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Books Doctrinal murder and mayhem
WHEN JESUS BECAME
GOD: THE EPIC FIGHT OVER CHRISTS DIVINITY IN THE LAST DAYS OF
ROME By Richard E. Rubenstein Harcourt Brace & Company, 267
pages, $26 |
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By JUDITH BROMBERG
As good a story as Richard Rubenstein tells in When Jesus
Became God, the most compelling line for me was the rhetorical question he
posed: What, one wonders, would Jesus have made of that?
The that is the near century of turmoil within the
Holy Roman Empire and the Christian church over the nature of Jesus
divinity. But that also extends to the beatings, the arson, the
assassinations carried out in Jesus name by opponents in this heated
debate.
Rubenstein, a professor of Conflict Resolution at George Mason
University specializing in violent social and religious conflict, is a Jew.
This book was a long time in incubation as he sorted through his fascination
with this central issue of another religions faith and his presumption to
meddle in it. He eventually came to see that, this
controversy tells us much about where we came from and what divides us. The
story may even suggest how violent divisions can someday be healed.
Whereas meddle was Rubensteins word, it was not
his practice here. He brings to this material a respectful objectivity that
allows the facts to speak for themselves.
The crux of the fourth-century debate centers on the divinity of
the historical Jesus, with half of Christendom holding with the belief
championed by a priest named Arius that Jesus was divine by adoption and thus
subordinate to Gods will. Arius chief nemesis was a scrappy young
priest, later to become bishop, named Athanasius, who insisted along with the
other half of Christianity that Jesus was fully God and fully human.
The Arian affair was not a mere intellectual exercise among
theologians; it toppled emperors and spilled over into street fights between
opposing shopkeepers and mass excommunications on both sides. Athenasius
himself, as Bishop of Alexandria, was exiled and restored to his see no fewer
than five times.
Any half-alert Catholic realizes that the church is an intensely
political organization. What I saw even more clearly in this book was how even
basic theology, doctrine and dogma were dictated by secular politics. Much of
the early politicization of the church lies at the feet of the Emperor
Constantine, who, while he was shaping church teaching was not even a baptized
Christian. (His procrastination stemmed from the fact that he had a lot of
living and governing left to do, not all of it pretty, so why start with a
clean slate too early in life?)
Within Constantines reign, Christianity went from a
persecuted sect to state religion in a remarkably short time. I am not
suggesting that Constantine did not have a genuine religious experience on the
field of battle, but it is equally true that he saw in Christianity a useful
tool to unite his far-flung, diverse empire. What he did not count on was a
pesky little dispute that would eventually weaken the empire and lead
ultimately to a schism in the church.
That pesky dispute was the quarrel over Jesus divinity.
Trying to meet a problem head on that, according to Constantine, was not worth
fighting over, he called for a council of bishops to resolve the dispute. There
were even political reasons for holding the Great Council in his summer
residence on Lake Nicaea. While Constantine leaned against Arius
position, even he oscillated over the course of the next five years despite
having manipulated an anti-Arian statement of faith at Nicaea. This irritation
within Christianity was not going away soon, and a great deal hung in the
balance. According to Constantine, Only a strong God, a strong church and
a strong empire would provide helpless humans with the security they
craved.
Even though the Council of Nicaea, which gave us the Nicene Creed,
is generally regarded as the first ecumenical (or universal) council, it was
not, in fact, universal at all. Even though it was attended by 250 bishops, the
largest gathering to date, only a handful of Western bishops attended. More
representative, attended by over 500 bishops from both East and West, was the
joint council of Rimini-Seleucia 25 years later, which adopted a pro-Arian
creed only to have it repudiated by the church.
The political machinations and doctrinal swings that ensued over
the last half of the century are too numerous to mention here, but not too
complicated for Rubenstein to sort through in a soap-operaish unfolding of
events. They do, indeed, include murder and mayhem all in the name of Jesus
true Son of God or adopted heir of the kingdom. A quote attributed to
Karl Marx who said, History repeats itself, but the first time as
tragedy, the second as farce, is oddly appropriate here.
One more attempt to suppress Christianity in favor of neo-paganism
yielded few results, proving that Christianity by the late fourth century did
not need the power of the state behind it to survive. The pagan ruler Julian
was succeeded by the Arian-leaning Valens who tried to impose his own version
of peaceful co-existence between the still-disputing factions, and in so doing,
dealt the anti-Arians a strong hand. He opened the door for three young
theologians-rhetoricians to radically reshape the Christian faith, clear
through to the present.
Basil of Caesarea (Basil the Great), his brother Gregory of Nyssa
and their best friend Gregory of Nazainzus developed the ideas that would
make it possible for conservative Arians and Nicene Christians eventually to
fuse.
Oddly, says Rubenstein, what triggered this
burst of creative thinking was a new issue that threatened to make divisions
within the Christian community even more contentious and complex: the nature of
the Holy Spirit. A new theological vocabulary was necessary, hence the
drafting of the doctrine of the Trinity.
Whereas both sides were eventually won over to this new thinking,
doctrinally, the Trinity was the point at which Christianity broke definitively
with its parent faith, Judasim, and other forms of monotheism.
The rest, as they say, is history, but not without a few more
chapters making Arianism a crime punishable by death, anti-Semitism a practice
sanctioned by the church and the rise of the cult of Mary, who became that
sort of liminal figure combining human characteristics with a divine
mission that many Arians had imagined Jesus to be.
Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, the doctrine that
healed one division a few centuries later caused an even greater
one. The Western and Eastern factions of the church split in the Great Schism
over the filioque, that is, whether a line in the Nicene Creed would
affirm that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the father and the son (Rome) or just
the father (Constantinople).
All I can say is, if any of this interests you, read this
book.
Judith Bromberg is a regular reviewer for NCR.
National Catholic Reporter, February 4,
2000
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