Question 1

Was there once when the Son was not?

Accepted Answer

John answers in his first breath: in the beginning the Word already WAS — and everything that was made was made through him, which removes him from the category of made things entirely. Jesus prayed to be glorified with the glory he had with the Father 'before the world was.' Micah said the Ruler from Bethlehem's goings forth are 'from everlasting.' And Hebrews applies Psalm 102 — a psalm addressed to Yahweh — directly to the Son: 'Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth.' The church at Nicaea did not invent a doctrine; it anathematized a sentence Scripture had already contradicted.

Question 2

Was the Son made out of nothing?

Accepted Answer

Hebrews calls the Son the brightness of the Father's glory and the express image of his person — radiance is from the light itself, not from nothing. The Father has given the Son to have life in himself, the very divine prerogative. And the Creator drew the line himself: 'I am the LORD that maketh all things; that stretcheth forth the heavens alone' — yet John and Paul say all things were made through the Son. If Yahweh created alone, and the Son created all things, the conclusion is not that there are two creators.

Question 3

A creature — but not like the creatures?

Accepted Answer

That middle category is precisely what Scripture does not have. Paul knows only the Creator, who is blessed forever, and the creation that must never be worshipped. Yet the Father commands all the angels to worship the Son, while an angel in Revelation refuses worship with the words 'worship God.' In heaven's own liturgy, every creature gives blessing 'unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb' — the Lamb stands on the receiving side of creation's worship. There is no shelf between Creator and creature to set him on.

Question 4

'The LORD created me' — does Proverbs 8 make Wisdom a creature?

Accepted Answer

The Hebrew word is qanah — 'possessed,' as the King James reads — and the passage is poetry personifying Wisdom, never once cited of Christ by the apostles. Even inside the poem the argument fails: one verse later Wisdom is 'set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was.' A Wisdom from everlasting cannot have been created in time. Athanasius spent the better part of a book on this verse sixteen centuries ago; its weight has not improved with age.

Question 5

Does 'firstborn of every creature' mean first created?

Accepted Answer

In Scripture 'firstborn' is a title of rank before it is a birth order: David, the youngest of eight, is made God's 'firstborn, higher than the kings of the earth.' Paul seals the meaning himself in the very next sentence — 'FOR by him were all things created … and he is before all things.' The Son is firstborn over creation because he is its maker and heir, not its eldest member. A text whose own grounding clause makes him the Creator cannot be conscripted to make him a creature.

Question 6

'My Father is greater than I'

Accepted Answer

Spoken by the Son on the night before the cross, on his way back to the glory he shared 'before the world was.' Paul gives the shape of the story: being in the form of God, he emptied himself and took the form of a servant — made for a little while lower than the angels for the suffering of death. Greater in position, while the Son stood in the far country of our flesh; not greater in nature, or John could not also record 'I and my Father are one' and the Jews' verdict that he made himself 'equal with God.'

Question 7

The Son does not know the day — so he cannot be God?

Accepted Answer

The same Gospels show both truths without blushing: the boy who 'increased in wisdom' is the Lord to whom Peter says 'thou knowest all things,' and of whom Matthew records that no one knows the Son except the Father — an exclusive, mutual knowledge no creature could sustain. The ancient answer is still the best one: the eternal Son truly took a human mind that learned and grew, without ceasing to be what he was. A Christ who could not genuinely say 'I do not know' in his manhood could not genuinely be one of us; a Christ unknowable to all but the Father could not be less than God.

Question 8

Is the Son changeable by nature?

Accepted Answer

Hebrews ends the question with five words: 'Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever' — and earlier in the same letter puts Psalm 102's words to Yahweh on the Son: 'thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail.' Immutability is the line Scripture draws around God alone — 'I am the LORD, I change not.' Place the Son on the changeable side of that line and Hebrews 1 and 13 must be torn out; leave them in, and Arianism cannot stand.

Question 9

Did Nicaea invent the Son's deity?

Accepted Answer

The receipts run the other way. Around AD 107 — two centuries before the council — Ignatius of Antioch wrote of 'Jesus Christ, our God' and of 'our God, Jesus Christ, conceived in the womb by Mary,' on his way to execution. Thomas had said it first: 'My Lord and my God.' What Nicaea added was not a doctrine but a word — homoousios, 'of one substance' — and it needed one precisely because Arians had learned to sign every biblical phrase while meaning a creature; Arius's own carefully vague confession to Constantine survives to prove it. Councils do not invent what martyrs were already dying for.

ARIANISM & THE BIBLE

TEST EVERYTHING