Another Patrick Sullivan Question

 Patrick Sullivan writes on Facebook:
"What is the meaning of the quarrel within Christianity over the separateness and the oneness of Christ with God? Why is there such violence and turmoil over its precise articulation? Is the /content/ of the quarrel in some sense incidental to the political/historical/social structure of it?

Religious faith can be a source of identity. In the Roman Empire of the 4th century there were many reasons to be concerned with identity, with which stream of culture one followed, and a confession of faith can be in a sense totemic.

Then again, I remark that theological distinctions can indicate, represent, or evoke metaphysical ones. Is there something special about the idea of being as close as possible to being God /without_being_God_Himself/, and does this articulate a metaphysical problem or structure, an irreducible distance, e.g.?"

The early controversies over the exact nature of Jesus, His identity with and distinction from God, speak to the very heart of what it means to be a Christian. There can be no doubt that the violence that arose from these disputes, The Arian Controversy, Nestorian Heresy, etc, are a black mark on the Church's history and are the opposite of the life Jesus should've inspired within the church. However, it is equally apparent that these disputes were not merely covers for political divisions. They were genuine conflicts of faith.

The questions of who Jesus was and what His relationship is with God stem from both the life of the early church and from the soteriological questions that arose from reflections upon what happened in the Gospels. The early church worshiped Jesus. They prayed to Jesus, and they assigned Him an honor that was either very close to, or identical with, God. This practice goes back pretty close to the beginning, if not to the very beginning.

Yet the conviction that Jesus was a man, a human being like any other, fully human, also runs deep throughout the Gospels and the early Church. That is why the opposition to Gnosticism was so strong. The idea that God had just put on the cloak of illusion of humanity was anathema to the early Church. That is because in that early church the idea of theosis was so strong. People believed that Jesus had come here to fundamentally change humanity: to make us more like God. In that sense Jesus had to have moral relevance, to give us an example of how to live. If Jesus was just God in disguise, He could in no way serve as an example of how we should, in fact live.

Gregory of Nyssa said it best, I believe, when he said: 'anything in the human condition not assumed by God in the Incarnation, is not redeemed.' Jesus had to be fully human to have soteriological significance, as well as moral significance. Yet, such a soteriological significance is lost if Jesus is not also, in fact, fully God. And not just A god but THE God, the God of the Old Testament. Polytheism was unthinkable in a movement that truly began as a Jewish sect. Further, the idea that only the One God could save, forgive sins, and defeat satan runs throughout the Old Testament. The conviction was that Jesus indeed saved, and yet because of human sinfulness and the primacy of God over creation, only the One True God could accomplish that goal. 

Two branches of early Christianity grew up. One, centered in Antioch, tended to emphasize juridical models of atonement, and were more concerned with the problem of sin. They thus emphasized Jesus as a human exemplar, who because of his sinlessness could accomplish something the rest of us could not. Yet other Christians criticized this view because it robbed Jesus of the power to truly overcome the forces that oppress us. The Antiochan camp wanted to distinguish God and Jesus so that the moral power of Christ was not lost.

The other school, centered in Alexandria, emphasized theosis over juridical atonement, and thus they were more likely to associate Jesus closely with God. God needed to 'assume' human nature to redeem it, and Jesus was seen as a super-being who did battle with the forces of darkness (often called an Atonement of Victory). They were criticized by the Antiochans for devaluing the human condition and denying the reality of sin as a moral dimension, and what was needed to save us from that kind of sin.

Anything that denied the divinity of Jesus as being that of the One True God of the Old Testament, further, (like Arianism or any Tritheistic tendencies), lost all the insights of the Old Testament and broke with the practices that sat at the center of church life: practices that included worshiping Jesus in a way that was only appropriate for Yahweh. 

The struggles between these groups eventually led to settlements like the Trinity and the Incarnation, which despite their logical inconsistencies were the only linguistic way of capturing the experience of the early Church. The passion of the various players stemmed from convictions about the primacy of God and the soteriological significance of Jesus Himself.