Trinitarian Heresies: What is Lost?

I. The Doctrine of the Trinity

By the doctrine of the Trinity, I mean the teaching of the Council of Nicaea, the Nicene Constantinople Creed, and the Athanasian Creed. The Nicene-Constantinople Creed states clearly that that there is one God who exists in three persons. The Council of Nicaea was a watershed for the Christian church—shortly after Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in 313, he convened the first ecumenical, fully representative, universally recognized council of the Christian church. There, the bishops discussed one of the most important questions that Christianity would ever have to face—what was the status of Jesus in relation to God? Everyone there agreed that Jesus was a divine being, but the Arians could not reconcile the idea that he was the same being as God the Father.

After a long and heated debate, the council decided that the evidence from the Bible and tradition lent itself much better to the belief that Jesus was God rather than a lesser being. They phrased this belief as follows: “[We believe] in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father [the only-begotten; that is, of the essence of the Father, God of God], Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were made [both in heaven and on earth]; who for us men, and for our salvation, came down and was incarnate and was made man; he suffered, and the third day he rose again, ascended into heaven; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” Later, at the Council of Constantinople in 381, the bishops added a section to include the Holy Spirit as God as well: “[We believe] in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father,² who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets.”³

Although the Trinity had been a standard doctrine long before Nicaea, these two councils provided Christians with the language that they needed to discuss the Trinity and the authority to use the Trinity as a basis for evaluating orthodoxy. The Athanasian Creed puts it this way:

1. We worship one God in trinity and the trinity in unity,

2. neither blending their person nor dividing their essence.

3. For the person of the Father is a distinct person, the person of the Son is another, and that of the Holy Spirit still another.

4. But the divinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is one, their glory equal, their majesty coeternal.

5. What quality the Father has, the Son has, and the Holy Spirit has.

The key is that God is one in essence and three in persons. Gregory of Nazianzus captures the need for both well: “No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the Splendor of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Them than I am carried back to the One.”⁴

II. What is Heresy?

Traditionally, a heretic is someone who has compromised an essential doctrine and lost sight of who God really is, usually by oversimplification. Literally, heresy means “choice”—that is, a choice to deviate from traditional teaching in favor of one’s own insights.

As Christianity grew and spread, it increasingly came into contact with competing belief systems such as paganism, Greek philosophy, Gnosticism, and others. Inevitably, teachers arose who attempted to solve the intellectual difficulties of Christian faith and make it more compatible with other philosophical systems.

It should be made clear that most of the heretics were usually asking legitimate and important questions. They were not heretics because they asked the questions. It is the answers that they gave that are wrong. They went too far by trying to make the Christian faith more compatible with ideas that they already found appealing, especially those of pagan Greek philosophy. Others struggled with Jesus’ claims to be both sent from God and one with God. The reactions of the religious leaders in the New Testament to Jesus’ claims underline the difficulty of this revelation and point to later struggles about Jesus’ identity.

III. Heresy and the Early Church

Following the apostles, the early church maintained that heresy means directly denying the central orthodox beliefs of the church. Early church creedal statements codified orthodoxy into a widely accepted form. Even before important Christian beliefs such as the canon of Scripture (list of books in the Bible) and the Trinity had been carefully articulated, the mainstream of Christian believers and leaders had a sense of the essential truths that had been handed down from the apostles and the prophets and passed along to each generation of Christians through Scripture, sermons, and baptismal creeds. Before the developments at Nicaea and Chalcedon regarding the proper beliefs about the Trinity and the dual natures of Christ, the early church possessed what is known as the “rule of faith.” To quote Demarest again, “The early church defended itself against heretical teaching by appealing to ‘the rule of faith’ or ‘the rule of truth’, which were brief summaries of essential Christian truths…The fluid ‘rule of faith’ gave way to more precise instruments for refuting heresies and defining faith, namely, creedal formulations such as the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Definition of Chalcedon and the Athanasian Creed.”⁵

The New Testament speaks frequently about false teaching and doctrine. For the early church, heresy was merely teaching that stood in contrast to the right belief received from the prophets and the apostles in the Scriptures and put into written formulas in the rule of faith and the creeds. The early church formed an accepted and received statement of what is true and essential to the Christian faith. The rule of faith gave birth to more precise statements of the essentials of the faith, such as the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed.⁶ These widely accepted formulations of the essential “right doctrine” (orthodoxy) handed down from the apostles were crucial for combating heresy.

It is important to note, however, that the early church did not consider every potential wrong belief to be heretical. Rather, only those beliefs that contradicted the essential elements of the faith were to be labeled heresy, not disagreements on nonessential doctrines.

IV. Why Learn about Heresies?

Core Christian doctrines such as the Trinity, the nature of Christ, and which books should be included in Scripture were developed through the early church’s struggles with heresy. When

teachers began to lead movements that were blatantly opposed to the apostolic tradition, the church was forced to articulate the essential elements of the faith.

The history of heretics, heresies, and the orthodox leaders who responded to them can be disheartening. Why learn about arguments over what sometimes seems like theological minutiae? There are two major reasons. The first is that while there is certainly ambiguity in the Bible, the Creator of the world has decided to reveal himself to us and even to live with us. It is important to honor that revelation. When we find this revelation distasteful and try to reshape God according to our preferences, we are beginning to drift away from God as he really is. Imagine a friend who ignores the parts of you that he or she doesn’t like. Is that a deep relationship? Ambiguity or not, uncomfortable or not, it is vital that we are obedient to what we can know about God.

The second reason is related to the first. When we have a flawed image of God, we no longer relate to him in the same way. Think of the way that you might have related to your parents when you were growing up. Even if you didn’t necessarily understand the reasons behind boundaries they set for you in childhood, they look a lot different when you are confident in your parents’ love than when you fear or resent your parents. It is surprising how much our beliefs about God impact our daily lives, which is partly what makes theology such a rewarding discipline.

It cannot be repeated enough that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Moreover, as C. S. Lewis warns, if we remain ignorant of the errors and triumphs of our his- tory, we run the risk of what he calls “chronological snobbery,” the arrogant assumption that the values and beliefs of our own time have surpassed all that came before. Lewis writes, “We need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is there- fore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.”⁷

V. Sabellianism

Sabellius argued that God is like one actor and who wore three hats. He was a third-century presbyter in Rome and argued that the Father, Son, and the Spirit are simply “masks” or modes in which the one person of God is experienced by believers. Although Sabellius was excommunicated by the bishop of Rome in AD 220, Sabellianism or modalism has remained a recurring challenge in church history. For example, modalistic anti-trinitarianism taught by Michael Servetus (16th century), Emanuel Swedenborg (18th century), Friedrich Schleiermacher (18th-19th centuries), and One Pentecostalism. The dominance of the one over the many, unity over plurality, is the common factor in all these departures from Trinitarian faith.⁸

1. Historical Background

During the second and third centuries, Christianity was struggling to reconcile the idea of a single God, as stated in no uncertain terms in the Old Testament: “I am the Lord, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God” (Isa. 45:5)—with the three divine names that appear at the end of the gospel of Matthew—“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 28:19). What was to be done about the apparent discrepancy? If there was no God besides the God of Israel, who were the Son and the Holy Spirit? Were they new gods who had just been revealed? Was one or both somewhere in between, a demigod? Some theologians, like Marcion, took the confusion as proof positive that the whole Old Testament had to be rejected, while others concluded that all three names were just three different ways that God wanted people to think of him. The most famous advocate of the latter position was a third century theologian and priest named Sabellius. Little is known about Sabellius, who was excommunicated sometime around AD 220, but the teaching attached to his name, known as Sabellian- ism or Sabellian Modalism, became a well-known heresy.

2. Heretical Teaching

During the second and third centuries, Christianity was struggling to reconcile the idea of a single God, as stated in no uncertain terms in the Old Testament—“I am the Lord, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God” (Isa. 45:5)—with the three divine names that appear at the end of the gospel of Matthew—“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 28:19). What was to be done about the apparent discrepancy? If there was no God besides the God of Israel, who were the Son and the Holy Spirit? Were they new gods who had just been revealed? Was one or both somewhere in between, a demigod? Some theologians concluded that all three names were just three different ways that God wanted people to think of him. The most famous advocate of the latter position was a third century theologian and priest named Sabellius.

Sabellianism is the most intellectually well-developed form of Modalism, a heresy that claims that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are simply different modes, or forms, of God rather than distinct persons. Modalism is itself a variety of an older heresy called Monarchianism, which stresses the “one rule” of God. The universe is so orderly, the Monarchians believed, that it must be the product of one supreme ruler, which means a single being. Trinitarianism seemed to complicate the idea of that single being. Monarchianism emerged as a response to the polytheism around the early Christians, affirming that there is no being equal to God and that he is the ruler over everything.⁹

While early versions of Modalism stood out as simplistic and easily dismissible, Sabellius gave the teaching a facelift, making it much more advanced and defensible. In Sabellianism, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are just three different hats or masks that God wears, as the situation demands. Therefore, while it was proper to speak of God the Father and God the Son, it would be incorrect to refer to them as interacting with one another or having separate experiences.

According to Hippolytus, an early opponent of Sabellius, Sabellianism divided up the three roles into the actions of the one God at different times in history. In other words, Father, Son, and Spirit are merely adjectives describing how the one divine being acts and is perceived by believers. Sabellius used the analogy of the sun to explain his position on the life of the Godhead. In the same way that the sun, a concrete object, gives off both light and heat, so also the single divine being radiates in history in different fashions. In the Old Testament we see the divine being acting as Father, then again in redemption in a different form as the Son in the Gospels, and finally in the lives of believers as the Holy Spirit in the present age.

Sabellius’s idea raises some important questions. First, if God takes one role at a time, who was crucified? Did God actually die? And second, to whom was Jesus speaking when he referred to God the Father? The answers to these two questions made Sabellius famous. As to who died on the cross, he adopted a position that his enemies dubbed “Patripassianism” or “the suffering of the Father.”¹⁰ Sabellius was consistent with his theory of the different roles: when Scripture said that Jesus was crucified, it was referring to the same person who had made a covenant with Israel in the Old Testament as well as the one who lived with believers in the New. To buttress this point, Sabellius quoted several passages from the Old Testament, such as Isaiah 63:8–9 lxx): “He became to them deliverance out of all their affliction: not an ambassador, nor a messenger, but himself saved them, because he loved them and spared them: He himself redeemed them.”¹¹ It seemed pretty obvious to Sabellius that the prophecy should be taken literally—the God of Israel came down and died to deliver his people, albeit in a new role.¹² He was adamant that it was all of God rather than part of God that suffered, since the point he had taken issue with in the first place was the division of God.

As for whom Jesus was addressing, Sabellius was again consistent in his theory. He proposed that Jesus was demonstrating how to pray for our benefit rather than holding an actual conversation with God. Sabellius used Jesus’ words to Philip at the Last Supper as a prooftext: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?” (John 14:9). This passage should have priority over the prayer, Sabellius believed, because Jesus was clearly identifying what the nature of God is. The idea that Jesus was praying as a demonstration was also related to Sabellius’s interpretation of “the Word” in John 1; while acknowledging that John 1 seems to hint at the divinity of the Word (traditionally seen as Christ by the orthodox), Sabellius maintained that the Word was to be understood in the simplest sense, as a sound that God had made, rather than turning the Word into a person.¹³

Sabellius’s writings do not survive—the previously quoted pas- sages are taken from quotations preserved by his opponents—and it is difficult to pin down his theology in its best form. It is also unclear what led him to develop his theory. However, from what we can glean from the reactions of his opponents, he had several legitimate concerns. Naturally, he wanted to defend the oneness of God. At this time, several groups had split from Christianity that proclaimed two or more gods—Marcion, for instance, or the Gnostics. Many of these groups had thrown out Christianity’s Jewish heritage. By prioritizing oneness, Modalists were voting for continuity with Judaism and in particular with Jewish monotheism. The fact that God the Father and God the Son (as the Trinitarians put it) each had their own testament only invited division. Marcion had published a list of differences between what he saw as the personalities of the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New, and declared his allegiance to the God of the New. But what if both books were actually devoted to the same God in different roles? The discrepancies would be resolved. Furthermore, Sabellians defended the full divinity of Christ against what they saw as a worrying tendency to demote him to a demigod.¹⁴ Earlier theologians such as Hippolytus had made claims that Christ and God the Father were two persons; Sabellians must have considered the division too sharp, and they charged Hippolytus and others like him with ditheism (worshipping two gods).¹⁵

Some of Sabellius’s concerns were pastoral. Sabellius thought that the idea of assigning persons to the three names was overly com- plicated in a way that God himself would not be. Perhaps the Trinity was a distinction that specialized theologians could make, but for the uneducated laypeople who made up the bulk of the church, a God who is both three and one would be impossible to worship without drifting into polytheism.¹⁶ So in addition to trying to maintain Jewish monotheism, Sabellius thought that his theory of “simple Unity” was a way to take Christianity out of the hands of academics and put it back where it belonged.

Sabellianism persisted in the outer regions of the Roman Empire for some time (especially in Libya, Sabellius’s homeland), and was condemned at most church councils. Although its theology was influential, largely because it was so easy to grasp, Sabellianism lacked clout as a movement and never made much headway into the church proper. The closest it came to doing so was when Sabellius managed to gain favor with Pope Callistus, a rival of Sabellius’s arch enemy Hippolytus, but Callistus soon excommunicated Sabellius and ended his career in the public eye.¹⁷

However, Sabellianism was indirectly credited with creating a much bigger theological crisis in the following centuries. Arian- ism, which drew sharp distinctions between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, was in many ways the opposite of the Sabellian heresy. It was rumored that Arius, who had formerly been a Christian monk, developed overly strong views on the distinctions among the Godhead after hearing what he considered to be a Sabellian sermon in Egypt.10 Indeed, Arianism represented most of the criticisms that Sabellius leveled against the Trinitarians, including the division of God into multiple beings.

3. Orthodox Response

In theology, it is much easier to tell when an idea is wrong than it is to articulate precisely the right answer. The church had been adamant that Modalism did not adequately account for the way God had revealed himself in Scripture, but as of yet few theologians had advanced a solution that was adequate. The challenge of Sabellianism and its brief influence in high places motivated the first substantial Trinitarian theologies and generated the terms that we use today. The orthodox party was represented by three major figures: Hippolytus, a failed candidate for pope, Tertullian, a North African lawyer and convert to Christianity, and Origen, a brilliant but eccentric philosopher from Egypt. Together, these figures hammered out the basics of Trinitarian theology that later figures, such as Athanasius, improved upon.

The Sabellians maintained that any Scripture passage that suggests that God is more than one must be interpreted metaphorically. But Tertullian argued that a metaphorical interpretation twisted the terms “Father” and “Son,” which were given to humans to convey something real about God. “In order to be a husband, I must have a wife,” Tertullian said. “I can never myself be my own wife. In like manner, in order to be a father, I have a son, for I never can be a son to myself; and in order to be a son, I have a father, it being impossible for me ever to be my own father.”¹⁸ Furthermore, he showed that Christ showed his deity to the apostles not only by assuming the attributes of the God of Israel (such as when he says, “I am,” in John 8:58) but also by calling on God the Father as a separate witness. Quoting John 8:18, Tertullian writes, “‘I am one who am bearing witness of myself; and the Father (is another) who has sent me, and bears witness of me.’ Now, if he were one—being at once both the Son and the Father— e certainly would not have quoted the sanction of the law, which requires not the testimony of one, but of two.”¹⁹ The fact that Christ did not know when the end of the world would take place, the fact that he was forsaken by God on the cross, and the fact that he constantly pointed his listeners to the Father as well as himself all rendered Sabellius’s theory difficult to maintain.

However, it remained for the orthodox party to explain precisely what Christ is in relation to the Father, and this was the real achievement of the controversy. They agreed that there are not two gods, as Marcion and some of the Gnostics said. Tertullian therefore developed terms that emphasized the unity of God as well as his distinctions. He proposed that we speak of the Godhead as “one substance (substantia) consisting in three persons (persona),” which was rendered in Greek as ousia (essence or being) and hypostases (concrete things).²⁰ That way, God can be understood properly as one being, a single agent, but it can also be acknowledged that God is also three persons who interact with one another and work together. It is from Tertullian

that we get the important Christian word “Trinity,” although the idea of the Trinity had been around long before and is taught in the Bible.

Tertullian and Origen also set forth explanations of how a Trinity might be possible without creating demigods. They proposed that Christ eternally proceeds from the Father, rather than being born at a single moment in time. (The Sabellians had accused the orthodox of embracing the Valentinian heresy, which said that God created a number of lesser gods, or aeons).

Although “begotten” suggests a one-time, completed action in the past, Tertullian pointed out that God is said to beget Wisdom in Proverbs 8:22—a personified, speaking Wisdom—but was there a time when God was without or will be without Wisdom?²¹ Surely not. God does not have to create his own insight—it simply flows out of him. Similarly, it is possible to “beget” the Son of God without meaning that God created a separate god.²² Christ came from, was dependent on, and was inextricably linked to the Father: “I confess that I call God and His Word—the Father and His Son—two. For the root and the tree are distinctly two things, but correlatively joined; the fountain and the river are also two forms, but indivisible; so likewise, the sun and the ray are two forms, but coherent ones. Everything which proceeds from some- thing else must needs be second to that from which it proceeds, without being on that account separated. Where, however, there is a second, there must be two; and where there is a third, there must be three. Now the Spirit indeed is third from God and the Son; just as the fruit of the tree is third from the root.”²³

However, even if this is so, why not speak of a divine Triad? Should we refer to God as the three persons of the Trinity, as “them” instead of “him”? Tertullian argued that when Jesus said, “I and my Father are one,” he was emphasizing the idea of substance, or divine essence, that allows us to refer to God as a single being. The phrase meant more than the mere unity of purpose that two separate beings would have, even if it also meant less than the complete identification of the Father with the Son that Sabellius had suggested. Instead, Christ was saying that he and the Father are one being, and that the idea that God is a single being came first: to talk to Christ, for example, is to talk to all the members of the Trinity.²⁴ The later Athanasian Creed puts it this way:

1. [W]e worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity;

2. Neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.

3. For there is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Spirit. 4. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit is all one, the glory equal, the majesty coeternal.

5. Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Spirit.

Since God is one, it is possible to distinguish the members of the Trinity, but that distinction does not affect worshiping God as a whole. Jesus’ glory is also the Father’s glory, and so forth. Many of the ideas listed above appeared in Tertullian’s work during this controversy.

4. Relevance

Sabellianism is one of the heresies in the church that sticks around. Anyone who has sat in a Sunday school class and heard that God is like water because he can take three forms (liquid, steam, and ice) has been exposed to a contemporary variation of Modalism. God is not one person who can change into three different forms but a being who is essence (unity) and three persons (plurality).

Although it generally has a low profile compared to Arianism, Modalism has also gained some momentum. It is seen today in the oneness Pentecostalism movement, which denies the Trinity. However, Modalism gains ground less because it is strongly advocated than because of apathy. Sabellianism is attractive in its simplicity, and Sabellius’s pastoral challenge—that the Trinity is the province of specialized theologians—strikes a chord in modern culture. Compared with the idea that God is merely one, the orthodox answer might seem overly complex and philosophical, or an unnecessary later addition to the authentic Christian faith. After all, the Bible does not spell out the Trinity—though it is clearly taught from passages from all over Scripture.²⁵

Perhaps one of the best reasons for complex Trinitarianism comes from C. S. Lewis, who once wrote, “Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.”²⁶ In some respects, this describes the Sabellian controversy; orthodox philosophy needed to be developed to answer the Sabellian philosophy. But Trinitarian theology is much more than a merely human philosophy. It takes seriously the idea that God has revealed himself in Scripture and wants to be known, and that he has revealed himself in a certain way. The question at the beginning—only one God, or three?—is unavoidable when reading the Bible, and the consequence of leaving the question unanswered is to let it be badly answered.

Sabellianism was one such bad answer. In the Sabellian scheme, God is no longer love, because he no longer has anyone whom he has loved eternally. The intimate relationship between God the Father and Jesus in John 17 becomes a weird sort of schizophrenia. Finally, since God takes on several different roles as he pleases (such as Son and Father), it is questionable whether we have ever encountered God as he really is rather than what he does. The orthodox party—laboriously, with many starts and stops in the first few centuries—worked out the answer that is best in accord with Scripture.

What’s more, Modalism undercuts the atoning work of Jesus Christ. If there is only one God who merely appears in different forms in history, one must question whether Jesus Christ was truly man, or if he only appeared to be, as in the heresy of Docetism. If Jesus Christ is not fully God and fully man, then he cannot be the one mediator between God and man.

On a final, practical note, some other religions, particularly the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, see Christianity as Sabellian. Since many of the errors that these groups ascribe to

mainstream Christianity are actually Sabellian in nature, it is useful to know the middle road that orthodox doctrine strikes between unity and dis- tinction. Being able to articulate concisely what the Trinity is, how it makes the best sense of Scripture, and how it affects our salvation and the worship of God can be valuable in witnessing to others as well as developing our own relationship with God.

VI. Arianism

Arius argued that Jesus was a lesser god. Arius, a third century Alexandrian presbyter, the Son was the first created being. He writes: “There exists a trinity (trias) in unequal glories.” The Father is “the Monad,” so that “the Father is God [even] when the Son does not exist.”²⁷ Semi Arians taught that the Son and the Father were of a similar essence (homoiousios) and denied that they were of the same essence (homoousios).²⁸

1. Historical Background

Sudden chaos overtook Alexandria in 318. A riot broke out and people streamed into the street chanting, “There was a time when Christ was not!” Meanwhile, another large group of Christians stood their ground with the bishop against this movement, insisting that Christ is the eternal God along with the Father. Eventually this conflict spilled over to the rest of the empire and threatened to break apart the unity of the church. What began this crisis? It really came down to one man—Arius (ca. 256–336).

Arius was a presbyter in Alexandria, the home of the brilliant theologian Origen (184–230). He came under the influence of Lucian of Antioch, a headmaster at a Christian school, and went to school with Eusebius of Nicomedia, who eventually became an important and influential bishop. Arius eventually went on to become a presbyter in Alexandria. Like most in Antioch, all three erred on the side of emphasizing the humanity of Christ rather than his divinity. They firmly rejected Sabellius’s Modalism, because that would imply that God the Father died and was crucified on the cross. And lest they put their respective church positions in jeopardy, they knew they could not publicly embrace Paul of Samosata’s Adoptionism (the idea that a human person named Jesus was adopted into divinity). A new solution needed to be developed. Based partly on Origen’s teachings on the Trinity, Arius developed a theory of the nature of God that firmly separated Jesus from the Father.

Since part of Arius’s responsibility as presbyter was to direct a school of biblical interpretation for priests and laypersons who wished to teach, his theories quickly gained traction with the next generation of Christian leaders. Over time he began to openly criticize Alexander, bishop of Alexandria. Alexander has been described in history as a gentle and tolerant soul who did not relish conflicts. Nevertheless, the bishop took the field against Arius and insisted that the Son is just as much God as the Father. Arius then accused Alexander of being sympathetic to Sabellius’s Modalism.

A time came when the Arian movement became so popular that Alexander could no longer fight Arius’s criticism with mere sermons and correspondences. He called a synod of bishops to discuss whether Arius’s views were orthodox. Before they made a decision, Arius rallied his followers to pour out into the streets to add pressure to the leaders. Arius’s sympathizers wrote songs to fire up the working class. The mob got caught up in the passion of the slogans, songs, and Arius’s personality, but they did not necessarily grasp the theological issues. In response, Alexander’s supporters likewise marched in the streets against Arius. When the two groups met, a riot broke out.

But the synod went on. More than a hundred bishops from various parts of the eastern Roman Empire listened to Alexander critique Arius’s teachings. He accused Arius of resurrecting Paul of Samosata’s Adoptionism in a more sophisticated way. It did not matter whether the Logos was created before or after time began, Alexander argued. The difference was slight. The fact of the matter was that Arius denied the deity of Christ, which is why Paul of Samosata’s teaching was rejected. Alexander insisted that salvation depends on God’s uniting himself with humanity in the person of Jesus Christ so that we can be saved. After hearing this, the synod decided that Arius’s view was heretical and forced him to leave the city.

2. Heretical Teaching

Arius was not trying to start a crisis; he thought that the relationship between God and Jesus was simple and needed to be freed from overcomplication. After all, “Trinity” was not a common term at the time, and it had not yet been precisely defined. The word “Trinity” is not found in Scripture (it was first used by Tertullian), and it is best described as shorthand for all the teachings of Scripture on the nature of God. Since the age of the apostles, Jesus had always been considered divine in at least some sense, but his precise relationship to the Godhead had not yet been articulated. Yet the church still had an unspoken sense of what the Trinity isn’t. This was why Sabellius was rejected for teaching that God is sometimes the Father, at other times the Son, and then at another time the Spirit, but never all at once (Modalism). Paul of Samosata, likewise, was rejected, because he taught that Jesus started out as a mere man who was “adopted” by God to become the Son of God (Adoptionism). Those early explanations were deemed incompatible with Scripture and therefore heresies.

Arius’s own conceptions of the Trinity can be traced back to Origen (184–253), a brilliant and imaginative Egyptian theologian.²⁹ Two streams of thought flowed in Origen’s teachings concerning the Son, and followers gravitated to one of the two streams. In one stream, Origen strongly affirmed that the Son is equal to the Father. In the other stream, Origen wrote that the Son is eternally subordinate to the Father. The implication of the second stream communicated to some that the Son is somehow a lesser being than the Father, though Origen did not elaborate.³⁰ The lack of a fuller explanation of the second stream of Origen’s thought left the door wide open for further suggestions.

To understand Arius’s theory, we must mention two common presumptions about God that were derived from the logic of Greek philosophy. First, God does not change (immutability). Change implies imperfection. For good or bad, if God changes, then he cannot be deemed absolutely perfect because he has either improved or regressed. God is already at the peak of perfection, so there is no room to grow, and he is fixed at that peak of perfection, so he cannot regress. Second, the other presumption is that God cannot suffer; he is “passionless” (impassibility). Most early theologians believed in these two attributes of God.

Arius and his followers exploited these two attributes to advance their argument that the Son is not coeternal with the Father but is the supreme creation. He acknowledged that everyone believed that Jesus Christ is the incarnation of the Logos (the Word). No problem there. The problem lay with the following: “If the Logos is divine in the same sense that God the Father is divine, then God’s nature would be changed by the human life of Jesus in time and God would have suffered in him.”³¹ The implication that God changes and suffers seemed blasphemous! So it must be then, Arius concluded, that only God the Father is without beginning. The Son came into existence through the will of the Father. To avoid charges of Adoption-ism, Arius taught that the Logos was begotten “timelessly”³²—that is, before Genesis 1:1. “In the beginning,” the Logos was created and was given all things from the Father to share.³³ With this solution it was not God the Father who grew up and eventually suffered on the cross but only the Logos experienced this on behalf of God and humanity. Thus, when the Scriptures speak of Jesus as the Son of God, this is merely a title of honor—a title given to Jesus as the one on whom the Father had lavished a special grace.

Arius believed that the Father and the Son are two separate beings and that the biblical model for their relationship is one of eternal subordination: the Father is the one who decides matters and the Son is the one who obeys. That the Son would yield to the Father’s preferences was a natural conclusion, since in Arius’s model the Son is simply a loyal creature serving his creator. Arius explained the sharpness of his division in reasonable terms: “For God to implant His substance to some other being, however exalted, would imply that He is divisible and subject to change, which is inconceivable. Moreover, if any other being were to participate in the divine nature in any valid sense, there would result a duality of divine beings, whereas the Godhead is by definition unique.”³⁴ According to Arius, if the Father and the Son were of the same essence, it is difficult to see how in the incarnation the Father would not become passible.

Arius argued that the Son was created before time. He is not coeternal with the Father. As he put it, “Before he was begotten or created or appointed or established, he did not exist; for he was not unbegotten.”³⁵ Furthermore, the Son is not of one divine substance with the Father. He is rather of a similar substance with the Father (Greek homoiousios). On this view, the divine qualities of the Son are derivative (contingent, not essential), given to the Son by the Father. As Arius described Jesus, “He is not God truly, but by participation in grace…He too is called God in name only.”³⁶

3. Orthodox Response

The Arian division caught Emperor Constantine’s attention. Although Christianity was not the official religion, Constantine hoped to use Christianity as a glue to hold the already shaky empire together. As Christianity went, so went the empire. Thus, he called the Council of Nicaea in 325 to resolve the situation.³⁷ After dramatic rounds of debates, the majority in the council stood with Alexander and condemned Arianism. They added to the Apostle’s Creed precise wording to clearly denounce Arianism with the following: “We believe…in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten from the Father [only-begotten; that is, of the essence of the Father, God of God], Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten not made, being of one substance [homoousious] with the Father…”³⁸

They adopted the term homoousious, meaning, “of the same substance,” to describe the Son’s relation to the Father. This horrified the Arians, but the orthodox bishops, such as Alexander and his young protege Athanasius, were overjoyed. However, even this council could not quell the rising popularity of Arianism. In fact, the council served as a catalyst for it to grow even more rapidly! So much so that Constantine began to doubt the wording of the Nicene Creed and thought about rewriting it in favor of Arianism. One man stood in his way: Athanasius (ca. 296–373).

The torch passed on from Alexander to Athanasius to defend orthodoxy even when it was starting to become unpopular. Elected as the new Bishop of Alexandria in 328, Athanasius found it appalling that Arius insisted that the Son is a creature. He had no time for Arius’s “smooth sophistry.”³⁹ A creature is a creature. What other types of creatures are there? Athanasius argued two negative consequences make Arianism dangerous and unacceptable.⁴⁰

First, Athanasius argued that only God can save humanity. No creature can cancel the power of sin and death, and thereby offer eternal life to other creatures. Only the Creator can do this. He argued that Arianism makes salvation impossible, because—no matter how high his status—the Son is still only a creature. Since everybody in the church recognizes that Jesus Christ saves, it stands to reason that Jesus is therefore God.

Second, looking at the common liturgy taking place in the fourth century, it was clear that the church prayed to and worshiped Jesus Christ. If the Son is only a creature, then the church is making a grave mistake in its public worship. Clearly, the first of the Ten Commandments forbids the people of God from worshiping anything else but God. If Arianism were true, Christians were com- mitting idolatry.⁴¹ The church should not be worshiping Christ if he is merely a creature. So, either Arians are right in their doctrine of the Son or the Church is right in its practice of worshiping the Son. Both cannot be right. Athanasius argued the church was right to worship the Son, because the Son is God.⁴²

Athanasius called the heresy of Arius the “forerunner of the Anti-christ.”⁴³ Athanasius proposed an alternative interpretation: since God created the world through Christ, and since Christ alone is said to be from the Father, it is proper to understand Christ and the Father as both being God.⁴⁴ According to Athanasius, the Son was eternally begotten from the Father such that he can be said to be of the same essence (homo-ousios) with the Father: “The Son is other in kind and nature than the creatures, or rather belongs to the Father’s substance and is of the same nature as He.”⁴⁵ Although the word “begotten” (which Athanasius borrowed from John 3:16) might suggest a one-time event, Athanasius relied on the unchanging nature of God to explain that the Father is eternally begetting and the Son is eternally begotten. If that sounds confusing, remember Tertullian’s early analogy of the different parts of a tree. There is the root, which carries water into the trunk, which then distributes it to the branches—a constant process as long as the tree is alive.

Moreover, Athanasius heavily emphasized the idea of salvation through theosis, a concept that had been popular with Origen and other Alexandrian intellectuals of his day. The doctrine of theosis said that the ultimate purpose of salvation is to make humans god-like—the image of God in humankind would be made pristine. It’s roughly equivalent to what Protestant churches call “glorification.” According to Athanasius, it is nonsensical to say that a nondivine creature could make others divine. His thoughts are worth quoting in full:

For humanity would not have been deified if joined to a creature, or unless the Son were true God. Nor would humanity have been drawn into the Father’s presence, unless the one who had put on the body was the true Word by nature. And as we would not have been delivered from sin and the curse, unless it had been by nature human flesh which the Word put on (for we would have had nothing in common with what was foreign), so also humanity would not have been deified, unless the Word who became flesh had been by nature from the Father and true and proper to him…Therefore let those who deny that the Son is from the Father by nature and proper to his essence deny also that he took true human flesh of Mary Ever-Virgin. For in neither case would it have profited us human beings, if the Word had not been true Son of God by nature, or the flesh not true which he assumed.⁴⁶

Defending his arguments proved to be a difficult task for Athanasius. In 332, Constantine restored Arius to his position as presbyter under immense political pressure. Athanasius was asked to accept this, but he refused. So he was exiled to the farthest outpost in Germany. Along his way to his exile, he met with several bishops in the West. They began to favor his view and Athanasius was seen as some- what of a hero for standing up to Constantine. Disappointments, after all, still brewed in the West over the moving of the capitol from Rome to Constantinople.

So, ironically, Athanasius’s exile helped bring back momentum for orthodoxy. Not only was Athanasius building up a network of support in the West but the church in Alexandria refused to replace Athanasius. So, he was still technically a bishop. Arius never did return to his position; he died a day before he was to be reinstalled (336). Constantine died a few months later (337).

Constantine’s son and successor, Constantius, allowed Athanasius to return to his position in Alexandria. But their relationship was a tumultuous one. Constantius, like his father, wanted stability for the empire. To maintain this, he thought the Semi-Arian view could be a good compromise between the Arians and the orthodox doctrines. They proposed replacing the word homoousious (meaning “of the same substance”) with the word homoiousious (meaning “of similar substance”). The words were differentiated in Latin by one little letter. Surely, Constantius thought, there is no harm in com- promising with some slight differences. To Athanasius, this was no small matter. That little letter made all the difference in the world in understanding how the Father relates to the Son. Salvation depends on Christ’s being God, not “like God.” He still insisted only God can save humanity. He argued that “salvation is not…possible through an hierarchical chain, from the Father through an intermediate Son to creatures. For an intermediary separates as much as he unites creatures with the Father.”⁴⁷ The essentials to the gospel remained: Jesus Christ must be truly God and truly human in order to be the perfect mediator.

Athanasius had to endure five exiles. In his forty-six years as bishop, he spent only seventeen in Alexandria. But he stubbornly stuck to the truth despite being up against what seemed like the world, and he is now recognized as perhaps the foremost defender of Nicene orthodoxy and the most prolific writer of orthodox Trinitarian doctrine in the fourth century. A few years after he died, his friends, the Cappadocian fathers—Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus—carried the torch to win the fight against Arianism and Semi-Arianism at the Council of Constantinople in 381.

4. Relevance

When it comes to the Trinity, a helpful caution might be in order. We can and should confess what the Trinity is, but no matter how deep we may probe into God’s nature, we cannot possibly begin to understand it fully. Evangelical theologian Harold O. J. Brown elaborates:

Without a coherent doctrine of the Trinity, the New Testament witness to the activity of God in Christ and in the work of the Holy Spirit will tend to force one either into modalism or a kind of tritheism. But if one begins with a doctrine of Trinity—as a number of orthodox Protestant theologians do—there is the danger that doctrine will take precedence over the New Testament witness and turn living, personal faith into theological metaphysics. It seems apparent that the safest course is to let theological understanding and personal faith go hand in hand. Too much enthusiastic faith without a corresponding degree of theological understanding is almost certain to lead to error, perhaps to serious heresy. Too much doctrine unaccompanied by a living and growing faith is the recipe for dead orthodoxy.⁴⁸

Though we can apprehend the doctrine of the Trinity, we cannot fully comprehend it. Despite that fact, it is vital to maintain a Trinitarian faith. The doctrine of the Trinity impacts one’s understanding of salvation. Additionally, it also affects the way we worship. James B. Torrance describes the impact of the Trinity on worship as follows: “As we reflect on the wide varieties of forms of worship…we can discern two different views.

“The unitarian view. Probably the most common and widespread view is that worship is something which we, religious people, do—mainly in church on Sunday. We go to church, we sing our psalms and hymns to God, we intercede for the world, we listen to the sermon (too often simply an exhortation), we offer our money, time and talents to God. No doubt we need God’s grace to help us do it. We do it because Jesus taught us to do it and left us an example of how to do it. But worship is what we do before God…Indeed this view of worship is in practice unitarian, has no doctrine of the mediator or sole priesthood of Christ, is human-centered, has no proper doctrine of the Holy Spirit, is too often non- sacramental, and can engender weariness… “The trinitarian view. The second view of worship is that it is the gift of participating through the Spirit in the incarnate Son’s communion with the Father. It means participating in union with Christ, in what he has done for us once and for all, in his self-offering to the Father, in his life and death on the cross. It also means participating in what he is continuing to do for us in the presence of the Father and in his mission from the Father to the world. There is only one true Priest through whom and with whom we draw near to God our Father…It takes seriously the New Testament teaching about the sole priesthood and headship of Christ, his self-offering for us to the Father and our life in the union with Christ through the Spirit, with a vision of the Church as the body of Christ…[God] lifts us up out of ourselves to participate in the very life and communion of the Godhead, that life of communion for which we were created.”⁴⁹

Athanasius saw the deity of Christ and the Trinity as essential to the practice of the church. Not only were baptismal and Eucharis- tic confessions bound up in Trinitarian language but so also were prayers. The Son was adored, prayed to, and believed to be present in the Eucharist, and if he was not really God, the worshipers were depriving God of the worship which is his due. But more than this, Athanasius saw that if the Son were not divine, the salvation of humans was called into question. In the same way that Gregory of Nazianzus argued that Jesus Christ must be fully human (as opposed to the claims of Apollinarianism) if he were to be the mediator between God and men, Athanasius argued that Jesus must be fully divine:

For it became Him, for Whom are all things, and through Whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Captain of their salvation perfect through suffering;” by which words He means that it belonged to none other to bring man back from the corruption which had begun, than the Word of God, Who had also made them from the beginning. And that it was in order to [become] the sacrifice for bodies such as His own that the Word Himself also assumed a body, to this, also, they refer in these words: “Forasmuch then as the children are the sharers in blood and flesh, He also Himself in like manner partook of the same, that through death He might bring to naught Him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and might deliver them who, through fear of death, were all their lifetime subject to bondage.⁵⁰

Athanasius saw an intimate connection between the salvation of humanity and the deity of Christ. Even though some sects like the Jehovah’s Witnesses still repeat elements of Arian teaching, Jesus claimed to be God, and the Christian tradition has maintained Athanasius’s belief in an intimate connection between salvation and the deity of Christ.

We are saved from God by God. Only a divine Savior can bear the weight of God’s wrath in atonement. Only Jesus as the God-man can satisfy the enormous debt and penalty caused by human sin against God. No mere human could bridge that gap. Only a divine Savior can pay the costly price for redeeming us from our bondage to sin and death. Only the God-man can conquer all his people’s enemies. Our salvation is dependent on the infinite divine capacity of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

VII. Conclusion

As Michael Horton writes, “Each person of the Trinity goes out to the other in mutual joy and fellowship and in that complete fullness creates a nondivine world to share analogically in this extroverted communion.”⁵¹ The beauty of this is lost with the Sabellianism and Arianism.

The doctrine of the Trinity proclaims a triune God, who turns toward humanity in the person of Jesus, the God-man who suffered, died, rose again, and ascended. The fact that Jesus and the Holy Spirit are just as much God as the Father is a nonnegotiable part of Christianity. Since questions about the relationship between Jesus, the Holy Spirt, and God the Father are inevitable, they needed to be answered well. Trinitarian orthodoxy encapsulates what Scripture says about that relationship and acknowledges the mystery of it.

If Christianity had agreed with Arius that Jesus could be a lesser god—if it had failed to defend monotheism, if it had fallen into the trench of professing three unrelated deities—it may have dissolved into the religion of Rome and its pantheons of false gods. If the early Christians had lost their nerve and conceded the “lesser divinity” of Jesus, whatever that might mean, then the work of God in Christ for our salvation would have been rendered meaningless. No mere man, nor half god, could possibly intervene to save fallen and sinful humanity, let alone restore all of creation. Only the Creator can enter creation to fix its brokenness and redeem its original, latent purpose. Athanasius explored this truth in On the Incarnation, defending the claim that the Father and the Son share one common substance (homoousios). Only the Creator can recreate. Only the Maker can remake. Only God can save us from our sins.

Because the Father and the Son are one substance, we can also be assured that we actually know God in Jesus Christ. Without confidence that Jesus is God, united in substance with the Father, we could not be sure that Jesus can speak for God, forgive sins for God, declare righteousness for God, or do anything to make us children of the Father.

While Trinitarian orthodoxy encapsulates what Scripture says about God being one in essence and three in person, it also acknowledges the mystery of it. To speak about God, to speak about the Trinity, is different from speaking about any other thing. God is categorically separate from all other subjects. God is God. And nothing else is. So when we discuss the Trinity, we are peering into what theologians call the “aseity” of God—God as he is a se, to himself. God presents himself fully only to himself. We know about the Trinity only because God lovingly reveals aspects of his attributes and character to us.

Trinitarian orthodoxy means worshiping one God who is revealed to be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for “their glory is equal, their majesty coeternal.”⁵² It guides the worshiper through key aspects of divinity, qualities or attributes of God, that are shared by all three persons of the Trinity. God is uncreated. God is unlimited. God is eternal. Each person of the Trinity is each of these things. This does not that mean that there are three separate divinities. The Father is uncreated. The Son is uncreated. The Spirit is uncreated.

In every external work of the Trinity the Father is the origin and cause, the Son is the medium and content, and the Spirit brings about the work’s intended effect within creation. In every external work of the Godhead—creation, providence, redemption, and consummation—the Father speaks his Word in the Son through the perfecting power of the Spirit.⁵³

Scripture records and reveals to us that God is one and it also reveals interactions between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The orthodox reading of the Bible is more difficult to understand than simple monotheism or separating the three persons altogether, but it is most faithful to Scripture.