply a creation of the Father. 

Unfortunately, Arius’s way of thinking spread very rapidly throughout the Church, and very soon many people, including bishops, embraced this position that held that Jesus was simply a creature and was not fully divine. As I mentioned in my previous letter, to combat the heresy that Arius shared, the emperor Constantine called for a Council in Nicaea in the year 325 in order to clarify the Church’s teaching on Jesus and his relation to the Father. 

At this time, a great number of Saints rose up to defend the divinity of Jesus, such as St. Athanasius, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, and St. Nicholas. According to legend St. Nicholas defended the divinity of Jesus to such an extent that he punched Arius during the Council of Nicaea. Eventually, the Church clarified that Jesus is the eternally begotten Son of the Father, not created in time, but begotten eternally from the Father. In defending the divinity of the Son, the Church clarifies that the Son and the Father are united in their divine essence, and that the Son remained fully divine while becoming fully human in the Incarnation.

May Christ’s Peace be with you, Fr. Briggs