Behind Arianism, Jenson sees the typical Hellenistic desire to escape time: “what moves Arius is the late-Hellenic need to escape time, to become utterly dominant. If we are to be saved, Arius supposes, there must be some reality entirely uninvolved with time, which has no origin of any sort and whose continuity is undifferentiated and uninterrupted. Just so, it is because Christ is involved with time that he will not do as really God: ‘How can the Logos be God, who sleeps like a man and weeps and suffers?’”

This means that much derided “classical theism” is the truly anti-Hellenistic position that affirms the reality of time and God’s involvement in time.