One of the most potent accusations you can make against Christians is that they deny the divinity of Christ. This accusation was made, far too hastily, against Fr Peter Kennedy on the basis of a television interview (pictured). It may be helpful to ask in what terms the question of Christ's divinity came first to be raised and why it is has been seen as so important.
The early Christians knew that Jesus addressed God as Father. After the resurrection, they had to ask how Jesus was related to God. Although, as Fr Kennedy said rightly, Jesus could not have referred to himself as God, that did not settle how he was related to the God whom he knew as Father.
The question was pressed in the Fourth Century by the Alexandrian priest, Arius. In order to protect the unity and otherness of God, he said that the Father was alone and uniquely God. Christ was also a unique, but a lesser being. Later Arians would say that the Father was alone uncreated. As Son of God, Christ was created.
The debate about this question was tumultuous and often confused. Both those who followed Arius and those who claimed that the relationship between Christ and the Father was one of equality found Scriptural texts to support their positions.
But they also found that their opponents could also interpret these texts coherently within their own framework. One side argued for Jesus' equality with the Father, for example, on the basis that Jesus was described as the Son of God. Their opponents then cited texts in which angels or human beings were described as sons of God.
It slowly became clear that the issue was not about particular texts but about what the whole Gospel demanded. Did the story of what God had done in Jesus Christ demand seeing Jesus Christ as equal to the one he called Father? Or was it compatible with seeing Jesus as a lesser being, even as no more than a human being?
The conclusion was that the Christian faith represented in the New Testament demanded that Christ be seen as the Son of God who was equal in all respects to the Father.
This was not the easier position to hold. Its opponents immediately asked how it could be compatible with the central belief that God is one, and how a divine Christ could share fully the limitations and weaknesses of our human life. There was material here for another century or two of turmoil.
So why did they see it as so important to say that Christ's relationship with the Father was one of equality? Finally, it had to do with intimacy. The Scriptures described God's relationship with us in Christ as intimate and personal. It could be crystalised in John's phrase, 'God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten Son'.
God's investment in us and our world was God's own self. It was family business. The image of the crucifixion as one of God sharing our pain.
The alternative, to see Christ as a lesser being meant that God's involvement with humanity was through a messenger or representative. Although this was a quite reasonable way to imagine God's relationship to the world, it did not correspond to the Gospel story of Jesus Christ. Jesus' life, death and resurrection were an event in God's life, not simply in a human life.
This conviction was also enshrined in Christian prayer and practice. Although it was problematic in the Jewish environment from which they came, the early Christians instinctively associated Christ in their prayer to God. Their forms of prayer suggested that the Father and Christ were inseparable.
This story has three continuing implications. First, that in Christian terms God needs to be seen in terms of relationship. To speak of Jesus as God is crude shorthand, useful for speaking with non-Christians, but often unhelpful within Christian conversation. We should more properly speak of Jesus as the Son of the Father, and of God as Trinity.
Second, the Fourth Century debate suggests that much is at stake in the discussion of Christ's relationship to God as Father. It has to do with the core identity of what Christians today believe with what the early Christians received. And it touches what that God has done for us and what we can expect of God.
Third, if the proper way of speaking of God in Christian conversation is as Trinity, the questions of gendered language and of the need for a variety of images of God are important in our day. It is perhaps significant that Ephraem, a strongly anti-Arian theologian, could speak easily of God as mother.
Andrew Hamilton is the consulting editor for Eureka Street. He also teaches at the United Faculty of Theology in Melbourne.