The Apologists and the Two Hands

Between the apostolic writings and Nicaea the Church confessed and worshipped Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with no agreed vocabulary for doing so. This file sets out what the second-century writers actually said — Justin’s Logos-theology, Theophilus’ first use of the word triad, Tertullian’s Latin formula, Athenagoras, and above all Irenaeus’ “two hands” — and concedes without flinching that much of it reads as subordinationist to post-Nicene ears, and why the Church has not treated that as heresy.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

What the Second Century Had and Did Not Have

The second-century Church had the baptismal formula, the rule of faith, the Eucharist, and the Scriptures. It did not have the word homoousios, a stable distinction between ousia and hypostasis, or any settled way of saying how the Son who was worshipped as God stood to the one God who is the Father. What it had instead was a problem it did not yet know how to state: it worshipped Jesus without ceasing to be monotheist, and it had to explain this to educated pagans, to Jews, and to Gnostics who offered their own solutions.

Read forward from the apostles, the second-century writers are remarkable for how much they hold. Read backward from Nicaea, they are alarming. Both readings are correct, and this file gives both.

Justin Martyr: The Word Who Is “Another”

St. Justin (c. 100–165), a philosopher converted at Ephesus and martyred at Rome, is the first Christian writer to develop a systematic account of the Son as the Logos. His purpose is apologetic: to explain to a Greek audience how the transcendent God who cannot be contained can be said to have appeared to Moses, and to claim for Christ whatever truth pagan philosophy possessed.

His central claims are three. The Logos is the reason and Word of God, God’s own, begotten from him before all creatures “not by abscission, as if the essence of the Father were divided,” but as fire is kindled from fire without diminishing the source (Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 61, 128; trans. ANF 1). The Logos is the one who appeared in the theophanies of the Old Testament — to Abraham, to Moses at the bush — because the Father cannot leave his place above the heavens (Dialogue 56–60, 127). And every human being possesses a seed of the Logos (logos spermatikos), so that those who lived reasonably before Christ — Socrates, Heraclitus, and among the barbarians Abraham and Elijah — were in a real sense Christians (First Apology 46; Second Apology 13).

Justin also gives us the earliest full descriptions of baptism and the Eucharist, and both are unambiguously triadic: converts are washed “in the name of God the Father and Lord of the universe, and of our Saviour Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit,” and the president of the assembly offers praise and glory “to the Father of the universe, through the name of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (First Apology 61, 65; trans. ANF 1).

The difficulty is that Justin repeatedly calls the Logos “another God” (theos heteros) and “another, numerically distinct” from the Maker of all, and describes him as serving the Father’s will (Dialogue 56.11, 128.4). He means, plainly, to deny that the Son is a separate divine principle; he says the Son is “other” in number and not in will. But the language sits several revisions short of the Nicene faith, and it would be dishonest to pretend that a post-Nicene reader is not brought up short by it.

Theophilus and the First “Triad”

The first surviving Christian use of the word triad (trias) of God is in Theophilus, bishop of Antioch, writing around 180: the three days before the making of the luminaries are “types of the triad, of God and his Word and his Wisdom” (Theophilus, To Autolycus II.15; trans. ANF 2). Two things follow from the phrasing. The word arrives, and it arrives casually, as though not a novelty — evidence that it was already in use. And the third member is named “Wisdom,” not “Spirit”; Theophilus, like several second-century writers, identifies the Spirit with the Wisdom of Proverbs 8, an identification that would later be transferred to the Son and become a battlefield.

Athenagoras of Athens, writing his Plea for the Christians around 177, makes the same triadic confession the ground of his defence against the charge of atheism: Christians “acknowledge a God, and a Son his Logos, and a Holy Spirit,” distinguishing in them “the power in union, and the distinction in order” (τὴν ἐν τῇ ἑνώσει δύναμιν καὶ τὴν ἐν τῇ τάξει διαίρεσιν) (Athenagoras, Legatio 10, 24; trans. ANF 2). It is worth being exact about what he does not say: his categories here are power and order, not essence. The vocabulary of shared being is not yet available to him, and reading it into the sentence would credit the second century with a settlement it had to wait two hundred years for. He too must explain the order without conceding a hierarchy of being, and he too lacks the words.

Irenaeus and the Two Hands

St. Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130–202), a disciple of St. Polycarp who had heard St. John, stands apart from the apologists in method and in result. He is not writing to persuade Greeks but to refute Gnostics, and against their proliferating emanations and their alien creator-god he insists that the one God made all things himself, needing no intermediaries — and made them by his own Word and his own Wisdom.

Hence the image: “It was not angels, therefore, who made us, nor who formed us… For God did not stand in need of these in order to accomplish what he had himself determined with himself beforehand should be done, as if he did not possess his own hands. For with him were always present the Word and Wisdom, the Son and the Spirit, by whom and in whom, freely and spontaneously, he made all things” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies IV.20.1; trans. ANF 1). The figure recurs: “the Son and the Holy Spirit… the Word and Wisdom; whom all the angels serve” (IV.7.4); “man, and not a part of man, was made in the likeness of God… by the hands of the Father, that is, by the Son and the Holy Spirit” (V.6.1); and at the summation of his account of salvation history, God’s hands are the same hands throughout, forming Adam from the earth and forming Christ in the Virgin (V.28.4; Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching 11).

The theological weight of the image is easy to underestimate. Against the Gnostics it secures that creation is God’s own act and that the same God creates and saves. Against the later Arian option it secures, in advance, that the Son and the Spirit are on God’s side of the line between creator and creature — they are his hands, not his instruments. And it sets the pattern for the whole later Orthodox account of the divine operation: every work of God is from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit, one work of the three (see Perichoresis and the Common Energy).

Irenaeus is also notable for what he does not do. He does not construct a cosmological Logos-doctrine explaining how the transcendent God touches matter; he is explicitly hostile to speculation about the Son’s generation, saying that anyone who claims to expound it has lost his senses (Against Heresies II.28.6). His restraint anticipates the Cappadocians’ more than the apologists’ does (see St. Irenaeus: Recapitulation).

Tertullian and the Latin Vocabulary

Tertullian of Carthage (c. 155–240) supplied the Latin West with the words it would use for a thousand years. Writing against the modalist Praxeas around 213, he coined or fixed trinitas, and stated the formula the West would keep: the Father, Son, and Spirit are “three, not in condition but in degree, not in substance but in form, not in power but in aspect; yet of one substance, and of one condition, and of one power, because he is one God from whom these degrees and forms and aspects are reckoned out in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” — una substantia, tres personae (Tertullian, Against Praxeas 2; trans. ANF 3).

The gain is real: Latin had a stable distinction between what is one and what is three two centuries before Greek did. The cost is equally real, and must be stated. Tertullian’s own explanation of it is frankly subordinationist and materialist in idiom — the Son is “a portion of the whole,” and the Father is “the whole substance,” as a root produces a shoot and a spring a stream (Against Praxeas 9). And Tertullian ended his life outside the Church’s communion, having joined the Montanists; the tradition has always cited him as a source of terminology rather than as a Father (see The Problem Cases). It should also be said, against a common confusion, that the Cappadocian hypostasis and Tertullian’s persona were not equivalents, and that treating them as a single doctrine expressed in two languages obscures the real difficulty the two halves of the Church had in recognizing each other’s faith through the fourth century.

The Honest Concession

The plain fact is that most pre-Nicene writers say things about the Son which, said after 325, would be heretical. The Son is regularly described as generated with a view to creation, as the Father’s minister, as second in rank; the Spirit’s status is barely discussed at all; the eternity of the generation is affirmed clearly only by Origen. A hostile account of the tradition can therefore assemble a long list of subordinationist quotations from before Nicaea, and this collection does not deny that the list exists.

Two things must be said in answer, and both are true.

The first is that the Church has never held that a Father’s every formulation is dogma. What she confesses is the consensus of the Fathers, discerned in the councils, not the sum of their expressions; and the ante-Nicene writers were being read charitably by the Nicene party itself, which had every incentive to claim them and no incentive to invent a doctrine of development (see The Consensus Patrum). St. Athanasius’ own procedure with earlier writers, and St. Photius’ later principle that the isolated expressions of holy men are not to be weighed against the common voice, are the same instinct applied twice.

The second is that what the pre-Nicene Church did is not ambiguous at all. It baptized into the threefold name, gave the Eucharist with a triadic doxology, prayed to Christ, and died rather than sacrifice to the gods. The vocabulary was unsettled; the worship was not. When the fourth century forced the question, the Church did not have to decide whether to worship the Son — she had to find words for what she had been doing since the beginning, and the words she found were chosen precisely because they preserved it.

References

Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies II.28; IV.7, 20; V.6, 28; Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching 11. Trans. ANF, vol. 1; Demonstration trans. John Behr, Popular Patristics 17. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1997.
Justin Martyr. First Apology 46, 61, 65; Second Apology 13; Dialogue with Trypho 56–62, 127–128. Trans. ANF, vol. 1.
Theophilus of Antioch. To Autolycus II.15. Trans. ANF, vol. 2.
Athenagoras. A Plea for the Christians (Legatio) 10, 24. Trans. ANF, vol. 2.
Tertullian. Against Praxeas 2, 8–9. Trans. ANF, vol. 3.
Behr, John. The Way to Nicaea. Formation of Christian Theology 1. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2001.
Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines. 5th ed. London: A. & C. Black, 1977.