The republication, with a substantial new afterward, of Rowan Williams's Arius should be welcomed by the thoughtful Christian public for several reasons. First, at the time of writing, Williams is one of the main contenders for the vacancy at Lambeth Palace and may well be the head of the Anglican communion by the time this goes to press. As such, he stands on the brink of being one of the most significant worldwide church leaders of the next decades; his writings, thus, have more than mere scholarly significance, and Arius, as his masterpiece, must form a central part of any assessment of the man. Second, the work is itself perhaps the single most detailed and rigorous analysis of the thought of Arius, "the archetypal heretic," ever to have been written. For those who have ploughed through R. P. C. Hanson's The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God (T&T Clark, Ltd., 2000) and been left with the feeling that the way in which orthodoxy emerged in the early church was immensely complicated, then Williams's book is bad news, demonstrating that even Hanson's account makes things more straightforward than they really were.
Williams's work, while not an easy read, will repay careful study. In three parts, he reconstructs what little can be known of Arius's life and writings, then addresses the nature of Arius's theology, and finally contextualizes Arius's thinking against the background of late classical philosophy. In each of these sections, Williams interacts extensively with previous scholars and presents a highly nuanced and complex picture of the types of questions and influences at work upon Arius's mind. Then, in an appendix, he surveys the literature that has emerged since the first edition of 1987, including the magisterial work of Hanson noted above. Underlying all of this discussion of Arianism is Williams's subtheme: How do concepts such as tradition, heresy, and orthodoxy emerge? Here, the picture Williams paints in Part One of the interpenetration of doctrinal issues and political and personal factionalism is highly illuminating and one that has obvious parallels with many of the doctrinal debates of far less moment which rage in the North American scene presently.
Williams's book should be purchased and studied by all those who are serious about understanding the nature and development of Christian orthodoxy. First, Arianism, the tendency to divide God the Father from the Son and to make the latter ontologically subordinate, is a perennial problem within the church. Trinitarianism is not strong within Evangelical circles even at the level of the ministry, with many pulpits echoing to the sound of types of tritheism or, more commonly, modalism. Protestantism has defined itself so carefully in relation to Roman Catholicism on the issue of justification that the fundamental identity of God as Three-in-One and One-in-Three has too often been taken unjustifiably for granted. Thus, books which explain why the church has come to think of God in the way she has are of crucial importance today. Second, while the debates and the doctrinal formulations which the church adopted are highly technical, the question which lies at their base is really very simple: If Christ saves, then must he be God? The church's answer was ultimately an unequivocal "yes." We neglect the wealth of patristic debate on this subject at our peril.
