And we want to begin a discussion of the Trinity and the first issue we want to take up here is the history of the doctrine of the Trinity through NICIA Calcidon. And the first thing I want to share with you here are my pedagogical goals. Why am I going to bother with this history that I'm going to subject you to for the next hour or so and the beginning of next week. First of all, I want to contextualize the early credal history of the church in terms of the church's response to the Christological and the Trinitarian trends of the first four centuries. Now what did he just say? Well, this is not nearly a history lesson. The fact is the early church debates about who Jesus is and how he relates to God. In other words, the early church debates about Christology who is priced and the Trinity are the same debates we have today. Turn on the Bible, answer man and listen to his callers and we're going to talk about those guys. It does seem to be no new heresy under the sun. It's interesting as I go through these, I go, hey, there's the Jehovah's Witnesses and there's the Mormons. Second reason, I think it's important that we learn to appreciate something of the complexity of these issues. We need to realize that people who earnestly sought the Lord differed from one another and differed radically over important biblical and theological issues. What we need to learn is that doctrine doesn't just fall out of the pages of Scripture. It must be sought, it must be won. And that message comes through more clearly looking at this issue historically than any other. Now let's get into B then the problem of the early church. The early church was faced with a serious problem. How are they to combine the monotheistic confession of the Old Testament with this new content of the New Testament revelation? Clearly there's something about this New Testament that goes beyond mere monotheism. But the fact of the matter is the church had no precedent. It had no models. How could they even begin to think of Jesus as deity? There was no framework through which they could understand these new things. So in some respects, the early history of the church was very much about seeking a suitable framework. A way to speak meaningfully and biblically about Jesus, about his relationship to the Father, and ultimately about how the Holy Spirit relates to the two of them as well.
As is usually the case in such matters, several frameworks were tried out and more than one existed at any one time by different groups. And so naturally there was competition and there was contention among these different frameworks. Now I think it best here to offer a taxonomy of these theological frameworks. Technically these types we're going to talk about are crystallological categories that is to say they articulate the way that the early church understood the status of Jesus Christ in his relationship to the Father. But each one carried its own particular set of broader implications for the doctrine of the Trinity. Those of you who had me this semester in spiritual last things, you're familiar with this framework. I want to use it again with some slightly different content. Well let's get into this taxonomy. And these are from J&D Kelly. I should give him a credit here. This is from his early Christian doctrines. First of all the first position is called adoptionism. The adoptionist position suggested there was a time at which the sun became divine. There was a time in which a peculiar relationship was conferred upon him by the Father. And I'm going to throw some scripture at you for each one because I want you to see that people who held different positions could also prove text in sight scripture. People who held this position could cite Psalm 2 or 7 and Hebrews 1, 5 and you can look those texts up and imagine what they would look like read through adoptionist eyes. Another position that was common could be called identity wasn't called that these terms are from Kelly but could be thought of as identity. There were Christians who said that there is an identity within the biblical text between the Father and the Sun. In other words that one is the other. The Father as Lord, Yahweh and Jesus as Lord, Kurias. And these folks could cite Isaiah 63, verse 9, Psalm 96, verse 10. What Kelly calls the subordinationists or the derivationists noted that there are passages which clearly say that the Father is greater than the Sun. And suggest that the Sun came from the Father. And thus that the Sun is somehow less than God. And they would turn to passages like Genesis 22, verse 15, and John 14, 28, where Jesus says the Father is greater than I. Finally, the distinction tradition. There are passages which speak of one Lord and another Lord, thus drawing a numeric distinction in such a way that one is not the other. And people who would hold this position could cite Psalm 110, verse 1, and Acts 234. Now without telling you which one of those is Orthodox letting you figure that out, we will look at each one of these a bit more separately here. Let's first of all take the adoptionist tradition. The adoptionist model actually began in Jewish Christian circles. For most Jews, the new ideas of Christianity simply implied polytheism and thus they rejected the Christian revelation. But other Jews sought to find a middle way, a compromise, a synthesis between the old tradition of Judaism and this new thing called Christianity. So we do have a group of people who could be called Jews, but also want to make room for a teaching about Jesus. Now of course, as we know, there was more than one variety of Judaism in the first and second centuries. And the position that we're here going to call ebianism came out of the Phariseic tradition of Judaism. If you recall, the Pharisees were extremely moralistic and rigorous in their application of the Old Testament law. So if we're going to synthesize the Phariseic Judaism and Christianity, what we might end up with is something that has the presuppositions of the ebianites. So what they wanted to put together was first of all an emphasis upon monotheism, second a certain reading of the Old Testament law. They want to think of the salvific preeminence of the mosaic law and Jesus. But Jesus is going to have to be understood through the priority of the first two. The first two principles are the starting points. You start with an emphasis upon monotheism and you start with the emphasis upon the mosaic law as the way to redemption. The question is, where is Jesus going to fit into that? Well adoptionism is going to be a key here for the ebianites. The ebianite story went like this. Jesus of Nazareth was the natural son of Joseph and Mary. He was not God incarnate. He was rather a prophet of the law. His mission was not to be a redeemer. What he was sent to do was to tell us how to rightly keep the law, how to he was sent to reveal, how he might rightly keep the law. And he was sent to be an example. He was meant to be an embodiment of how you keep the law. As baptism, God empowered him, commissioned him to function as that example, that exemplar. Again, his mission is not redemptive, it's prophetic. He is a Messiah, but the mission of the Messiah is to give the right interpretation of the law and to give an example of law keeping. Thus we have a tradition or a position that is not tributarian in any way, shape, or form. It really has a unitarian understanding of God. Now even though ebianism survived well into the 4th century, it was already on the way in the mid-2nd century. As the church became more and more gentile and less and less Jewish, Christians started to understand that this position did not do justice to the uniqueness of Jesus Christ. But even as the ebianists were passing from history, there were gentile Christians who accepted and defended the doctrine of the radical oneness of God. So basically the same starting point is the ebianists. Here we talk about the dynamic monarchions. The term monarchion was actually coined by Trotelli and of Carthage. It originally meant that these people defended the monarchy, the unity, the simplicity of God over against polytheistic systems. Like the ebianists, the dynamic monarchions insisted upon the monotheism of God. But their commitment to monotheism came more from rationalist philosophy than it did from the Old Testament. And their rationalism demanded a number of things. First of all, God is a simple being that is to say he has no parts. If God has parts, you can separate those parts and some part will be more fundamental than the other parts and the part that's more fundamental is what you should be calling God in the first place. Does that make sense? Second, God is one. That's the monotheism. Third, a strict distinction between the physical and the material. And along with that, the association of God with the spiritual. Does that say physical and material? B, B, B, B, B, B. Spiritual and material. Or mental and physical. But an insistence that God is mental or spiritual and not physical or material. And this means, of course, no incarnation. If God is absolutely associated with the immaterial, the spiritual, he cannot come in contact with physical reality. Now, from those commitments, Fidocious of Byzantium claimed that the divinity that was in Jesus of Nazareth was an impersonal power which proceeded from God. But this divinity that was in Jesus of Nazareth was not God. It was simply a power thus the name, dynamic, monarchism. The word dynamic comes from dunamis, power. In a manner that was very much like the Ebeneites, Fidocious claimed that inspired by the spirit at his baptism. Jesus led a exemplary life of close communion with God. At his baptism, the Christ principle, this dynamist, this dunamis descended on Jesus, who was already a supremely virtuous man. But at his baptism, the Christ adopted Jesus as God's Son. From that day forward, he was able by the power of the indwelling Christ, or sometimes called the Logos, to perform miracles. And he was blessed with extraordinary insight into the nature of men and things. Well, again, Jesus does not appear to be God here. The oneness of God is protected but at the price of Christ. At most, Jesus is a man who is indwelt or possessed by God in such a scheme. Before leaving the dynamic monarchies, we should at least note that they didn't merely state their own position, but they also entered into quite a bit of dialogue and critique with other positions. And one of the positions that they critiqued was those who held to a real distinction between the father and the son. Not surprisingly, the dynamic monarchians said that people who hold to that distinction are polytheists, the argument went like this. See what you think about this logic. If the father is one and the son another, and if the father is God and Christ God, then there is not one God. But two gods are simultaneously brought forward. The father and the son. See any holes in that? Looks pretty good, actually. Now, like ebonyism, dynamic monarchism will not survive. But its arguments against the true deity of Christ and its allegation that trinitarianism is merely a thin veil for polytheism. It will survive and will be reproduced by the Aryans of the 4th century. We should note, again before we pass on here, that adoptions in the still with us. Classical liberalism has a lot in common with the adoptionist tradition, as does Mormonism, quite frankly. Roman No. 3 identity. Far more numerous and far more long lasting than dynamic monarchism was a movement called modalism or modalistic monarchism. Like the dynamic monarchians, the modalistic monarchians, I'm not going to try to say that three times fast, but like the last group, this new group, also emphasized the unity and simplicity of God. But unlike the dynamic monarchians, the modalists did not want to limit or deny the deity of Christ. You see, they want to say Jesus is God. This means that the shared title of monarchianism is perhaps unfortunate. Because apart from their shared theological commitment to monotheism, the two movements have almost nothing in common. Well, what are they insist upon? Three things. All of them passionately held. The simplicity of God, the oneness of God, and three, the deity of Christ. So divine simplicity, monotheism, and the deity of Christ. But these are not all equally held commitments. The first two are primary. The deity of Christ must be explained in terms of simplicity and oneness. Any suggestion that the sun was other than the father or a distinct person, apart from the father, will seem to the modalists to lead in escapeably to the blasphemy of two gods. Even though they want to say Jesus is God, they do not want to head in the direction of polytheism. We see how they do that. The modalists held to the oneness of God, yet to the full deity of Christ by claiming that the distinctions within God that we see in the New Testament are more apparent than real. They are more linguistic than real. They are more historical than ontological. They did not deny the full deity of Christ. They simply identified it with the father. Any distinction between the father and the sun is purely verbal, not real. Christ is not numerically distinct from the father anyway. The father is the sun. The difference is merely one of name. I'll catch you on what's going on here. I could be called Mike. I could be called Mr. Williams. I could be called Dr. Williams. I could be called Hey You Joe. That's not four people, that's one. And according to the modalistic monarchians, what we have here is one God who goes by three names. One of the earliest proponents of modalism was Praxis. Holding to the idea that the name Father signifies the Godhead, Praxis contended that whenever the deity is present, wherever God is, it's a projection of the father. The one simple, the one single God. But this one God can be designated by the term Father or Sun. The terms don't stand for real distinctions. They're merely names applicable at different times. Christ then is not separate from the father anyway. You can put it this way. Christ is the father speaking in a different voice. Now this allowed Praxis to hold that the entirety of God is present in Jesus. These guys actually hold to a very high doctrine of the deity of Christ. And after I heard this one, you'll see the day on the Bible, answer me. Now the best known modalist thinker was a fellow by the name of Sibelius. He emphasized the identification of the father and the son to such an extent that he could say the father died on the cross. The father died on the cross. His thinking went like this. If Christ is God, as Christian faith rightly insists, then he must be identical with the father. Otherwise, he couldn't be God. Consequently, if Christ suffered, the father suffered since there was no division in the Godhead. Now this doctrine of the suffering God has sometimes been called potropostionism. And it's only complicates the issue because this school of thought has been very popular throughout the history of the church. And it's gone by many different names. If you're going to write a paper on them, you'd have to look at potropostionism, monolithic monarchism, subbellinessism, and about 15 other terms. But like Praxis, Sibelius sought to defend the Ones of God and the deity of both Christ, oh, and the Holy Spirit, but without falling into a polyphistic identity. What shall we say, he asked? Have we won God or three gods? Now, Sibelius would get at his point. He would try to develop analogies. Remember what we said? The church is looking for frameworks, and the creation of analogies is one way that they'll try to produce a framework for understanding the Trinity. One of his popular analogies was the analogy of the Sun. This one astronomical entity radiates both warmth and light. According to his model or his analogy, the father is the form of the Sun. And the Sun and Spirit are modes of the Sun's self-expression, where the Sun, that is the S-O-N, is the Sun, the S-U-N, as it's seen, the Spirit is the Sun as it is held. So you have here a kind of ontological analogy. Yet having said that, Sibelius did see some distinctions within God. It was not all merely verbal. There was, according to him, a certain kind of historical distinction within God. Well, I should perhaps say that God distinguishes himself historically. Well, he could even say that God is one being in three persons. If you don't think about the classical language, that really confuses things because that is the classical language. You see, he used the Greek word cross upon. And this word will later go to Latin as persona and come into English as bullwinkle. No, person. But originally, this word cross upon really meant something like a mask. An actor playing a role in a drama wears a mask. And his idea is that God is able to change these masks as the circumstances arise and as the need arises. God wears three masks. He plays three different historical roles as he performs a number of historical operations. This means that Sibelius did distinguish between the Father, the Sun, and the Spirit in terms of history, which he divided into three dispensations. The age of the Father, the age of the Son, and the age of the Spirit. But what's he saying here? The Old Testament, we have the Father, but the Father incarnates as the Son. God changes his mask. And at Pentecost, the Son incarnates, that being incarnates, no, decarnates or something, into the Spirit and he changes his mask again. He could also think of these historical roles in functional terms. The Father is the creator and log giver, the Son is the Redeemer, the Spirit is the sanctifier glorifier. The Orthodox theologian, Tertullian of Carthage, caught it well when he likened Sibelius' analogies to the changes that water undergoes when it's exposed to temperature variations. If you cool water sufficiently, it changes into ice. Should you heat it sufficiently, it will transform into steam. But whether it's vapor, liquid, or solid, it is water, nevertheless. Now, what's wrong with any of that? Have we got, is this the Orthodox position? Is this the historical position of the Church? And it's in this direction, that Tertullian and the tradition of distinction will move.