The radical fault of this heresy is, that it shifts the whole idea of Sonship from the person
to the nature. Christ is the Son of God as to his person, not as to nature. The two natures do not
form two Sons, since they are inseparably united in the one Christ. The eternal Son of God did not
in the act of incarnation assume a human personality, but human nature. There is therefore no room
at all for an adoptive Sonship. The Bible nowhere calls Christ the adopted Son of God. Christ is,
in his person, from eternity or by nature what Christians become by grace and regeneration.
In condemning Monotheletism, the Church emphasized the duality of natures in Christ; in
condemning Adoptionism, she emphasized the unity of person. Thus she guarded the catholic
Christology both against Eutychian and Nestorian departures, but left the problem of the full and
genuine humanity of Christ unsolved. While he is the eternal Son of God, he is at the same time
truly and fully the Son of man. The mediaeval Church dwelt chiefly on the divine majesty of Christ,
and removed him at an infinite distance from man, so that he could only be reached through
intervening mediators; but, on the other hand, she kept a lively, though grossly realistic, remembrance
of his passion in the daily sacrifice of the mass, and found in the worship of the tender Virgin-Mother
with the Infant-Saviour on her protecting arm a substitute for the contemplation and comfort of his
perfect manhood. The triumph of the theory of transubstantiation soon followed the defeat of
Adoptionism, and strengthened the tendency towards an excessive and magical supernaturalism
which annihilates the natural, instead of transforming it.
Note.
The learned Walch defends the orthodoxy of the Adoptionists, since they did not say that
Christ, in his two-fold Sonship, was alius et alius, (which is the Nestorian view), but
that he was Son aliter et aliter, a[llw" kai; a[llw". Ketzerhistorie, vol. IX., pp. 881, 904. Baur (II.,
p. 152) likewise justifies Adoptionism, as a legitimate inference from the Chalcedonian dogma,
but on the assumption that this dogma itself includes a contradiction. Neander, Dorner, Niedner,
Hefele, and Möller concede the affinity of Adoptionism with Nestorianism, but affirm, at the same
time, the difference and the new features in Adoptionism (see especially Dorner II., p. 309 sq.).
§ 119. The Predestinarian Controversy.
Comp. vol. III., §§ 158–160, pp. 851 sqq.
Literature.
I. The sources are: (1) The remains of the writings of Gottschalk, viz., three Confessions (one before
the Synod of Mainz, two composed in prison), a poetic Epistle to Ratramnus, and fragment of
a book against Rabanus Maurus. Collected in the first volume of Mauguin (see below), and in
Migne’s "Patrol. Lat.," Tom. 121, col. 348–372.
(2) The writings of Gottschalk’s friends: Prudentius: Epist. ad Hincmarum, and Contra Jo. Scotum;
Ratramnus: De Praedest., 850; Servatus Lupus: De tribus Questionibus (i.e., free will,
predestination, and the extent of the atonement), 850; Florus Magister: De Praed. contra J. Scot.;
Remigius: Lib. de tribus Epistolis, and Libellus de tenenda immobiliter Scripturae veritate.
Confession which Felix had to sign in 799 when he abjured his error, it is said that the Son of God and the Son of man are one
and the same true and proper Son of the Father, "non adoptione, non appellatione seu nuncupased in utraque natura unus Dei
Patrus verus et proprius Dei Dei Filius."