Archetypal Heresy: Arianism through the Centuries - Softcover

Wiles, Maurice

4.2

10 ratings by Goodreads

9780199245918: Archetypal Heresy: Arianism through the Centuries

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0199245916 ISBN 13: 9780199245918

Publisher: Oxford University Press, U.S.A., 2001

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Arians in the third century A.D. maintained that Jesus was less divine than God. Regarded as the archetypal Christian heresy, Arianism was condemned in the Nicene Creed and apparently squashed by the early church. Less well known is the fact that fifteen centuries later, Arianism was alive and well, championed by Isaac Newton and other scientists of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. This book asks how and why Arianism endured.

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Review:

This book is a rarity: a work of ripe and profound scholarship that is nevertheless both concise and readable...Throughout there are comments of great insight and good sense which make the book much more than just a monograph for specialists in the history of doctrine. It is rather an important case study giving much food for thought to anyone interested in the health and the commending of Christian doctrine in our own day.

Synopsis:

Arianism has always been regarded as the archetypal heresy. It did affirm the divinity of Christ as the Son of God, but, unlike orthodoxy, it regarded the divinity as secondary and inferior to that of the Father, the one supreme God. Recently many scholars have presented a more positive view of the religious intentions of Arianism than has been customary in the past. Yet the Nicene Creed, which was designed explicitly to outlaw Arianism, remains one of the primary expressions of Christian orthodoxy. Maurice Wiles traces the history of how Arianism has been viewed in later Christian thought, particularly where scholars or religious groups have adopted broadly Arian views. The main example of a re-emergence of Arian ideas is among the leaders of new scientific Enlightenment in the early eighteenth century, especially Sir Isaac Newton and his disciples, William Whiston and Samuel Clarke. The longest section of the book deals with how and why their beliefs took this form, and why this approach disappeared again around the end of the century.

A final section considers the interaction of belief and critical judgement in British Arian scholarship, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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