True God and true man: (a brief reply to Mr. Bill Phipps).

At the end of a century full of ironies, the United Church of Canada has struck a peculiarly wavering and quavering note by electing a Moderator who, I hear, denies that Christ is God. The United Church coat-of-arms carries the motto, Ut omnes unum sint - That they all may be one. The Moderator can hardly be advancing church unity with his theology. Better to change the name to the Disunited Church, and comfort himself with the thought that there is a lot of disunity going around.

An old heresy

G.K. Chesterton said that a new philosophy was generally an old heresy revived. Denying Christ's divinity is a very old heresy called Arianism, name after a priest, Arius, who taught it. It occupied the Church during much of the 300's A.D. It reappeared after 600 A.D. in the form of Islam. It is also a central teaching of Jehovah's Witnesses.

It is not as if the claim that Christ is God is not overwhelming. "What should we feel at the first whisper of a certain suggestion about a certain man?" asked Chesterton in The Everlasting Man.

"Certainly it is not for us to blame anybody who should find that first wild whisper merely impious and insane. On the contrary, stumbling on that rock of scandal is the first step. Stark staring incredulity is a far more loyal tribute to that truth than a modernist metaphysic that would make it out merely a matter of degree. It were better to rend our robes with a great cry against blasphemy, like Caiaphas in the judgment, or to lay hold of the man as a maniac possessed of devils like the kinsmen and the crowd, rather than to stand stupidly debating fine shades of pantheism in the presence of so catastrophic a claim."

What to do with His humanity?

But there is another sense in which Arianism is still foolish. If you deny Christ's divinity, what are you going to do with his humanity? Christ does not subside into "a mere man" when his divinity is denied; he becomes impossible. Somebody that was on to this was Annas, Caiaphas's father-in-law. There is more significance than meets the eye in the fact that he was our Lord's first judge. Christ "was taken first to Annas" and then to Caiaphas. Caiaphas condemned Christ to death for claiming to be God. Annas condemned him for claiming to be man. Annas wanted to know his secret. Annas knew that no man who is a man and nothing more makes statements like:

* Before Abraham came to be, I am (Jn 8:58)

* Father, glorify me with that glory that I had with you before the world was (Jn 17:5)

* I am the light of the world (Jn 8:12)

* Son, thy sins are forgiven thee (Mt 9:2)

* Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you (Jn 6:54).

Annas would have believed that he was God, as long as he did not have to believe that he was also man. Annas was a "realist." Annas would have believed anything other than that Christ said the things he said and did the things he did and was still true man and, on top of it all, was sinless. So when Christ answered, "I have always spoken openly, in the marketplace, and whither all the Jews resort," Annas sent him in disgust to his son-in-law without giving the latter any signal to spare him.

The point? Annas is the first heretic. The first heresy was Gnosticism, which was into phantom ideas, and which begat Docetism, which denied Christ's humanity, saying that he was a phantom.

Caiaphas was the second heretic, the first Arian, denying Christ's divinity. Arianism was the second heresy.

Arianism and Docetism are two sides of one bad coin. It is really quite impossible to deny Christ's divinity or his humanity without denying both - a fulfillment of Christ's words, "To him who hath it shall be given, and he shall abound, but from him who hath not, even that which he hath shall be taken away" (Mt 13:12).