Novatian of Rome and the Culmination of Pre-Nicene Orthodoxy

James L. Papandrea

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781606087800
  9781498253956
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630876487
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie chrétienne

Novatian of Rome and the Culmination of Pre-Nicene Orthodoxy is an overview of the development of Christology and Trinitarian doctrine, which reached a plateau with Novatian, the third-century priest of Rome. Here James Papandrea offers an enlightening and thorough treatment of the thought, historical context, and theological influences of Novatian. Included are an assessment of the alternative Christologies of the pre-Nicene period, a survey of Novatian's legacy, and concluding comments on the relevance of his theology and ecclesiology for the contemporary church.

1

The State of Christology before the Mid-Third Century

The Age of the Apostolic Fathers and Apologists

Before we can look at the writers who preceded and influenced Novatian, it must be acknowledged that the early church produced a variety of interpretations of Scripture and of the life of Christ, including alternatives to what would come to be called orthodoxy. These alternatives came to be labeled “heresies,” a word that implies that they were deviating, or separating, from the church of the apostles. While it is not the case that these alternatives (“heresies”) preceded orthodoxy, nevertheless it is true that in some sense, the clarification of orthodoxy is a response to heresy. Therefore, it is necessary to briefly mention the two major groups of alternative interpretations to which the orthodox writers were responding, and outline the theological/christological options as they were in the second century. Although there was a significant amount of diversity within each of these two major heresy groupings, and although the groupings themselves are somewhat artificial (constructed as labels for the losers of the debates), nevertheless Novatian and others like him saw these groups as the extremes, on the fringes of the church, with orthodoxy as a “middle way” between the extremes.

Ebionites

The word Ebionites means “the poor ones,” and they called themselves this because they believed they were following Jesus by imitating his poverty and humility. The early Christian writers saw the Ebionites as the legacy of the so-called Judaizers of Paul’s letters in the New Testament.1 They were probably mostly Jewish Christians who were uncomfortable with the idea of the divinity of Christ as it was being expressed in Christian worship, perhaps worrying that such a belief implied the worship of two Gods. Therefore Ebionites maintained that Jesus was a mere man, perhaps a prophet, or anointed like the heroes of the Old Testament, but not the divine Son of God. Some said he was an angel, but still a created being, and therefore they rejected the idea of a divine nature in Christ. As a prophet, Jesus received the Holy Spirit for the first time at his baptism. However, he was only temporarily indwelt by the Spirit, who left him alone on the cross (Mark 15:34/Matt 27:46). The resurrection of Christ, then, would not be a bodily resurrection, but would be interpreted as a metaphor for eternal life. Thus the Ebionites affirmed the humanity of Christ, but denied his divinity. For the Ebionites, salvation was primarily by obedience to the Jewish law. Some tended toward asceticism. Interestingly, this belief also had implications for the Eucharist. Since they did not believe that the blood of Jesus had any atoning significance, they seem to have rejected the use of wine in the Eucharist.

Docetics and Gnostics

At the other end of the spectrum from the Ebionites were the Docetics and Gnostics, who affirmed the divinity of Christ, but to varying degrees denied his humanity. Just as the Ebionites were most likely Jewish Christians, the Docetics and Gnostics were primarily Gentile Christians, former pagans, for whom it was never a priority to limit the number of gods to one.2 In the New Testament we can already see that there were certain “false teachers,” who denied the real flesh of Christ (1 John 4:2–3). The earliest expression of this is called Docetism, from the Greek verb meaning “to seem” or “to appear.” Docetics, as they are called, believed that Jesus only appeared to be a real human, but was in reality a phantom. This was based on an extreme form of dualism that assumed that only what belongs to the spiritual realm is good, and anything that belongs to the physical world is inherently evil. Therefore Docetics reasoned that the divine Christ could not become flesh, since flesh was of the material world and evil. They also reasoned that the Creator of this material world could not be the same good God that Jesus called his Father. The most famous proponent of docetism was Marcion, who would eventually be excommunicated from the church at Rome and start his own movement known later as the Marcionites. They taught that there were (at least) two gods, and the God of Jesus was a better, higher God than the Creator in the Old Testament. Salvation, for them, meant being rescued from this world and its “inferior god.” This led Marcion and his followers to reject the Old Testament, and any part of the New Testament that connected Jesus to the God or the prophets of the Hebrew Bible.

Eventually, a form of docetism evolved called Gnosticism (from the Greek word gnosis, meaning “knowledge”).3 Gnostics taught that Jesus had not come to bring salvation, but secret knowledge. Part of this “knowledge” was the belief that we are all divine, and therefore we do not need forgiveness or salvation, per se, what we need is illumination, that is, to be enlightened as to our own divinity. Based on these teachings, Docetics and Gnostics rejected the idea of a future resurrection (2 Tim 2:17–18). For them, the resurrection of Christ would have been interpreted as a mystical vision in which Christ shed the appearance of his humanity to reveal his real (non-human) self. Gnostics rejected the church’s baptism as an image of dying and rising with Christ, and they created their own baptisms. They rejected the church’s Eucharist since they did not believe that Jesus had a real flesh and blood body. Some (ironically, like the Ebionites) had their own eucharistic rituals that substituted water for the wine (because they believed Jesus had no blood), but others refused to participate in any Eucharist.4 Many of them rejected marriage, even creating a second baptism that was meant to symbolize a mystical marriage. Some distanced themselves from the world by a life of extreme asceticism. Others chose to disregard the physical world with a lifestyle of extreme promiscuity.

The Gnostics eventually separated themselves from the mainstream church. They evolved into a wide variety of secret societies with elaborate mythologies based on a syncretism of Christianity with paganism and astrology. Gnosticism was never one organized religion, and in fact it is misleading to talk about it as one movement. It was really many different teachers with a diverse following, creating widely divergent groups, each with their own versions of the Gnostic myths. Some even allowed that Jesus might have had a tangible body, however they would have separated this tangible Jesus (who was nevertheless not really human) from the concept of the divine Christ, as if Jesus and Christ were two distinct entities.

With the Ebionites on one side, maintaining that Christ was human, but not at all divine, and the Docetics and Gnostics on the other side, teaching that Christ was divine but not really human, the Christology of the apostolic fathers and apologists was built around the affirmation of both the divine and the human natures in Christ.5

Ignatius of Antioch (c. 50–110 CE)

Ignatius was bishop of Antioch in Syria at the beginning of the second century. He had been arrested duri...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: The State of Christology before the Mid-Third Century
• Chapter 2: Novatian: His Life and Historical Context
• Chapter 3: Novatian: Master of Doctrine
• Chapter 4: Novatian’s Ongoing Legacy
• Appendix: Outline of Doctrinal Terms
• Other Works by the Author
• Bibliography