579 Christologies in the 2nd and 3rd Centuries (Dale Tuggy)

Have you heard of Hippolytus’s Refutation of All Heresies? Written not long after 222 A.D. this book works through dozens of heresies–beliefs that the author disagreed with. Some scholars have argued against Hippolytus as the author, preferring to call him pseudo-Hippolytus. But regardless of who wrote the tome, the fact is that this huge book was the mature result of nearly seventy years of Christians cataloging heresies. In each case the next generation typically included much of what had come before and this book is no exception. It’s a massive tome, totaling more than 400 pages long in the most recent translation by David Litwa.

In this talk, delivered at the 2024 UCA conference held in Little Rock, Arkansas, Dr. Dale Tuggy draws on the Refutation of All Heresies to catalog the major christological options that were known to the author in the third century. Excluding all the gnostic groups, Tuggy identifies three broad groups of Christians who held very different ideas about Christ: the Dynamic Monarchians, the Modalistic Monarchians, and the Logos Incarnationists. Or to use the parlance of today, biblical unitarians, oneness believers, and Arians.

But, what about the Trinity? Where was it? Why didn’t pseudo-Hippolytus mention three persons in one being? Surely hundreds of millions of Christians who say the Church has always believed in the Trinity from the beginning can’t be wrong, can they? Listen in to this talk to find out.

Dale Tuggy is an analytic philosopher specializing in Trinity theories. He’s the author of the Trinity article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as well as the book What Is the Trinity, which gives a brief introduction to the various Trinity models and their problems. A month ago, a new book came out that he contributed to called One God, Three Persons, Four Views, in which he debated various Trinitarian scholars, putting forward his own non-trinitarian view as an alternative. Find out more about Tuggy and his work at his blog: Trinities.org.

In what follows he lays out the various christologies in the period before Nicea as well as explains quotations by Athenagoras and Mileto that modern trinitarian defenders use to prove that the Trinity was there in the second century. Lastly, he provides evidence for which view he thinks was the majority in the second and third centuries.

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