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"God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself " ( II Cor. 5:19). In these simple words Paul expressed the central Christian conviction which Christian theology ever since has labored to preserve, to defend, and as far as possible to understand. Ever since the fifth century we have been accustomed to consider that the central problem of Christology is how to maintain the true humanity of the Savior without obscuring the affirmation that God was indeed acting in Christ. The first four Christian centuries faced rather a different problem in the intellectual definition of the faith-to assert the true deity of the God who acted in Christ without obscuring the ancient faith of Israel that "the Lord our God, the Lord is one" ( Deut. 6:4, R. S. V., margin). By the end of the second century the possible alternative solutions had been explored. Holding firm to the unity of God, or, as that age would have said, to the divine monarchy, one might say that Father and Son are merely two appearances of the same subject--two parts (prosopa, personae, as in dramatis personae) assumed by the same simple being. This is modalism, commonly known from the name of one of its conspicuous representatives as Sabellianism. Or one could adopt the opposite course and say that God the Father, and he only, is God in the true sense. Then the Word who was known on earth was another, a second and subordinate, divine entity--theos kai kurios heteros--as Justin Martyr rather carelessly says, although that phrase would not mean for him quite what it does for us. Arius later formalized this subordinationism. But this is dangerously close to polytheism, and it might be safer to say that the eternal Word is simply an attribute of God, or an aspect of his working, and that in these last days he spoke supremely through Jesus as he had in old times spoken through prophets and sages. This was the view that was attributed to Paul of Samosata, bishop of Antioch.

The Old Roman Symbol, known to us in a later form as the Apostles' Creed, is an excellent case in point. In the late second century converts at Rome were asked in the baptismal rite, "Do you believe in God the Father Almighty?" and "Do you believe in Christ Jesus, the Son of God . . .?" By the end of the third century the second phrase probably read as we now know it, "his only Son our Lord," thus excluding any tendency to reduce Jesus to the rank of one among many. By general agreement the Church seems thus to have rejected the extreme positions that had been explored by some Christian teachers at Rome--modalism on the one hand, and the treatment of Jesus as a mere man on the other. But further definition there was none, nor in this Creed, still commonly used by the Churches of the West, is there to this day.

In the East, forms of Christian profession were likely to dwell somewhat more on God the Word as well as on Jesus the Son of God. So Origen tells us that the common rule of faith as he understood it included the confession that Jesus Christ was born of the Father before all creatures, and served God in the making of the world before he himself came into the world that he had made, becoming man while he yet remained divine. When formally expounding his own understanding of the doctrine he stays close to Biblical titles--the Word and Wisdom of God, and the image of his being (hypostasis, Heb. 1:3). But he introduces one principle, philosophical though not technical, which is of great importance in the later discussion. As God is eternal, so his Word and Wisdom is equally eternal, as also his Spirit--in other words, Son and Spirit belong on the divine side of the infinite division between deity and all that is not God. Equally Origen asserts that, as man, Christ was a real man, with no element lacking in his humanity that is necessary to man. But in him whom we know as both God and man, dying and returning victor over death, godhead and manhood coexist, like fire and metal in red-hot iron. Yet Origen sometimes seems to speak of Son and Spirit as coeternal, and yet not quite divine; he certainly accepts the suggestion that they might be the seraphim who cried, "Holy, holy, holy." . . .

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