Known in modern day as a ‘soft account’ of Jesus’ incarnation (O’Collins 232), Neo-Arianism keeps the Arian position that God is an ingenerate, non-shareable essence (Butler 362) who created Jesus’ existence and allowed for his immortality (Butler 366). However, unlike Arianism, Neo-Arianism claims that humankind is capable of understanding God’s essence, and that Jesus is more than a mere creature: his created human existence makes him relatively divine (Butler 365, 366).
Therefore, much of the Orthodox versus Neo-Arian debate boils down to the term incarnation. O’Collins describes this term as God the Son having lived out a human existence, yet he also had divine characteristics that his followers came to recognize (O’Collins 232). Still, because the Neo-Arian position is already rooted in the Arian argument that Logos and Wisdom are ingenerate, that a ‘begotten son’ is a created one, and that the Father is subsistent and not consubstantial (homoousios) with the Son, Jesus was simply referred to as Logos and Wisdom because he was powered by God’s grace and mission to send a Savior to humankind (Butler 356, 358).
Given that the Neo-Arian position accepts Jesus as having had a divine calling, although it reduces said calling to something that could have been assigned to any human that God chose to create for salvific purposes, Jesus is therefore a necessary yet arbitrary mediator. Namely, any other human with an instilled heroic virtue could have heeded the calling as well (O’Collins 233).
Reducing Jesus’ mission to a rather arbitrary calling leads to multiple questions: Does Jesus truly embody God in some way, or is he more of revealer of the Word? Or is he a ‘window’ to God’s revelation? Or does the whole discussion circle back to Jesus being God’s empowered representative? (O’Collins 232).
O’Collins contends that Jesus is not only epistemologically transcendent, but his incarnation also makes him ontologically transcendent. After all, if Jesus is a Savior who had insight into God the Father’s divinity — including that salvation through Christ’s death and resurrection gives humankind eternal life — how could Jesus give eternal life without he himself not knowing beforehand what it means to be eternal? Which means how could Jesus act on behalf of God without also being God? O’Collins sums it up this way: “…asking others to accept someone who acts in every way as the President of the United States without actually being the American President” (232, 233).
In addition, Butler points out that the Neo-Arian understanding of God the Father and Jesus as Son is a syllogistic nightmare. Even fourth-century, Neo-Arian contemporaries — including Socrates — complained that Neo-Arianism was flat out incomprehensible. As such, Neo-Arians were pejoratively called technologues — meaning they had confusingly transformed early Christian theology into a heavily dialectic position (366, 368).
And there is yet another glitch in the Neo-Arian position on the incarnation: it ultimately suggests that, for the past two thousand years, Christians have been practicing idolatry by worshipping Jesus as God (O’Collins 234). This argument alone does not directly crush the Neo-Arianism position – but it does give a reminder that pre-Arian Christians certainly viewed and worshipped Jesus as God (Matt. 14:33; 28:9,17; Col. 1:15-17; Titus 2:13).
Works Cited
Butler, Michael E. “Neo-Arianism: Its Antecedents and Tenets.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 4, 1992, pp. 355–71.
O’Collins, Gerald. Christology: A Biblical, Historical and Systematic Study of Jesus. 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.