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The Arian Controversy (325-381)

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Arian Controversy (325-381) The Arian debates represent more or less a vortex or a fulcrum of theological events that increasingly developed into a political conundrum. What started as a purely theological controversy regarding the true nature of Jesus had metamorphosed into a state-church intermingling of overlapping spheres of legitimizing power claims. The vision of the Christian world and implicitly the relation between empire and church, between emperor and patriarch, was born and became the foundation of the Church’s theological principles and teachings. Arians beliefs about the consubstantiality of Jesus and the independence of the Church from the Empire were complementary. Arians advocated for Christological sub-ordination and the subordination of the Church to the State. Thus the Arians were more disposed to accept the will of an Emperor, because the canons, tradition, and scriptural law centering in the historical Christ could not possibly in their eyes take precedence over the living law of the Emperor ordained by the eternal divinity. The dispute between the orthodox Fathers and the Arians was a clash …show more content…

This controversy about how the Word related to God the Father led to the ultimate victory of Athanasius, patriarch of Alexandria from 328 to 373, who argued, alongside with the Council of Nicaea of 325, that the Word was absolutely and completely divine, “of one substance with” God the Father. This conclusion was confirmed by the First Council of Constantinople in 381. As mentioned before, the Arian Controversy also established the precedent of the church turning to the emperor to find and impose a resolution of its theological disputes, and of the emperor calling councils of bishops to enunciate the “faith of the church” he would then impose

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