The Early Church Era · c. 190-270 · Smyrna, Rome, Libya

Modalist Monarchianism

An open theological question

Historians and Christians themselves are divided on whether this group's core beliefs fall inside the historic Christian creeds.

Era

The Early Church Era

Time Period

c. 190-270

Region

Smyrna, Rome, Libya

Status

An open theological question

About This Movement

Around the turn of the third century a way of protecting the oneness of God became briefly popular and then notorious. Noetus of Smyrna, and after him Praxeas and Sabellius at Rome, taught that Father, Son and Spirit are not three who are distinct but one who appears in three ways - so that the Son is the Father under another aspect. The objection was immediate and blunt: then it was the Father who was born, and the Father who died. Tertullian wrote Against Praxeas to say so, in a book that also gave Latin theology much of the vocabulary it would use for the opposite view. Hippolytus wrote against Noetus, and accused Callistus, the bishop of Rome, of sheltering the teaching - an accusation tangled up with his own rivalry for that see. Sabellius' name stuck to the position longest, and modalism is still sometimes called Sabellianism, though very little is known about him.

In Its Own Record

Formed From

Tertullian's Voice — Against Praxeas is the fullest Latin answer to the position, and coined much of the vocabulary the doctrine of the Trinity later used.
The Roman Church in the Third Century — Hippolytus accused Callistus of sheltering the teaching; the charge is inseparable from his rivalry for the see.
The Church of Antioch in the Third Century — Paul's adoptionism and Sabellius' modalism are opposite refusals of the same developing account of the Son, argued in the same decades.

Sources

No sources recorded.