Lecture 14: What Christians Believe About God

Question 1

Problem 1: Who is God?

Answer 1

• Early Christians needed to determine how to square three essential beliefs with one another
  1. There is one God
  2. Jesus Christ is worshipped as God (the Holy Spirit is also worshipped as God)
  3. Jesus is not the Father (the Holy Spirit is not Jesus or the Father)

Question 2

Belief: There is One God

Answer 2

• Following their Jewish forefathers, Christians adhered to a strict monotheism
• Monotheism: the belief that there is only one God

Question 3

Belief: Jesus Christ is worshipped as God

Answer 3

• This was just as essential as monotheism
• These strict monotheists worshipped Jesus

Question 4

Belief: Jesus is NOT the Father

Answer 4

Jesus’ earliest followers insisted Jesus was distinct from the Father

Question 5

3 Essential Beliefs of Early Christianity: Why is the doctrine of the Trinity so complicated?

Answer 5

• There is one God
• Jesus is worshipped as God
• Jesus is not the Father
• Christians had to make sense of how these three essential beliefs could coexist in a logically consistent way
• Christians had to draw more precise boundaries to explicitly rule out false beliefs

Question 6

The Role of Heresies

Answer 6

• Early Christian heresies represent attempts to create logically consistent conceptions of God that broke one of these three rules
• Heresy: any belief that represents a denial of a core doctrine of the Christian faith
• Three primary types of heresies are tritheism, modalism, and subordinationism

Question 7

Heresies of Tritheism

Answer 7

• Tritheism: the belief in three distinct Gods. Most commonly a denial or weakening of the unity of the Father, Son and Spirit as one God
• Tritheism was most often a hypothetical or imagined position
• Marcionism and Gnosticism could be said to represent this category of heresy
• Both deny that the God of the OT is the same God as the Father of Jesus Christ

Question 8

Heresies of Modalism

Answer 8

• Modalism: a group of beliefs which claim that the Father, Son, and Spirit are not distinct persons, but different modes in which the one God appears to us
• Functional modalism: the three persons of the Trinity represent three different aspects of the activity of God
• The most influential form of modalism was Sabellianism, a form of chronological modalism
• Chronological modalism: God appears in different modes at different times in history

Question 9

Heresies of Subordinationism

Answer 9

• Subordinationism: a group of beliefs which assert that the Son and/or the Spirit are somehow inferior to the Father
• Adoptionism: the belief that Jesus was an ordinary human being who was adopted by God to he his son
• Arianism: the belief that Jesus Christ was created by god in time, before the rest of creation. Jesus is divine, but is not of the same substance as God.

Question 10

The Nicene Creed

Answer 10

• The Nicene Creed was created at the First Council of Nicaea in 325, and then clarified at the First Council of Constantinople in 381
• It was created to protect these three essential beliefs:
  1. There is one God
  2. Jesus Christ is worshipped as God
  3. Jesus is not the Father

Question 11

Problem 2: Who is Jesus Christ?

Answer 11

• Early Christians needed to determine how to square two essential beliefs with one another
  1. Jesus Christ is worshipped as God
  2. Jesus Christ is a human being

Question 12

Heresies Denying Jesus’ Humanity

Answer 12

Docetism: the belief that Jesus only seemed to be human
- Apollinarianism: the belief that Jesus had a real human body, but a divine mind

Question 13

Heresies concerning Jesus’ Nature

Answer 13

• Nestorianism: the belief that two distinct natures coexist in the single body of Jesus of Nazareth
• Monophysitism: the belief that Jesus has a single nature that is both human and divine
  Challenged by Chalcedonian Definition

Question 14

Timeline

Answer 14

• Death of Christ
• All NT books written
• Marcionism, Gnosticism, Adoptionism, and Sabellianism condemned around this time
• Council of Nicaea: created the Creed of Nicaea; condemned Arianism
• Council of Constantinople: completed the Nicene Creed; condemned Arianism and Apollinarianism
• Council of Ephesus: confirmed the Nicene Creed; condemned Nestorianism
• Council of Chalcedon: created the Chalcedonian Definition; condemned Nestorianism and Monophysitism