Today the Church remembers Saint Athanasius, a bishop who lived mostly in the fourth century. To be a bit anachronistic, Athanasius was the champion of orthodoxy at the Church's very first ecumenical council: the Council of Nicaea, which started in AD 325. The particular point of Christian orthodoxy for which he strongly advocated was the real divinity of Jesus Christ. Prior to this first Council, perhaps the most widespread understanding of the Son's relationship to the Father was the one set forth by another bishop: Arius
Arianism insisted that the Son was the first creation of the Father. According to this view the Father created, or made, the Son before creating anything else either invisible or visible. A good summary of Arianism is there was a time when the Father existed when the Son did not exist. Time, of course, is a function of change. Athanasius rightly understood that this meant that Jesus Christ was, at best, a sort of demi-god.
Far from being "true God from true God," a demi-god is a being who possesses only partial or lesser divine status, a minor deity, maybe the offspring of a god and a mortal, or a mortal raised to divine rank. The classical world was full of such second and third-rate deities.
The particular term Athanasius introduced into Christian theology, the word he thought best-describes the relation of the Son to the Father is the Greek word homoousios. Like most complex, philosophical terms, homoousios is difficult translate. In the third English edition of Roman Missal, promulgated in 2011, homoousios is translated as "consubstantial," as in "consubstantial with the Father."
"Consubstantial" is used in the current English edition of the Missal because it is translated from the Latin consubstanialem Patri and not from the original Greek. But the translation of homoousios used in the second English edition of the Roman Missal, taking its cue from the Greek, is probably a better one: "one in being with the Father."
In the Nicene Creed, we also profess that Jesus is "God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made." Distinguishing between begotten and made is vital for confessing Jesus' divinity. You make what is unlike yourself (someone made this ambo). Like begets like. So, human parents beget a human child. A divine Father begets a divine Son.
Far from being a demi-god, Jesus is truly God and truly human. Just as he is consubstantial with the Father, through the Blessed Virgin Mary, he consubstantial with us! In our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles, it is confessing Jesus' divinity that lands Stephen (one of the Church's first seven "deacons"- see Acts 6:1-6) in hot water. It is Stephen's unwavering confession of Jesus' divinity, his Lordship, that, imitatio Christi, results in his being stoned to death.
Jesus' divinity was not some late development. It is in the New Testament- think of the Prologue to Saint John's Gospel (see John 1:1-5) or this passage from the first chapter of the Letter to the Colossians- Col 1:15-20, to pick just two.
It is, nonetheless, difficult to describe the mystery of one God in three divine persons. Because it is really the mystery of love, grasping it at all is probably more experiential than it is intellectual. But as Jesus says in today's Gospel: "This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent" (John 6:29).
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