Dynamic Monarchianism
Dynamic monarchianism, owes its origin to Theodotus, a leather-merchant active in Rome about AD 190, and was spread by Paul of Samosata, bishop of Antioch, who was condemned for his views by the church in AD 268. [1] This doctrine can be found in some of William Branham's teachings and has been adopted by Lee Vayle and his followers.
Monarchianism
Monarchianism, emphasizes the unity of God as the only monarchia, or ruler of the universe and came in two different flavours - Dynamic monarchianism and modalistic monarchianism.
If the premise “God is one” is foremost in one’s thinking about the Godhead, then the deity of the Son and the deity of the Holy Spirit can be problematic. If God (the Father) is God, and Jesus (the Son) is God, to some it appeared that there were two gods. Additionally, if the Holy Spirit is God, then they would argue that a belief in three gods is affirmed. This issue was the underlying difficulty that both movements sought to address[2]
Dynamic Monarchianism
Dynamic monarchianism believed that Jesus was just an ordinary man, though one who was particularly good and holy. The Spirit (or Christ) descended upon Jesus at his baptism, enabling him to perform miracles without making him divine. Thus, Jesus was a man indwelt in an unusually powerful manner by the Spirit, but he was not God. [3]
Although early material is scant, Theodotus taught that the ‘Spirit’ or ‘Christ’ descended upon Jesus at baptism, initiating miraculous powers in one who was, though supremely virtuous, just an ordinary man.
Theodotus was an offence to his critics for defining Jesus as a ‘mere man’ (psilos anthrōpos — hence the label ‘psilanthropism’), a term underlined by the adoptionist’s own description of his previous lapse from faith as denial ‘not of God but of a man’. According to Hippolytus, Theodotus ‘determined to deny the divinity of Christ’. Artemon, a convert in Rome to the teaching of Theodotus, sought to establish the historical pedigree of adoptionism; the significant response of one contemporary, held by some scholars to be Hippolytus, was to demonstrate that each of the early Christian apologists ‘proclaim Christ both God and man’.
The most famous heir to the early adoptionist tradition was Paul of Samosata who, in most of the early witnesses, is firmly linked with the teaching of Artemon. Paul was finally condemned for his views by the church in Antioch (AD 268). We have no contemporary record of his doctrine but it is plain that he was understood to teach that Jesus was ‘by nature an ordinary man’ (koinou tēn physin anthrōpou).
In the next century he was accused by the church historian Eusebius of holding a demeaning view of Christ and thus denying both ‘his God and his Lord’. It was his misdemeanour, alleged Eusebius, to draw back from acknowledging that the Son of God came down from heaven, confessing instead that Jesus was ‘from below’.
Modern Christologies sometimes defend themselves, with some justness, from the suspicion of adoptionism by consciously renouncing certain untenable features of the original movement, such as its impersonal interpretation of the divine presence with Jesus, its neglect of divine initiative over against human achievement and its blurring of the New Testament distinction between Christ’s Sonship and the adoptive counterpart in believers. These unsound traits, however, were, at least in the minds of the movement’s critics, quite secondary to the inadequately expressed identity accorded in adoptionism to the Jesus borne by Mary. Its really characteristic error was to deny the divine origin and identity of Jesus, calling him a mere man, a failing combated by the later title Theotokos (God-bearer) for Mary.[4]
Hippolytus explained some of the major ideas of dynamic monarchianism:
- Jesus was a (mere) man, born of a virgin, according to the counsel of the Father. After he had lived indiscriminately with all men and had become preeminently religious, he subsequently — at his baptism in the Jordan River — received Christ, who came from above and descended (upon him) in the form of a dove. This was the reason, according to Theodotus, why (miraculous) powers did not operate within him prior to the manifestation in him of that Spirit which descended and which proclaims him to be the Christ[5].
Adoptionism
This term is most commonly applied to the notion that Jesus was merely an ordinary man of unusual virtue or closeness to God whom God ‘adopted’ into divine Sonship. This exceptional elevation, which in primitive adoptionism was usually associated with the event of Christ’s baptism, involves nevertheless only a special divine activity upon or in Jesus.
Adoptionism (or Adoptianism) is technically the title also for a less well-known movement in the Spanish church of the 8th century, condemned for making Christ’s manhood participate in his dignity as Son only by adoption.[6]
References
- ↑ Sinclair B. Ferguson and J.I. Packer, New Dictionary of Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 6.
- ↑ Gregg R. Allison, Historical Theology: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), 235.
- ↑ Gregg R. Allison, Historical Theology: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), 235.
- ↑ Sinclair B. Ferguson and J.I. Packer, New Dictionary of Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 6.
- ↑ Hippolytus, The Refutation of All Heresies, 7.23, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, Philip Schaff, and Henry Wace, 10 vols. (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1994
- ↑ Sinclair B. Ferguson and J.I. Packer, New Dictionary of Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 6.