Lately, I have been amusing myself by watching videos about the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Those who are not familiar with the Jehovah’s Witnesses know them as the people who go door to door to spread their religion. Those who are somewhat familiar with the Jehovah’s Witnesses know them as a rather authoritarian cult whose members do not celebrate their birthdays, Christmas, Halloween, or anything else that might be enjoyable. I find this sect intriguing because it seems to be a revival of Arianism. The Jehovah’s Witnesses seem to be Arians.
Jehovah’s Witnesses Kingdom Hall
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Arians? Am I suggesting the Jehovah’s Witnesses are Nazis? Of course not. I said Arians, not Aryans. An Arian is a follower of the third and fourth-century priest and theologian Arius. Arius taught doctrines which became known as Arianism.
One of the most perplexing problems of early Christian theology was the question of just who and what Jesus Christ actually was. Jesus was called the Son of God in the Bible. What did that actually mean? If Christianity was a polytheistic religion, the issue might have been resolved easily. Jesus, the Son of God, might have been a lesser deity like Apollo, the son of Zeus. Jesus could have been a demigod like Hercules. However, Christianity is a monotheistic religion. There is only room for one God.
So what was Jesus? Was he the same divine being as the God of the Old Testament? Was Jesus a highly favored and blessed man? Was he an angel or a being halfway between God and man? The solution most Christians eventually settled on was that Jesus is God. In mainstream Christianity, there is one God, composed of three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Each person is eternal and uncreated. Jesus is God the Son who became fully human while remaining fully divine.
This is a subtle doctrine, and it should not be surprising some dissenters preferred a less complex doctrine. One of these dissenters was a priest and presbyter from Cyrenaica named Arius. It is not entirely clear precisely what Arius preached and to what extent he founded the movement known as Arianism. Few of Arius’s writings survive. His opponents destroyed his works. What little survives exists in quotations used by polemicists seeking to refute Arianism. Arius, or at least the Arians, taught that Jesus was created by God the Father and, therefore, was kind of a sub-God, divine, but subordinate to the Father. The Arians rejected the doctrine of the Trinity.
The Trinitarians, led by Alexander, the Patriarch of Alexandria bitterly opposed the Arians. The clashes between partisans of the two factions became so fierce; that they seemed to threaten the peace of the Roman Empire. This did not please the Emperor Constantine. Part of the reason Constantine supported Christianity was that he hoped the religion would bring unity to the Empire.
Now, infighting among Christians was threatening to tear it apart. To resolve the Arian controversy, Constantine summoned the leaders of the Christian Church to the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325. This Ecumenical Council condemned Arius and the Arians as heretics and formally established the doctrine of the Trinity. The Trinitarian doctrine became a part of what came to be Catholic or Orthodox Christianity. Catholic and Orthodox are terms used to refer to the Western and Eastern branches of what might be called Nicene Christianity, so Nicene is the word I will use.
The Council of Nicaea settled the Arian controversy within the Roman Empire. Although several Emperors supported Arianism, the doctrine died out among the Romans. Nicene Christianity was the official form of Christianity in the Empire. This was not true outside the Empire. At about the same time as the Council of Nicaea, missionaries led by the Goth Ulfias were already spreading Christianity to the Germans who lived beyond the frontiers. Ulfias happened to be an Arian, so the Germans he converted to Christianity were Arian Christians, with one important exception.
In time, religion became associated with ethnic identity. To be a Roman was to be a Nicene Christian. A German was an Arian. This complicated relations between the Germans and the Romans, Especially when German tribes like the Goths and the Vandals invaded the Western Roman Empire and set up their own kingdoms. The Romans found themselves ruled not only by barbarians, which was humiliating enough but by barbarians who were heretics. This religious difference meant that when the Eastern Romans, under Emperor Justinian, sought to reconquer the western provinces, they could count on a sympathetic population of Nicene Christians. The German kings could not entirely trust their formerly Roman subjects.
The one German tribe that was an exception to German Arianism was the Franks. The Franks were still pagan when they overran Gaul. In 508, the Frankish King Clovis I decided he ought to convert to Christianity. This was expected. Paganism had become unfashionable among both Romans and Germans. What was unexpected was that Clovis resolved to convert to Nicene Christianity. This decision was to change the course of European history.
Being Nicene Christians, the Franks had the same advantage the Eastern Romans had when warring with the Arian Germans. A Frankish king who fought against the Visigoths or Lombards was not simply fighting a simple war over territory and loot. He was fighting a holy war against heretics, often with the support of the Papacy. This advantage helped the Franks to defeat the other German kingdoms and to become the predominant state in post-Roman Europe.
Over time, the Arian German rulers began to convert to the Catholic faith the majority of their subjects. The King of the Visigoths converted in 589. The kings of the Lombards held out until 671. For the next 800 years, Christianity in Europe was Nicene, trinitarian Christianity.
This began to change with the Protestant Reformation. The Reformers, such as Luther and Calvin, had many differences with the Roman Catholic Church but were all orthodox in their essential doctrines. They were all Nicene Trinitarians. Nevertheless, once prevailing orthodoxies begin to be questioned, there is no stopping, and it wasn’t long before some decidedly unorthodox doctrines began to be preached. This was a hazardous practice since the one thing both Catholics and Protestants agreed on was that heretics should be persecuted. Many heterodox, nontrinitarian sects were founded after the Protestant Reformation, including the Unitarians, the Quakers, and the Deists.
In North America. Such sects flourished in the more tolerant atmosphere of the North American colonies, especially during the Great Awakening. Another wave of unorthodox religious movements began during the Second Great Awakening of the 1820s to 1840s. This second wave included the Shakers and the Latterday Saints or Mormons.
Charles Taze Russell founded the organization that would become the Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1870, sometime after the Second Great Awakening. He was clearly influenced by restorationist and Aventist strands of that earlier movement. Like many preachers during the Awakening, Russell strove to restore Christianity to its primitive beginnings. Russell also taught that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent. As part of his quest to restore the original doctrines of Christianity, Russell rejected the concept of the Trinity. Instead, he believed that Jesus was a being created by Jehovah. He thought that Jesus was the Archangel Michael. The Jehovah’s Witnesses have held on to such unorthodox doctrines to the present day.
It may not be strictly accurate to call the Jehovah’s Witnesses “Arians.” There are differences between their views and the teachings of the Arians of ancient times. Still, it is interesting, to me at least, how old ideas get revived in new forms. Perhaps there really is nothing truly new under the sun.
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