CHAPTER 8

After the New Testament

Christological Dead Ends of the Second and Third Centuries

OVER THE PAST FIVE years I have become re-enamored with French cinema, and among my favorite filmmakers is Eric Rohmer. I am especially taken by his two brilliant films My Night at Maud’s (Ma nuit chez Maud, 1969) and A Tale of Winter (Conte d’hiver, 1992). The plots of both films are driven, in part, by a philosophical concept known as “Pascal’s Wager,” derived from the seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal.

Pascal’s Wager is invoked in these two films through their explorations of personal relationships. Suppose a person has a decision to make in life—to do something or not. Even though there would be no downside in doing it, she would have only the slimmest of chances for success. Still, that success, should it happen, would lead to an amazingly positive outcome. Pascal’s Wager says that given the choice, even if the odds for success are slim, it is better for her to take the risk: there is nothing for her to lose and a lot for her to gain.

When Pascal developed this idea, it was related not to existential decisions about personal relationships, as in Rohmer’s films, but to theology. For Pascal, a man of the Enlightenment, it was important to decide whether or not to believe that God exists. There may be only a slim chance that he does. Still, if someone decides to believe, there could be a fantastic reward if he is right and no real downside if he is wrong. On the other hand, if he decides not to believe, no real benefits come from the decision, but there could be very real and harmful downsides (such as eternal punishment). And so, even though the chances of being right may be remote, it is better to believe than not to believe.

People have often told me that I should return to my Christian faith because of Pascal’s Wager. Their logic is that if I believe in Christ, I could experience enormous benefits if it turns out that Christ really is the Son of God who brings salvation, and no downside if he is not; but if I choose not to believe, I could face enormous (eternal) bad consequences, with no upside. So it is better to believe than not to believe.

On the surface this may sound convincing, but I think it needs to be put into a broader perspective. The problem is that deciding for or against a particular religious point of view is not like flipping a coin, where there are only two possible options and outcomes. There are hundreds of religions in the world. You cannot choose for all of them, because some of them are exclusivistic and require a person’s total commitment. So it is not an either/or proposition, as those who support Pascal’s Wager sometimes imagine.

To put it in simple terms, if you were to choose for Christianity, that would mean choosing against Islam (to pick an example). But what if the Muslim view about God and salvation is right and the Christian view is wrong? Then it doesn’t help to have taken Pascal’s Wager and to have chosen Christianity.

Christianity has long been an exclusivistic religion—meaning that historically, a person who chose to be a follower of Christ could not also be a Muslim or a Hindu or a pagan. And this exclusivism does not merely keep a person from being a Christian and something else; it also keeps a person from being a different kind of Christian with a different kind of Christian belief. As it turns out, there are many different kinds of Christians, some of whom claim that if you do not adopt their particular version of the faith, you cannot be saved. I know of some Baptist churches that insist that if you are not baptized in their Baptist church, you are lost. Being baptized in some other Baptist church is not good enough—let alone in a Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist, or other kind of church. With hard-core conservative forms of Christianity like this, it is obviously not a matter of taking the “wager” and choosing between just two options. There are tons of options, any one of which might be “right.”

This stress within Christianity that there is a right view and lots of wrong views; that the wrong views are found not only outside Christianity, but also inside it; and that wrong views could lead a person straight to the depths of hell, is not simply a modern invention. It goes back to the early years of the church. It was certainly in place in the second and third Christian centuries. By that time it had become exceedingly easy to castigate anyone as a “heretic” for holding to an alternative way of looking at God, and Christ, and salvation. Deciding who was right and who was wrong, and what views were true and what views were false, became an overpowering concern among the Christian leaders. This is because many Christians after the New Testament period had come to think that Christ was the only way of gaining salvation. Moreover, this salvation came only by having the correct understanding about God, Christ, salvation, and so on. For that reason, discerning right and wrong beliefs—ascertaining what was “orthodox” (right) and “heretical” (false)—became an obsession of many of the leaders of the early church.


Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Early Church

THERE WERE NUMEROUS VIEWS of Christ throughout the second and third Christian centuries. Some of Jesus’s followers thought he was a human but was not (by nature) divine; others thought he was divine but not a human; others thought he was two different beings, one human and one divine; yet others—the side that “won” these debates—maintained that he was human and divine at one and the same time and yet was one being, not two. These debates, however, need to be placed in their broader context. For Christians were arguing not simply about the identity and nature of Christ, but about all sorts of other theological issues that were circulating at the time.

There were debates about God, for example. Some Christians maintained that there was only one God. Others argued that there were two Gods—that the God of the Old Testament was not the same as the God of Jesus. Yet others argued that there were twelve gods, or thirty-six gods, or even 365 gods. How could someone with those views even be Christian? Why didn’t they simply read their New Testament and see that they were wrong? The answer, of course, is that the New Testament did not yet exist. To be sure, all of the books that were later collected and placed in the New Testament and deemed, then, to be holy scripture were in existence. But so were lots of other books—other Gospels, epistles, and apocalypses, for example—all of them claiming to be written by the apostles of Jesus and claiming to represent the “true” view of the faith. What we think of as the twenty-seven books of “the” New Testament emerged out of these conflicts, and it was the side that won the debates over what to believe that decided which books were to be included in the canon of scripture.1

There were other wide-ranging debates as well. Was the Hebrew Bible—the Jewish scriptures—part of the revelation of the true God? Or was it simply a sacred book of the Jews, of no relevance for Christians? Or even more extreme, was it authored by a lower, malevolent deity?

What about the world we live in? Was it the creation of the one true God? Or was it the inferior creation of the God of the Jews (who was not the God of the Christians)? Or was it a cosmic disaster and inherently evil?

The reason most Christians today would have no trouble answering any of these questions is that one perspective from early Christianity emerged as triumphant in the debates over what to believe and how to live. This is the side that insisted that there was only one true God; he had created the world, called the Jews to be his people, and given them his scriptures. The world had been created good, but it had become corrupt because of sin. Eventually, though, God would redeem the world and all of his true followers in it. This redemption would come through his Son, Jesus Christ, who was both God and human at one and the same time, the one who died for the salvation of all who believe in him.

That this view would emerge as triumphant was not at all a foregone conclusion in the early Christian centuries. But triumph it did, and it became the dominant Christian belief until now. Here, I focus on the debates concerning the views of Christ, especially as he was regarded as God.

Scholars often describe these theological debates as struggles between “orthodoxy” and “heresy.” These are rather tricky terms, in no small measure because what they literally mean is not how they are used by historians who are today engaged in the study. Literally, the word orthodoxy means right belief. The word heresy literally means a choice—that is, a choice not to believe the “right belief.” A synonym for heresy is heterodoxy, which literally means different belief—that is, different from the belief that is “right.” The reason historians do not use these terms according to their literal meanings is that historians are not theologians (or if they are theologians, they are not practicing theology when they are writing history). A theologian may be able to tell you what the “right” thing to believe is, and what “wrong” things should not be believed. But the historian has no access—as a historian—to theological truth or to what is “right” in the eyes of God. The historian has access only to historical events. And so the historian can describe how some early Christians thought there was only one God and others thought there were two, or twelve, or thirty-six, or 365; but the historian cannot say that one of these groups was actually “right.”

Still, historians do continue to use the terms orthodoxy, heresy, and heterodoxy to describe the early struggles over truth. This is not because historians know which side, ultimately, was right, but because they know which side, ultimately, prevailed. The side that eventually won the most converts and decided what Christians should believe is called “orthodox,” because it established itself as the dominant view and thus declared it was right. A “heresy” or a “heterodoxy,” from a modern historical perspective, is simply a view that lost the debate.

I stress this point because if, in this chapter, I describe a view as orthodox or as heretical, I’m not making a claim about what I think is true and right or false and wrong. I’m referring instead to a position that either came to dominate the tradition or lost the battle.

This chapter is mainly about the views that lost and came to be declared heresies; the next chapter explores those that won and came to be declared orthodox. I begin with three heretical views that were decisively ruled out of bounds by the emerging orthodox opinion. These views can be set out as three contrasting ways of understanding Christ. Some Christians denied that Christ was God by nature; for them, he was “only” a human who was adopted to be divine. Others denied that Christ could be human by nature; for them, he only “appeared” to be a man. Yet others denied that Jesus Christ was a single being; for them, he was two separate beings, one human and one divine. All three of these views ended up being theological “dead ends.” A lot of people went down these paths, but they eventually led nowhere.2


The Path That Denies Divinity

ONE OF THE MOST interesting features of the early Christian debates over orthodoxy and heresy is the fact that views that were originally considered “right” eventually came to be thought of as “wrong”; that is, views originally deemed orthodox came to be declared heretical. Nowhere is this more clear than in the case of the first heretical view of Christ—the view that denies his divinity. As we saw in Chapter 6, the very first Christians held to exaltation Christologies which maintained that the man Jesus (who was nothing more than a man) had been exalted to the status and authority of God. The earliest Christians thought that this happened at his resurrection; eventually, some Christians came to believe it happened at his baptism. Both views came to be regarded as heretical by the second century CE, when it was widely held that whatever else one might say about Christ, it was clear that he was God by nature and always had been. It is not that the second-century “heresy-hunters” among the Christian authors attacked the original Christians for these views. Instead, they attacked the people of their own day for holding them; and in their attacks they more or less “rewrote history,” by claiming that such views had never been held by the apostles at the beginning or by the majority of Christians ever. They were instead innovations that needed to be trounced and rejected by all true believers.


The Ebionites

Several groups in the second Christian century appear to have held on to the very ancient understanding of Christ as a human being who had been adopted by God at his baptism. It is unfortunate that we do not have writings from any of these groups that lay out their views in detail. Instead, for the most part, all we have are the writings of the Christian authors—usually “heresy-hunters,” known to scholars as heresiologists—who opposed them. It is always difficult to reconstruct a group’s views if all you have are writings by their enemies who are bound and determined to attack them. But sometimes that is all we have, and such is the case here. Scholars have long known that it is necessary to take the heresiologists’ claims with a pound of salt. But even so, it does seem plausible in this case that some Christians continued to hold the views ascribed to them by their enemies. One such group has been known as the Ebionites.

The Ebionites are attacked by a number of our heresiologists, including one we will have occasion to discuss at greater length, a church leader in Rome from the early third century named Hippolytus. Throughout our sources the Ebionites are portrayed as Jewish Christians—that is, Christians who continued to think it was necessary for the followers of Jesus to keep the Jewish law and Jewish customs, that is, to retain (or acquire) a Jewish identity. There was a certain logic to this view: if Jesus was the Jewish messiah sent from the Jewish God to the Jewish people in fulfillment of the Jewish law, then it makes sense that he embraced a Jewish religion and that to be his follower a person needs to be Jewish. But as Christianity increasingly became gentile (non-Jewish), it also makes sense that it eventually departed from its Jewish roots and came to oppose key aspects of Judaism, as we will see at greater length in the epilogue.

Some scholars have maintained that the Ebionites could trace their theological lineage back to the earliest followers of Jesus, the Jewish believers who congregated in Jerusalem in the years after Jesus’s death around the leadership of his brother James. In terms of their Christological views, the Ebionites do indeed appear to have subscribed to the perspective of the first Christians. According to Hippolytus, in his lengthy book Refutation of All Heresies, the Ebionites maintained that they could be made right with God, or “justified,” by keeping the Jewish law, just as Jesus himself was “justified by fulfilling the law.” Being made right with God, then, was a matter of following Christ’s example, and anyone who did so also became a “Christ.” In this view, Christ was not different “by nature” from everyone else. He was simply a very righteous man. Or as Hippolytus puts it, the Ebionites “assert that our Lord Himself was a man in a like sense with all (the rest of the human family)” (Refutation 22).3

In the opinion of Hippolytus and his orthodox peers, nothing could be farther from the truth. For them, Christ was God—not because he was exalted to a divine status, but because he was a preexistent divine being who had always been with God and was equal with God, even before he was born.


The Theodotians (Roman Adoptionists)

Another group that held to such “adoptionist” views—the view that Christ was not by nature divine but was adopted to be God’s son—emerged not out of Jewish Christianity, but from purely gentile stock. This was a group known as the Theodotians, named after their founder, a shoemaker, who happened also to be an amateur theologian, named Theodotus. Since they were centered in Rome, scholars sometimes refer to this group as the Roman Adoptionists.

The followers of Theodotus did think that Christ was unlike other humans in that he was born of a virgin mother (and so they may have accepted either the Gospel of Matthew or the Gospel of Luke as scripture). But other than that, as Hippolytus tells us, for them “Jesus was a (mere) man” (Refutation 23). Since Jesus was unusually righteous, at his baptism something special happened: the Spirit of God came upon him, giving him the power to do his great miraculous deeds. As Hippolytus presents it, the Theodotians were split among themselves concerning Jesus’s relationship to God: some of them maintained that Jesus was a “mere man” who was empowered by the Spirit he received at the baptism; others apparently believed that at that point Jesus became divine; yet others maintained that “he was made God after the resurrection from the dead” (Refutation 23).

The longest refutation of the Theodotians’ perspective comes in the writings of Eusebius, whom we have already met as the “father of church history.” As happens so frequently throughout his ten-volume work on the history of the church, Eusebius quotes at length an earlier writing that attacks a heretical view, without, however, indicating who the author was. A later church father called the writing in question “The Little Labyrinth” and indicated that it was produced by the great theologian Origen, whose own Christological views I will discuss below. As it turns out, some modern scholars have argued that it was instead written by Hippolytus. In either event, this source appears to have been written in the early third century, and it is directed against the adoptionists who maintained that “the Savior was merely human.”

The author of “The Little Labyrinth” indicates that Theodotus the shoemaker had a follower who was a banker and who was also called, remarkably enough, Theodotus. Another member of the group was a man named Natalius, who was induced to become the bishop of the group when he was told that he would receive 150 denarii a month for his troubles (a sizable amount of money at the time). But then in an interesting anecdote we are told that Natalius was driven from the sect by an act of God, who sent him some very graphic nightmares in which he “was whipped all night long by holy angels and suffered severely, so that he got up early, put on sackcloth, sprinkled himself with ashes, and without a moment’s delay prostrated himself in tears before the Roman bishop Zephyrinus” (Eusebius, Church History 5.28).4

The author of “The Little Labyrinth” indicates that the Theodotians maintained that their view—that Jesus was completely human, and not divine, but that he was adopted to be the Son of God—had been the doctrine taught by the apostles themselves and by most of the church in Rome until the time of Bishop Victor, at the end of the second century. Historically, as we have seen, the Theodotians may well have had a point: some such understanding does indeed appear to have been among the earliest Christian beliefs. Whether it was the view held by most Roman Christians until near their own time is not as clear. The author of “The Little Labyrinth” refutes the claim by pointing out that renowned Christian authors from the time of Justin Martyr, who was writing in Rome around 150 CE, held a different view: “in every one of these Christ is spoken of as God.”

In Chapter 9 we will see that this author is right: Justin did see Christ as a preexistent divine being. But Justin was writing 120 years after the “earliest” Christians and cannot, of course, be used to show what the followers of Jesus were saying in the years just after Jesus’s death, more than a century earlier.

It is worth observing that “The Little Labyrinth” accuses the Theodotians of altering the texts of the New Testament they were copying in order to insert their own adoptionist views into them. It is an interesting passage and worth quoting at length:

They laid hands unblushingly on the Holy Scriptures, claiming to have corrected them. In saying this I am not slandering them, as anybody who wishes can soon find out. If anyone will take the trouble to collect their several copies and compare them, he will discover frequent divergencies; for example, Asclepiades’ copies do not agree with Theodotus’. A large number are obtainable, thanks to the emulous energy with which disciples copied the “emendations” or rather perversions of the text by their respective masters. Nor do these agree with Hermophilus’ copies. As for Apolloniades, his cannot even be harmonized with each other; it is possible to collate the ones which his disciples made first with those that have undergone further manipulation, and to find endless discrepancies. . . . They cannot deny that the impertinence is their own, seeing that the copies are in their own handwriting, that they did not receive the Scriptures in such a condition from their first teachers, and that they cannot produce any originals to justify their copies. (Eusebius, Church History 5.28)


This became a standard charge among the orthodox heresy-hunters of the early Christian centuries—that the heretics altered their texts of scripture in order to make them say what they wanted them to say. But two points need to be stressed when evaluating these claims. The first is that many texts of scripture actually did support such heretical views, as we saw in Chapter 6 when we talked about exaltation Christologies (e.g., Rom. 1:3–4; Acts 13:33). The second is that even though the orthodox claimed that this kind of manipulation of texts was a heretical activity, in the manuscripts of the New Testament that survive today almost all the evidence points in the other direction, showing that it was precisely orthodox scribes who modified their texts in order to make them conform more closely with orthodox theological interests. Certain heterodox scribes may have done the same, but among our surviving manuscripts there is almost no evidence to demonstrate that they did so.5

In any event, these adoptionist views were rejected by the orthodox theologians of the second and third centuries, whose views had firmly moved into the camp of incarnational Christologies, in which Christ was understood by nature to be a preexistent divine being who had become human.


The Path That Denies Humanity

WE HAVE SEEN THAT those holding adoptionist views of Christ claimed to represent the earliest views of Jesus’s own apostles. Of course, every group representing every view of early Christianity claimed that its views were the original teachings of Jesus and his earthly followers—but in the case of the adoptionists, they may well have been right. The view we consider now is in some ways the polar opposite: it maintained that rather than being completely human, and so not—by nature—divine, Christ instead was completely divine, and so not—by nature—human. Eventually, this view came to be labeled docetism, from the Greek word dokeo, which means to seem or to appear. According to this view, Christ was not really a man but only “appeared” to be. He in fact was completely God. And God, for these believers, could not be a human any more than a human can be a rock.

This understanding too can be traced back to early times, though not nearly as early as the adoptionist understanding rooted in exaltation Christologies. Docetic views, when first we meet them, appear to have emerged out of incarnation Christologies later in the first century—but still during the times of the New Testament. One would be hard-pressed to see them as views adopted by the original followers of Jesus, however. As we have seen, there may be some reason to suspect that Paul held to some such views—but it is very difficult to say. Paul does speak about Christ coming in the “likeness of sinful flesh” (Rom. 8:3) and to have been “in appearance” as a human (Phil. 2:7), but he never spells out clearly his views about the humanity of Jesus. He does, however, say that Christ was actually “born of a woman” (Gal. 4:4), and that does not sound like the sort of thing most docetists would want to claim.

As a result, the first clear attestation of a docetic view comes only near the end of the New Testament period, in the book known as 1 John. The author of this anonymous work was traditionally said to be Jesus’s disciple John, the son of Zebedee. The book was almost certainly not written by him, though, and it makes no claim to be written by him. What is clear is that the book is directed against members of this author’s community—or rather former members who have split off from the larger group because of a difference of opinion concerning the nature of Christ’s existence. Those who have left the community to found their own church do not believe that Christ “came in the flesh”; that is, they do not believe he was a real flesh-and-blood human being.


The Docetists Opposed in 1 John

The author of 1 John explicitly refers to a group of former members of the community who have left, whom he calls antichrists—that is, “those opposed to Christ”: “Now many antichrists have come, from which we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us but they were not of us; for if they had been of us they would have remained with us. But they went out in order that they all might be shown not to be of us” (1 John 2:18–19).

It is clear from this passage that the opponents of Christ were once in this author’s church, but they left. The author maintains that they never really were of like mind with those who remained in the community. But what was the issue that made them leave? On another occasion the author mentions the “antichrists,” but this time he tells us what it is they believed that was at odds with his own views and the views of the wider community: “By this you know the Spirit of God. Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God; and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and now is in the world already” (4:2–3).

And so, only those who acknowledge that Christ came “in the flesh” can be considered true believers. The antichrists who have left the community apparently did not make this acknowledgment. Scholars debate the meaning of this passage, but it is easiest to assume that those who have split from the community deny the real fleshly existence of Christ. This would explain as well why the author begins his book the way he does, by stressing that Christ had a real, bodily, tangible existence: “What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we beheld and our hands handled, concerning the word [Logos] of life; and the life has been manifested and we have seen and witnessed and report to you the eternal life that was with the father and has been manifest to us” (1:1–2).

He goes on to say that he is referring to the Son of God, Jesus Christ (1:3). Why does he stress the tactile existence of Christ as one who could be seen, heard, and handled? Precisely because the antichrists have denied it. You may be struck by the fact that this opening to the book of 1 John sounds vaguely like the opening of the Gospel of John, which also starts with “in the beginning” and also refers to the word/Logos of God that provided life and became a human (John 1:1–14). Why the similarities? It is widely believed among scholars that 1 John was written by someone living in the same community in which the Gospel of John was written and circulated. As we saw, the Prologue of John stressed that Jesus was the incarnation of the preexistent Word of God who was both with God and was himself God. This incarnation Christology is one of the “highest” views of Christ to be found in the New Testament. How can we explain the view of the antichrist, which is “higher” still—so high that Christ is completely divine and not at all human? Some scholars have maintained that within the community that produced the Gospel of John, some believers took the Christological views of the Gospel to an extreme—or at least to what they considered to be a logical conclusion—and maintained that Jesus was so much God that he could not really have been a man. The book 1 John was written, then, to counter that view by insisting that “Jesus Christ came in the flesh” and that anyone who refused to acknowledge his fleshly existence was in fact an antichrist.


The Docetists Opposed by Ignatius

The view embraced by the antichrists dismissed in 1 John came to be widely held in some Christian groups of the second century. A similar view was opposed by one of the most interesting authors from just after the New Testament period, a Christian bishop of the large church in Antioch, Syria, named Ignatius. We wish we knew a good deal more than we do about Ignatius’s life. What we do know is that he was arrested in Antioch for Christian activities around 110 CE and was sent to Rome to be executed by being thrown to wild beasts. On his journey to Rome, Ignatius wrote seven letters that still survive. They are, needless to say, fascinating reading, as they were written in some haste by a Christian who was staring a gory martyrdom in the face. The letters were written to various churches, most of which had sent representatives to meet Ignatius along his journey. Ignatius had learned of the inner workings of these churches and was writing to help them deal with their problems. One of the major problems he heard about was that some of these communities were having conflicts over the nature of Christ, as some of their members were embracing a docetic Christology.

Ignatius takes a strong stand against any such understanding that Christ was not a real flesh-and-blood human being who physically suffered and died. And one can imagine why he was so adamant in his opposition to such views. If Christ did not really experience pain and death—that is, if he was only a phantom of some kind without a real body or physical sensation—what would be the sense of Ignatius himself going through torture and death as a follower of Christ? For Ignatius, Christ was a man like all men. He was God too, to be sure. But he had a real body, he could feel real pain, and he could experience real death.

And so Ignatius tells his Christian readers in the city of Tralles that they are to “be deaf when someone speaks to you apart from Jesus Christ.” For Christ “was truly born, both ate and drank, was truly persecuted at the time of Pontius Pilate, was truly crucified and died” (To the Trallians 9).6 He goes on to attack people he calls “atheists.” He labels them “unbelievers” and indicates they “say that he only appeared to suffer (it is they who are the appearance).” For if they are right that Christ was only an appearance, “why am I in bondage, and why also do I pray to fight the wild beasts? I am then dying in vain and am, even more, lying about the Lord” (To the Trallians 10).

Ignatius says something similar to the Christians in the town of Smyrna: “For [Christ] suffered all these things for our sake, that we might be saved; and he truly suffered . . . not as some unbelievers say, that he suffered only in appearance. They are the ones who are only an appearance” (To the Smyrneans 2). That is to say, Christ was not deceitful, only pretending to be a fleshly being when he wasn’t; it is Ignatius’s docetic opponents who are deceitful. Ignatius then insists that Christ not only died in the flesh, he was raised in the flesh, as proved by the fact that “after his resurrection he ate and drank with them as a fleshly being” (To the Smyrneans 3). Christ was not simply disguised in human form; instead, it is the docetists who are “wild beasts in human form.” If Christ was “only in appearance, I also am in chains only in appearance. But why then have I handed myself over to death, to fire, to the sword, to wild beasts?” For Ignatius, since salvation comes to the human body, it must be experienced in the human body; and it must have been accomplished by Christ’s own actual human body. Otherwise, it is just an empty and apparent salvation.


The Marcionites

The best known docetist of the second Christian century was a famous preacher and philosopher, who was eventually branded as an arch-heretic, named Marcion. It is much to be regretted that we do not have any writings from Marcion’s hand, as he was tremendously influential on Christianity in his day, establishing churches throughout the Christian world that embraced his distinctive teachings. Unfortunately, we know of these teachings only from what his orthodox enemies said about them in their refutations. These refutations are, in any event, extensive. The heresiologist Tertullian, whom I will discuss at greater length below, wrote a five-volume work against Marcion that we still have today. This serves as our chief source of information about this great heretic.7

Unlike the antichrists mentioned in 1 John, Marcion did not take his theological cues from the Gospel of John but from the writings of the Apostle Paul, whom he considered to be the great apostle who alone understood the real meaning of Jesus. Paul in particular stressed that there was a difference between the Jewish law and the gospel of Christ. For Paul, following the dictates of the law could not make a person right with God; only faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus could do that. Marcion took this differentiation between law and gospel to an extreme by saying that in fact they were completely at odds with one another. The law was one thing, the gospel another. And that was for a very clear and, to Marcion, obvious reason: the law was given by the God of the Jews, but salvation was given by the God of Jesus. These were, in fact, two different gods.

Even today, some people—often Christian people—think of the God of the Old Testament as a God of wrath and the God of the New Testament as a God of mercy. Marcion honed this view to a razor-sharp edge. The God of the Old Testament created this world, called Israel to be his people, and then gave them his law. The problem was that no one could possibly keep the law. The God of the law was not evil, but he was mercilessly just. And the just punishment for breaking his law was condemnation to death. That was the punishment everyone deserved, and it is the punishment everyone received. The God of Jesus, on the other hand, was a God of love, mercy, and forgiveness. This God sent Jesus into the world in order to save those who had been condemned by the God of the Jews.

But if Christ belonged to the spiritual loving God rather than to the just Creator God, that must mean he did not belong in any sense to the creation itself. Christ could not, therefore, have actually been born and could not actually have any attachment to this material world, which was the world created by and judged by the God of the Jews. And so Jesus came into the world not as a real human being with a real birth. He descended from heaven in the appearance of a full-grown adult, as a kind of phantom who only appeared to have human flesh. But it was all an appearance, designed, evidently, to fool the Creator God. Jesus’s “apparent” death was accepted as the payment of the sins of others, and through seeming to die, the phantom Jesus from the spiritual God managed to bring salvation to those who believed in him. But he didn’t really suffer and he didn’t really die. How could he? He didn’t have a real body. It was all an appearance.

In response, the opponents of Marcion among the orthodox insisted that the God who created the world was the same God who had redeemed the world; the God who gave the law was the God who sent Christ in fulfillment of the law; and Christ was an actual, full, flesh-and-blood human who did not seem to suffer and die but who really did suffer and die, shedding real blood and feeling real pain, so that he could bring real salvation to real people who desperately needed it. The orthodox view that triumphed over Marcion and other docetic Christians like him insisted that even though Christ was divine, he was also actually, really human.


The Path That Denies Unity

SO FAR WE HAVE explored two Christological extremes—on one hand were adoptionists, who claimed that Christ was human but not, by nature, divine; on the other were docetists, who claimed that Christ was divine but not, by nature, human. The orthodox position, as we will see, claimed that both sides of this dispute were right in what they affirmed and wrong in what they denied: Christ was divine by nature—actually God—and he was human by nature—actually man. But how could he be both? One solution to this problem was deemed completely wrong-headed and heretical: that Jesus Christ was in fact two entities, a human Jesus who temporarily came to be inhabited by a divine being, who departed from him before his death. Some such view was held by a variety of Christian groups that modern scholars have called Gnostic.


Christian Gnosticism

There have been long, hard, and heated debates among scholars in recent years concerning the nature of the religious phenomenon known as Gnosticism.8 If nothing else, these debates have shown that we can no longer speak simply of Gnostic religions as if there were a monolithic set of beliefs shared by a wide range of religious groups, all of whom can fairly be labeled Gnostic. Some scholars think that the term Gnosticism has been so broadly defined that it is no longer of any use at all. Others have more plausibly suggested that we need to define Gnosticism very narrowly and refer only to a certain group as Gnostic and to call other, roughly similar groups by other names. Since this is not a book about Gnosticism per se, I do not need to go into great detail about these scholarly disagreements, important as they are. Instead I will simply indicate what I mean by Gnosticism and briefly discuss the kind of Christological view found among surviving Gnostic texts.

The term Gnosticism comes from the Greek word for knowledge, gnosis. As we have seen, Christian Gnostics maintained that salvation came not through faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus, but through proper “knowledge” of the secrets Christ revealed to his followers. For many centuries we knew about Gnostics only from the writings directed against them by such Christian heresiologists as Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Tertullian. We now know that even if we take the reports of these heresy-hunters gingerly and treat them with a rigorously critical eye, they still can mislead us as to the real character of Gnostic views. We know this because actual writings by Gnostics themselves have turned up. Now we can read what the Gnostics have to say about their own views.

The most significant find of such writings in modern times was a collection of books uncovered by Egyptian farmhands digging for fertilizer near the town of Nag Hammadi.9 This collection is called the Nag Hammadi Library. It contains thirteen books that are ancient anthologies of texts, most of them Gnostic writings produced by Gnostics and for Gnostic readers. Altogether the books contain fifty-two treatises—forty-six if you eliminate duplicates. They are written in the ancient Egyptian language known as Coptic; originally the books were apparently all authored in Greek, so the surviving copies are later translations. The books in which these treatises were found were manufactured in the fourth Christian century; the treatises themselves were composed much earlier, probably in the second Christian century. Studies of these books abound in scholarship. For our purposes, I briefly summarize the basic view set forth in these texts to help us make sense of the Christology that Gnostic Christians commonly shared.

Gnostic Christians did not think that this world was the creation of the one true God, making their views roughly similar to those of Marcion. But unlike Marcion, Gnostics subscribed to extensive mythological explanations for how the world came into being. Its origin was traced far into eternity with the generation of numerous divine beings who made up the divine realm. At some point—when the divine realm was all that existed—a cosmic catastrophe occurred that led to the formation of divine beings who were imperfect and not fully formed. One or more of these lower, imperfect, and (often seen as) ignorant divinities created this material world that we inhabit.

Gnostic texts do not explain the logic lying behind this view of the origin of the world, but it is not hard to detect. Does anyone really want to assign responsibility for this world, filled with so much pain and suffering, to the one true God? This is a world with hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, droughts, epidemics, birth defects, famine, war, and on and on. Surely a good and powerful God is not responsible for this cesspool of misery and despair. The world is a cosmic disaster, and the goal of religion is to escape this disastrous world.

According to Gnostics, the world is a place of imprisonment for sparks of the divine that originated in the divine realm but have come to be entrapped here. These sparks want and need to escape their material entrapment. They can do so by learning the secrets of who they really are, where they came from, how they got here, and how they can return.

You may wonder what any of this has to do with Christianity. According to the Christian Gnostics, this view of the world was taught by Christ himself. Christ is the one who came into the world to teach heavenly secrets that can liberate the divine sparks entrapped in matter.


A “Separationist” Christology

Apparently, some Gnostics held to a docetic understanding, that Christ—who could not belong to this evil material world—came to the earth as a phantom, much as Marcion had said. Marcion himself should not be thought of as a Gnostic; he held that there were only two gods, not many; he did not think of this world as a cosmic disaster, but as the creation of the Old Testament God; and he did not think divine sparks resided in human bodies that could be set free by understanding the true “gnosis.” Moreover, his docetic view does not appear to have been the typical view of Gnostics. Rather than thinking that Christ was completely divine but not human, most Gnostics appear to have thought that Jesus Christ was two entities: a human Jesus who was temporarily inhabited by a divine being. For them, there was a “separation” between Jesus and the Christ. We might call this a separationist Christology.

Because the man Jesus was so righteous, a divine being from the heavenly realm came into him at his baptism. This is why the Spirit descended upon Jesus and—as Mark’s Gospel says—came “into” him at that point (the literal meaning of Mark 1:10). And this is why he could begin doing his miracles then—not earlier—and delivering his spectacular teachings. But the divine cannot, of course, suffer and die. So, before Jesus died on the cross, the divine element left him. This is attested, some Gnostics claimed, by Jesus’s final words: “My God, my God, why have you left me behind?” (the literal meaning of Mark 15:34). Jesus was abandoned by his divine element on the cross.

One of the Nag Hammadi texts that espouses this kind of Gnostic separationist Christology most poignantly is the book we considered in Chapter 5 called the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter, which is allegedly narrated by none other than Jesus’s closest disciple, Peter. In the final portion of the text, Peter is said to be speaking with Jesus, the Savior, when suddenly he sees a kind of double of Christ who is seized by his enemies and crucified. Peter is understandably confused and asks Christ: “What am I seeing O Lord? Is it you yourself whom they take?”10 His confusion increases because then he sees yet another Christ figure above the cross and asks in his dismay: “who is this one above the cross, who is glad and laughing? And is it another person whose feet and hands they are hammering?” (Apocalypse of Peter 81).

Christ replies that the person above the cross is “the living Jesus” and that the person being nailed to the cross “is his physical part.” And so, there is a radical disjuncture between the physical, human Jesus and the Jesus who is “living.” The physical being is said to be “the home of demons, and the clay vessel in which they dwell, belonging to Elohim” (that is, God). The physical Jesus belongs to this material world and the inferior God who created it. But not the living Jesus: “But he who stands near him is the living Savior, the primal part in him whom they seized. And he has been released. He stands joyfully looking at those who persecuted him.” In other words, the divine element—the living Christ—has been set free from its material shell. And why does the living Jesus find the scene so amusing? “Therefore he laughs at their lack of perception, and he knows that they are born blind. Indeed therefore, the suffering one must remain, since the body is the substitute. But that which was released was my incorporeal body” (Apocalypse of Peter 83).

Here then is a separationist Christology. The “real” Christ, the “living Jesus,” is the divine element that only temporarily inhabited the body. It was this lower, inferior part, the “home of demons,” that was crucified. It is not the dying Jesus who brings salvation; salvation comes through the living Jesus who cannot be affected by suffering and who can never die. Those who don’t understand, who think that it is the death of Jesus that matters, are the object of Christ’s ridicule. Obviously, this would include church leaders who insisted that the real suffering and death of Jesus was the one thing that brought salvation. For this Gnostic author, these church leaders were not only misguided; they were a joke.

But the Gnostics did not have the last laugh. For a variety of complex social, cultural, and historical reasons, the Gnostic form of Christianity did not succeed in winning the majority of converts to its perspective. Orthodox church writers such as Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Tertullian ended up winning the day. These orthodox authors attacked the Gnostics for their divisive views based on a divisive set of theological beliefs: Gnostics, the orthodox charged, separated the true God from creation; they separated human bodies from their souls; and they separated Jesus from Christ. But in fact the one God had made the world, which is a place of suffering not because it was created evil, but because it has fallen as a result of sin. This was not God’s fault. This one God had made humans body and soul, and they would be saved body and soul. The true God had sent his Son into the world, not in the mere appearance of human flesh and not as a temporary inhabitant of a human body. God was one and his Son was one, body and soul, flesh and spirit, human and divine.


Early Christian Hetero-Orthodoxies

BY 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.


Modalism

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?


The Modalist View

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.


The Opposition by Hippolytus and Tertullian

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)


The Resultant Doctrine of the Trinity

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.


The Christology of Origen of Alexandria

With no early thinker is this more clear than with Origen of Alexandria—the greatest Christian theologian before the debates of the fourth century. Although he was an orthodox thinker in his time, he was condemned in later centuries for perpetrating heresy.

Origen, born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt, was unusually precocious. Already at a young age he was appointed head of the school that educated converts, the famous catechetical school. He was brilliant, learned, and massively well read. He was also incredibly prolific. According to the church father Jerome, Origen’s biblical commentaries, treatises, homilies, and letters totaled some two thousand.14

Origen delved into theological areas that had not yet been examined by any of his predecessors in the faith, and as a result he came up with many distinctive and highly influential ideas. Later theologians questioned his orthodoxy, and he was faulted for developing ideas that subsequently led to the major theological schism that I discuss in the next chapter, the Arian controversy. But he was working in virgin territory. He accepted the orthodox views of his day—including the Christological perspective claiming that Christ was divine and human at the same time, and yet was one person, not two. But Origen worked out that doctrine in a way that took him into theological arenas never before explored.

Among his abundant writings, none is more interesting than his book On First Principles, written around 229 CE when Origen was just over forty years old. This was the first attempt we have of a systematic theology, that is, a methodical attempt to deal with the major theological views of the church, both to establish what “all” Christians were supposed to believe and to speculate on how to understand the considerable number of gray areas not yet worked out by the orthodox thinkers of his day.

Origen begins his book by stressing that Christ is to be understood as God’s Wisdom, which existed always with God the Father (since God always had wisdom), without beginning. Christ is also God’s Word, since he is the one who communicates to the world all that is involved with God’s Wisdom. For Origen, Christ was not only a preexistent divine being; he was always with God the Father, and since he is God’s own Wisdom and Word, he was himself God by nature, and always has been. He was the one through whom God created all things.

This, then, naturally raises the question of how it is that “this mighty power of the divine majesty” can have become a human, “to have existed within the compass of that man who appeared in Judea” (On First Principles 2.6.2).15 Origen himself stands in awe of the question of incarnation: “The human understanding with its narrow limits is baffled; and struck with amazement at so mighty a wonder knows not which way to turn, what to hold to, or whither to betake itself. If it thinks of God, it sees a man; if it thinks of a man, it beholds one returning from the dead with spoils after vanquishing the kingdom of death” (On First Principles 2.6.2).

How exactly did this divine figure become human? How, in becoming human, did it not diminish its divinity? And how can the human be divine without ceasing to be human? Origen’s solution is one of the ideas that ended up making him susceptible to the charge of heresy. He came to believe in the preexistence of souls. In this view, not only did Christ preexist his appearance on earth as a human, so did everyone else.16

Origen maintained that in the remote past, way back into eternity, God created an enormous number of souls. He made these souls in order to contemplate and participate with the Son of God, who was God’s Word and Wisdom. But virtually all of these souls failed to do what they were designed to do and fell away from their adoring contemplation of the Word and Wisdom of God. Some fell away further than others. Those who fell the furthest became demons. Those who fell not so far became angels. And those who fell somewhere in between the two became human beings. Becoming a demon, a human, or an angel was a kind of punishment for the soul. That is why there are ranks and divisions among these three kinds of being, with some greater than others. Among humans, that is why some people are born with birth defects or disadvantages in life. It is not because God is capricious in how he deals with people; it is because some people are being punished more severely for the greater sin they committed before coming into human existence.

There was one soul, however, out of all the multitude, that did not fall away. Understanding this soul is the key to Origen’s Christology. This one soul clung with absolute devotion to the Word and Wisdom of God in a state of constant contemplation, “in a union inseparable and indissoluble.” Its unceasing contemplation had a profound effect on this soul. The best analogy that Origen can draw is of a piece of iron placed into the blazing coals of a very hot fire. After a long while, the iron—even though it is not itself “fire”—nonetheless takes on all the characteristics of fire. Touching it would produce no different effect from touching the fire itself. That’s what happened to this soul. It “was forever placed in the Word, forever in the Wisdom, forever in God.” It, in effect, became “God in all its acts and feelings and thoughts; and therefore it cannot be called changeable or alterable, since by being ceaselessly kindled it came to possess unchangeability through its unity with the Word of God” (On First Principles 2.6.6).

This one soul was the means by which God could establish contacts with the fallen souls who had become human as a means of punishment. For this one soul, thoroughly infused with Christ, the Word and Wisdom of God, became a human. Since it was “at one” with God (like the iron in the fire), in its incarnate state, as the man Jesus, it too could rightly be called the Son of God, the Wisdom of God, the power of God, the Christ of God; and since it was human, it could be named Jesus and be called the Son of Man.

How is it that Jesus Christ can on the one hand have a rational soul, like all other humans, and yet still be a manifestation of the Son of God on earth? It is because “this soul which belongs to Christ so chose to love righteousness as to cling to it unchangeably and inseparably in accordance with the immensity of its love; the result being that by firmness of purpose, immensity of affection and an inextinguishable warmth of love all susceptibility to change or alteration was destroyed, and what formerly depended upon the will was by influence of long custom changed into nature” (On First Principles 2.6.5).

Here then is a highly sophisticated, if greatly speculative, understanding of the incarnation and nature of Christ, arguably the most advanced early attempt to understand how Christ could be both human and divine. But it too would be surpassed in the years to come, as theologians worked to refine their views and to rule out of court any views that they considered either heretical or bordering on heretical.17


The Dead Ends and Broad Avenues of Early Christologies

WHEN THE HERESIOLOGISTS OF the second, third, and fourth centuries discussed the “heretics” whom they considered to be a threatening presence in their midst, they described them as demon-inspired, evil propagators of falsehood. The reality, though, is that virtually no heretic then or since has considered himself or herself to be a “heretic,” in the sense that the ancient heresiologists used the term, as referring to someone who propagated error. No one thinks they are propagating error, just as no one thinks that their views are “wrong.” Anyone who thinks their views are wrong changes those views so that they become right. Almost by definition, everyone thinks that their views are “orthodox”—at least in the theological sense of “right teachings.”

This is one of the reasons why historians do not use the terms heresy, heterodoxy, and orthodoxy in the value-laden theological sense to describe which views are right and which are wrong. People always think they are right. So historians use the terms in a neutral sense, to describe the views that ended up being declared true by the majority of believers—or at least the majority of church leaders—and those that ended up being declared false.

But since everyone who propounded one view or another in the early church believed that their views were right, there is very little reason to suppose that anyone meant to cause harm by advancing the views they did. Virtually everyone in the early church whom we know of believed they were doing the right things and intended to understand the secrets of the Christian religion correctly. But history is not always kind to good intentions.

Christians wanted to affirm certain beliefs. But in some instances, if those affirmations were pressed to an extreme, they did not allow Christians to affirm other beliefs that they or other Christians also wanted to affirm. We have seen, for example, that some Christians wanted to affirm that Christ was human, but they did so to such an extent that they refused to acknowledge he was divine. Others wanted to affirm that he was divine and did so to such an extent that they refused to acknowledge he was human. Others tried to get around the problem by claiming that he was two different things: part of him was human and part of him was divine; but this solution brought division and disunity instead of harmony and oneness. Others wanted to affirm that since there can be only one God, Jesus could be divine only if he himself was that one God come to earth. But that solution ended up causing Christians to say that Jesus begot himself as the father to his own son, along with other equally confusing formulations. Some superscholars of the day such as Origen tried to resolve the problems in more sophisticated ways, but these views also led to ideas that were later deemed objectionable, such as the view that all of us have souls that preexisted and were brought into the world as a form of punishment.

I should stress that these issues were not merely intellectual games that a group of cerebral Christian theologians were playing. They evidently mattered to ordinary Christians as well, and not just because they wanted to get their beliefs “right”; it was also because they wanted to know how to worship properly.18 Should Jesus be worshiped? If so, should he be worshiped as God, or as a subsidiary divinity? Or is God the Father alone to be worshiped? And is the God who is to be worshiped the same God who created the world, or some other deity? If Jesus is to be worshiped and God the Father is to be worshiped, how does one avoid the conclusion that the Christians worship two Gods?

Throughout all these debates, we see Christian thinkers trying to figure it all out, wanting to make certain affirmations that they took to be gospel truth. What resulted was not so much confusion, as considerable nuance and sophistication. Eventually a Christology emerged that affirmed at one and the same time aspects of what opposing heresies affirmed, while refusing to deny what they denied. This led to a significantly refined but highly paradoxical understanding of how it is that Jesus could be God.

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