THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
Smyrna, and through him a grand-pupil of St. John, the inspired master. He likewise uses the terms " Logos " and " Son of God " interchangeably, and concedes the distinction, made also by the Valentinians, between the inward and the uttered word, in reference to man; but contests the application of it to God, who is above 4. Irenseus. all antitheses, absolutely simple and imchangeable, and in whom before and after, thinking and speaking, coincide. ' B.& repudiates also speculative or a priori attenipts to explain the derivation of the Son from the Father. This he holds to be an incomprehensible mysterj^. He is content to define the actual distinction between Father and Son by saying that the former is God revealing himself; the latter, God revealed. The one is the ground of revelation; the other is the actual, appearing revelation itself. Hence he calls the Father " the invisible of the Son "; and the Son, " the visible of the Father." He discriminates most rigidly the conceptions of generation and of creation. The Son, though begotten of the Father, is still, like him, distinguished from the created world as increate — without beginning, and eternal; all plainly showing that Irenaeus is much nearer the Nicene dogma of the essential identity of the Son with the Father than Justin Martyr and the Alexandrians. When, as he does in several passages, he still subordinates the Son to the Father, he is certainly inconsistent, and that for want of an accurate distinction between the eternal Logos and the incarnate Christ. Expressions like " My Father is greater than I," which apply only to the Christ of history, in the state of humiUation, he refers also, like Justin and Origen, to the eternal Logos. On the other hand, he is charged with leaning in the opposite direction — toward the Sabellian and Patripassian views — but unjustly. Apart from his frequent want of precision in expression, he steers in general, with sure Biblical and churchly tact, equally clear of both extremes, and asserts alike the essential unity and the eternal personal distinction of the Father and the Son. He vindicates at length the true and full hirnianity of Christ against the Docetism of the Gnostic schools. Christ must be man, like us in body, soul, and spirit, though without sin if he would redeem us from sin, and make us perfect. He is the second Adam, the absolute, universal man, the prototype and summing up of the whole race. He also teaches a close union of the divinity and humanity in Christ, in which the former is the active principle, and the seat of personality, the latter the passive and receptive principle.
TertuUian (about 220) can not escape the charge of subordinationism. He bluntly calls the Father the whole divine substance, and the Son a part of it, illustrating their relation by the figures of the" fountain and the stream, the sun and the beam. He would not have two suns, he says; but he might call Christ God, as Paul does in Rom. ix. 5. The sunbeam, too, in itself considered, may be called sun, but not the sun a beam. Sun and beam are two distinct things (species) in one essence (substantia), as God and the World, as the Father and the Son. But figurative language must not be
taken too strictly, and it must be remen ?red that TertuUian was especially interested to i-'Stinguish the Son from the Father, i" oppo- 5. Tertul- sition to the Patripassian Praxeas. lian. In other respects he did the Church christology material service. He propounds a threefold hypostatical existence of the Son (filiatio): (1) The preexistent, eternal immanence of the Son in the Father, they being as inseparable as reason and word in man, who was created in the image of God, and hence in a measure reflects his being; (2) the coming forth of the Son with the Father for the purpose of the creation; (3) the manifestation of the Son in the world by the incarnation. He advocates the entire yet sinless humanity of Christ, against both the Docetistic Gnostics (Adv. Marcionem • and De came Christi) and the Patripassians (Adv. Praxeam). He accuses the former of making Christ, who is all truth, a half lie, and, by the denial of his flesh, resolving all his work in the flesh into an empty show. He urges against the latter that God the Father is incapable of suffering and change. Professor Warfield (see bibliography) lays much stress upon the definition which TertuUian gives of the Trinity, and regards TertuUian rather than Origen as the real father of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.
Dionysius, bishop of Rome (262), came nearest the Nicene view. He maintained distinctly, in g j^.^ the controversy with Dionysius of nysius Alexandria, the unity of essence and of Home. threefold personal distinction of
Father, Son, and Spirit, in opposition to Sabellianism, tritheism, and subordinationism. His view is embodied in a fragment preserved by Athanasius (De sententiis Dionysii, iv., and Routh, ReliquicB sacrce, iii., Oxford, 1846, p. 384).
m. The Nicene Christology, from 325 to 381: This is the result of the struggle with Arianism and semi-Arianism, which agitated the Eastern Church for more than half a century. The Arian heresy denied the strict deity of Christ (his coequaUty with the Father), and taught that he is a subordinate divinity, different in essence from God (Gk. hetero-ousios) , preexisting before the world, yet not eternal (" there was a time when he was not "), himself a creature of the will of God out of nothing (Gk. ktisma ex ouk onton), who created this present world, and became incarnate for our salvation. Semi-Arianism held an untenable middle ground between the Arian hetero-ousia and the orthodox homo-ousia, or coequality of the Son with the Father, and asserted the homoi-ousia, or similarity of essence, which was a very elastic term, and might be contracted into an Arian, or stretched into an orthodox, sense, according to the general spirit and tendency of the men who held it.
In opposition to these heresies, Athanasius of Alexandria ("the father of orthodoxy") and the three Cappadocian bishops — Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa — maintained and defended ( with superior ability, vigor, and perseverance, the homo-ousia, i.e., the essential oneness of the Son with the Father, or his eternal divinity, as the comer-stone of the whole Christian system. This doctrine trimnphed in the councils