free choice: and there was one not three?

Goethe was enchanted by Gottfried Arnold’s “The Impartial History of the Church and the Heretics,” writing, ” that every man in the end came to have his own religion, and now it seemed to me the most natural thing in the world that I should devie my own; which I did with great comfort…” To devise one’s own religion- that is, in fact, exactly what hersy is: private choice, the opposite of orthodoxy which is not chosen but imposed and accepted….

However dangerous, an injection of mysticism was necessary to the Church. Periodically, it reinflated the sagging body. It also lifted it over some of the jagged texts of Scripture which might otherwise have punctured it. But not everyone is capable of skipping lightly over solid difficulties, and there have always been some men, even within the Church, who insist on facing them, even if they are thereby forced to disturbing consequences.

At first such men were few. Critics could stay outside the Church, and converts, when they swallow, swallow whole. But with the rise of learning in a Christian society, Biblical critics arose who were not afraid of following their rational conclusions  even into heresy. They were never very many, but their impact was great. It was they, for instance, who, in the sixteenth-century, refloated the long-wrecked hulk of Arianism and converted the simple, puritan intolerance of barbarian tyrants into the rationalized belief of a Servetus or a Priestly. It was they who, slowly and painfully, built up the irreversible science of Biblical criticism, and thereby devalued orthodoxy and heresy alike.

Puritanism, millenarianism, mysticism, rationalism, in sum are the four permanent sources of heresy. None of them are necessarily heretical; all of them, at times, have been contained within the Church. Nor need they be radical. All have been held, at times, by fundamentally conservative men. But at certain times and at certain places, something has happened to swell these streams into floods, threatening the whole structure of Church and society. …

ADDENDUM:

(see link at end)…Scholars trained in the schools of Greek philosophy and rationality did not entirely lose

ir mind when they became Christian theologians. It was quite reasonable, therefore, for them to proceed from the concept of a single, universal creator god to the proposition that whatever else Christ may have been, he was less than the supreme god, a subordinate deity somewhere between man and the Almighty.

This, in a nutshell, was the view of Arius, a theorizing presbyter in 4th century Alexandria.

“A creation,” said Arius, “is less than its creator. The Son is less than the Father that ‘begot’ him. In the Beginning was the Creator God and the Son did not exist.”

It was a simple theology, one that had a certain rationality and also the merit that it could be readily understood. It showed the influence upon Arius of Alexandrian neo-Platonism, and more particularly, the speculations of Lucian of Antioch.

Borrowing freely from the lexicon of pre-Christian philosophers, Greek words like ‘ousia’ (essence), ‘hypostasis’ (substance), ‘physis’ (nature), and ‘hyposopon’ (person), were given new ‘Christian’ meanings by Arius and those who came after him. Read More:http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/arianism.html