Dear Editor,
I am a Presbyterian clergyman and must, therefore, disqualify myself from pronouncing publicly on the issue of the rebuilding of the Sacred Heart Church that used to be on Main Street, Georgetown.
However, the reference of John Fredericks to the decisive role of the laity in the resolution of the Aryan (sic) heresy, in an attempt to rouse the laity, presumably of the Roman Catholic Church in Guyana, to “do their duty”, interests me. Equally interesting is Mr Xiu Quan-Balgobin-Hackett’s arcane comment: “Come on, Dr Fredericks, you’re letting the cat out of the bag. Christians are not ready for that kind of ‘Honest to God’ knowledge” (SN 2007-01-15).
Whatever the role of the laity in the governance of the Catholic Church these days, at the time of the Arian controversy (c.318-325) and far beyond, that role was, at best, negligible. In matters of doctrine it was even less so.
The heresy propounded by Arius, variously described by Church historians as ” learned and ascetic layman” (W.H.C. Frend) and a “presbyter” (Walker et-al) was an Eastern (Greek) problem. The Western (Latin) Church, including Rome, had from its beginning, held that the Trinity was composed of “Three Persons in one substance”. For that Church, Christ was both human and divine. There was no question about that.
The Eastern Church accepted both the humanity and divinity of the Son/Logos. The question raised by Arius was: In what sense was the Logos divine? He could accept that Christ “was before all ages” and even that he was God from God (that is, possessed of a divinity derived from God, but not that he was “truly God from God”). He insisted that unlike God who, as absolute first principle, was agennetos (“underived”, “ungenerated”), “there was when the Son/Logos was not”. You will notice that he did not say, “a time when the Son/Logos was not”. The following steps were taken against Arius:
1. About 320, Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, Egypt, had Arius and his associates excommunicated by a council of about 100 Egyptian bishops.
2. In 325, an assembly of bishops at Antioch presided over by Hosius of Cordova, installed Eustathius, a firm anti-Arian, as bishop of that diocese, and issued a confession of faith which insisted against Arius that the Son/Logos was “begotten
