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judged to be wrong, or heretical.
One such idea was Arianism—the
theology of Arius (c.250–336 CE),
a Christian leader in Alexandria,
Egypt—which emphasized
monotheism so strongly that it
denied the deity of the Son and,
by implication, of the Spirit. For
Arius, only the Father was truly
God. Although the Son was to be
honored for having the closest
possible relationship with the
Father, the Son was still only a
representative of the Father’s deity,
and did not share that deity.
This tallied with some aspects
of accepted Christian thinking: one
of the essential characteristics of
God was that he was uncreated—
he had no beginning as well as
no end to his life. The Arians
therefore argued that since children
have to be born, the Son of God
could not possess all the essential
characteristics of God, because, as
a Son, he must have been born. An
Arian dictum about the Son of God
stated that “there was once when
he was not”: there must have been
a time before the Son of God was
born, when God existed without
him. In their view, this logic proved
that only the Father was truly God.
One of the words used to describe
the Son was homoiousios, which
is a Greek term meaning “of similar
substance.” The Son was “of
similar substance” to the Father,
but not the same.
The Arians had preserved
monotheism, but at the expense
of the Son and the Spirit. This
was potentially disastrous for the
Christian faith, since the central
claim of Christians was that through
the life, death, and resurrection of
Jesus—the Son of God—God
himself had saved them. If the Son
of God was not truly God, then how
could they be sure that God really
did want to forgive them their sins
and receive them in his kingdom?
At the Council of Nicea in
325 CE, Arianism was condemned
when its central tenet, that the Son
was homoiousios with the Father,
was rejected. Instead, Jesus was
declared to be homoousios, which
means “of the same substance.”
This distinction made all the
difference—it was agreed that
the Son utterly shares the Father’s
deity. Consequently, it was
accepted that the Son had no
beginning—God has always been
a Father and a Son, together with
the Holy Spirit.Persons, not masks
A second answer deemed heretical
to the question of the Trinity was
given by a 3rd-century CE priest in
Rome, Sabellius, and his followers.
Unlike the Arians, the Sabellians
affirmed that the Son and the SpiritA DIVINE TRINITY
St. Athanasius of Alexandria is
remembered for his staunch theological
defense of Trinitarianism against the
teachings of Arianism. He had a key
role in drafting the Nicene Creed.
were truly God. They solved the
problem of whether God is one or
three by maintaining that Father,
Son, and Spirit are three modes
of the one God’s being. This idea
is known as modalism.
Father, Son, and Spirit can be
thought of as masks available to an
actor in a play. There is only one
actor, but he can play three parts,
simply by wearing three different
masks. At first, this might seem
like a good way to describe how
God is experienced: sometimes
Christians encounter him as the
Father, at other times as the Son,
and still other times as the Spirit.
However, if Christians only ever
encountered God’s three masks,
how could they be sure that they
had met God himself? After all,
people can wear masks in order to
hide their true identity. What if God
wore the masks to pretend to be
something he is not? And so, instead
of talking about masks or modes,
Christian theologians began to
use the Greek term hypostases,
which was translated into Latin as
personae, or persons. They posited
that God is three hypostases of one
ousia (Greek for essence/being—in
Latin, substantia, or substance),God is divided without
division, if I may put it
like that, and united in
division. The Godhead
is one in three and
the three are one...
Gregory of Nazianzus