Arianism and the Suffering God

RPC Hanson writes, “At the heart of the Arian Gospel was a God who suffered. Their elaborate theology of the relation of the Son to the Father which so much preoccupied their opponents was defised in order to find a way of envisaging the Christian doctrine of God which would make it possible to be faithful to the Biblical witness to a God who suffers. This was to be achieved by conceiving of a lesser God as reduced divinity who would be ontologically capable, as the High God was not, of enduring human experienced, including suffering and death.”

Hanson goes so far as to say that “Because Arians were determined that the Son of God did genuinely, seriously, undergo human experiences, within the limits of their doctrine they understood the scandal of the Cross much better than the pro-Nicenes. Neither Athanasius nor Hilary nor the Cappadocians could ever have envisaged the self-emptying of the Son as Asterius did, nor have written etiam sui ipsius impassibilitatem praeposuit salutem humanam (he even placed human salvation before his own immunity from suffering). Here Arian thought achieved an important insight into the witness of the New Testament denied to the pro-Nicenes of the fourth century, who unanimously shied away from and endeavoured to explain away the scandal of the Cross.”

Arianism achieves this, though, by positing two “unequal gods, a High God incapable of human experiences and a lesser God who, so to speak, did his dirty work for him. Most of us will conclude that this was too high a price to pay.” The better course is Barth’s: God is so utterly sovereign that even human weakness and human death are not beyond Him.