Is the Catholic Church Over?

You’re listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So, I want to explore today a big question with all the chaos and controversy and confusion in the Catholic Church, does this disprove the Catholic claim? I mean, after all, if the church claims to be infallible and to be a source of unity, how do we account for all the chaos and confusion?

Now, there’s any number of examples you could draw on to explore this question. I’ll take an easy one just because it’s in the news these days, which is the recent Vatican declaration, Fiducia Supplicans on blessing same-sex couples, and really even more deeply just on the nature of blessings as such.

Immediately after this document came out, there were claims that it authorized blessing same-sex unions, which clearly doesn’t. But there also were things like Father James Martin blessing a same-sex couple. And there’s this question, was what he did okay in all of this? This led to massive amounts of confusion and controversy amongst Catholics.

Now, a lot of that has more recently died down the DDF, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of Faith, which released the initial document, gave a subsequent clarification that actually shows why the misapplications of the document were not well supported and pushes back against some of the ways the document was being abused. But nevertheless, all of this caused a lot of tumult and I think in some ways, it’s still causing a lot of tumult.

And in the face of that, you saw a couple different things happen. Number one, there were plenty of Catholics who started to say, “Wait, how do we make sense of all of this? Am I right to be Catholic? Do I belong in the church? Is the Catholic claim true?” And number two, you see a lot of non-Catholic Christians who leapt on this, and I might even say kind of an opportunistic sort of way. So, you see this somewhat from Eastern Orthodox pop apologists.

You also see it a lot from Protestants. So, Babylon Bee had a headline, Protestant Sleeps Soundly Knowing He Doesn’t Have To Care What Some Guy In A Funny Hat In Rome Says About Anything Like, “Hey look, you come to Protestantism, you don’t have to worry about what your leaders are going to say because you don’t believe in things like papal infallibility or because you’re free from any sort of authority structure at the end of the day.” I mean it’s not like there aren’t Protestants saying crazy things. It’s not like Protestantism isn’t currently being torn apart over so-called LGBTQ issues.

I mean, the United Methodist Church right now is going through a massive schism. So, it’s not really like Protestants are free from these kind of fights, but in a more serious I think way, Gavin Ortlund responded to here before, claims that this disproves the kind of claims of the magisterium. He says, “The frequent claim from Roman Catholics that Protestants have confusion and chaos because we lack an infallible magisterium really falls flat right now in light of what is happening under Pope Francis.”

And then he encourages, anyone suffering from disillusionment to put their trust instead in the Word of God, “our unfailing refuge and guardian of truth. Don’t be yoked under human institutions that bend and twist with the variegating trends of human culture. The Word of God is a sure rock beneath your feet, whatever else changes.”

Without knowing Gavin’s mind, I don’t know if he means with capital W Word of God scripture or as is usually the case, Jesus Christ. But if he does mean Jesus, then we can take great solace in the fact that Jesus promises to found a church that there is one church on Earth that isn’t merely a human institution that is of divine origin.

But nevertheless, I think Gavin’s right, that there’s a sort of two-dimensional silly version of church unity that all of the crises in the church disprove. Now, you could use this one or literally thousands of other examples. If your claim as a Catholic is “Come to the Catholic Church, we never have fights,” you only need to spend about a week in the Catholic Church to see that’s not true. If it’s, “We never have doctrinal confusion or questions,” well obviously that’s not true.

And so, in as much as Gavin is responding to sort of a caricature of Catholicism and a caricature that I think in fairness to him, some Catholics put forward, yeah, he’s right. That’s not a believable model in light of church history or current events or you name it, but there is an actual vision closer to what the church claims for herself, which we might call a dying and rising church.

I want to look to a couple examples here. Like I said, I mentioned the example of the recent dust up over blessing same-sex couples. You could use any number of things, the Second Vatican Council, you name it. And long before any of those more recent fights, you see a couple beautiful descriptions of the church. It’s kind of this dying and rising church.

I’m going to point to two authors who I think are really helpful here. The first one is Monsignor Ronald Knox, early 20th century, British Catholic. He was the author of a lot of beautiful things, including maybe my favorite Catholic book, The Belief of Catholics. He also, as you might imagine as a monsignor, preached and he was a beautiful preacher. And so, he has what are called pastoral sermons and occasional sermons, which just means sermons for special occasions.

In his occasional sermons, he talks about the history of the church and he says, “As the church journeys on through the centuries and the threads of her experience are interwoven with the tangled skin of human history, fresh crises must arise, which are worthy of record, worthy of perpetual commemoration.”

Now, I want to point this out because this is really important because Knox is already at the outset presenting this very differently than the two ways I often see church crises handled. One way is to sweep them under the rug. And the other way is to treat them as some kind of disproof of the Catholic Church. Knox says neither of those. Instead, these crises are something we should constantly be going back to, they’re worthy of perpetual commemoration.

Why? Because he says the whole story of the church is one which imitates the story of her divine master. She dies and she rises again. She was buried in the catacombs. She rose again with Constantine. She died in the dark ages. She rose again with Charlemagne. She died with the Renaissance. She rose again with the saints of the counter reformation. And so, he says, you cannot kill the Catholic Church.

That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be problems. He says, the heresies spread themselves like weeds and weeds come up when and where they’re least expected. Small wonder that they should flourish to the end of time. If your argument against the Catholic Church is the field has wheat and weeds, well, that’s the field that Jesus describes in Matthew 13 of what the kingdom of God looks like. That until the end of time, you’re going to have good fish and bad, you’re going to have wheat and weeds.

And so, Knox says the miracle of Catholicism of another kind, not she’s always been free from the influence of error or heresy. Not that at all. Rather is that the same trunk attacked again and again throughout the centuries, always puts out fresh branches, decks itself and fresh leaves as the centuries go by, shoots all the more generously where it is pollard. Now, I had to look up what pollarding is. It’s when you cut off the top branches of a tree and it actually helps the tree grow.

And so, Knox is saying, “Okay, think about the image that we see in scripture of the church as like a tree or a plant.” And so, you’ve got a bunch of different versions of this. Jesus gives the example of a mustard tree. St. Paul talks about the vine in Romans, whatever image you want to use. You can find plenty of examples in botany. You’re going to have branches that fall off.

And in that process, that trimming process is actually good for the health of the tree. It’s good for the health of the plant. This is what pollarding is. You’re trimming the branches that need to be trimmed so that the thing can grow. And so, Knox says, “Men think that they have killed the Catholic Church and go to sleep on it. And while they sleep, she pushes back the stone which they have set over her. Casts aside the gravestones in which they bound her and celebrates for each of her calvaries a fresh triumph of Easter.”

I love this description, as you might imagine. And it should be clear from Knox’s description that he’s considering both external threats, the persecution of the church, but also internal threats, things like heresy. Now, that’s Knox. I want to actually focus today on one of those crises that he doesn’t even mention in that beautiful description.

But his contemporary, GK Chesterton in The Everlasting Man does mention it. Now, in Everlasting Man, Chesterton actually gives five examples. He says, “At least five times, therefore, with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist sceptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases, it was the dog that died.”

So, Chesterton, about three years after becoming Catholic, writes this book about how there’s these five moments in history where it looks like the Catholic Church is just defeated. It looks like Christian orthodoxy is gone and the face of something else, whether that’s Arianism, which we’re going to look at today or Albigensian, this agnostic-like heresy or humanist skepticism or atheism and all of this stuff.

And time and time and time again, it looks like the church died and right when you want to give up comes roaring back. There’s this sort of death and resurrection motif in the history of the church. So, like I said, I want to focus just on the first of this, this crisis of Arianism because I think if we’re aware of the Arian controversy at all, it’s a footnote to church history. And I want to point out just how big of a deal it was because I think we can actually draw a lot of lessons from it. And I think we can actually draw a lot of solace from the way that God worked everything out in the end.

But we can just call this death in the golden age. And the reason I say death in the golden age is the Arian controversy strikes as Knox says kind of win where you least expected, because this is what should be the great triumph of the church. Remember how he talks about the church seems to die in the catacombs and then rises with Constantine? He legalizes Christianity and you expect it to be this great golden age of the church. And this is also how some people in that time and place describe it. So, Eusebius, who’s a big fan of Constantine in his work church history.

Now, Eusebius is alive during this time. This is a fourth century writing. He says, “Men had now lost all fear of their former oppressors. Day after day, they kept dazzling festival. Light was everywhere. Men who once dared not look up, greeted each other with smiling faces and shining eyes. It’s like the end of a musical.”

And I mean that pretty literally because he says they danced and sang in city and country alike, giving honor, first of all to God our sovereign Lord as they’d been instructed, and then to the pious emperor with his sons so dear to God. Old troubles were forgotten and all irreligion passed into oblivion. Good things were enjoyed. Those yet to come eagerly awaited.

Sounds like just happily ever after. Hey, the church faced some horrible conditions right before Christianity was legalized. You have the Diocletian Persecution where Christians are being rounded up and murdered, martyred. You’ve got Christians who are apostate under fear of persecution. You have bishops and laity alike who in some cases are becoming heroic martyrs and other cases are falling away from the faith or compromising with paganism.

And all of this, thanks be to God, ends with the legalization of Christianity. It’s not the state religion as is sometimes mistakenly said. Constantine doesn’t make Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire, but he does legalize it and he does do things like give spaces for Christians to build churches and he gives lands. St. John Lateran. There’s no person named John Lateran. St. John Lateran is called that because the Church of St. John built on the land that had belonged to the Lateran family. And so, this family, their land is given to the church by the Roman emperor.

So, all of that’s to say things are looking pretty good for the church right now. This appears to be a golden age. But in reality, this golden age is also where the church will face one of her greatest controversies, challenges, crises and will appear for a while to have lost. So, we can call this the Arian crisis and the “death” of the Catholic Church.

So, quick summary, if you want to know where we’re going with the story, Arianism is the idea that Jesus was an inferior created divinity. He is a creature, sort of, but he’s not like other creatures. But on the other hand, he’s also not the eternal God. He’s not equal with the Father. He’s inferior to the Father. So, he’s thinking about a lesser deity the way you might have in Roman paganism where you’ve got the top God like Zeus and then you have lower Gods like Mars. You can imagine that.

This is the heretical form of Christianity that several Roman Empire, excuse me, several Roman emperors trying to impose upon the church.

Now, this story is important for a number of reasons. I want to give a couple. First because one of the major objections to Catholicism is, well, this is all just like the invention of Constantine that you have and if you read certain Protestant writers, especially those who maybe aren’t as scholarly to put it nicely, you’ll find this idea that there was this golden age right before Constantine, but then Constantine co-ops everything. And so, this church that had been fighting so hard against Paganism, once the pagan emperor declares himself Christian, then they just accept all these pagan practices. That’s a common claim.

If you watch the recent episode I did on the history of Christmas, you’ll see that with Christmas or Easter, any number of other things and it’s really poorly sourced. But that’s one claim.

A second related claim is that Christian Orthodoxy is not really the true faith. Orthodoxy is just whatever the powerful like the emperor say it is. So, if the emperor tomorrow said, “Well, X is true,” well, that becomes the Orthodox position. Now, GK Chesterton in Everlasting Man describes, he addresses these challenges.

He says one of the rationalistic explanations for the rise of Christianity, the rise of Christendom, is that Christianity didn’t really rise at all, that is come from below. It was rather a top-down imposition. That’s the idea. That it wasn’t, oh, Christians spread massively. It’s rather the emperor imposed it. Now, this is a really important question because one of the Christian claims is, look, you have this small group of Christians, who very rapidly in the course of a few hundred years spread and overtake the Roman Empire not by the sword, but by the power of conversion, by the truth of the Christian claim, et cetera.

And so, one of the non-Christian responses is, “Yeah, we don’t really buy that. We think the reason Christianity wins in the fourth century is because Constantine imposes it.” Now, there’s been some really interesting stuff on this done. I might get another video just on that particular claim, but nevertheless, we want to keep that in mind that there’s this idea that, oh, Christianity is just a top-down in position, that the empire, the Roman Empire is really just whatever the emperor says it is. One of the emperors, Constantine, happens to be a Christian, he could have just as easily been anything else.

But whatever he is, that becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire and thus, it becomes as strong as universal, as invincible as the Roman Empire. And that the reason Christianity has remained in the world is just this kind of a relic of the Roman Empire. It is the ghost of Caesar still hovering above Rome.

Now, I think there’s several things wrong with that claim, but I’m going to let Chesterton address it in due time. One thing he also adds is that this is that second claim that orthodoxy is really just officialism, that whatever the emperor says, that’s orthodoxy. Now, Chesterton points out that Arianism disproves this. The whole great history of the Arian heresy, he says, might’ve been invented to explode this idea. It is a very interesting history often repeated in this connection.

And the upshot of it is that insofar as there ever was a merely official religion, it actually died because it was merely an official religion. And what destroyed it was the real religion. In other words, the story you’re about to hear, it was about how the Roman emperors didn’t try to impose Catholicism on the church. They tried to impose Arianism on the church and they lost because the Catholic Church won.

So, I already alluded to this, but what do the Arians believe? And here, I want to point out. Scholars don’t like the term Arianism because it suggests there’s one brilliant leader. Arias comes to prominence simply because he’s a priest in Alexandria. The bishop of Alexandria wants to know what his presbyters or what his priests are believing, and he finds out that Arias believes this really heretical form of Christianity that Christ was created. And this sparks a whole big debate.

I’m going to turn to a couple sources to talk about that. The first one is Michael Frassetto’s book, The Early Medieval World: From the Fall of Rome to the Time of Charlemagne. In Volume 1, he talks about this. He says, “According to Arius, the Son rather than existing from before the beginning of time, was created in time. Arius argued further that God the Father created the Son as a mediator between himself and fallen mankind. He was divine by grace of the Father. And since he had become like God the Father, others had hoped to become like the Father.”

So, Jesus in this view is a mediator between God and man, but as an in-between figure, not fully God and fully man, but not quite God, not quite man. That’s the image that you end up with. But Arius also presents Christ as sort of an exemplar for what’s possible for all of us. We can become like the Father in this way. But this loses something of the distinctiveness of Christ. So, that’s Frassetto.

The other book I want to turn to is actually Bart Ehrman’s book. Now, Ehrman you may know is a major critic of Christianity. He’s an ex-Christian agnostic, but he has a book called The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World, in which he talks about how a lot of the atheist myth about Christianity, this idea that Christians just win because it’s imposed top-down by the emperor isn’t true. And he talks about the Arian controversy as well in this.

He says, “The issues with Arianism didn’t just involve church polity.” So, before Arianism, there was a whole issue called Donatism. We’re going to ignore that. That looks at the structure of the church. But he says with Arianism, we’re not dealing with church polity, but with hardcore theology, specifically the hot and detailed question of the identity of Christ and his relationship with God the Father. Are they equal? Is the Father greater? Are they coeternal or did the Father exist first? Those are the questions.

So, the Orthodox humanitarian Nicene position, we’ll get into the Nicene creed in a second here, is that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are coequal, coeternal. The Father didn’t exist before the Son or before the Spirit. The Son is eternally begotten. He has always existed with the Father. He comes forth from the Father, but he’s always come forth from the Father. That’s a very hard thing for us to wrap our minds around, fair enough, but that’s contrary and as we’re going to see, the Nicene Creed is in no small part of response to Arianism. It’s contrary to Arianism, which says, “The Son is created.”

And so, let’s talk about Constantine, Council of Nicaea, Nicene Creed. In Ehrman’s words, Constantine, like most Christians to this day, did not follow or even much appreciate all the nuances of the debate, but he was deeply invested in it and called the famous Council of Nicaea in 325 in order to resolve it. So, Constantine’s pretty new to the whole Christian thing. He’s not baptized and he just wants Christians to be united.

I mentioned before, Methodists are right now going through a major schism here in America, and you can imagine a secular leader saying, “Hey, you Methodists do great work. I don’t want to see you guys tearing each other down. Let’s sit down in a room and just sort it out together. I don’t care what you decide. Just agree on something and go forward and move on.”

That’s more or less Constantine’s position. He actually writes a letter to the patriarch of Alexandria, who is Orthodox. He was a believer in Nicaea and what would later be called Nicene Christianity or Trinitarian Christianity, and he basically scolds him for asking these stupid irrelevant questions about whether Christ was created or not. He just does not understand why this is even an important question. All he sees is, well, these Christians are fighting with one another. They’ve just come out of persecution and they can’t keep away from each other’s throats. This looks like a totally unforced battle from Constantine’s perspective.

So, he calls the Council of Nicaea not because he wants to impose his own theology, as has often been supposed, because he wants to get the major Christian leaders in a room to figure this out, to stop the fight in his empire. And so, Ehrman says, “At the end of the Council of Nicaea, the bishops took a vote. Arius lost. The council devised a creed, a statement of faith that expressed its understanding of the nature of both the Father and the Son and related important theological matters.” That creed ultimately came to form the basis of the Nicene Creed still recited in many churches today.

Now at the council, only 20 participants ended up on the Arian side. Constantine then pressured the naysayers to concede the case and convinced nearly all of them to do so. The only two recalcitrant bishops along with Arius himself who, remember, wasn’t even a bishop, he’s just a priest, were sent into exile. So, yeah, it looks like Constantine, he’s punishing the naysayers, the outliers, and you might say, “Aha. See? Catholicism was imposed on the church by Constantine. This proves it.” And that would be a convincing case if history stopped in 325 with the first council of Nicaea.

But the actual story is way more complicated than that because Arianism strikes back. So, I’m going to go back to Bart Ehrman. He says, “As was true of the Donatist controversy,” which I mentioned but we’re not going to talk about, “the council called by Constantine did not finally resolve the matter. Arians continued to press their case and made converts to their cause. Emperors after Constantine, including his own offspring, adopted the Arian view and exercised their authority to cement its stature in the church, even though, as we’ll see, it eventually lost.”

Now, Ehrman’s right as far as he goes, but you could actually say even more than that, because it’s not just Constantine’s children or some of his children who favor Arianism, but Constantine himself seems to have ultimately been won over to the Arian side.

Michael Frassetto in the early medieval world puts it like this, “The council upheld the Catholic view of the essential unity of the Godhead embodying it in the summer of the faith that formed the basis of what is traditionally called the Nicene Creed. But the controversy continued for the next several decades. Even Constantine in the 330s became more inclined to the Arian view. His successors often adopted Arianism as the preferred expression of Christianity.”

So, we believe it is not entirely clear from the historical record that the bishop who baptizes Constantine actually is an Arian. And so, that’s kind of even Constantine who calls the first Council of Nicaea ends up thinking Nicaea got it wrong, and Arianism doesn’t just go away after 325. That’s the easy version of the story. There’s an Arian controversy in the church. The church meets, 325, boom. Arianism is gone. That’s not really how it worked.

And so, for instance, Constantine’s son, Constantius, is actually Constantius II adopts an Arian Creed, which then becomes the foundation for the Germanic people said there are a bunch of gothic and Visigoths and all this people who are basically converted to Arianism by the arrogant Roman emperor.

This is again, A-R-I-A-N. This is not about white supremacy. This is about the view of Arius that Christ is inferior to the Father. And so, he’s setting this as the official religion of the Roman Empire more or less, and doing this in several different ways like deposing any bishops who continue to hold to the Nicene view. And we’ll get into this in a second here.

But this is spreading beyond the borders of the Roman Empire so that the peoples to the north, the Germanic peoples who will come down and settle in the Roman Empire sometimes come down and invade the Roman Empire are becoming gothic s. They are buying into this heretical form of Christianity. And so, the faith of Arius continues to have supporters among the emperors for the next few decades.

This is the thing that Chesterton’s talking about. If you want the top-down official version of Christianity from the time of Constantinian, it’s not really Catholicism. It’s the Arian alternative to Catholicism. So, let’s talk about this. How bad does this get? It gets pretty bad. It gets really bad in fact.

Now, I want to give several ways we can talk about it. Number one, you’ve got good bishops like St. Athanasius who are deposed. They’re sent into exile. Rivals are put into their place. Number two, the Roman emperor you’ve already seen, Constantine goes from Catholic leaning to Arian leaning, but his nephew Juliet, goes from being an Arian to being an outright pagan who is known as Julian the Apostate for good reason.

Third, the church appears totally chaotic during this time. This is not the golden age of peace and harmony. And number four, in some ways most disturbing for the Christian writers in this age, there’s an ambiguous church council that appears to endorse or at least permit this heresy to occur.

So, let’s talk about each of these. First, good bishops in exile. There are several examples that could be given, but there’s one really famous one, so I’m going to give this just as the example. When we talk about the Arian controversy, you’ll sometimes hear people use the phrase Athanasius contra mundum. Athanasius against the world. And the reason is this, Athanasius, who is Bishop of Alexandria, is an outspoken defender of Nicene orthodoxy and he hates anything that smells like Arianism. He hates Arianism. He hates semi-Arianism. He hates when other bishops or leaders are not hard enough on Arians.

And so, he runs into a lot of problems in the church and in the Roman Empire. Jennifer Barnes in her book, Bishops in Flight, focuses on his story and she talks about how Athanasius of Alexandria appears to have fled into exile five times during his 10 years bishop. We don’t know all of the details about each of those depositions, but it appears he’s being pushed out both by other bishops and being pushed out by the Roman emperor. And so, things are looking bad. Hey, 325, it looks great. The bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius, his predecessor won. Everything looks good.

And then you get Athanasius. He’s great. And it looks like, “Hey, Christian Orthodoxy has won. The Trinity has won. This is the authentic vision of Christianity. We’re done with Arianism.” And that quickly proves not to be the case. Arianism strikes back and strikes back hard and in the face of this, good bishops like Athanasius flee their diocese. And so, this is alarming. This would be a lot to handle. That’s the first negative thing in terms of how bad it gets.

So, second, as I mentioned, you’ve got these heretical and apostate emperors. Now, without getting too deep into the weeds on Roman history, although I know some of you listening probably are obsessed with Roman history, given everything I know about men, Constantine begins a new lineage of Roman emperors and after he dies, the empire is divided. So, you have Constantine II who then gets killed by his brother. You’ve got Constance I. He is pretty good in terms of Christian orthodoxy. And then you have Constantius, who is the Arian.

And so, that’s the beginning. We’ll talk a lot about that. Now, Constantius reigns from 337 to 361. So, Constantine is 306 to 337. So, you have 306 to 337 Constantine. And then over part of the empire originally just the eastern part, but eventually the whole empire, Constantius II 337 at 361. When Constantius dies, Constantine’s nephew, Constantius’ cousin, Julian becomes emperor, and he is only emperor for a little more than a year. Well, a little under two years, a year and seven months, and he becomes an apostate. He tries to bring back Roman paganism, tries to get rid of Christianity.

And then, there’s a couple more successors who go back to being Arians. And then eventually, we’ll get to that part of the story, so just hold that thought. We’ll talk about Julian and then we’ll talk about his successors after that. So, Julian 361 to 363. As Chesterton points out, just as a modern man might pass from Unitarianism to complete agnosticism, so the greatest of the Arian emperors, Julian, ultimately shed the last and thinnest pretense of Christianity. He abandoned even Arius in return to Apollo.

And Chesterton says, “If there really was something that began with Constantine, then it ended with Julian.” You can’t say the reason Christianity is so strong in the empire is because of the emperor, when the emperor hates Christianity, when he’s an apostate, who thinks we should all be pagans instead.

And so, the Constantinian theory about why the church thrives doesn’t work, A, because Constantine and his successors mostly are not Catholic Christian, they are much more sympathetic to Arian Christianity. And B, because Constantine’s successor and nephew, two successors on is openly anti-Christian, ex-Christian, non-Christian. And so, you just can’t explain. That’s not how Christianity is spreading. It’s spreading in the face of that. It’s spreading despite the emperor not because of it. Okay. That’s the second negative trajectory that Arianism devolves into non-Christianity.

The third is what we might call post-conciliar chaos. Now, if you know anything about the controversies within the church after Vatican II, you’ll hear that term thrown around about the chaos after the Second Vatican Council. But it’s worth pointing out that there is a similar chaos in many ways after the first council of Nicaea.

St. Basil, The Great talks about this. And he says, he’s going to describe the unhappy reality. He says, “Did it not at one time appear that the Arian schism, after its separation into a sect opposed to the Church of God, stood itself alone in hostile array?” In other words, at one time, didn’t it look like Arianism was going to win because they were the only organized ones.

He says, “But when the attitude of our foes against us was changed from one of long-standing and bitter strife to one of open warfare, then, as is well known, the war was split up in more ways than I can tell into many subdivisions, so that all men were stirred to a state of inveterate hatred alike by common party spirit and individual suspicion.”

In other words, it’s easy to paint this these days as a battle just of Catholics against Arians, but in fact, it certainly felt much more like a battle of everyone against everyone else. That it wasn’t like that Catholic side was all totally happy and united one with another. In Basil’s words or Basil’s words, he says, “What storm at sea was ever so fierce and wild as this tempest of the Churches? In it every landmark of the Fathers has been moved; every foundation, every bulwark of opinion has been shaken: everything buoyed up on the unsound is dashed about and shaken down.” That people just seem like they’re abandoning tradition.

And then he says, “We attack one another. We are overthrown by one another. If our enemy is not the first to strike us, we are wounded by the comrade at our side. If a foeman is stricken and falls, his fellow soldier tramples him down.” Catholics are tearing down Catholics. Arians are tearing down Arians. This is total chaos in the church. He says, “There is at least this bond of union between us that we hate our common foes, but no sooner have the enemy gone by than we find enemies in one another.”

You can unite a group of Christians around hating some heresy. But as soon as that heresy’s vanquished, it turns out those Christians are not really getting along with each other. They just start fighting with one another. And this comes at a tremendous cost. In St. Basil’s words, he says, “Who could make a complete list of all the wrecks?” If this is a naval battle, it’s producing a lot of shipwrecks. Some have gone to the bottom on the attack of the enemy, some through the unsuspected treachery of their allies, some from the blundering of their own officers.

Look, I think a lot of that could be applied to today. When you look at people who’ve had their faith shipwrecked, sometimes it’s because of some anti-Christian, non-Christian, anti-Catholic, non-Catholic attack. Other times, it’s because of the treasury of fellow Catholics or the bad performance of their own bishops and their own leaders and everyone else.

So, Basil goes on. “We see, as it were, whole churches, crews and all, dashed and shattered upon the sunken reefs of disingenuous heresy, while others of the enemies of the Spirit of Salvation have seized the helm and made shipwreck of the faith.” This is the chaos he’s describing. And then he says, “The luminaries of the world, which God set to give light to the souls of the people, have been driven from their homes.” We already saw that with Athanasius. “And a darkness verily gloomy and disheartening has settled on the Churches.”

Then he says, “Every one is a theologue,” meaning like a theologian, “though he have his soul branded with more spots than can be counted.” It doesn’t matter how sinful you are, you still feel like you’re an expert on church theology and everything else. “The result is that innovators find a plentiful supply of men ripe for faction, while self-appointed scions of the house of place-hunters reject the government of the Holy Spirit and divide the chief dignities of the Churches.”

In other words, they don’t respect the kind of structure God has given that kind of go their own way. So, you have these influential leaders that are attracting factions of Christians rather than respecting the actual order of things. Basil then warns, “The institutions of the Gospel have now everywhere been thrown into confusion by lack of discipline. There is an indescribable pushing for the chief places while every self-advertiser tries to force himself into high office.”

Now, I would suggest that the difference now is that self-advertisers aren’t necessarily trying to push themselves into high office. They’re content to push themselves to get more and more clicks and views and the like. But that’s still the same spiritual temptation and danger that you form a faction around your theological click.

And Basil warns, “The result of this lust for ordering,” that does not mean the lust for order. That means the lust for ordering other people around or giving orders or being in charge of things. “The result of this lust for ordering is that our people are in a state of wild confusion for lack of being ordered.” Ironically, with a thousand different people telling you what to believe, you find yourself having no voice to listen to because you don’t know where to turn. There’s too many different voices shouting opposite theologies and opposite directions.

“The exhortations of those in authority are rendered wholly purposeless and void, because there is not a man but, out of his ignorant impudence, thinks that it is just as much his duty to give orders to other people, as it is to obey anyone else.” No one, in Basil’s day, like no one in today’s age, seems to want to obey. They want to give the order. They want to resolve all the theological controversies themselves.

Now, I’m not the only one who reads these words and thinks, “That sounds a little bit like today.” Back in 2005, Pope Benedict XVI and his Christmas address to the Roman Curia pointed out the same thing. He said, “What has been the result of the Second Vatican Council? Was it well received? What in the acceptance of the council was good and what was inadequate or mistaken? What still remains to be done?”

And he answers these questions pretty honestly. He says, “No one can deny that in vast areas of the Church the implementation of the Council has been somewhat difficult, even without wishing to apply to what occurred in these years the description that St. Basil, the great Doctor of the Church, made of the Church’s situation after the Council of Nicaea.” In other words, Benedict is saying, “Yeah, we are not quite at that level, but we see a lot of similarities with that.”

And he says of it, “We do not want to apply precisely this dramatic description to the situation of the post-conciliar period, yet something from all that occurred is nevertheless reflected in it.” So, yeah, maybe it’d be too much to just say, “The situation in the church after Vatican II is just a giant pitched naval battle where everyone is firing on everyone else.” But we feel a little affinity with that. We might hear some echoes in our own age of that kind of situation.

But for all of that, there was actually one thing that was in some ways more disturbing than the chaos and controversy that Basil describes, and that’s this apparently heretical senate. So, St. Athanasius of Alexandria, who we’ve mentioned before, talks about this. He talks about how leaders in the Arian party who didn’t really understand Christianity well first were silently deceiving one another, and then began sowing their seeds of heresy and influencing the Emperor Constantius, and they influenced him to call a council.

Now, their idea was to basically overthrow the first council of Nicaea to undo what the first council of Nicaea does. Well, rather than just calling one council, the emperor instead calls for two separate sentences to happen or two separate councils to happen. There’s one in the west in northern Italy, what’s now the city of Ravenna, or excuse me, now the city of Rimini and in the east in Cilicia, and what’s Southern Turkey.

Now, this geography’s going to matter a little bit. The Arian controversy is largely an eastern controversy. Its beginnings are in a theological dispute in Alexandria and modern-day Egypt and Cilicia is where the eastern bishops are meeting. Meanwhile, in what’s now Rimini in northern Italy, the western bishops are meeting, but some of the representatives from the Arian party show up at the western meeting as well. And the western bishops don’t seem to have a good grasp on the nuances of what the debate is actually about.

And so, the eastern Arians sort of trick them into affirming a creed that appears totally orthodox. And so, at the Council in Rimini in 359, they say, “We believe in one Only-begotten Son of God, who, before all ages and before all origin, before all conceivable time, before all comprehensible essence was begotten impassibly from God.” Sounds good so far, right?

“Through whom the ages were disposed and all things were made. And Him begotten as the Only-begotten, Only from the Only Father, God from God, like to the Father who begat Him, according to the Scriptures; whose origin no one knows save the Father alone who begat Him.” So, you might be saying, “Okay, that sounds a little weird.” But for a lot of people, I think he would hear that without having all of the nuances of the controversy in Arianism and think, “Yeah, this sounds fine.”

If someone said that, there’s nothing obviously in there that’s false. But the Council also has this statement that they’re avoiding the term “essence”, which is Usian Greek as substantial as the Latin equivalent. They said, “Whereas the term ‘essence,’ has been adopted by the Fathers in simplicity, and gives offence as being misconceived by the people, and is not contained in the Scriptures, it has seemed good to remove it, that it can never in any case used of God again, because the divine Scriptures nowhere use it of Father and Son.”

Now, that part appears to be a full-frontal assault in the Nicaean Creed saying, “Hey, the Nicaean Creed is wrong in saying the Son is consubstantial with the Father.” But notice even here, the Arian party is very sly. They don’t just say, “The council of Nicaea is wrong.” They just say, “Ah, we don’t want to use that term anymore because it’s confusing to people and because it’s not a scriptural term.”

And look, that by itself isn’t actually heretical. The Council of Nicaea doesn’t say everyone has to always use this exact language to describe the relationship of the Father and Son. It affirms its belief, but it’s not crazy to think, “Okay, well, we’ve had decades now of controversy over what the Nicaean Creed means. Maybe we should find another way of saying the same thing.” And so, they come up with this vaguer language, which is this, “We say that the son is like the father in all things as also the holy scriptures say and teach.”

Now, the western bishops are suspicious of the Arian party, but not as suspicious as they ought to be. Michael Stewart Williams in the politics of heresy in Ambrose of Milan recounts how Ambrose talks about this. St. Ambrose of Milan, the guy brings St. Augustine into the church. Ambrose retells the story of the description ascribed in other writers to Valens of Mursa.

Now, Valens is one of the leaders of the heretical Arian party, which naive bishops are persuaded to sign up to an ambiguous creed on the basis of the anathema added to it, specifically that the Son is not to be considered a creature like the other creatures. So, they’re thinking, “Okay, maybe that creed was a little ambiguous. We want to make sure people don’t think Jesus is just another creature.” So, Valens says, “Oh, absolutely. Anathema to that. Jesus is not a creature like other creatures.” They’re like, “Okay, great. We’re on the same page.” But they’re actually being really deceptive.

Now, you may be wondering, well, what’s the problem with that? Well, because they didn’t say Jesus wasn’t a creature. They said he wasn’t a creature like other creatures, which leaves open the idea that Jesus is the Father’s only perfect creature, as Arius once said, that he’s a creature, but unlike other creatures.

But notice if you’re not really looking for the way this could be misconstrued and misinterpreted, it’s easy to miss it because look on his face, Jesus is not a creature like other creatures. Why not? Well, because he’s not a creature at all. Well, the other way you could read that is Jesus is not a creature like other creatures because a different kind of creature, which would be the heretical interpretation.

So, as sometimes happens in the history of the church, a statement permits both an orthodox reading and a heretical reading. And so, St. Jerome talks about how this ambiguous synod was received as a win by the heretics. He says, “After these proceedings, the council was dissolved all returning gladness to their own provinces.” Everybody thinks, “Good. We won.” Orthodoxy wins if you’re Catholic or Arianism wins if you’re Arian. And everybody’s happy as well, including the emperor because it looks like east and west are going to be totally happy. Now, they’re knit together by the bond of fellowship.

Hey, that controversy got worked out. But no. He says, “Wickedness did not lie hidden long. The sore that is healed superficially before the bad humor has been worked off breaks out against.” They put a Band-Aid over flesh wound. And it wasn’t an actual remedy here. They just found language ambiguous enough that both sides could agree to it.

And so, Valens and the other Arian leaders, including some imminent Christian bishops, began to wave their palms and to say that they had not denied that Jesus was a creature, simply that he was a creature not like other creatures. And in the process of this apparent win for orthodoxy, the orthodox had fallen into this trap because they hadn’t actually defeated Arianism. They defeated a misunderstanding of Arianism or the Arian side really strategically worded this so they could say yes to this anathema.

And in the process, the term “Usia” was abolished. The Nicaean faith stood condemned by acclimation. These bishops, even though it’s not an ecumenical council, it’s still important. This council of remedy was a big deal. I believe there were 400 bishops who were attending. And Jerome famously says here, “The whole world groaned and was astonished to find itself Arian.” Meaning, in other words, not that the Catholic bishops had suddenly converted to Arianism, but they had in this synod affirmed what they thought was Catholicism and had sort of been tricked into giving a major wind to the Arian inside.

And Jerome goes on to say after this, “Some remained in their own communion, others began to send letters to those Confessors who as adherents of Athanasius were in exile; several despairingly bewailed the better relations into which they had entered.” This is what happens. After you find yourself in this situation where through ambiguity, heresy seems to have crept in through the back door, seems to be ascending, seems to be on the rise. You’ve got these Catholics openly saying, “Well, should we even stay Catholic? Is this right?” And they’re getting panicked. They’re getting freaked out.

Meanwhile, others are defending their mistake as an exhibition of wisdom. Jerome does not have a lot of sympathy for those who defended the council afterwards is a good idea, even after they realized the ambiguity in which they’d stepped. He doesn’t say they actually endorsed heresy because they don’t. They endorse ambiguity which gives a wind to the heretics.

And so, Jerome says, “The ship of the Apostles was in peril, she was driven by the wind, her sides beaten with the waves. No hope was now left.” That’s a really dire kind of presentation. The church looks done. In the golden age of the Church, we can forget this happened, that the church appeared to be defeated. Catholicism looked like it had been vanquished through some subterfuge by the Arian heresy. And bishops who should have known better fell for this because they got tricked by the heretics.

Well, what happened next? Jerome fortunately doesn’t stop his account right there, the very next sentence, “But the Lord awoke and bade the tempest cease. The beast died, and there was a calm once again. To speak more plainly, all the bishops who had been banished from their sees, by the clemency of the new emperor returned to their Churches. Egypt welcomed the triumphant Athanasius. Hilary returned from the battle to the embrace of the Church of Gaul. Eusebius returned and Italy laid aside her mourning weeds.” That’s the good Eusebius. There’s a good and a bad Eusebius.

“The bishops who had been caught in the snare at Ariminum and had unwittingly come to be reported of as heretics, began to assemble, while they called the Body of our Lord and all that is holy in the Church to witness that they had not a suspicion of anything faulty in their own faith.

We thought, said they,” now he’s paraphrasing them here, “the words were to be taken in their natural meaning, and we had no suspicion that in the Church of God, the very home of simplicity and sincerity in the confession of truth, one thing could be kept secret in the heart, another uttered by the lips. We thought too well of bad men and were deceived. We did not suppose that the bishops of Christ were fighting against Christ.”

What ultimately happens, the first council of Constantinople really hammers home the falsity of Arianism. And so, what we actually call the Nicaean Creed today is a combination of the creeds worked out first at Nicaea and then Constantinople. Michael Frassetto, the historian in early medieval world puts it like this. He talks about how Constantius and his successors had favored Arianism, but it faced a terrible setback under the Arian emperor, Valens.

Now, this is after Julian, The Apostate. His defeat by the Visigoth, the Battle of Adrianople in 378 was understood as a judgment of God against a heretical ruler. Ironically, he’s actually battling Germanic Goths who are themselves Arian. But the fact that he lost a battle he should have won was viewed by the Roman people as vindication of Catholicism over the falsity of Arianism.

So, his successor, Theodosius, was a staunch advocate of the Nicaean Creed, promoted Catholic Christianity to the rank of state religion. It’s he, Theodosius, not Constantine, who actually makes Catholicism the state religion. And he does so to push back against Arianism as well as traditional paganism.

But even this, Michael Frassetto points out, didn’t actually win the day for Catholicism over Arianism. Why? Because as I already mentioned, there are these Gothic Arians. And so, there’s Ulfilas, an Arian Goth, who’s a missionary, from the early 340s until his death in 382 or 383 translates the Bible into the Gothic language. And he helps convert a lot of Arians from Pagan, excuse me, a lot of Goths from Paganism into Arianism.

And so, this actually took about a quarter millennium between the time of the first council of Nicaea until the final vanquishing, any real sense of Arianism. The Spanish Visigoth in 587 end up converting when they’re king converts to Catholicism. So, obviously there, I’m truncating a lot of history and frankly, Frassetto is truncating a lot of history because there’s a complicated history of the different tribes that are around the Roman Empire and how they fare after Catholicism wins out in the Roman Empire.

But nevertheless, what can we learn from this? I want to suggest four takeaways. First, the church’s infallibility doesn’t mean that we’ll be spared the weeds of heresy. And so, if your understanding of the Catholic Protestant question is be Catholic because we never have to deal with heresy, that’s not true. That’s not why you should be Catholic. And that’s not why the church or any of the great doctors of the church say you should be Catholic.

Number two, things look bad sometime. But don’t despair. Christ promises the gates of hell won’t overcome. So, you have this continual dying and rising in the church, but that means there are times where things actually look bad. And we need to remember, just like you don’t want to give up on Jesus on Good Friday, you don’t want to give up on the church in any of these times where the church seems to go down to the dogs, any of the times where the church seems to have died or that orthodoxy in the church seems to have died, which leads to number three, the truth does win out, but not always quickly.

It looked like there was a quick win at the Council of Nicaea in 325, but pretty quickly, heresy comes back and then it looks like heresy has won, and it’s a much longer, prolonged, complicated fight. And things actually got a lot worse before they got a lot better. And so, Arianism was defeated by the church, but it takes a couple hundred years, really, like I said, about a quarter millennium from the early 300s to the late 500s.

And so, we may find ourselves in the middle of a long battle. And the fact that we’re in the middle of a long battle doesn’t mean we should give up. It might mean the truth wins out, but not in your lifetime. There were a lot of people in this supposed golden age of the church who had that experience. They held onto the Catholic faith even if their bishop didn’t. They held onto the Catholic faith even if their bishop was deposed for holding onto the Catholic faith. They held onto the Catholic faith in the face of some huge obstacles. What they didn’t do is give up. They didn’t jump ship.

And then the final point is that the truth is worth fighting for. Nothing I’m saying here should be taken to mean don’t fight for orthodoxy in the church. There’s a false vision that says, “Well, look, the gates of hell won’t overcome. So, I’m not going to sweat it. Why even fight about this? God’s going to win. The Holy Spirit’s in control. Gates of hell won’t overcome.”

Well, there’s a couple problems with that. One of those problems is while the gates of hell won’t ultimately overcome the church, that you won’t see Catholicism completely destroyed, you can see areas where the Catholic Church is destroyed. I mentioned Alexandria was this hotbed of theological controversy.

And for a long time, Alexandria produced some brilliant theologians like Athanasius, but it also produces enough heretics. And so, there’s a major controversy. And today, Alexandria is majority Muslim and all of North Africa is majority Muslim in these places that had once been hotbeds of Christianity. Likewise, in Europe, where you have the vibrant areas of Christianity, you now find secularism and atheism setting in.

And so, the fact that the Catholic Church won’t be overcome, that it is indestructible, does not mean that there won’t be people who are lost in the process because of the dangers of heresy and both internal and external threats. We want to fight for them. We want to fight for our people.

But moreover, one of the ways that orthodoxy wins out over heresy is that the Holy Spirit uses those who are willing to fight for the faith. So, don’t give up on the church, but fight for the church and fight for the truth in the church. It’s a lesson I think we need to take away from this. So, there’s much more that could be said about that. I just give all of this to suggest that those who tap dance over the grave of the church every time there’s a controversy are doing so a little prematurely.

Look, I want to give just one last fact here. By almost any reckoning, the Catholic Church and particularly the papacy, is the oldest government on Earth, not just oldest religious, but oldest continual governance on Earth. There are other countries that are much older, China, for instance, but their government isn’t. The Chinese government only goes back to the Chinese revolution. So, it’s not even a hundred years old. You’ve got plenty of other examples like this.

Here’s this body that by basically any reckoning goes back to the Roman Empire and is still here. It survived the Roman Empire, survived any number of empires, and they tried to suppress it and it was proved to be indestructible. So, I point to that just to say, we can trust this.

We can trust the church because she has stood the test of time and every time it looked like heresy was going to win, it didn’t. Every time it looked like some external threat was going to quash the church or crush the church in the church, it didn’t. And that’s the promise we have. And that’s the promise we hold onto even when things get dark, even when there’s chaos, even when there’s a naval battle where a peaceable church ought to be.

So, I hope that’s helpful. I hope it gives you some hope, some reassurance that this is a comedy and not a tragedy. This is a story with a happy ending, and there’s no reason to panic. There’s no reason to fear Christ who has won the ultimate victory promises an ultimate victory to the church, but it doesn’t always look like that in the midst of history. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.

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