The monotheistic Arius had it right. The Trinitarian Athanasius had it wrong.
The NT (New Testament) Jesus is not “of one substance with the Father”, as Trinitarianism asserts. He is subordinate not only in his earthly life, but also in his heavenly preexistence. As the Arians said, the Son is of “like” (homoiousios) substance with the Father, but not of “the same” substance (the Athanasian homoousios).
The Gospels’ preexistent Jesus is not the Trinitarian Son. He is much more like a super-angel. Which is probably why all the Gospels, including John, label Jesus as the biblical (Books of Daniel and Ezekiel) heavenly Son of Man. The Son of Man is an ancient angelic being. He is created or begotten, and therefore subordinate to God, who is the original Creator-Begetter. However,at the same time, he is the one unique, superlative creature in that he is the express image of God and the “subcontractor” in God’s work of Creation. But he is not “God”, because even the most perfect image is never identical or equivalent to that which it reflects; he is not Creator because God is the Creator – who handed his blueprint to the Son for doing the actual labor of cosmos-construction; and on the final day he will exercise God’s own judgment (again functioning as the Son of Man) – again, not because he is “God”, but because God ordained him to that ministry or capacity; and he forgives sin not because “only God can forgive sin”, but because – again – God empowered him to do so.
Even John’s Jesus is not the same as God. He explicitly excludes himself from the Godhead in texts such as John 17:3 where he calls the Father, “You – the only true God” (there is no room here for the Son or any other divine figure);
where he tells Mary Magdalene that he must “ascend to your God and to MY God” (God cannot have a God);
and where he calls himself “a man who has heard, and obeys, the will of God” (God cannot obey God).
Significantly, John’s Jesus never refers to himself as “the Word”. On the contrary, John only calls Jesus “the Word” in the Prologue, which is an antiphonal hymn John borrowed from other sources, and interspersed with John the Baptist material. In the main body of John’s Gospel, Jesus never calls himself the Word – he calls himself the Son of Man, the Son of God, the Shepherd, the Living Water, the Bread of Life, etc., but never the Word, never the Logos.
Therefore even if we were to read between John’s lines and still manage to see the Word speaking in and through Jesus, we still have the portrait of a subordinate being because of course, a word that is spoken is secondary to the speaker’s originating motive and intent. The Word is not the Father-Creator, but as Creation’s subcontractor, of course the Word was there with God “in the beginning”. Of course as the primordial Son, the Word existed before all Creation – and of course has to exist “before Abraham came to be”; and naturally the Son/Word is planning, in John’s Farewell Discourse, to “return to the glory I had with the Father before the world was made” – a claim to preexistence, but not to deity. None of these affirmations indicates that the Word is of the same essence of God. Quite the contrary, they only emphasize his subordination and obedience to his true, only Source – his heavenly Father.
Thus, Arianism far better discloses the primordial angelic creature that the earliest christologies conceived Jesus to be. Christianity’s jettisoning of the Arian Christ remains its single most, greatest, self-inflicted wound. Only if and when new conventicles of Arian-based christology are convoked and become viable can the Christian Church finally say that it is actually worshiping “in spirit and in truth”.
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