Trinitarian Heresies
Before we begin to discuss some specific views of the Trinity that have been condemned by the church as heretical, something must be said about what heresy meant in the early church (as it took on something of a different meaning in the late middle ages), as well as a word about those who supported those heresies.
Heresy has taken on a very negative connotation and to even speak of heresy in today’s world is often met with anger and bad memories. It is remembered that in the late middle ages and into the Renaissance, to be branded a heretic was to attack a person and give grounds to imprison or execute them. Heresy became something that was decided by the church as an autonomous authority and used as a stick to beat people who disagreed with the church. As such it became an extremely political term that is rightly rejected in modern times.
However, this is not the meaning that heresy had in the early church. In the first centuries, heresy was a pastoral diagnosis. If someone was teaching something that was going to be finally destructive to the laypeople, the rest of the church, out of mercy and compassion to those who might be led astray, felt the need to combat that view. It was not nearly as political a term as it became. Heretics were not put to death (though they were occasionally exiled). It is also important to note that the mainstream of the church was not always of one mind. In particular, the conflict with Arianism so impacted the church that, though the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD had rejected the Arian heresy, the church soon after became very much influenced by it that it was said, “Athanasius (the greatest champion for Nicene theology at the time) against the world.” Eventually the church once again rejected Arianism, but it was not the case that once the decision was made there was no room for disagreement, but that the truth of the Trinity continued to impress itself upon the church.
Another thing that needs to be kept in mind when considering various heresies is that those who developed heretical views (the founder of a particular heresy was often called a “Heresiarch”) often did so, not in order to lead people astray or to misrepresent the truth. Instead, they were more often than not trying to do justice to the Gospel as we have it in scripture. For example, the key question being asked at the time of the major Trinitarian heresies was, “What is the relationship between the Father and the Son?” Those who denied what would later come to be known as “orthodoxy” were not trying to mislead, but genuinely believed that their views were correct, and used the Bible to back these views up.
This is a good place to state that, throughout the history of the church, not a single argument was solved simply by an appeal to scripture. The questions were not based around, “What does the text say?” but “What does the text mean?” A major interpretational strategy in the early church and in the Reformation was, “Scripture is the best interpreter of Scripture.” This meant that it was best to allow the passages of the Bible that are clear to interpret those that are difficult. The problem is, who decides which texts are clear and which are difficult? Which texts were emphasized often made all the difference in the world. The primary concerns in theology are not truly textual but methodological. This is why the thrust of this work has been more on how we approach theology than on providing an utterly complete account of all Christian belief. With all these things in mind, we will turn to consider some particular Trinitarian heresies and why they are destructive to Christian faith.
Arianism
This is perhaps the most dangerous and insidious Trinitarian heresy. It was, after all, the first heresy that was combated in an official way, first at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD and again at the First Council of Constantinople in 381 AD. Arianism gets its name from an elder named Arius from Antioch (in present day Turkey) who moved to Alexandria and taught that Jesus, who is called the Son of God, is not fully divine. The claim was that the Son was the greatest of all creatures and was brought out of nothing like the rest of creation. He was not True God from True God as the creed would eventually declare. Arians summed up their views about this with the phrase “There was when the Son was not” (We could say “There was a time when the Son did not exist,” though that is not quite as precise).
The concern of Arius was to preserve the unity of God. If the Son was confessed as fully God, you now had a Father who is fully God and a Son who is fully God. How could this mean there were anything but two Gods? In light of his understanding of monotheism, this was not possible. In the end, what became incarnate (and indeed, it was argued that Jesus was not quite God and not quite man, but something that is in between the two) in Christ was not the fullness of God, but the greatest of all creatures, unfathomably greater than human beings, but not God. It must also be noted that, for many Arians, God himself could not become a human being as it would imply the corruption of God by entering into the brokenness of the human condition. Athanasius would respond that, just as, when Jesus touched a leper, he was not made unclean but cleansed the leper, when God entered into humanity, God was not corrupted, but humanity was healed.
This view has many insurmountable problems. If Jesus is not really God, then the activity of Jesus cannot ever be more than the activity of one of God’s creatures on behalf of others of God’s creatures. The activity of Christ finally tells us nothing about God, but is only a nice lesson of self-giving as a virtuous thing for creatures to do. If Jesus is not really man, but some kind of human/divine being that is really neither one nor the other, then this action has not really even touched our humanity.
Aside from this serious problem, that the salvation proclaimed and embodied in Christ does not touch either God or us and so is effectively useless, Arianism has catastrophic consequences for our knowledge of God. What has been claimed to be the single most significant instance of revelation (indeed, revelation in the fullest sense of the word) is Jesus Christ. If Arius is correct, and Jesus is not of one being with the Father, the word and activity of Christ is not the word and activity of God and so cannot tell us anything certain about God. This means that we can finally say nothing whatsoever about God, since we have no point of access into the divine life on which to base our statements. However, if we look at this same situation from a different perspective, it means that we can say anything we want to about God. If something exists and we can know it, it calls into question any statement we might make about it because it is judged to be true or false in light of what actually exists. However, if we can know nothing about God, there is nothing that can judge our statements about God and we are free to rethink God however we choose and we will inevitably create a god that we want instead of the God that actually exists and is revealed in Christ.
Sabellianism/Modalism
This view takes its name from the name of Sabellius, who argued that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not truly distinct in any meaningful sense of the term, but are rather different facets of the One God that we name differently depending on how we come to encounter God at any particular time. For example, when we encounter God as Creator, we call God the Father; when we encounter God as the redeemer who rescues us, we say we have encountered God as Son; finally, when we experience the power of God dwelling within us, empowering us for our lives, we say that God is Holy Spirit. The names Father, Son and Holy Spirit do not refer to any distinction within God, but only distinctions in how God appears to us. What are traditionally called “Persons” within the Godhead are really “modes,” or ways of appearing to us.
This view, at first, doesn’t seem so bad. After all, why does it matter if we interpret what classic Christian theology has called the Persons of the Trinity as our subjective experience of the One God who is far greater than we can fit into only one analogy? The problem is that we are saying that, though God interacts with us in a three-fold way, though God declares himself to be Father, Son and Holy Spirit to us, it does not correspond with who God actually is. We are saying that there is a tremendous breach between who God is toward us and who God is in himself. If this is the case, we must ask the question, “What, then, does Jesus tell us about God?” This is an important question because, if there is a gap between who God is in himself and who God is toward us, we must ask what God’s activity toward us in Jesus Christ tells us about who God really is in God’s own life. Finally, Jesus tells us nothing certain about who God is because Jesus refers to distinctions between himself and the Father and Spirit, which, according to this view, simply do not exist.
Again, it must be stressed that the goal of Sabellianism was not to derail the faithful or to collapse the Gospel. The goal was to preserve the oneness of God that was seen to be threatened by truly calling Jesus divine. However, by totally eliminating the distinctions between the Persons, it results in making Jesus misrepresent God. This view grants that, when God interacts with us, it is as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but denies that these distinctions have anything to do with who God really is. In the language defined above, it grants that there is an Evangelical Trinity, but not an Ontological Trinity.
There was an ancient view that came to be known as Patripassionism, which means literally, “The Father suffers.” In effect, this view states that, when Jesus was suffering on the cross, the Father suffered as well. It must be stressed that, by saying this, the intention is to say that there is no difference whatsoever between the Father and the Son. We have already said in a previous chapter that the Father did indeed suffer when Christ was on the cross, but suffered as the Father who was giving up the Son, not as the Father who is at the very same time the Son. Or, in other words, it was the Son who was crucified, not the Father, though the crucifixion of the Son was the cause of the Father suffering, but in a different way.
Some have said that the problem with this view is that it allows God to suffer. However, the fact that God suffers is only problematic if one presupposes from the beginning that God cannot suffer and to suffer is unworthy of God. If we press this line of thinking very far, we end up saying that, either Jesus, as the one who suffers on the cross, is not really God (for God cannot suffer) or that he suffers only in his human nature (which ends up introducing a split between Christ’s divinity and humanity like in Nestorianism, discussed in chapter three).
However, the problem is not that Patripassionism claims that God has suffered but because it finally eliminates any distinction between the Father and the Son, which ends up with a Sabellian or Modalist view of God. If the Father is suffering on the cross, and not the Son in distinction from the Father, then the distinction that is proclaimed in the New Testament between the Father and the Son is done away with, yielding all the problems discussed above.
As a side note, it is significant that, when some have bypassed Father and Son language when referring to God (believing it to be sexist), while attempting to name the Trinity, have spoken of God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. This is problematic for a few reasons. First, if indeed it is meant to be equivalent to saying that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, it implies that the Father and the Father alone creates, that the Son and the Son alone Redeems, and the Spirit and the Spirit alone sanctifies us. This is not compatible with the Biblical witness, which emphasizes that it is the joint work of all three Persons as the one Being of God that do all things. Calling God Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier is more of a job description than the Trinitarian name and, in the final analysis, when claimed that it is equivalent to Father, Son and Holy Spirit, it is a modalist understanding of God.
Tritheism
Out of the three classic heresies that are being discussed here, Tritheism is the only one that acknowledges that the distinctions that we see between Father, Son and Holy Spirit are rooted in the nature of God. However, this view goes further than this. This view argues that, in light of the three-fold way in which God reveals himself to us, where the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are each spoken of as divine, we can come to no other conclusion but that there are indeed three gods.
It must be said that this discussion will be far shorter than the others as it has not ever had strong support in the history of the church. Indeed, when people like Gregory of Nyssa were accused of being polytheists, the response was immediate and passionate that they affirmed only one God, though that one God is indeed a community of persons.
The primary concern with this view is that it violates the core convictions of Jews and all the early Christians, that God is one (as exemplified by the Shema, quoted above). To say that there are actually three real gods and not just the one God that is explicitly claimed in both the Old and New Testaments is a radical departure from the history of Israel. This separation from God’s historical interaction with Israel has many problems of its own (see chapter 2, God’s Interaction With Israel).
If some speculation might be in order as to how Tritheism might still be present in one form or another in the modern church, it might be suggested that, if there is a sharp distinction between the work of Christ and the work of the Father or between the work of Christ and the work of the Spirit, Tritheism may be lurking nearby. There has been a practice of many throughout Christian history where an idea is discussed called the Law of Appropriations. In this view, there are some attributes and tasks that are particularly the dominion of the Father (such as creation), others that belong particularly to the Son (such as redemption and love), and others that belong to the Spirit (such as power for the Christian life). If calling God Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier while emphasizing the oneness of God was fundamentally a modalist position, doing the same while emphasizing the threeness of God (as the law of appropriations does) tends toward tritheism. I do not mean to suggest that those who do such things would say they are Tritheists, but rather their sincere attempts to explain God imply such a view.
Love it. Aprreciate it. Thank you. JC in GA
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