What does it take to make a Christian? That was a question that was widely debated in the very early Church. That is to say, before the Roman Emperor Constantine called all the Church leadership together and worked out a common faith at the Council of Nicaea in 325. Prior to that time (and for some time afterwards, truth be told), there was a very wide range of religious belief that was called “Christian”. One of these was “Arian” Christianity. We’ll come back to that because that’s what the Council was called to resolve.
Before Arius ever lived, though, there were “Gnostic” Christians. Gnostics, while they believed in Christ, weren’t sure they believed in God. Or, more correctly, they believed that God, the God we know, Jaweh, or Jehova, the Hebrew God, was a blind, insane, minor sort of God who had indeed created the earth, but had done it in such an inept way that all creation is terribly imperfect. Gnostics (“Gnostic” means “those with knowledge”, more or less) believed that the way to get past all the sin and craziness of this world was through mystical prayer and exercises. They believed Jesus had come to lead them out of this world and past the insane God to true happiness. It was way more complicated than that, but you get the idea.
Another order of Christians were the Montanists, who were very much like the New Age movement of today. They believed that certain of their members could (and did) “channel” Jesus and other saints, and that these “channelings” constituted holy writ just as valuable as Matthew, Luke, John or Paul. Tertullian, one of the most famous Catholic Church fathers ended up becoming a Montanist, as he was taken in by the supposed messages from the beyond.
Another such group was called “Sabellians”, after their “prophet”, Sabelius. Sabellians refused to believe in the Trinity. Catholic Christians believe in one God who plays three roles: Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Sabellians believed that these three were not three separate “persons”, or in Latin, personae, roles, but rather just three different ways of seeing the same God. Some Sabellians became called “Modalists”, and others “Monarchians”. Among the latter group eventually grew up, in Arabia, a group that we today call Islam.
Well, anyway, one day, the Bishop of Alexandria was having a meeting with his priests and deacons. He asked them a question about the Trinity, and one of the priests, named Arius, thought he was talking about Sabellianism. He wasn’t, but Arius thought he was, and out of that grew perhaps the largest controversy ever to shake the Church. All over the East, Churchmen and clergy began to “line up” behind the Bishops of Alexandria and Antioch, who opposed Arius, and Arius himself, who argued that Jesus was not, in fact, himself “God”, but rather that he had been created by God, along with everything else.