The nonexistence of the spirit world

I have been reading Maurice Wiles Archetypal Heresy: Arianism through the centuries. For those not up to date on the Christological controversies of the 4th century, Arius promoted the view that Jesus was a creature made by God and was thus subordinate to God. Arius’ opponent was Athanasius who insisted that Jesus was of “one substance” with the Father, whereas Arius insisted that Jesus was of “like substance” with the Father. The difference in the Greek spelling was one iota.

The big punch up between Arius and Athanasius occurred at the council of Nicaea at which the Nicene creed was promulgated and from which the Church receives its formulation of God as the Trinity: Father Son and Holy Spirit. One of the affirmations of the Council of Nicaea may be found in the first Article of Religion of the Anglican church:

There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker and preserver of all things both visible and invisible. And in unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power and eternity; the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

This formula, as do other formulas found in the creeds of the Church, does not allow either the Son or the Spirit to be subordinate to the Father; to be separate divine beings.

In the 17th century there was a revival of Arianism in Britain and it is interesting that it was promoted by the early English scientists, especially Isaac Newton, George Whiston, and later, in a different way, by Joseph Priestley.

Newton and Whiston were Biblicists, believing that the bible was the revelation of God about Himself and in their research into scripture they came to the Arian conclusion, that Christ was a creature, a separate divine being from the Father and below the Father, thus destroying the equality of beings in the Trinity and Trinitarian theology itself.

When Newton came to Cambridge he dismissed the teachings of Aristotle and branched out on his own using his own observations and his own formidable intellect to produce a remarkable foundation for modern science.

In researching the scriptures he again relied on his own researches. In a way he was one of the first modern men in that he refused to acknowledge the authority of the church and insisted that he did it his way - a kind of 17th century Frank Sinatra.

While ditching Aristotle paid off in natural science, ditching the authority of the church allowed him to come to his own wrong conclusions. It must be said in his defence that a rational exploration of biblical texts will not give out onto the doctrine of the Trinity, indeed there are many texts, taken on their own, that point in the Arian direction.

The problem with Newton and Whiston’s approach was that they brought scientific methodology to the task and this restricted their view of the matter. There is something in the scientific mind that creates either atheists or fundamentalists, rationality is just not enough. Rather, Christians believe in order to know, a recipe for disaster in science but a necessity in the matters of faith. Perhaps this explains the frailty of theological writing done by scientists turned theologians.

The exegesis of biblical texts is not an exact science like the interpretation of a set of observations in nature and it is often the hidden orientation of the exegete that decides the outcome.

I can’t help thinking that attempts to make Jesus subordinate to the Father is produced by a refusal to accept that the man on the cross, on the stinking dunghill of Golgotha, outside of the city walls and abandoned by all, is God. This is the offence at the centre of the Christian story which marks it out among the world religions.

To Islam, for example, to identify God with this destitute and degraded one is an insult to God. We just do not want God to be like this and so we demote Jesus to something less than God. Trinitarian theology will not allow us to escape the unwanted identification thus subverting the idea that we make God up for our own comfort, for who would invent such a God?

The irony of the early English scientists leaning towards Arianism is that this belief must presuppose the presence of the spirit world. Jesus was seen to be an independent and subordinate divine being. We know that Newton had great trouble with Descartes’ mechanical picture of the universe and his own physics that seemed to leave no room for the intervention of God and here we see him subscribing to a view of the universe that would have to be inhabited by multiple spirits.

Wiles makes the observation that Arianism and its cousin Unitarianism decline in the 18th century because belief in the spirit world declined. It is hard to assess this proposal, although Keith Thomas’ book Religion and the Decline of Magic would be a good starting place. I am aware of highly educated Victorians attending séances and in our day, especially among the religious, belief in the spirit world is alive and well.

One example that comes to mind is the Charismatic churches who base their practice on the presence of the Holy Spirit and His actions among the congregation healing and giving the gift of tongues. It seems that if you believe enough and pray hard enough then God will make himself be present to do the bidding of the worshippers. The presence of God is not in the form of Word and Sacrament or as the Church but is an actual ethereal being summoned up by the worshipers.

This is why Trinitarian theology is so important, because it closes the door on such superstitious belief, who knows what the church would be like if Arius had won the day!

The attack on Christianity that comes from prominent scientists is based on the presupposition that if the spirit world does not exist, then God cannot exist and Christianity is a delusion. If Arianism had triumphed this would have been a valid criticism. But orthodox Christian belief holds the truth of the Father with the historical existence of the Son, and the mysterious way they are communicated to men and women by the Spirit, together in the one holy and undivided Trinity.

This is a far cry from the theistic monism that the modern persecutors of Christianity presume. It does not presume the existence of a spirit world, invisible but permeating everything, but the coalescence of interpreted historical event and our perception of it.

The mistake that our present day persecutors make is to think that the Christian revelation is a revelation of the existence of the spirit world. One can understand how this can come from scientists, being as they are so focused on the nature of the world and being so dependent upon that world behaving in predictable ways (not being imbued with mind).

But Christian revelation includes the revelation that the world is not the habitat of mind, this is why natural science arose in the Christian West despite the glitch of Galileo’s trial.

If Arius had his way and his system became orthodox, then natural science would have been crippled. Christian revelation is the revelation of things we do not naturally see, that brokenness runs not between groups who are right or wrong but in a jagged line through each individual person, that on the cross we murdered the one true man.

Christian revelation is the revelation of the nature and destiny of man in the flesh, not the exposure of a parallel spirit world.

Athanasius did not win the argument against Arius with a reasoned discourse, in fact he was devious and a bully and one wonders at the establishment of such a key concept as the Trinity to theology and indeed the whole of Western civilisation from such a quagmire of personality and politics. But despite the methods used, the Nicene formulation has served the Church and the world well.

It may seem absurd to the modern mind to indulge in the metaphysics of the godhead. What sort of rationality could we use for such a discussion? As we have noted, such a concept cannot simply be plucked out of the Bible. And how do we discuss something that by definition is beyond us?

Perhaps Athanasius, for all his thuggery, saw how things would go if Arius had had his day, a deficient theology that could not be at the centre of the flowering of the culture of the West. So perhaps the logic was more about the outcome than of seeing the invisible things of God!

One of the difficulties of the doctrine of the Trinity is that it is not a natural idea. To explain, language is natural, we already know how to speak before we go to school, while reading and writing is unnatural and we have to be intensively taught. The human mind contains structures that deal with language but must develop specific structures to deal with literacy.

In the same way we relate to persons in a natural way and it is also natural to imagine a personal God. But it is not natural to conceive of a person who is described as three persons in one, this has to be taught.

This is why, in the absence of church teaching, ideas about God will always revert to simple monotheism. That is why Arianism is the Archetypal Heresy because our minds are naturally attuned to single persons. If Christianity is not to revert to folk theology the church must grasp the nettle and actively teach Trinitarian theology and its history. We already have the example of 19th century liberalism in which Jesus was just a nice bloke and that after Arianism had declined to extinction, in the clergy at least.

The liberalism of Protestant Churches, so like the Latitude men of the 18th century, who thought that such theological niceties were not important, is not an option. They may feel that they can more easily communicate to the man in the street, but who would be excited about that communication?

Dumbed down theology is boring and ineffective and should be avoided. It is right that the liturgy should begin with the words “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit” but how much of our preaching actually reflects this?