Arian Nonsense Fight

 But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction.

2 Peter 2:1

"A priest named Arius stood up and posed the following simple question: "If the Father begat the Son, he that was begotten had a beginning of existence." In other words, if the Father is the parent of the Son, then didn't the Son have a beginning?

Apparently, no one had put it this way before. For many bishops, Arius spoke heresy when he said that the Son had a beginning. A debate erupted, led by Arius on the one side and by Alexander and his deacon Athanasius on the other. Athanasius became the Church's lead fighter in a struggle that lasted his entire life.

In 320 A.D., Alexander held a Council of Alexandria to condemn the errors of Arius. But this did not stop the controversy. The Church had nearly split over the issue when the controversy reached the ears of the Roman emperor Constantine.

The orthodox accused the Arians of attempting to lower the Son by saying he had a beginning. But, in fact, the Arians gave him an exalted position, honoring him as "first among creatures." Arius described the Son as one who became "perfect God, only begotten and unchangeable," but also argued that he had an origin.

The Arian controversy was really about the nature of humanity and how we are saved. It involved two pictures of Jesus Christ: Either he was a God who had always been God or he was a human who became God's Son.

If he was a human who became God's Son, then that implied that other humans could also become Sons of God. This idea was unacceptable to the orthodox, hence their insistence that Jesus had always been God and was entirely different from all created beings.

By denying man's divine origin and potential, the doctrine of creation out of nothing rules out both preexistence and reincarnation. Once the Church adopted the doctrine, it was only a matter of time before it rejected both Origenism and Arianism. In fact, the Arian controversy was only one salvo in the battle to eradicate the mystical tradition Origen represented.

Origen and his predecessor, Clement of Alexandria, lived in a Platonist world. For them it was a given that there is an invisible spiritual world which is permanent and a visible material world that is changeable. The soul belongs to the spiritual world, while the body belongs to the material world.

In the Platonists' view, the world and everything in it is not created but emanates from God, the One. Souls come from the Divine Mind, and even when they are encased in bodily form, they retain their link to the Source.

 

Origen took up the problem of the soul's changeability but came up with a different solution. He suggested that the soul was created immortal and that even though it fell (for which he suggests various reasons), it still has the power to restore itself to its original state.

This new theology, which linked the soul with the body, led to the ruling out of preexistence. If the soul is material and not spiritual, then it cannot have existed before the body. As Gregory of Nyssa wrote: "Neither does the soul exist before the body, nor the body apart from the soul, but ... there is only a single origin for both of them."

When is the soul created then? The Fathers came up with an answer: at the same time as the body - at conception. "God is daily making souls," wrote Church Father Jerome. If souls and bodies are created at the same time, both preexistence and reincarnation are out of the question since they imply that souls exist before bodies and can be attached to different bodies in succession." N-D.com

This was some of the psycho-babbel nonsense dividing the early church. A waste of time fighting over someone trying to introduce silly nonsense into Christiandom.
Of course the soul does not pre-exist.....(which rules out reincarnation & Mormonism). As for the argument of the "Son" being the first creation of God...I believe that they relate to us as Father, Son & Holy Spirit in the roles they play in salvation...They are all 3 equally eternal and Deity. The Godhead. Arius, even if he was well meaning, was clearly used by the opponent of God to introduce illogical thinking into the church to usher in division.