LUTHER 1527 Arianism

LUTHER 1527
Dr. Oecolampadius also would like to lend a helping hand to that concept of metaphor. When the preachers in Swabia demolished it with an irrefutable treatise, so that he himself could not deny that Paul speaks of the spiritual rock, and no metaphor was there, he still did not honor the truth but grumbled a little against it and said that Paul in this expression was visualizing and thinking of the material rock (Leiblich is translated variously in this volume: “bodily,” “corporeal,” “physical,” “material.”) which represented Christ. As if we were asking here what Paul was visualizing or thinking of, rather than whether there is a metaphor in Paul’s words! We know very well that the material rock represented Christ, and hence Christ is in name and reality a spiritual rock. -Martin Luther

Arianism
Arianism was a religious political war against the spirit of the Christian revelation by the spirit of the world, which, after having persecuted the church three hundred years from without, sought under the Christian name to reduce her by degrading Christ to the category of the temporal and the created, and Christianity to the level of natural religion. It substituted for a truly divine Redeemer, a created demigod, an elevated Hercules. Arianism proceeded from human reason, Athanasianism from divine revelation; and each used the other source of knowledge as a subordinate and tributary factor. The former was deistic and rationalistic, the latter theistic and supernaturalistic, in spirit and effect. The one made reasonableness, the other agreement with Scripture, the criterion of truth. In the one the intellectual interest, in the other the moral and religious, was the motive principle.
HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH Schaff Volume 3 NICENE AND POST-NICENE CHRISTIANTY A.D. 311-600
(Pages 642-643)