How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (41 page)

B
Y THE END OF
the second century it appears that a majority of Christians had not accepted the views of the adoptionists, the docetists, or the Gnostics. All these views were widely seen as theological dead ends—or worse, theological heresies that could lead to eternal damnation. Most Christians instead embraced the understanding that came to be—at least in the next century—the dominant view throughout Christendom: that Christ was a real human being who was also really divine, that he was both man and God, yet he was not two separate entities, but one. How, though, could that be? If he was human, in what sense was he divine? And if he was divine, in what sense was he human? This was the theological conundrum Christian thinkers had to resolve. It took them a very long time indeed to do so. Before settling on one solution, Christian thinkers proposed a number of solutions that may have seemed appropriate and satisfying at the time, but that in the long run came to be rejected as inappropriate, dissatisfying, and even heretical. This is one of the hard-and-fast ironies of the Christian tradition: views that at one time were the majority opinion, or at least that were widely seen as completely acceptable, eventually came to be left behind; and as theology moved forward to become increasingly nuanced and sophisticated, these earlier majority opinions came to be condemned as heresies. We have seen this movement already with the exaltation Christology that was the original form of Christian belief. By the second century it was widely deemed heretical.
¹¹
Later understandings of the second century were acceptable and dominant in their day, but they too came to be suspect and even spurned.

Since these later understandings embraced the principal orthodox concerns—to see Jesus as both human and divine, and as one being not two—yet came to be condemned as heretical, I have coined a new term for them: I call them
hetero-orthodox
(literally “other-orthodox”). Here I consider two such understandings that played an important role in the formation of later Christological thinking.

The first was the view that evidently was held by a majority of Christians at the beginning of the third century—including the most prominent Christian leaders in the church, the bishops of the church of Rome (i.e., the early “popes”). Modern scholars sometimes call this view
modalism.

Christians in the period by and large insisted on maintaining two separate views that on the surface may seem, and did seem to others, to be contradictory. The first was monotheism: there is only one God. There are not two gods, as for Marcion, or an entire realm of gods, as for the Gnostics. There is one God and only one God. But the second view was that Christ was God. It wasn’t merely that Christ was a human who had been adopted to a status of divine power, as in the (now primitive) exaltation Christologies. It was that he was a preexistent divine being who was by his very nature, in some sense, God. But if God the Father is God, and Christ is God, how is it that there are not two Gods?

A modalist Christology explained it. According to modalists, Christ was God and God was God because they were the same person. For those who took this position, God exists in different
modes
of being (hence
modalism
), as the Father, and as the Son, and as the Spirit. All three are God, but there is only one God, because the three are not distinct from one another but are all the same thing, in different modes of existence. Let me explain by analogy: I am a different person in my different relationships, even though I am the same person. I am a son in relationship to my father, and a brother in relationship to my sister, and a father in relationship to my daughter. I am son, brother, and father. There are not three of me, however, but only one of me. God is like that. He is manifest as Father, Son, and Spirit; but there is only one of him.

According to Hippolytus, this view was held by one of the bishops of Rome named Callistus (bishop from 217 to 222
CE
): “That the Father is not one person and the Son another, but that they are one and the same.” Moreover, “That Person being one, cannot be two” (Hippolytus,
Refutation
7). The conclusion for modalists was clear and straightforward: “If therefore I acknowledge Christ to be God, He is the Father Himself, if he is indeed God; and Christ suffered, being Himself God; and consequently the Father suffered for He was the Father Himself” (Hippolytus,
Against Noetus
2). Or as an adversary, Tertullian, put it, “the devil” has put forward the view that “the Father Himself came down into the virgin, was Himself born of her, Himself suffered, indeed was Himself Jesus Christ” (
Against Praxeas
1).
¹²
The opponents of the modalist view sometimes mockingly referred to modalists as “patripassianists”—that is, those who maintain that it was the Father (Latin,
pater
) who suffered (Latin,
passus
).
¹³

As might well be imagined, the supporters of this view could appeal to scripture as the source for their teaching. For example, in Isaiah 44:6 God declares, “I am the first and the last; and beside me there is no other.” This surely must mean what it says—there is literally no other God besides the God of the Old Testament. But at the same time, the Apostle Paul, in Romans 9:5, speaks of “Christ . . . who is over all, God blessed forever.” If there is only one God, and Christ is God, then Christ is the God of the Old Testament. God the Son and God the Father are one God—not two separate beings, but the same being.

Those who embraced this view attacked anyone who thought that Christ could be a God separate from God the Father. As Hippolytus admits, the modalists who objected to his own view—that the Son and the Father were two separate beings—“called us worshippers of two gods” (
Refutation
6). Or as Tertullian says, “They are constantly throwing out against us that we are preachers of two gods and three gods, while they take to themselves pre-eminently the credit of being worshippers of the One God” (
Against Praxeas
3).

It is no wonder that the modalist understanding was so popular. Hippolytus notes, with some chagrin, that it was not only the view held by the bishops of Rome, but it had “introduced the greatest confusion among all the faithful throughout the world” (
Refutation
1). Tertullian admits that the “majority of believers” have trouble accepting his own view but prefer the view of the modalists (
Against Praxeas
3).

But Hippolytus and Tertullian were no pushovers. Quite the contrary, they were forceful polemicists and aimed their attacks not only at such “obvious” heretics as Marcion and the Gnostics, but also at those who seemed to be orthodox in affirming both the humanity and divinity of Christ but who nonetheless pressed the logic of their positions to a point that created its own kind of heresy. As a result of this controversy, Hippolytus, one of the leaders of the church of Rome, withdrew with a group of like-minded Christians from the larger church and was elected as a kind of sectarian bishop. He is known to history as the first antipope. In that role, he saw himself as the advocate of orthodoxy and maintained that the more broadly recognized bishops of Rome were heretics.

For his part, Tertullian was the best-known author from the important church in Carthage, North Africa. He was famous as a Christian apologist (that is, a defender of the faith against pagan intellectual attacks), heresiologist, essayist, and all-around polemicist. He was one of the most important theologians of the early third century, and no controversy drove him to develop his own theological views with greater sophistication than his opposition to the modalists. It was in the context of the ensuing back and forth that Tertullian became the first Christian author to adopt the term
Trinity
as a way of understanding the relationship of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—who were distinct in number from one another even if they stood together as One.

Hippolytus had a good deal to say about the shortcomings of a modalist view, but for the most part it came down to a very basic point: scripture portrays Christ as a separate being from God the Father, so they cannot be one and the same. And so, for example, John 1:18 says, “No one has seen God at any time; the only Son who is in the bosom of the Father, has made him known.” Obviously, Christ was not in his own bosom. In Matthew 11:27 Christ says “all things are given me by the Father,” and he clearly was not giving these things to himself. On occasion Hippolytus pushes the point of Greek grammar: in John 10:30 Jesus says, “I and the Father are one.” As Hippolytus points out—in an ancient equivalent to the view that it “all depends on what the meaning of the word is is”—the verb used is the plural
are
, not the singular
am.
Jesus does not say “I am the Father” or “the Father and I am one.” He says “the Father and I
are
[plural] one.”

Even more trenchant are the biting comments of Tertullian, who more than any polemicist of his time had no qualms about attacking his opponents with all the vicious wit at his disposal. He mocks those who say, in effect, that God the Father “Himself made Himself a Son to Himself.” In his words:

It is one thing to have and another thing to be. For instance, in order to be a husband, I must have a wife; 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. (
Against Praxeas
10)

For if I must be myself my son, who am also a father, I now cease to have a son, since I am my own son. But by reason of not having a son, since I am my own son, how can I be a father? For I ought to have a son, in order to be a father. Therefore I am not a son, because I have not a father, who makes a son. (
Against Praxeas
10)

Here we have a heresiological version of Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” Tertullian, like Hippolytus, could also appeal to scripture:

On my side I advance the passage where the Father said to the Son, “Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten Thee.” If you want me to believe Him to be both the Father and the Son, show me some other passage where it is declared, “The Lord said unto Himself, ‘I am my own Son, today have I begotten myself.’” (
Against Praxeas
11)

Even though Hippolytus and Tertullian vigorously attacked the modalist position, they did want to hold on to the theological affirmations that created it in the first place. They, like their modalist opponents, agreed that Christ was God, and that God the Father was God, but that there was only one God. In order to retain this view while rejecting the modalist option, Hippolytus and Tertullian developed the idea of the
divine economy.
The word
economy
in this usage does not refer to a monetary system but to a way of organizing relationships. In the divine economy there are three persons—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. These are three distinct beings, but they are completely unified in will and purpose. As we will see in the next chapter, at the end of the day these affirmations are difficult—one might say impossible—to hold in mind simultaneously, but they are affirmed nonetheless in a way that at the very least can be called paradoxical. The three are one. As Hippolytus expresses his view of the economy:

The Father indeed is One, but there are Two Persons, because there is also the Son; and then there is the third, the Holy Spirit. The Father decrees, the Word executes, and the Son is manifested, through whom the Father is believed on. . . . It is the Father who commands, and the Son who obeys, and the Holy Spirit who gives understanding. The Father who is above all, and the Son who is through all, and the Holy Spirit who is in all. And we cannot otherwise think of one God, but by believing in truth in Father and Son and Holy Spirit. (
Against Noetus
14)

Hippolytus termed this three-in-one God the
triad.
Tertullian, as I have noted, called it the Trinity. In his view, the “one only God has also a Son, His Word, who proceeded from Himself, by whom all things were made.” This Son was “both man and God, the son of man and the Son of God” (
Against Praxeas
2). By now, as is clear, “son of man” is no longer an apocalyptic term, but a designation of humanity, as “Son of God” is a designation of divinity.

For Tertullian, the relationship of the Father and the Son is worked out in the divine economy, in which the Spirit too plays a distinctive role. This economy “distributes the Unity into a Trinity, placing in their order the three Persons—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; three however, not in condition, but in degree; not in substance, but in form; not in power, but in aspect; yet of one substance and of one condition, and of one power, inasmuch as He is one God” (
Against Praxeas
2).

Tertullian goes on to stress that the three within the godhead are “susceptible of number without division.” Later he indicates that this is “the rule of faith” that Christians adhere to: “The Father is one, and the Son one, and the Spirit one, and that they are distinct from each other.” The diversity, though, does not mean separation: “it is not by division that He is different, but by distinction; because the Father is not the same as the Son, since they differ one from the other in the mode of their being” (
Against Praxeas
9).

Even though Hippolytus and Tertullian are well on the way to the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, they are not there yet. This is clear to anyone conversant with the fourth-century debates that I discuss in the next chapter and who reads from Tertullian the following: “Thus the Father is distinct from the Son, being greater than the Son, inasmuch as He who begets is one, and He who is begotten is another” (
Against Praxeas
9). Later orthodox theologians would have found this view completely inadequate. In stressing that the Father was “greater” than the Son, Tertullian articulated a view that would later be deemed a heresy. Theology, in these early years of the formation of Christian doctrine, could not stand still. It progressed and got more complicated, sophisticated, and refined as time went on.