We Hold To The Monarchia : Monarchian primacy for ecclesiastical authority and a majority view

"BY THE END OF the second century it appears that a majority of Christians had not accepted the views of the adoptionists, the docetists, or the Gnostics. All these views were widely seen as theological dead ends—or worse, theological heresies that could lead to eternal damnation. Most Christians instead embraced the understanding that came to be—at least in the next century—the dominant view throughout Christendom: that Christ was a real human being who was also really divine, that he was both man and God, yet he was not two separate entities, but one. How, though, could that be?

If he was human, in what sense was he divine? And if he was divine, in what sense was he human? This was thetheological conundrum Christian thinkers had to resolve. It took them a very long time indeed to do so.

Before settling on one solution, Christian thinkers proposed a number of solutions that may have
seemed appropriate and satisfying at the time, but that in the long run came to be rejected as
inappropriate, dissatisfying, and even heretical.

This is one of the hard-and-fast ironies of the Christian tradition: views that at one time were the majority opinion, or at least that were widely seen as completely acceptable, eventually came to be left behind; and as theology moved forward to become increasingly nuanced and sophisticated, these earlier majority opinions came to be condemned as heresies.

We have seen this movement already with the exaltation Christology that was the original form of Christian belief. By the second century it was widely deemed heretical.

Later understandings of the second century were acceptable and dominant in their day, but they too came to be suspect and even spurned.

Since these later understandings embraced the principal orthodox concerns—to see Jesus as both
human and divine, and as one being not two—yet came to be condemned as heretical, I have coined a new term for them: I call them hetero-orthodox (literally “other-orthodox”).

Here I consider two suchunderstandings that played an important role in the formation of later Christological thinking.

Modalism (MONARCHIANISM)
The first was the view that evidently was held by a majority of Christians at the beginning of the third century—including the most prominent Christian leaders in the church, the bishops of the church of Rome (i.e., the early “popes”). Modern scholars sometimes call this view modalism.
Christians in the period by and large insisted on maintaining two separate views that on the
surface may seem, and did seem to others, to be contradictory. The first was monotheism: there is
only one God. There are not two gods, as for Marcion, or an entire realm of gods, as for the
Gnostics. There is one God and only one God. But the second view was that Christ was God. It wasn’tmerely that Christ was a human who had been adopted to a status of divine power, as in the (nowprimitive) exaltation Christologies. It was that he was a preexistent divine being who was by his verynature, in some sense, God. But if God the Father is God, and Christ is God, how is it that there are not two Gods ?"
- How JESUS BECAME GOD The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee by Bart D.Ehrman -
"The distinction between Father and Son was accordingly nominal; yet it was to this extent more than nominal, that the one God, in being born man, appeared as Son; it was real, so far, from the point of view of the history of salvation. In support of the identity of the “manifested” and the invisible, these Monarchians referred to the O. T. THEOPHANIES, WITH AS GOOD A RIGHT as, NAY, with A BETTER THAN, the defenders of the Logos Christology."

- History of Dogma Vol.III by Adolphe Harnack -
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