Heresies

Please join us at Saint Barnabas Church Dunwoody on Thursdays each week after the 7pm Eucharist for a new six-week course on the heresies condemned by the Seven Ecumenical Councils. What does the orthodox and catholic Faith teach on these matters?

We should be very careful to avoid any sense in which we might inadvertently imply that Our Lord was adopted as the Son of God by the Father - and that we are not therefore different from Christ in nature or kind, but only degree. Early adoptionists and the Arians held the view that Christ was different from us only in degree, for Our Lord was a created being adopted and loved by God, to whom God imputed divine status and adoption. The Christ of the Arians was thus deuteros theos, a second God, or a God by grace and in name only. But that, of course, is what we are by theosis - adopted by God to 'be God' in a relative and secondary sense, by grace and adoption (II Peter 2.4, Saint John 10.33-38). Jaroslav Pelikan and John Henry Newman both remind us that the Arian Christ takes the place of the Orthodox Catholic Mary - that for the Arians, Christ, a created being made perfect by divine grace, replaces the role that God has in fact reserved to Mary, the first human hypostasis fully to receive divinisation. We should make it clear that Christ is the Son of the Father in nature, being and essence, consubstantial with the Father, and that we live as Christ only because we share Our Lord's divine sonship through justification and grace only. 

Arianism, like one form of protestantism, was essentially the rationalizing spirit -- the inability to accept or see things beyond reason. - Hillaire Belloc