A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

Church was now firmly embedded within traditional society. The outsiders had
become insiders. Jesus, the all-too-human rebel against the empire, now seemed
an inappropriate role model, and the response was to elevate his divinity. This
meant a shift away from the gospel texts, which stressed his humanity and
supported a subordinationist position, and towards the Old Testament and the
letters of Paul. The God of the Old Testament appeared a better support for an
authoritarian empire, while in Paul’s letters Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection
were transformed into cosmic events, isolated from the political context in which
they actually took place. (This development will be discussed further in Chapter
XII.)
It was one thing for the changing mood to support a Jesus whose divinity was
stressed at the expense of his humanity. There remained immense problems in
formulating this in any coherent way. There were a few biblical quotations, such
as John’s ‘I am in the Father and the Father is in me’ (14:9-11), that supported a
unity of the Godhead, but as seen above, there were many texts from the gospels
that rejected this idea of unity in favour of subordinationism. Even the most
committed Nicene knew that he was vulnerable to counterattack on this ground,
and this explains the enormous energy the supporters of Nicaea expended in
finding alternative interpretations of key subordinationist texts. Another difficult
issue for the Nicenes was that of Jesus’ ‘begetting’. The Nicene Creed referred to
‘Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God, begotten as only-begotten of the Father’. This
presented no problem for the subordinationists, as the ‘begetting’ simply referred
to the method of creation of Jesus, the subordinate Son, by his Father. Yet the
Nicenes wished to argue that Father and Son had co-existed for all eternity - so
when could the ‘begetting’ have taken place if there was never a time when the
Son did not exist as begotten? The problem simply took the debate on to a new
level of intractability. (It has to be remembered that these debates were taking
place in both Greek and Latin and there was great potential for confusion when
translating complex philosophical terms from one language to the other.)
There were two other major problems for the Nicenes. The first was that if
Jesus was fully God from eternity, then how did his human existence fit
alongside his divinity? The greater the degree of divinity—and one could go no
higher than that posited by the Nicenes, in which Jesus was actually ‘of the same
substance’ as God the Father - the more difficult it was to give Jesus a
meaningful human existence in which he actually suffered. Then, as already
mentioned, there was the problem of the Trinity. The subordinationists had no
difficulty in accepting the concept of a Trinity in which there was a hierarchy of