It is one thing to assert that God exists, but it is another thing, to say what this God is like. And the great debates that took place within early Christianity were specifically addressing this point. God may exist but he may be a despotic tyrant and that is not what humanity desires.

There were many issues that were discussed, and it is not my intention to delve into these exhaustively, but I would like to concentrate on two items which are related to each other and are central to the Christian faith. These are – who is Christ and what does salvation mean for humankind?

In the beginning the whole theology about Christ had to be developed in prayer and reflection on what Christ accomplished and how he had done that. And it is here that some of the most bitter controversies arose.

There were those who saw in Christ not God but a good being who sacrificed himself for humanity. These feelings were especially strong within the Church in Alexandria. They referred to scripture in support of their position and their leader was an Alexandrian priest by the name of Arius. Christ was seen as a derivative divine being, functioning as if he were a god, but not a being of equal stature as God. They saw the Father as far beyond any accessibility by mortal humans and it was through Christ that ‘contact’ was mediated between the God beyond all realms. They would speak of Jesus as the Angel of Mighty Counsel, or as the Heavenly High Priest leading creation to worship the unseen God, the Father who is forever hidden in unapproachable darkness. They went so far as to deny that the divine son had always existed.

A little excursion into grammar will cast some light here. As a general rule, the articular form ho Theos – literally – the God was a title reserved for God Almighty or God the Father whereas the inarticular form – theos – designated a secondary divinity – a god. Thus, the prologue in John’s Gospel could be read (since the inarticular form was used): “In the beginning was the Logos and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was a god.” Interestingly, as an aside, almost all heresies support their position by reference to scriptures.

But the situation is not all that clear or simple.

In John 20:28, the apostle Thomas addresses the risen Christ as my God, in the articular form, ho Theos. Arguments went on but with time it became obvious that the Arian position made Christianity incoherent and non-sensical – it really led to a dead end.

For many of the Fathers of the Church the question of salvation is important in determining who Christ is. And by salvation, they meant a much more robust understanding compared to the anemic vision of salvation as some kind of extrinsic legal transaction between God and humanity whereby a debt is cancelled and the soul is offered a pass into eternal life. For the early Fathers such as Athanasius, Basil, the two Gregories and many more, salvation had a far deeper and richer meaning. To be saved was to be joined to God Himself in Christ, to be divinized, as 2 Peter 1:4 says: to become partakers of the divine nature. It was often repeated that God became man that man may become god. In Christ, the human and the divine had become united in a perfect and indissoluble union, forever. This is the essence of salvation. This is what Christ accomplished through his incarnation and sacrificial death on the cross.

If this is salvation, then how can we be saved if Christ is not truly Divine, a true ho Theos? Only God can join us to God and therefore, if Christ is not divine, then all our talk about salvation is just a flurry of meaningless words.

Through the debates that took place in the fourth century a number of remarkable conclusions were reached. In the ‘rational’ and simplified Arian model, the Logos functioned as an emissary for the unreachable God shrouded in isolation and impenetrable by human efforts. However, the orthodox faction of Christianity claimed that now, through Christ and in the Spirit, the Father Himself has made Himself known to humanity. Creation itself, now could not be seen as something defective and tragically separated from its source – God – and this world is no longer a realm forever alien to God, a creation that a soul has to flee from in order to be ‘saved’. The world is good and beautiful and is, in fact, the theater of divine action and intervention.

The heretical view of ‘Christianity’ had an air of tragic sadness that saw salvation as a continual, resigned leave-taking, as the soul shed its contacts with all that had held it bound to material creation. The personal, the contacts with all whom we loved had to be discarded because they were seen as contributors to our failings to purify ourselves so that we could become like god.

The answer as to what salvation is in the understanding of scriptures and the Church came in the formulation as to who Christ is. Christ is one divine person who perfectly possesses everything proper to God and everything proper to man, without robbing either of its integrity, and who, because of this, makes it possible for every human being to become a partaker of the divine nature without ceasing to be a complete human being. Christ is described as one person with two natures. The significance of this is that personhood is now seen as a fundamental component of creation and not something that is temporary and which will disappear. It is this property of personhood that makes each human being unique and of immeasurable value. No previous vision of mankind even approaches this grandeur which is seen as a component of what it means to be a human being. But what does this have to do with salvation and Christian hope?

To answer this question we have to consider what Christianity means by the term ‘person’. We take this term to mean the identity or personality that each of us has. But within Christianity, this term has a far richer connotation. Personhood is intimately related to our interactions with others because it is the others that form and inform our personhood. In the Old Testament, we are told to love our neighbor as our selves because it is those we interact with and love who make us who we are, who gift us with personhood. And if personhood is a fundamental aspect of being a human being, salvation means that our connections to those we have loved and who have loved us is not broken by death as it is in the model where Christ is not divine. If these connections with those we love are broken, then what kind of salvation would that be?

Our concept of salvation has become overly individualistic whereas in Christianity it is a concept that includes all of creation and all of our relations. We have become so focused on sin as the lynchpin in our considerations of salvation that we have missed the wider picture. Yes, sin is an important impediment but isn’t it curious that in the liturgy we ask to be forgiven sins even if we are not consciously aware of them or of having committed them? How can we be held responsible for something we may not even be aware of? In this all juridical concepts of salvation are wiped away. Sin is anything that stands in the way of our union with God and it is this union that is our salvation. But, you ask – how is it possible that the infinite God can become a human being?

The clue to this is already given in the early chapters of the book of Genesis where it is stated that God made man in His image. Already, in this description we have a hint of the fact that one of the points of creation is to have God enter into His image, into man. Salvation is the renewal and perfection of this image through what is referred to as theosis – God-man union. And furthermore, we often raise the question as to what God can and can’t do. We, in our pride, forget that we cannot limit the illimitable God.

A lot more can be written about the debates that went on in the early Church. With the illustrations that I have chosen, what I tried to do is show that these were not arid discussions but touched on the very heart and meaning of our faith. The Fathers at that time struggled to describe the indescribable and to present it in such a way that common men and women could make some sense of the questions that stood before them.

I find it ironic that those who do not believe, question and challenge the idea that God can become incarnate. For them the idea of the God-man has been replaced by the man-god, the human who is the epitome of the universe who is puffed up with the understanding and technical achievements that he has brought about and they do not see the irony of this inversion of the God-man concept in Christianity.

In the next several letters I am going to touch on the painful subject of evil as it became incarnated in the artificial famine in Ukraine called the Holodomor.

Sincerely,
Bar-Abbas