2nd–4th Century AD Apologists on the Trinity
The following quotation is taken from the book authored by J. P. Moreland & William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, published by IVP Academic Press, Downers Grove, Illinois, second edition, 2017, Part VI—Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology, pp. 577-582. All emphasis will be mine.
2.1 Logos Christology
The stage for both the later trinitarian controversy and the christological controversies, in which the doctrines of the Trinity and incarnation were forged and given creedal form, was set by the early Greek Apologists of the second century, such as Justin Martyr, Tatian, Theophilus, and Athenagoras. Connecting the divine Word (Logos) of the prologue of John’s Gospel (Jn 1:1-5) with the divine Logos (Reason) as it played a role in the system of the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (ca. 20 BC–ca. AD 50), the Apologists sought to explain Christian doctrine in Philonic categories. For good or ill, their appropriation of Hellenistic thought is one of the most striking examples of the profound and enduring influence of philosophy on Christian theology. For Philo, the Logos was God’s reason, which is the creative principle behind the creation of the world and which, in turn, informs the world with its rational structure. Similarly, for the Christian Apologists, God the Father, existing alone without the world, had within himself his Word or Reason or Wisdom (cf. Prov 8:22- 31), which somehow proceeded forth from him, like a spoken word from a speaker’s mind, to become a distinct individual who created the world and ultimately became incarnate as Jesus Christ. The procession of the Logos from the Father was variously conceived as taking place either at the moment of creation or, alternatively, eternally. Although christological concerns occupied center stage, the Holy Spirit too might be understood to proceed from God the Father’s mind.
Here is how Athenagoras describes it:
The Son of God is the Word of the Father in Ideal Form and energizing power; for in his likeness and through him all things came into existence, which presupposes that the Father and the Son are one. Now since the Son is in the Father and the Father in the Son by a powerful unity of Spirit, the Son of God is the mind and reason of the Father. . . . He is the first begotten of the Father. The term is used not because he came into existence (for God, who is eternal mind, had in himself his word or reason from the beginning, since he was eternally rational) but because he came forth to serve as Ideal Form and Energizing Power for everything material. . . . The . . . Holy Spirit . . . we regard as an effluence of God which flows forth from him and returns like a ray of the sun. (A Plea for the Christians 10)
According to this doctrine, then, there is one God, but he is not an undifferentiated unity. Rather, certain aspects of his mind become expressed as distinct individuals. The Logos doctrine of the Apologists thus involves a fundamental reinterpretation of the fatherhood of God: God is not merely the Father of mankind or even, especially, of Jesus of Nazareth; rather, he is the Father from whom the Logos is begotten before all worlds. Christ is not merely the only-begotten Son of God in virtue of his incarnation; rather, he is begotten of the Father even in his preincarnate divinity.
2.2 Modalism
The Logos-doctrine of the Greek Apologists was taken up into Western theology by Irenaeus, who identifies God’s Word with the Son and his Wisdom with the Holy Spirit (Against Heresies 4.20.3; cf. 2.30.9). During the following century a quite different conception of the divine personages emerged in contrast to the Logos doctrine. Noetus, Praxeus, and Sabellius espoused a unitarian view of God, variously called modalism, monarchianism, or Sabellianism, according to which the Son and Spirit are not distinct individuals from the Father. Either it was the Father who became incarnate, suffered, and died—the Son being at most the human aspect of Christ—or else the one God sequentially assumed three roles as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in relation to his creatures. In his refutation of modalism, Against Praxeas, the North African church father Tertullian brought greater precision to many of the ideas and much of the terminology later adopted in the creedal formulations of the doctrine of the Trinity. While anxious to preserve the divine monarchy (a term employed by the Greek Apologists to designate monotheism), Tertullian insisted that we dare not ignore the divine economy (a term borrowed from Irenaeus), by which Tertullian seems to mean the way in which the one God exists. The error of the monarchians or modalists is their “thinking that one cannot believe in one only God in any other way than by saying that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are the very selfsame person.” But while “all are of one, by unity (that is) of substance,” Tertullian insists that
the mystery of the 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, from whom these degrees and forms and aspects are reckoned, under the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. (Against Praxeas 2)
In saying that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one in substance, Tertullian employs the word substance in both the senses explained by Aristotle. First, there is, as Tertullian affirms, just “one God,” one thing that is God. But Tertullian also means that the three distinct persons share the same essential nature. Thus, in his exegesis of the monarchian prooftext “I and my Father are one” (Jn 10:30), Tertullian points out (1) that the plural subject and verb intimate that there are two entities, namely, two persons, involved, but (2) that the predicate is an abstract (not a personal) noun— unum, not unus. He comments, “Unum, a neuter term, . . . does not imply singularity of number, but unity of essence, likeness, conjunction, affection on the Father’s part, . . . and submission on the Son’s. . . . When He says, ‘I and my Father are one’ in essence —unum—He shows that there are two, whom He puts on an equality and unites in one” (22).
So when Tertullian says that the one substance is distributed into three forms or aspects, he is not affirming modalism, but the diversity of three persons sharing the same nature. Indeed, he is so bold in affirming the distinctness of the persons, even calling them “three beings” (13; cf. 22), that he seems at times to court tritheism. Comparing the Father and the Son to the sun and a sunbeam, he declares, “For although I make not two suns, still I shall reckon both the sun and its ray to be as much two things and two forms of one undivided substance, as God and His Word, as the Father and the Son” (13). Thus he conceives the Son to be “really a substantive being, by having a substance of his own, in such a way that he may be regarded as an objective thing and a person, and so able . . . to make two, the Father and the Son, God and the Word” (7). Tertullian even seems to think of the Father and Son as distinct parcels of the same spiritual stuff out of which, in his idiosyncratic view, he believed God to be constituted (7).
Conventional wisdom has it that in affirming that God is three persons, church fathers like Tertullian meant at most three individuals, not three persons in the modern, psychological sense of three centers of self-consciousness. We shall return to this issue when we look at the creedal formulation of trinitarian doctrine, but for now we may note that an examination of Tertullian’s statements suggests that such a claim is greatly exaggerated. In a remarkable passage aimed at illustrating the doctrine of the Son as the immanent Logos in the Father’s mind, Tertullian invites his reader, who, he says, is created in the image and likeness of God, to consider the role of reason in the reader’s own self-reflective thinking. “Observe, then, that when you are silently conversing with yourself, this very process is carried on within you by your reason, which meets you with a word at every movement of your thought, at every impulse of your conception” (5). Tertullian envisions one’s own reason as a sort of dialogue partner when one is engaged in self-reflective thought. No doubt every one of us has carried on such an internal dialogue, which requires not merely consciousness but self-consciousness. Tertullian’s point is that “in a certain sense, the word is a second person within you” through which you generate thought. He realizes, of course, that no human being is literally two persons, but he holds that “all this is much more fully transacted in God,” who possesses his immanent Logos even when he is silent. Or again, in proving the personal distinctness of the Father and the Son, Tertullian appeals to scriptural passages employing first and second-person indexical words distinguishing Father and Son. Alluding to Psalm 2:7, Tertullian says to the modalist, “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 I have begotten myself ’” (11). He quotes numerous passages that, through their use of personal indexicals, illustrate the I-Thou relationship in which the persons of the Trinity stand to one another. He challenges the modalist to explain how a Being who is absolutely one and singular can use first-person plural pronouns, as in “Let us make man in our image.” Tertullian clearly thinks of the Father, Son and Spirit as individuals capable of employing first-person indexicals and addressing one another with second-person indexicals, which entails that they are self-conscious persons. Hence, “in these few quotations the distinction of persons in the Trinity is clearly set forth” (11). Tertullian thus implicitly affirms that the persons of the Trinity are three distinct, self-conscious individuals.
The only qualification that might be made to this picture lies in a vestige of the Apologists’ Logos doctrine in Tertullian’s theology. He not only accepts their view that there are relations of derivation among the persons of the Trinity, but that these relations are not eternal. The Father he calls “the fountain of the Godhead” (29); “the Father is the entire substance, but the Son is a derivation and portion of the whole” (9). The Father exists eternally with his immanent Logos; and at creation, before the beginning of all things, the Son proceeds from the Father and so becomes his first begotten Son, through whom the world is created (19). Thus the Logos only becomes the Son of God when he proceeds from the Father as a substantive being (7). Tertullian is fond of using analogies such as the sunbeam emitted by the sun or the river by the spring (8, 22) to illustrate the oneness of substance of the Son as he proceeds from the Father. The Son, then, is “God of God” (15). Similarly, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son (4). It seems that Tertullian would consider the Son and Spirit to be distinct persons only after their procession from the Father (7), but it is clear that he insists on their personal distinctness from at least that point.
Through the efforts of church fathers like Tertullian, Hippolytus, Origen, and Novatian, the church came to reject modalism as a proper understanding of God and to affirm the distinctness of the three persons called Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. During the ensuing century, the church was confronted with a challenge from the opposite end of the spectrum: Arianism, which affirmed the personal distinctness of the Father and the Son, but only at the sacrifice of the Son’s deity.
2.3 Arianism
In 319 an Alexandrian presbyter named Arius began to propagate his doctrine that the Son was not of the same substance with the Father, but was rather created by the Father before the beginning of the world. This marked the beginning of the great trinitarian controversy, which lasted through the end of the century and gave us the Nicene and Constantinopolitan Creeds. Although Alexandrian theologians like Origen, in contrast to Tertullian, had argued that the begetting of the Logos from the Father did not have a beginning but is from eternity, the reason most theologians found Arius’s doctrine unacceptable was not, as Arius fancied, so much because he affirmed, “The Son has a beginning, but God is without beginning” (Letter to Eusebius of Nicomedia 4-5). Rather, what was objectionable was that Arius denied even that the Logos preexisted immanently in God before being begotten or was in any sense from the substance of the Father, so that his beginning was not, in fact, a begetting but a creation ex nihilo and that therefore the Son is a creature. As Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, was later to protest, on Arius’s view, God without the Son lacked his Word and his Wisdom, which is blasphemous (Orations Against the Arians 1.6.17), and the Son is “a creature and a work, not proper to the Father’s essence” (1.3.9). In 325 a council at Antioch condemned anyone who says that the Son is a creature or originated or made or not truly an offspring or that once he did not exist; later that year the ecumenical Council of Nicaea issued its creedal formulation of trinitarian belief.
The creed states,
We believe in one God, the Father All Governing, creator of all things visible and invisible;
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father as only begotten, that is, from the essence of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not created, of the same essence as the Father, through whom all things came into being, both in heaven and in earth; Who for us men and for our salvation came down and was incarnate, becoming human. He suffered and the third day he rose, and ascended into the heavens. And he will come to judge both the living and the dead.
And [we believe] in the Holy Spirit.
But, those who say, Once he was not, or he was not before his generation, or he came to be out of nothing, or who assert that he, the Son of God, is a different hypostasis or ousia, or that he is a creature, or changeable, or mutable, the Catholic and Apostolic Church anathematizes them.
Several features of this statement deserve comment: (1) The Son (and by implication the Holy Spirit) is declared to be of the same essence (homoousios) as the Father. This is to say that the Son and Father both share the same divine nature. Therefore, the Son cannot be a creature, having, as Arius claimed, a nature different (heteroousios) from the divine nature. (2) The Son is declared to be begotten, not made. This anti-Arian affirmation is said with respect to Christ’s divine nature, not his human nature, and represents the legacy of the old Logos Christology. In the creed of Eusebius of Caesarea, used as a draft of the Nicene statement, the word Logos stood where Son stands in the Nicene Creed, and the Logos is declared to be “begotten of the Father before all ages.” The condemnations appended to the Nicene Creed similarly imply that this begetting is eternal. Athanasius explains through a subtle word play that while both the Father and the Son are agenetos (that is, did not come into being at some moment), nevertheless only the Father is agennetos (that is, unbegotten), whereas the Son is gennetos (begotten) eternally from the Father (Four Discourses Against the Arians 1.9.31). (3) The condemnation of those who say that Christ “is a different hypostasis or ousia” from the Father occasioned great confusion in the church. For Western, Latin-speaking theologians the Greek word hypostasis was etymologically parallel to, and hence synonymous with, the Latin substantia (substance). Therefore, they denied a plurality of hypostaseis in God. Although the Nicene Creed was drafted in Greek, the meaning of the terms is Western. For many Eastern, Greek-speaking theologians hypostasis and ousia were not synonymous. Ousia meant “substance,” and hypostasis designated a concrete individual, a property-bearer. As Gregory of Nyssa, one of three Cappadocian church fathers renowned for their explication of the Nicene Creed, explains, a hypostasis is “what subsists and is specially and peculiarly indicated by [a] name,” for example, Paul, in contrast to ousia, which refers to the universal nature common to things of a certain type—for example, man (Epistle 38.2-3). The Father and Son, while sharing the same substance, are clearly distinct hypostaseis, since they have different properties (only the Father for example, has the property of being unbegotten). Therefore, the Nicene Creed’s assertion that the Father and Son are the same hypostasis sounded like modalism to many Eastern thinkers. After decades of intense debate, this terminological confusion was cleared up at the Council of Alexandria in 362, which affirmed homoousios but allowed that there are three divine hypostaseis.
What were these hypostaseis, all sharing the divine nature? The unanimous answer of orthodox theologians was that they were three persons. It is customarily said, as previously mentioned, that we must not read this affirmation anachronistically, as employing the modern psychological concept of a person. This caution must, however, be qualified. While hypostasis does not mean “person,” nevertheless a rational hypostasis comes very close to what we mean by a “person.” For Aristotle the generic essence of man is captured by the phrase “rational animal.” Animals have souls but lack rationality, and it is the property of rationality that serves to distinguish human beings from other animals. Thus a rational hypostasis can only be what we call a person. It is noteworthy that Gregory of Nyssa’s illustration of three hypostaseis having one substance is Peter, James, and John, all exemplifying the same human nature (To Ablabius That There Are Not Three Gods). How else can this be taken than as an intended illustration of three persons with one nature? Moreover, the Cappadocians ascribe to the three divine hypostaseis the properties constitutive of personhood, such as mutual knowledge, love, and volition, even if, as Gregory of Nazianzus emphasizes, these are always in concord and so incapable of being severed from one another (Third Theological Oration: On the Son 2). Thus Gregory boasts that his flock, unlike the Sabellians, “worship the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, One Godhead; God the Father, God the Son and (do not be angry) God the Holy Spirit, One Nature in Three Personalities, intellectual, perfect, self-existent, numerically separate, but not separate in Godhead” (Oration 33.16). The ascription of personal properties is especially evident in the robust defense of the full equality of the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son as a divine hypostasis. Basil states that the Holy Spirit is not only “incorporeal, purely immaterial, and indivisible” but also that “we are compelled to direct our thoughts on high, and to think of an intelligent being, boundless in power” (On the Holy Spirit 9.22). Quoting 1 Corinthians 2:11, he compares God’s Spirit to the human spirit in each of us (16.40) and states that in his sanctifying work the Holy Spirit makes people spiritual “by fellowship with Himself ” (9.23). The Cappadocians would have resisted fiercely any attempt to treat the Holy Spirit as an impersonal, divine force. Thus their intention was to affirm that there really are three persons in a rich psychological sense who are the one God.
In sum, while modalism affirmed the equal deity of the three persons at the expense of their personal distinctness, orthodox Christians maintained both the equal deity and personal distinctness of the three persons. Moreover, they did so while claiming to maintain the commitment of all parties to monotheism. There exists only one God, who is three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Further Reading
William Craig & the Deity of Christ
William Craig on the Holy Spirit
Tertullian: Trinity is the Faith of the Ancient Church
Were the Early Church Fathers Trinitarians?
Ante-Nicene Witness to Jesus’ Deity
Early Church, Monarchy & Hierarchy
The Uncreated Word Becomes A Son
Early Church & the Holy Spirit