RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Monarchianism
are one person; and though in God the Logos (Son) and " Wisdom " (Holy Ghost; elsewhere in Paul Logos is identical with " Wisdom ") may be distinguished, they nevertheless remain qualities of God. God sent forth the Logos from himself from eternity and even begat him, so that the Logos may be termed " Son " and have a being ascribed to him, though he remains an impersonal power. The Logos, which can not be made manifest, worked in the prophets, still more in Moses, and most of all in the son of David born of the Holy Ghost by the Virgin. The Redeemer is, therefore, human in essence and comes " from hence," while the Logos works in him " from above." The union of the Logos with the man Jesus is to be considered an indwelling (with an appeal by Paul to John xiv. 10), so that the Logos is in Jesus what the apostle called the " inner man " in the Christian. On the other hand, since the Logos does not dwell essentially in Jesus, the two are to be distinguished, the Logos being the greater. Mary did not give birth to the Logos, but to a man essentially like other men; and the man, not the Logos, was anointed with the Spirit in baptism. On the other hand, Jesus was made peculiarly worthy of the divine grace, and was correspondingly preserved from sin. In consequence of his mental endowment and his will, Jesus was like God and became one with him, not only being without sin himself, but also overcoming by his toil and struggle the sin of the first parent of mankind. As Jesus steadily progressed ethically, the Father endowed him with miraculous powers; so that he became the redeemer and savior of mankind, and finally became inseparably united with God forever, receiving as the reward of his love a " name which is above every name " and the power of judgment. He is, moreover, enthroned in divine honor, so that he may be termed " God from the Virgin." His preexistence may, therefore, be postulated on the basis of foreknowledge and prophecy; and in like manner he may be regarded as born through the grace of God. Doubtless Paul of Samosata, in his view of the baptism, recognized a special degree of the indwelling of the Logos in the man Jesus; and he seems to have held that Jesus did not become Christ until his baptism. In his polemics Paul sought to show that the belief that Jesus was by nature the son of God led to ditheism; he openly opposed the Alexandrine exegetes; and he banished from the liturgy all psalms of the Church in which the essential divinity of Christ was maintained. While the doctrines of Paul of Samosata clearly mark a continuation of those of Hermas and Theodotus, he not only adopted the current theological terminology of his time, but also gave a philosophical, ethical, and Biblical foundation to the old heterodox type of doctrine. While in certain respects he was foreshadowed by the complicated theology of Origen — and also perhaps by the Alogi of Asia Minor and the Theodotians of Rome — his development of the nature and the will in the persons, the character and power of love, and the recognizability of Christ's divinity solely from his activity as being one with the divine will — these stand almost alone in the entire dogmatic literature of the oriental churches of the first three centuries.
He is especially characterized, however, by his conscious substitution of history and ethics for metaphysics, as in his rejection of Platonizing dogmatics. While, moreover, he considered the peculiar divinity of Jesus to consist in his attitude and his will rather than in his nature, he held that the spirit and the grace of God rested in special measure (in accord with the divine promises) on Christ as the peculiar object of the predestination of God, Christ's activity and his life in and with God thus becoming unique. By this theory room was left for a human life.
Yet Paul taught an eternal son of God, and an indwelling of that son in Jesus; he proclaimed the divinity of Christ, held the doctrine 3. Paul's of two persons (God and Jesus); and, Homoousi- like the Alexandrine theologians, reanism and jected Sabellianism. The very synod Influence, of Antioch which condemned him apparently rejected the term homoousios in deference to him, on the ground that (according to the conjecture of Athanasius), if Christ was of the same nature as the Father, the latter was not the ultimate source of divinity, but both the Father and the Son must be derived from a primordial substance, and thus be in the relation of brothers. The possibility must also be borne in mind, however, that, as Hilary says, the synod rejected the term homoousios because Paul himself had declared God and the (impersonal) Logos (the Son) to be of the same substance. At all events, the majority of the synod considered the doctrines of Paul extremely heterodox, and, with all their own uncertainty on the precise character of the essentially divine element in Christ, they picked a very real flaw in Paul's Christology — his practical teaching of two sons of God, though the actual difference between the two parties lay in the problem of the divine nature of the Redeemer. With the deposition of Paul of Samosata it was no longer possible to gain a hearing for a Christology which denied the personal, independent preexistence of the Redeemer. It was no longer sufficient to interpret his theanthropic life from his deeds, but it was necessary to believe in his divine nature. Nevertheless Paul's school lingered on for a time, giving inspiration to the tenets of Lucian of Samosata (q.v.) and his followers, who ultimately developed into the Arians. In the fourth century Photinus approximated the teachings of Paul, whose affinity with the great Antiochian theologians is also clear, independent though the tenets of the latter school were in their origin. Among the great Antiochians Paul of Samosata was again condemned, and his name was used a third time in the Monothelite controversy (see Monothelites). Even in the early fourth century the Acta Archelai show that in easternmost Christendom there was a Christology untouched by Alexandrine teachings and to be ranked with Adoptionism. Here it is clearly evident that as late as this period the Logos-Christology had not overpassed the boundaries of the Christianity confederated in the empire.
[The influence of Paul of Samosata was probably perpetuated in the Paulicians of Armenia (q.v.), and his name appears in their denominational
Btonarchianiem