Justified True Belief

(P1) Modalism makes the Father, the Son, and the Spirit three names for one person. + Modalism is the first of the two errors, and most people meet it long before they ever hear its name. (1) One God who appears as three, one at a time. - Start with the pictures people still reach for in Sunday school. The same water is ice in the freezer, liquid in the glass, and steam over the kettle. Or one man is a son to his mother, a father to his own boy, and a foreman down at the plant. Both of those get taught with a straight face most weeks of the year, in churches that would be alarmed to hear what they are called. - What they are called is modalism, from mode, a way of appearing. On that account there is exactly one divine person, and he acts as Father in creation, as Son in redemption, and as Spirit in the church. Three roles, one actor, and never two of them on stage in the same scene. - The teachers belong to the years around AD 200. Noetus taught it in Asia Minor and Praxeas carried it to Rome, and a little later Sabellius gave his name to the whole family of views, which is why the older books call it Sabellianism. (2) It was built to protect God's oneness, not to attack it. - The modalists were monotheists in a hurry: one God and only one, and no counting past that. The word they defended was the "monarchy," which in their Greek meant single rule from a single source, and they were sure that anyone who spoke of the Son as somebody other than the Father had already started counting to two. - Tertullian, writing against Praxeas around AD 210, put his finger on the exact mistake. The modalist supposes that "one cannot believe in one only God in any other way" than by saying that Father, Son, and Spirit are the very selfsame person (Against Praxeas 3). - The error is not carelessness about God. It is care about God's oneness with nowhere to put the rest of the evidence. (3) If the Son is another name for the Father, then the Father hung on the cross. - Follow the account out and there is nowhere else for the suffering to go. Take away the second person and the one who died under Pontius Pilate is the one who sent him, because there is nobody else there. - The early church had a word for that result: patripassianism, from the Latin for "the Father suffered." Tertullian's jab at Praxeas is famous, and it is not gentle. Praxeas, he wrote, "put to flight the Paraclete, and he crucified the Father" (Against Praxeas 1). The Paraclete is the Spirit, the counselor Jesus promised he would send. (4) The view is not a museum piece. - Oneness Pentecostals, a modern movement that baptizes in Jesus' name alone, hold it deliberately and argue for it in print. Far more people hold it by accident, having been handed the water analogy at seven years old and never given anything better since. - So the refusal is not archaeology. The error the church spent a century turning away is the one most likely to be sitting in an ordinary pew on an ordinary Sunday morning. Therefore, modalism keeps the full deity of the three by collapsing them into one person under three names.

(P2) The three address, send, and pray to one another. + One person can be described in a hundred ways. One person cannot be on both ends of a conversation. (1) Nobody says "I" and "you" to himself. - Tertullian handed Praxeas a challenge that has never been met. Scripture keeps putting two parties inside a single sentence: "The Lord says to my Lord: Sit at my right hand" (Psalm 110:1). Find me, he said, one passage anywhere that reads, "The Lord said unto Himself, I am my own Son, today I have begotten myself" (Against Praxeas 11). - Jesus builds a question to the Pharisees out of that psalm's two Lords (Matthew 22:41-45). The honest thing to say about the verse is that the second "Lord" in the Hebrew is an ordinary word for a superior, so the line on its own is not announcing anybody's divinity. What it is doing is holding two Lords in one sentence. David's son is somehow David's master, and there is no puzzle there at all unless the psalm has two. - Talking to yourself in the car is ordinary enough. Sending yourself somewhere, and then being pleased with yourself as a beloved son, is not the same kind of thing at all. (2) At the Jordan all three are there at once. - Luke gives the whole scene in one sentence. Jesus is in the water praying, the Spirit comes down on him in bodily form like a dove, and a voice out of heaven says "You are my beloved Son" (Luke 3:21-22). Three of them, at the same moment, doing three different things. - Sequence is the entire idea of a mode. An actor can play three parts in one play by changing costume between scenes, and an audience will follow him happily. What he cannot do is play two of them in the same scene, facing himself, speaking to himself from off stage. - The pattern is not confined to one river bank either. Jesus sends the disciples out to baptize into one name that belongs to three (Matthew 28:19), and Paul closes a letter by asking three for three different gifts (2 Corinthians 13:14). (3) "I and the Father are one" says two, not one. - John 10:30 is the modalist's favorite verse, and it is the verse Tertullian turned around on him. The argument is grammar rather than theology, which is what makes it so hard to wriggle out of. - English does the same work every day and nobody notices. A husband who says "my wife and I are one" has never once been taken to mean that there is only one person in the marriage. - Greek and Latin mark that difference in the word itself. "I and the Father" is a plural subject and the verb is plural with it, and the word "one" is neuter, which is the form both languages use for a thing rather than a person: hen in Greek, unum in Tertullian's Latin. One person would have taken unus. Tertullian: "Unum, a neuter term, does not imply singularity of number, but unity of essence... He shows that there are two, whom He puts on an equality and unites in one" (Against Praxeas 22). (4) Prayer needs somebody on the other end. - In the garden he asks that a cup pass from him, and then yields: "not my will, but yours, be done" (Luke 22:42). On the modalist account that garden holds one person expressing a preference to himself and then overruling himself. - From the cross the cry is "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46). Somebody was being addressed there, and the only somebody available is the one person modalism has already spent. - The pattern reaches back past the making of the world. Jesus asks for "the glory that I had with you before the world existed," and says "you loved me before the foundation of the world" (John 17:5, 24). A God who is one person and nothing more had nobody at all to love until he made somebody. Therefore, the three do to one another what no single person can do to himself: address, send, and pray.

(P3) Arianism makes the Son a creature made out of nothing. + The second error runs in the opposite direction. It keeps the three genuinely distinct and pays for it by moving the Son across the line that separates God from everything God made. (1) Arius taught that there was once when the Son was not. - Around 319 a presbyter in Alexandria named Arius, which is to say a senior clergyman serving under the bishop, began teaching that the Son is not of the same substance as the Father but was produced by him before the world began. - Some of his slogans survive only because his opponents wrote them down in order to argue with them: "God was not always a Father," and the Son is "a creature and a work, not proper to the Father's essence" (Orations against the Arians 1.3.9). - Others stand in a letter he wrote himself, to Eusebius of Nicomedia, listing the sentences he says he is being persecuted for. The Son has a beginning where God has none, and the Son is "out of nothing" (Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History 1.5). - He also set his theology to music, in a work called the Thalia, the "Banquet," which Athanasius says ran in the loose meter of popular songs. Doctrine with a tune travels a good deal further than doctrine in a treatise. (2) He was defending God's uniqueness, not attacking Christ. - This is a serious position held by a serious man. Arius was convinced that the Father alone is unoriginate, deriving from nothing and depending on nothing, and that whatever derives from another is by that very fact made. - The Son he ended up with was no ordinary creature. He was the first and greatest of all things, existing before time began, the one through whom everything else was made, and Arians worshipped him. That is exactly what made the view attractive to sincere people and dangerous to the church. (3) Being begotten from the Father was never the objectionable part. - Origen, a century before the quarrel started, taught that the Father's begetting of the Word has no beginning at all and never stops. Later generations argued with Origen about a great many things, and not one of them faulted him for that. - Tertullian went the other way and came to no harm either. On his account the Word is eternally inside God and becomes the Son when he comes forth for the work of creation (Against Praxeas 7), which puts a beginning on the Son's distinct existence. The church that took his side against the modalists never once called that the heresy. (4) What Arius added was a Son who came from outside God. - Here is the sentence the whole controversy turns on. Arius held that the Word had no existence within God before he was begotten, and was not from the Father's substance. Take those two denials together and the begetting is no longer a begetting at all. It is a manufacture, out of nothing, and what gets manufactured is a creature. - Which is why the creed the bishops wrote at Nicaea in 325 refuses "there was when he was not" and "he came to be out of things that are not" in the same breath, as one package. The beginning being turned away is a start from outside God, not a coming forth from within him. That is why neither Origen's begetting nor Tertullian's was ever condemned. - Second Temple Judaism, the Judaism of Jesus' own day, knew one bright division running through everything that exists: God on one side, and everything God made on the other. Arius did not erase that line. He kept it, drew it about as firmly as anyone ever has, and put Christ on the far side of it. Therefore, Arianism keeps the distinctness of the three by demoting the Son into the created order.

(P4) The Son is God, not a creature. + The church's answer to Arius was not that his logic failed. It was that his conclusion cost more than he had noticed. (1) A God who once lacked his Word and his Wisdom would have been speechless and unwise. - If the Word was made, then before the making God had no Word of his own, and no wisdom of his own either, since Paul calls Christ "the power of God and the wisdom of God" (1 Corinthians 1:24). He acquired both later on. That was Athanasius's reply to Arius (Orations against the Arians 1.6.17). - Picture the being that reply describes: something with no thought and no wisdom of its own, later coming into possession of both. Whatever that is, it is not the God who says "I am the LORD, who made all things" (Isaiah 44:24). - Athanasius also reports the escape his opponents reached for. God has his own Word and his own Wisdom, they said, and the Son is called both by grace, as honorary titles handed to a creature (Orations against the Arians 1.5). The price of that escape is a second Word inside God who is not Christ, and a Son who holds his titles by courtesy. (2) The texts that call the Son God nearly always distinguish him from the Father. - John opens with both halves in one line: "the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1). With, and was. Keep only the "with" and you have unitarianism, the view that God is one person and the Son somebody less than God. Keep only the "was" and you have modalism. John wrote neither of those sentences. - Thomas, looking at a man he had watched die, says "My Lord and my God!" (John 20:28). He is not confusing the man in front of him with the Father that man had prayed to a week earlier. - Hebrews goes further still, because there the Father addresses the Son as God, in a line lifted out of a royal wedding song: "Your throne, O God, is forever and ever" (Hebrews 1:8, quoting Psalm 45:6). Two speakers, and the first one calls the second God. (3) Christians were already worshipping the Son two centuries before the council met. - Around AD 112 the Roman governor Pliny wrote to the emperor Trajan about a sect he had been interrogating. They met before dawn, he reported, and sang "hymns to Christ as to a god" (Epistles 10.96). That is a provincial administrator's paperwork, filed by a man with no stake whatever in the question. - Worship is a sharp test in that setting. Jewish writers of the period honored exalted figures freely, angels and patriarchs among them, and no Jewish group gave any of those figures a place in its own worship. An angel in Revelation refuses it point blank: "You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you and your brothers the" (Revelation 22:8-9). - Creatures who understand their own position decline worship. The Son receives it, generations before any emperor summoned anybody to anything. (4) "Begotten, not made" refuses the move in three words. - English blurs a distinction the creed badly needed. A daughter comes from her parents and a chair comes from a carpenter, and we reach for the same small word for both, though only one of the two is manufacture. - Greek could mark it, with two words that differ by a single letter: agenetos, not made, and agennetos, not begotten. Athanasius pressed hard on the difference. In the "not made" sense the Son is as unoriginate as the Father, deriving from no source outside God at all. Only in the "not begotten" sense does the Father stand alone, since the Son is indeed begotten (Orations against the Arians 1.9.31). - The sun and its light will do as a picture. The light comes from the sun and is not one second younger than the sun, and nobody supposes the sun manufactured it at nine o'clock this morning. - Christians who agree completely about the Son's full deity still disagree about what eternal begetting adds and whether Scripture teaches it at all. That question stays open, and thoughtful people sit on both sides of it. Either way the creed's phrase does the work it was written to do, which was to refuse the word "made." Therefore, the Son stands on God's side of the line that divides the Creator from everything made.

(C1) Therefore, the three are equally God and really distinct. + Modalism and Arianism fail in the same way, and it is a failure anybody can spot without training. (1) Both errors are refuted by the same small step. - A man pulls into the driveway, sees that his wife's car is gone, and concludes she is not home yet. He has proved nothing about cars. He reasoned that if she were home the car would be in the driveway, and the driveway is empty, so she is not home. - Logicians call that pattern modus tollens, or "denying the consequent": if this, then that; not that; therefore not this. When the premises hold, the conclusion is not optional. - Run it twice. If modalism were true, the three could not send and address one another. They do (P2). So modalism is false. If Arianism were true, the Son would be a creature. He is not (P4). So Arianism is false. - Neither premise has to be certain for that to work. Each has only to be more plausible than its denial, which is the ordinary bar for an argument built this way. (2) Each error kept half the evidence and threw the other half away. - Modalism held onto the full deity of the three and paid with their distinctness. Arianism held the distinctness and paid with the Son's deity. Orthodoxy is the refusal to pay either price. - Two men are handed a blanket they are both sure is too short for the bed. One pulls it up and leaves the feet bare, the other pulls it down and leaves the shoulders bare, and each is certain somebody has to be cold. The church kept saying, at considerable cost, that the blanket is not too short. (3) Both errors were tidier than the truth. - Modalism is the simplest monotheism on offer. Arianism is the tidiest philosophy: one absolute source, everything else derived from it, and no puzzle whatever about how three can be one. - A movement inventing a doctrine takes the tidy option, because it has no reason not to. This one did the opposite, twice. - It turned away modalism in the decades around AD 200, with no legal standing, no emperor to please, and nothing to gain by making its own confession harder to explain. It turned away Arianism a hundred and twenty-five years later. Two expensive refusals like that are what people do when they are guarding something they were handed. (4) Monotheism was never what divided them. - Praxeas held that God is one. So did Arius. So did Tertullian and Athanasius, who spent their working lives arguing with the two of them. Nobody in the room was proposing a second God. - The fight was among monotheists, about which sentences in the text they were permitted to stop believing in order to keep the arithmetic simple. The answer that survived was: none of them. (5) Both refusals reach the Spirit as well. - Neither error was ever going to stop at the Son. Make the Son a name for the Father and the Spirit becomes a third name; move the Son into the created order and there is no reason to leave the Spirit behind. Both moves were made, and both were turned away. Athanasius wrote to a fellow bishop named Serapion against teachers who granted the Son everything and still called the Spirit a creature (Letters to Serapion). - The evidence runs the same way it ran for the Son. Peter tells Ananias that he has lied to the Holy Spirit and then, in the very next breath, that he has lied to God (Acts 5:3-4). That is the deity. The Spirit says "me" and "I" and picks two men out of a congregation to send abroad (Acts 13:2). That is the distinctness. The church wrote both down at Constantinople in 381. Therefore, the three are equally God and genuinely distinct, which is what every later formulation of the doctrine tries to hold together.

(P5) Nicaea's creed fenced two first-century claims with fourth-century words. + The council of 325 met to answer Arius, and what it produced was less a definition than a boundary. (1) The council's real work was exclusion. - The creed itself is short. Its teeth are in the anathemas tacked on at the end, which are formal condemnations that put a named position outside the church's confession. They fall on anyone who says "there was when he was not," or that the Son "came into being from nothing," or that he is "of another substance." - A building code does not design anybody's house. What it does is tell builders what will fall down. The bishops were doing the second job, and doing it against one specific set of sentences that one specific man had written. (2) Homoousios carried no agreed definition even at the time. - The word means "of the same substance," and it is one of the most argued-over terms in Christian history. Historians who work on the period judge that it prevailed less because everyone agreed what it meant than because it was the one term the Arian party could not bring itself to sign. - It had a target even so. The creed sets it right beside the phrase "begotten from the substance of the Father," and that pairing shows what it was there to rule out: a Son produced out of nothing, from somewhere other than God's own being. - What it never acquired was a settled positive sense. That is why it decided so little on its own, and why the argument ran on for another fifty-six years, until a second council met in 381. (3) The vocabulary needed repair within forty years. - Two Greek words caused the trouble. Ousia meant the kind of thing something is, and hypostasis meant the particular thing that exists and bears properties. Gregory of Nyssa gave the plainest example anybody has managed: ousia is "man," and hypostasis is Paul. - Latin speakers heard it differently. To them hypostasis looked like a word-for-word rendering of substantia, so "three hypostaseis" sounded like three substances, which is tritheism, three Gods. Meanwhile Nicaea's condemnation of anyone calling the Son a different hypostasis sounded to Greek ears like modalism. - Ordinary language does this to people constantly. For most of the twentieth century "billion" meant a thousand million in America and a million million in Britain, and two careful men could use that word at each other for an hour without either of them noticing they were out by a factor of a thousand. - The Council of Alexandria in 362 did what those two would eventually have to do. It questioned both parties, found that they meant the same thing by different words, and ruled that either way of speaking could stand. The formula that settled the vocabulary for good, one ousia in three hypostaseis, came a few years later from the Cappadocians, three bishops from what is now central Turkey. (4) Strike the technical words out and both claims survive. - Every sentence standing behind (P2) and (P4) was written before AD 100, in documents that were copied, read aloud, and quoted in churches for two centuries before the bishops ever assembled. - So delete homoousios, ousia, and hypostasis from the language entirely. The baptism at the Jordan still has three in it, Thomas still says "My Lord and my God," and Pliny's Christians are still singing before dawn. What the fourth century added was a fence around those sentences that a determined reader could not bend. Therefore, the creed supplied vocabulary for claims the church already had, and vocabulary is not doctrine.

(C2) Therefore, the Trinity was fenced at Nicaea, not invented there. + What the doctrine claims can be said in one line: one God, three persons, each of them fully God. What the fourth century contributed was not that sentence but a wall around it. (1) The council added no new doctrine. - What it ruled out were two ways of subtracting one, and it did so in words nobody had needed before, because nobody had pressed the question that hard before. - A father teaching a child to ride does not invent the bicycle by shouting "not into the road." (2) The awkward facts about the council are all true. - It was not above politics. An emperor called it, paid for it, and wanted a quiet empire out of it. - The vocabulary was neither inevitable nor happy. Homoousios was ambiguous, the hypostasis muddle took the rest of the century to sort out, and the church has been explaining the words ever since. - The creed of 325 answered one question and left the next one standing. It gives the Spirit a single clause, never calls him God, and the fuller confession had to wait for the council of 381. - A council's authority settles nothing by itself. What a creed can do is state what the church found in the text, and it stays answerable to the text afterward. - Grant all four of those, and the doctrine's date does not move by a single year. (3) What is left is a short vocabulary and a permanent test. - Modalism is one person under three names, and it fails at the Jordan, where there are plainly three. Arianism is a made Son, and it fails at the worship he was already receiving from Jewish monotheists who would not have given it to an angel. - Two exclusions are not by themselves a doctrine, and there were always other ways to go wrong besides those two. What holds the middle is not whatever happened to be left over. It is the positive content of (P2) and (P4), which is not a formula at all but a handful of first-century sentences: three who address one another at a river, and a Son standing on God's side of the line. - Any account of God that makes the Son a costume the Father wears, or a magnificent creature the Father made, has already been tried and argued at length and turned away, in each case by people who were doing their best to protect the oneness of God and found that the text would not let them buy it so cheaply. Therefore, the doctrine the church confessed in 325 is the doctrine it had been baptizing people into since the first century, and the fourth century's contribution was a fence, not a foundation.