Nicaea Month
Orthodoxy, Tom Wright, and A Few Good Men
Our Nicene Creed takes its name from a synod of bishops gathered in ancient Nicaea (now İznik, Turkey) about this time of year in AD 325 to address the Arian crisis. No, not “Aryan.” Arian, as in Arius, a pastor in Alexandria, Egypt, who taught that Jesus Christ the Son of God — while certainly divine in some sense, and exalted above all other creatures — is a creature, not God. Against this false teaching, the council fathers confessed that Jesus Christ is “true God of true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father.” The million-dollar word in that sentence, translated consubstantial, is homoousios: of the same essence, nature or substance. The Father is God the Almighty, the infinite Creator. So too is the Son, his Son, who precisely as Son shares the same nature as the Father who begets him not in time, but in eternity. He is, as we say, a chip off the old block, the spitting image of God, like father, like son: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1.1); “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature” (Heb 1.3); “for whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise” (John 5.19). Create out of nothing, say, or justify sinners or raise the dead — or conquer Death itself. So skeptical Thomas didn’t exaggerate one bit when he beheld the scars of the risen Jesus and cried out: “My Lord and my God!” (John 20.28). That’s who Mary’s son Jesus is: Immanuel, “God with us” (Matt 1.23). The Lord who became Servant. The Son of God made Son of Man. The Word made flesh to save the world.
I say we make June “Nicaea Month.”
June is also, of course, “Pride Month” here in the good ‘ole US of A, plus every corner of the globe where our culture has metastasized. So Nicaea Month may have trouble getting off the ground.
This calendrical juxtaposition has me thinking about present day challenges more than the glorious battles of ages past. Conference papers on Nicaea and books on Athanasius are all well and good, mainly. But what are we to make of theologians who lecture splendidly on On the Incarnation yet do not defend the truth of the Incarnation against the heresies of the present age? They’re a dime a dozen. And what are we to do with bishops who prize sentimental piety (in others) and winsomeness (in themselves) more than faithfulness to the Word of God? A penny a dozen, max. And we don’t even make pennies anymore.
It just so happens that theologian-bishop Tom Wright chose Nicaea Month as the right time to come out in favor of abortion in certain circumstances. June 1, to be exact, the feast of Justin Martyr. (Spoiler alert: “martyr” wasn’t Justin’s last name; a valiant apologist, he was beheaded in Marcus Aurelius’ Rome circa 166.) A couple days later, Bishop Tom shared his personal feeling that faith in such Nicene things as the eternal divinity, Incarnation, and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ is optional in certain circumstances. That was June 3, the feast of the martyrs of Uganda, who were burned to death that day in 1886 for their faith in Jesus Christ (and their refusal to engage in gay sex with the king.)
Yup, that N. T. Wright, our generation’s greatest champion of the resurrection of Jesus as a fact of history and the future resurrection of the dead as the substance of Christian hope. It staggers the orthodox mind. At least, it staggered mine. Until my wise and soberminded wife — who wasn’t surprised in the least — reminded me that hip, empathetic theologians always cave in the end. Tenderness leads to the gas chambers, wrote Flannery O’Connor. And winsomeness leads to hell.
St Irenaeus wrote Against Heresies to defend the faith, yes, and build up the church, certainly — but also to summon gnosticizing Christians to repentance lest they perish forever. He cared enough to criticize. His compassion was so great that he named the difference between the true faith and the gnostic lie. St Augustine wrote against Pelagius, because he loved him; he fought with Julian in order to fight for his soul. And as for Athanasius, the man of the hour — surnamed “the great” and also contra mundum, endless headache of worldly episcopal colleagues, thorn in not a few imperial sides, exiled five times for the faith — let’s just say that if he bumped into Bishop Tom in an English pub, odds are a theological barfight would break out.
Of course, Bishop Tom isn’t going to run into Athanasius in a pub anytime soon, or Irenaeus or Augustine either — would that he could meet Luther — for these great men are long dead. That is to say, they’ve fallen asleep as far as life in these mortal bodies is concerned. Their spirits, on the other hand, are alive and well, hidden with Christ in God, awaiting the resurrection of the body yet to come. There they join their voices with angels and archangels to sing the praises of God and the Lamb. And there — I like to think — they pray for and even somehow cheer on their brothers and sisters here below, we pilgrims who still sojourn in the flesh. (All these catholic truths, I first learned from Wright: and I remain grateful.)
But it falls to us to fight the good fight of the faith. To contend for the faith once delivered to the saints. To take our stand in Jesus Christ, and take up the sword of the Spirit which is the Word of God, and run the devil through with it. For the point of studying the church fathers is not to write books about them, but to do what they did. And the point of studying the Scriptures is not to write books about them either, but to believe, preach, confess, defend, and if necessary die for the words of the prophets and the apostles.
Unless I’m mistaken, the battle has three main fronts; and the three-and-a-half fathers mentioned above — counting Luther as an Augustinian — lead confessing pastors in the charge and show us what to do with our swords once we get there.
Irenaeus is our champion against the gnostics. Eric Voeglin, at a scholarly level, and Mark Sayers in popular form, document what Cyril O’Reagan calls “the gnostic return in modernity.” The old elect “spirit” is the new empowered “self.” The real you is the you that casts of every restraint to realize itself. This includes the givenness of “the body you were born with,” as we say, already assuming “you” are not the body that “you” were born “with.” Unless, of course, you choose to “identify” with that body, as most happen to do. Apart from sovereign choice, there is no given, real, objective good. Neither is there such a thing as evil, apart from the limits imposed upon the self from outside itself by family, culture, religion, or the body. The only moral index left is felt authenticity — if your self is bold enough to perform itself into being — or felt safety — if you are timid, traumatized, or otherwise too weak to try achieving yourself.
Considered from the standpoint of the self, the only sin is submission. Whereas for the leader, father, pastor, etc., the unforgivable sin is to declare truth or command obedience. Indeed, to tell the truth and command the good is to sin against the holy spirit of the age, the sacred self. That’s why faithful pastors are getting crushed by the tyranny of empathy, and why faithful theologians are getting sidelined by the dictatorship of relativism (Joseph Ratzinger). Had Bishop Tom counseled his family member to carry her potentially-malformed child to term, that would have constituted spiritual abuse. Had he condemned abortion, he would be guilty of blasphemy against the gods of the West: choice, self, Moloch, feeling good.
What a painful irony. N. T. Wright, qua New Testament theologian, is an Irenaeus redivivus who has spent a lifetime defending the goodness of creation, the God of Israel, the reality of Jesus, the truth of the resurrection, the Kingdom of God, the bodiliness of Christian hope, even (he is an Anglican after all) the sacraments. But Tom Wright, avuncular podcasting bishop, is a gnostic.
Athanasius is our champion against the Arians. By “Arian” I implicate every modern pastor or theologian who denies the glorious truth of the Trinity viz. the ancient faith that all catholic Christians confess in the Nicene Creed. There are so many varieties of this perennial heresy today that it would be tedious to enumerate them all. Suffice it to say that Marcus Borg, the personal friend of Wright’s whom Wright assures us was a true Christian by virtue of Borg’s spiritual experiences, was a kind of modern Arian; for like Arius, he was fond of Jesus, and like Arius he denied that Jesus is God incarnate. But outright Arians are restricted to liberal Protestant and progressive Catholic contexts.
More common, and I fear also more dangerous, is the subtle Arianism that pervades American Christianity in the form of Moralistic Therapuetic Deism. Jesus Christ is not your homeboy, boyfriend, life coach, or therapist. Jesus Christ is the LORD, Son of God in human flesh, who died for our sins, routed hell, and rose the victor over death on the third day. The Holy Spirit is not a warm feeling, an atmosphere of affirmation, a culture of positivity. The Holy Spirit is the Lord and Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father, who — with the Father and the Son — is worshiped and glorified. He gives the free gift of new birth, sanctifies selfish sinners into self-giving lovers, and will — on the last great day — give new life to our mortal bodies in the resurrection of the dead. “God,” therefore, is not a nondescript deity but the one living and true God of Israel, The Holy Holy Holy One, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Augustine is our champion against the Pelagians. Now, modern Pelagianism already popped up in the sketch of modern gnosticism, for the two go hand in hand. The self must realize itself to be “saved” i.e. happy, fulfilled. Since deep down (or deep within) the self is fundamentally good, salvation is within reach for everyone who tries hard enough to live his/her/their dream. Such, at any rate, are the Pelagian lies that pervade our gnostic culture. In fact, the self is absorbed by itself, imprisoned by original sin. We are not basically good; we are born sinners. The problem is not external to the self, but inside it: me, myself, and my curved-in-upon-myself “I.” Salvation, then, is not an achievement — striving for salvation only makes matters worse, reinforcing the deep sin of pride, the self glorying in its own awesomeness as a self — but a gift. It comes to the self from outside, from our saving God, through the gospel of Son, by the strong grace of the Spirit. And when it comes, it comes as death: the destruction of the old self inherited from Adam, in order to make way for the new creation of a new man in Jesus Christ. This gift is given in baptism, not online, because it concerns the whole embodied person. And it is given in church, not your living room, because its goal is the restoration of your being as a person — not the realization of your “self” — and persons do not exist in isolation but in communion.
I’d mentioned sneaking Luther into my trio of church fathers. He is — he ought to be — the Great Church’s doctor of justification by faith, just as Augustine is doctor of grace. Wright has been wrong about this chief article for some time: minimizing the depth-reality of sin, downplaying the wrath of God against our wickedness, downgrading the Cross as the once-for-all sacrifice of God incarnate in the sinner’s stead, and therefore failing to account for the justification of the sinner by faith in the atoning blood of the Lamb. In the past, I’ve turned something of a blind eye to Wright’s pelagianizing tendencies because of the beauty and power of his Irenaean vision of Jesus, the Kingdom, and the victory of God. But in light of this month’s disturbing revelations, I’m starting to wonder how deep the rot goes. After all, it is not as if we are free to pick and choose which parts of the biblical narrative, apostolic gospel, and orthodox faith we wish to include in our Christianity. To join Irenaeus in battle against the gnostics, you must also join with Athanasius against the Arians. And if you have the courage to work through the implications of Athanasius’ soteriologically-driven faith in the blessed and holy and saving Trinity, you will soon find yourself in the camp of the great general from North Africa. And if you immerse yourself in Scripture with Augustine, it’s only a matter of time before you realize that brother Martin is at your side in the fight as well.
These, gentle readers, are my thoughts mid-way through Nicaea Month. See you at the barricades, my brothers, and be sure to bring your Bibles! I’ll provide well-marked copies of Against Heresies, On the Incarnation, Against Julian, and Galatians.
“Be watchful! Stand firm in the Faith! Act like men! Be strong! Let all that you do be done in love” (1 Cor 16.13-14).