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Dogmatic Theology — Topic 5

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Dogmatic Theology — Topic 5

Trinitology

Trinitarian Heresies and Their Refutation

  • The beginning of heresy
    • Monarchianism (Anti-Trinitarianism)
    • Monarchian heresy: Dynamism
    • Monarchian heresy: Modalism
    • The Perverse Teaching of Subordination
    • The teachings of Origen
    • The teachings of Arius
    • The refutation of Arianism: St. Athanasius and the doctrine of deification
    • The “Macedonian” Heresy (Πνευματομάχοι)
    • The teaching of the “Filioque”

Monarchian heresy: Dynamism

The emergence of the Monarchian movement of the Dynamists is associated with the names of Theodotos of Byzantium (also “the Tanner”) (c. 190), Theodotos the Banker or Money Changer (c. 200) and Asclepiades.[1] Theodotus the Tanner during one of the persecutions renounced Christ. Justifying himself, he said that he denied not God but Christ who was simply a man. Theodotus did not deny that Christ was born in a supernatural way, but that it was God Who was born; not the Logos, but a person who unlike other men was deified. By nature Christ is not God but man: nowhere in Scripture does it say that Christ is God. It is said that: The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee(Lk. 1:35), but it is not said “He shall be born of thee.” Thus an ordinary man was born, albeit in a supernatural way from the Virgin. Yet in Him the Spirit of God (i.e. the power of God and not a Person of the Trinity, hence the name dynamist: δύναμις – strength) fully abode. This man was more fully deified than any of the previous prophets.

Consequently, this movement in essence came to the total denial of Christianity. Not having the ability to present their teaching as an ideal for common people, the Dynamists tried to win over the Christian intelligentsia by analyzing the Scriptures “critically” for proofs of their teaching. In the person of their final representative, Paul of Samosata, a remarkable dialectics was produced. Only with great effort did the Christian Church achieve victory over his systematic, yet heretical teachings.

The doctrine of Paul of Samosata arose after the death of Origen and the other exceptional theologians of the ancient period. Paul became the bishop of Antioch around the year 260 and was condemned and deposed at the Council of Antioch in 268. According to the teaching of Paul God is a single being – ἐν πρόσωπον. This single person (single hypostasis) could in no way develop into multiplicity. Within this God was found the “Logos;” however, this Logos is not the hypostatic Son of God, but rather the non-hypostatic wisdom (σοφία) contained in God.

[1] Eusebius of Caesarea. Church History. Book 5. Ch. 28.

Monarchian heresy: Modalism

The movement of the Modalist Monarchians is connected with the personages of Praxeas, the heresiarch Noetus of Smyrna, and most notably with Sabellius the Presbyter. The Modalists based their teaching off the following passages of Holy Scripture: I am the Lord, and there is none else, there is no God beside me(Is. 45:5);he that hath seen me hath seen the Father(Jn. 14:9); I am in the Father, and the Father in me(Jn. 14:11); I and my Father are one(Jn. 10:30).

The early Modalists borrowed the teachings of the Syrian Patripassions (from Latin: pater – father and passio – to suffer). They taught that the Father Himself appeared in the flesh, having become the Son, suffered, died and raised Himself from the dead. The Modalists thought that in God there was one hypostasis and one being; God is unquestionably singular, being triple not in hypostases but in guise (πρόσωπον, persona – face, the mask of an actor, disguise, outer appearance) or in manner of being (latin – modus) under which is discovered the singular God. Thus the term “modalism” and “son-father” (Υἱοπατήρ). Polemicizing with the Modalists, Tertulian says that it would be more palatable to assert that there are two separate gods, than to accept their single “shape-shifting” God (quam unum deum versipellem praedicare).[1]

Sabellius brought the teaching of Modalism to its ultimate culmination. God Himself is an inaccessible entity (Monad – Μονάς, Μονάδος). When considered outside the context of the created world God is silent. When God begins to reveal Himself, He becomes the “speaking” God. Thus God takes on the role of the Word for the creation of the world. According to Sabellius the Logos is revealed in three persons throughout the process of the Divine Economy, as the Father, the Son and the Spirit. Therefore, the Monad is not identified as the Father, nor the Logos and the Son; in fact Sabellius’ Logos proceeds the Father. He connects the idea of the Trinity to the history of the Divine Economy: the Father is manifest for the creation of the world and the Law of Moses, the Son in the incarnation, and the Holy Spirit in the descent upon the apostles. The Father ceases to exist when the Son appears, and likewise the Son when the Holy Spirit becomes manifest, which in His own turn will eventually revert to being the Logos, Who will again fade into the Monad; the “speaking” God Who is revealed will once again become the silent God, and everything will fall into silence.

[1] Tertullian. Against Praxeas. Chapter 23:7.

Monarchianism (Anti-Trinitarianism)

The Church’s teaching about Christ both as the Logos and as the eternal Son of God to many seemed to be a strange and unacceptable novation of a “second God.” One heresy which rose up in opposition to this supposed “teaching of polytheism” was Monarchianism(Anti-Trinitarianism). Tertulian states that their battle cry and sign was, “we hold to monarchy” (monarchiam tenemus). By monarchy (μοναρχία) they meant the teaching of an absolutely singular God that had absolute power. This term was used by them to show that the Christian doctrine of God was directly opposed to the ideas of the ancient world with its polytheistic tendencies. The doctrine of the Logos was the “stumbling block” for the Monarchians. In fact, many of the Monarchians considered the Gospel of John (in which the theology of the Logos is most clearly described) and the Book of Revelations as fabrications, claiming that Cerinthus, a Gnostic heretic, had written them under the name of John.

There were two lines of thought that led to the denial of the divinity of Christ as the second Person of the Holy Trinity. 1) Christ is not essentially God, but is only a man filled with the power of God. 2) God Himself is the Son, and is Christ, i.e. the Father and Son are two names of a single identical being, they differ from each other only subjectively in the manner in which They reveal Themselves to us. In the first case the Monarchians are called Dynamists (or Adoptionists), in the second – Modalists.

The beginning of heresy

Christianity has from is beginnings confessed strict monotheism, belief in one God alone; however, as we learned in the previous lesson, the one God is Three Persons. The complexity of this dogma lead many into delusions and false conceptions. Throughout history these false teaching were condemned by the Church as heresies (αἵρεσις – a choice, a system of principles). Since the true teaching about the Most Holy Trinity has already been considered at length, this lesson will focus strictly on content of the most prominent heretical teachings that the Church faced.

The Perverse Teaching of Subordination

Many ancient philosophers taught about a single Divine Absolute, meaning an absolute entity, transcendent of the world, an inaccessible monad. While considering the world next to God, the finite next to the infinite, philosophers denied the possibility of direct communication between the Absolute and the created. An intermediary was necessary, something lower than the divine Absolute but higher than the world. In philosophy, this intermediary was called the Logos, which was the reflection of the Divine in the world.

The apologists, knowing this philosophical system, naturally pointed to those elements of it which were helpful in the evangelization of the pagan nations about the Son of God, the Word of God, by Whom all thing were made (Jn. 1:3). Nonetheless, this philosophical principle of an intermediary also had negative effects on early Christian teachings about God, because of the inequality between the Logos and the Absolute. This trend was called “subordination” in the pre-Nicean period.

We can see a classic example of subordination in the works of Tertullian (c. 155-223). He proves first that the Son of God is not the same person as the Father, and second that acknowledging the hypostatic existence of the Son is not ditheism. The teaching of Tertullian can be expressed in the following terms:

  • Each of the Persons of the Trinity is God;
  • “Both the Father is God, and the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God; and all together they are God;”
  • Yet They are all One;
  • The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are united in essence, but divied in Persons.

The internal Word of God abode in the Father eternally, inseparable from the Father as His Intellect. The Logos is revealed, is born when the words let there be light****(Gen. 1:3) are pronounced. He receives His hypostatic existence in the first moment of creation and for creation as the instrument of creation. God the Father Himself, being transcendent, cannot directly encounter anything, and thus is in need of an intermediary in the work of creation.

The divinity of Son of God, the Logos, as the intermediary between God and creation, is lesser than that of the Father. Tertullian speaks about the Word as being part of the Divine substance. The Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father through the Son.” Like the Son, Who received hypostatic existence at the beginning of creation, so too the Holy Spirit begins His individual existence at the moment of Pentecost, before which He abode inseparable from the Son. It is worthy of note, that this predominance of philosophical thought in theology brought the West eventually to the teaching of the Filioque.

The refutation of Arianism: St. Athanasius and the doctrine of deification

![](https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIP.xAzbJjE21SxgoWo- NmQWUgAAAA?pid=ImgDet&rs=1)The importance of deification became a crucial argument for St. Athanasius the Great in the dispute with Arius. His argument is founded on a soteriological principle: “He (God) was made man, so that we might be made God” (i.e. deified).[1] This saying was first formulated by Irenaeus of Lyons:

“For it was for this end that the Word of God was made man, and He who was the Son of God became the Son of man, that man, having been taken into the Word, and receiving the adoption, might become the son of God. For by no other means could we have attained to incorruptibility and immortality, unless we had been united to incorruptibility and immortality. But how could we be joined to incorruptibility and immortality, unless, first, incorruptibility and immortality had become that which we also are, so that the corruptible might be swallowed up by incorruptibility, and the mortal by immortality, that we might receive the adoption of sons?”[2]

The whole Church accepted man’s deification as the necessary and indispensable foundation of salvation. St. Athanasius taught that two conditions had to be true for salvation and deification to be possible:

  1. The Divinity of the Son: “man could not be deified, if the Word, having become flesh, was not the true and actual Word of the Father by nature;”
  2. Union of man with God in Christ: “for this reason there came about such a union, (in Christ,) to unite man with God by nature, that his (man’s) salvation and deification should be sure.” This would not have been possible if the Son had not been God: “if the Son were a creature, then man remained no less subject to corruption, still being separated from God.”

St. Athanasius formulated his teaching in the following way: God the Father is the sole source for Divine Being (Life, Existence); from Him the other Persons of the Trinity and all creation receive their origin of being. However, the created world is fashioned , whereas the Son is born of the Father, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father.

While refuting Arius St. Athanasius explains that the birth of the Son differs from the act of creation in the following ways: 1) birth indicates descent from the very being of the Father, from His own essence, so the Son is akin to the Father in everything; 2) birth is an act by nature of the one giving birth; God the Father gives birth to the Son not by will but by cause of His nature as the Father , whereas creation is an act entirely dependent on the will of the Creator.

[1] Athanasius the Great. On the Incarnation. 54.3.

[2] Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies. Book 3.19.1.

The teaching of the “Filioque”

Due to historical circumstances, the subject of the descent of the Holy Spirit from the Father occupied an important place in the development of the Orthodox doctrine of God. The controversy arose because of an addition to the Nicene- Constantinopolitan Creed made in the Latin West. It is known as the Filioque (“and the Son”); the implication is that the Holy Spirit proceeds not just from the Father, but from both the Father and the Son.

The roots of the doctrine of the Filioque are found in the theology of St. Augustine, specifically his teaching on the Trinity. Although the schism, brought about in part because of the Filioque, occurred many centuries after the life of Augustine, the western conceptual model of the Trinity was formulated and significantly differed from that of the Eastern Church already in the IV century.

The rationale of this doctrine is contained in the assertion: that which is not contrasted (juxtaposed) in God cannot be discerned. In this context the interrelations of the Divine Persons are considered in a naturalistic way, by analogy of relations observed in the created world, in particular, cause-and- effect relationships. It was thought that if both the Son and the Spirit have their direct cause of being only from the Father, they were indistinguishable one from another. As a consequence, an additional relationship was introduced between the Son and the Holy Spirit, to distinguish them from each other, which is also defined as a procession. As a result, the point of equilibrium immediately and sharply shifts toward Unity, rather than Trinity.

In the Christian East the Latin doctrine of the Filioque was observed long before the Great Schism of 1054. The first of the Eastern Fathers to address this question was St. Maximus the Confessor (†662), but he saw no fundamental difference between the Eastern teaching on the descent of the Spirit from the Father through the Son and the Latin teaching on the descent of the Spirit from the Father and the Son. Photius I of Constantinople (†893) position was much harsher, as he saw in the Filioque signs of Sabellianism.

Following the Great Schism in 1054 the controversy became ever more acture. Among others, Sts. Gregory II of Cyprus, Patriarch of Constantinople (†1289), Gregory Palamas (†1357) and Mark of Ephesus (†1444) were instrumental in forming the current Orthodox position on the question of the Filioque.

Throughout the Filioque controversy the Greek Fathers raised a variety of objections to the Latin doctrine, which can be summarized in the follow five points:

  1. the very fact of making an addition to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed is an unacceptable innovation;
  2. the doctrine of the Filioque contradicts Holy Scripture (cf. Jn. 15:26);
  3. it contradicts the writings of the Eastern Fathers of the Church, whose authority is confirmed by the Ecumenical Councils;
  4. it violates the principle of monarchy in the Trinity by introducing a “second beginning” into the God-head;
  5. in the theology of the Holy Fathers, the pre-eternal procession of the Holy Spirit is not the same as His descent in time “through the Son,” which is connected directly with the Economy of salvation and not the eternal ontological procession.

The teachings of Arius

For the presbyter Arius, who started teaching in Alexandria around the year 318, the philosophical ideas of the single Absolute and the intermediary role of the Logos in the work of creation was an axiom. Unlike Origen, who “raised” a creature to the level of eternity, practically to the level of Divine essence (a sort of veiled pantheism), Arius couldn’t accept that the Son was born of the essence of the Father and thus “took away” part of His essence. If the Son were born of the essence of the Father and also coeternal with the Father, then Arius saw no difference between the Father and the Son, which he understood as Sabellianism. Additionally, the origination of the Son from the Father’s essence, according to Arius, necessarily presupposed emanation, the overflowing of the Divine essence, which was seen as an absurd idea because it introduces variability into God.

The principle of the Absolute refers only to God the Father in Arius’ teaching. Everything else is foreign to God and has a different essence including the Son Who is born (i.e. changes), which means He is not God, but a creature. Only the Father is unoriginate and thus only He is God. The Son comes into being just as other creature do. The Father’s act of will produces the Son: “the Son subsist(s) in will and intention (of God) before time and before the ages…before he was begotten, or created, he did not exist.”[1] The Son is the first and highest of God’s creatures.

[1] Letter of Arius to Eusebius of Nicomedia. // Theodoret of Cyrus. Church History. 1.5.

The teachings of Origen

Origen (c. 185-254) constructed a slightly modified version of subordination. Cosmology is the central element in his system. Thus, Origen only looked at trinitology in light of his teaching on creation (likewise he developed his Christology and soteriology in the context of his teaching on the pre- existence of souls). Origen’s point of departure, like Tertullian’s, was the idea of the Logos being an intermediary between the Father and creation, and secondly the philosophical principle that there cannot be two Absolutes.

According to Origen, God must always be creating. He is Creator by nature, and creation is thus an act of divine nature (later St. Athanasius the Great will insist that creation is an act of divine will, not nature). Therefore since the Son is born for creation He must be eternally born: ἀεί γεννητός (always being born) not just γεννητός (born). Accordingly, there is no difference between the Son before and after creation. For the Son “to be” means “to be being born;” He cannot “be born” or “have been born.” Origen’s theology states that the Son is coeternal with the Father, and that between the Father and the Son there is no interim. This was a constructive progression in theology (i.e. the eternal birth of the Son); however, it was developed on the false premise of the eternal existence of creation also.

Yet Origen’s theology did not reach total equality between the Father and Son. Although Origen states that the enteral birth cannot be an “emanation,” accompanied by the lessening of the Divinity, yet the idea that there can be only one Absolute kept Origen from thinking outside of the terms of subordination. Birth “from the being” of the Father is seen by him as a kind of physical act, an eternal process in time and not truly pre-eternal. Origen conceived this as a division of the Father’s being into parts, and therefore denied the possibility of the Father and Son as a single united Being, and consequently their complete equality.

Origen insists that one can only pray to the Father and not to the Son; but to know God and to pray to Him is only possible “through” the Son and “in” the Spirit. The Father is the origin of the Divine life: the idea of the monarchy of the Father is absolute and unconditional for Origen. To the Father he gives not only the name Θεός, but also Αὐτοθεός (God-self). As regards the Son Origen also uses the name Θεός, but generally adds: God by communion, God by attribute, δεύτερος Θεός (second, other, lower God) and even “intermediate nature” (between God and creation), or even directly “creation” (κτίσμα) (nevertheless he does not claim that the Son was created “from nothing,” as Arius did later). The Holy Spirit is even lesser in Divinity that the Son.

The “Macedonian” Heresy (Πνευματομάχοι)

The next heretical group that the Church came up against was the “Pneumatomachi” (Πνευματομάχοι – lit. spirit-fighters), also known as Macedonians or Semi-Arians. They have their origins in Arianism. Obviously in Arianism not only the Son is disparaged, but even more so the Spirit is. Following the condemnation of Arianism, when the Church established that the Father and the Son are of one essence, a group continued to deny the equality of the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son. In refuting these heretics, St. Athinasius and later the Great Cappadocian Fathers used the same methodology as in the dispute with the Arians. Their point of departure is the notion of the fullness and perfect unity of the Holy Trinity: “the entire Trinity is one single God.” In the Holy Spirit is the beginning of renewal and sanctification, the Spirit of life, Spirit of Holiness, Chrismation and Seal. Because of the Spirit we are called partakers of God. If the Holy Spirit were a creature, it would be impossible for is to be partakers of God: “We would be united with a creature and become alien to the Divine nature, not partaking of it in the slightest.” The reality of deification testifies to the divinity of the Spirit. Salvation was brought about through the incarnate Son of God, Jesus Chrsit, Who sends us the Holy Spirit, through whom we are brought into the Divine life.

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