As Christianity as a whole was figuring out how to reconcile the idea that God is one and both the father and Jesus are not the same and yet are God and that Jesus was somehow begotten, etc certain unacceptable ideas were presented and adopted by self-described Christians. In the midst of these controversies, Tertullian was the first person to use the conceptual language of one substance, three persons to describe the nature of God.
Among the later-designated deviant views were the Monarchian teachings. They came in two dangerous formulations: 1) patripassianism (the conflation of the son with the father, or modalism) and Dynamic Monarchism(or adpotionism, also called Sabellianism).
Patripassianism suggested that the father and the son were the same thing, just assuming different forms. In reality, there was no difference between the two. It is like us wearing different shirts on different days. When I am working at a bank I wear my tie, when I am at the creek, I wear my hideous denim cut-offs. This view was attractive because it preserved the fierce monotheism of the Jews.
Adoptionism suggested that Jesus was fully human and only was the vessel for the Spirit of God from the time that he was baptized. When the Dove descended upon him, he was possessed with the Spirit of God and adopted as his son. This had precedent in Roman legal conceptions of adoption (see Augustus and Julian) and also made sense in terms of the anointed one of God in Jewish ideas.
Tertullian responded to these challenges by offering counter-explanations into the nature of the relationship between these three things that are one god… somehow. His formulations of that relationship were forerunners of the great Trinitarian creeds of the 300s.[1]
The Trinity, flowing down from the Father through intertwined and connected steps, does not at all disturb the Monarchy, or oneness of the divine empire. whilst it at the same time guards the state of the Economy. – TertullianIn speaking about Christ against adpotionism, he talks of one person and two natures using legal terminology and rhetoric.[2] In speaking against patripassianism, he uses the metaphor of the Sun, writing, “it is one substance, but has three manefestations, light, heat, and the orb itself.”[3] Heat stood for the Spirit, light to the Son, and the Father by the Sun itself. Thus it was impossible for there to only be one entity that was wearing three different hats.
So, we see in the patristic era internal arguments concerning the monotheism of God with the revealed persons of the now-called trinity. I have sympathy towards the Adpotionists and the Monarchians because they certainly have Biblical support and the Spirit was nice enough to leave out the nature of its relationship to the Son and the Father in the Canonical writings. However, I reject the Adoptionist and Manarchian claims and follow in the tradition of the proto-orthodox and orthodox views of God. In later posts, I’ll talk about the councils that followed up on Tertullian’s formulations.
[1] Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity, Volume 1, 77.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Bettenson and Maunder, Documents of the Christian Church, 38.
