Arianism

"‘If,’ said he, ‘the Father begat the Son, he that was begotten had a beginning of existence: and from this it is evident, that there was a time when the Son was not. It therefore necessarily follows, that he had his substance from nothing.’"

"Nathaniel Lardner, the author of Letter on the Logos, the work Priestley credited with his own conversion from Arianism to Socinianism, had published anonymously to avoid retribution from both the civil authorities and private citizens — in vain as it turns out."

"The problem that neither side in the controversy [regarding Jesus' divinity] had yet grasped was this: whoever presented a detailed explanation of the relationship of the Father to the Son could fairly easily be accused of heresy. This is because it was difficult, perhaps impossibly so, to describe Jesus' relationship to God in a way that did not seem either to deny his humanity (the Sabellian heresy) or to question his divinity (extreme Arianism). The real root of the difficulty was that Judeo-Christian monotheism posited an infinitely powerful, mysterious, single God who had created not only the world of people and things, but time and space itself. If Christ was actually this God, the human element in him seemed to dwindle into insignificance. But if he was other than God, then, unless one conceived of him as some sort of angel, he would be seen primarily as a man."

"We believe in one God the Father Almighty, maker of all thing visible and invisible."