Adoptionism

Adoptionism teaches that Jesus was born an ordinary man and only became, or was declared, the divine Son of God at some point in his earthly life — his baptism or his resurrection — rather than being God’s Son from eternity. It denies Christ’s pre-existence and full deity, treating his divine sonship as a status conferred on him rather than what he already was.

Historical Origin

The teaching arose in the late second and third centuries among Christians anxious to avoid what they took to be a slide toward worshiping two Gods, a concern sharpened by the era’s Logos theology, which spoke of the Son as a distinct divine figure alongside the Father. Modern scholars group this response together with a second, different one — identifying Jesus outright with the Father — under the label “monarchian,” from the Greek for “rule by one,” since both approaches meant to defend God’s oneness; this teaching is the “dynamic” branch, from dynamis, “power,” describing the divine power its adherents believed came upon Jesus.¹ Theodotus, a cobbler from Constantinople who went to Rome around AD 190, is credited with originating it; the more influential Paul of Samosata, bishop of Antioch in the mid-third century, developed it further before a synod of bishops meeting at Antioch removed him from office in AD 268.¹

Core Tenets

Theodotus held that Jesus was born of a virgin but otherwise an ordinary man until the Spirit descended on him like a dove at his baptism in the Jordan, empowering and designating him “the Christ”; his followers disagreed among themselves over whether he became God at that moment or only at his resurrection.² They argued their reading had been the apostles’ own, appealing to Jesus’s statement “you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth” (John 8:40), to Moses’s promise of “a prophet like me… from your brothers” (Deut. 18:15) as proof the coming Christ would likewise be merely human, to the suffering figure of Isaiah 53:3-4, to Paul’s naming of “the man Christ Jesus” as mediator (1 Tim. 2:5), and to the apostles’ description of Jesus in Acts 2:22 as “a man attested to you by God by means of powerful deeds.”³ Paul of Samosata pressed the logic further: he denied even the virgin birth, taught that Christ had no existence before his life on earth, and — consistent with holding that Jesus was, in his own words, “from below” — refused to allow psalms addressed to Christ to be sung in the church where he was bishop.⁴

Confessional and Biblical Response

The Son is “eternally begotten of the Father,” one of three subsistences “of one substance, power, and eternity,” all “infinite, without beginning.”⁵ Scripture attributes both divine and human predicates to a single subject: “the Word that was with God and was himself God became flesh” (John 1:1,14), and Christ himself claimed an existence prior to Abraham (John 8:58).⁶ Bavinck grants that only through his resurrection did Christ “enter into full sonship” (Rom. 1:4) and receive “a name above every name” (Phil. 2:9), while denying that this in any way contradicts his prior, personal divine existence (2 Cor. 8:9; Phil. 2:6; Col. 1:15-17): “a deity or divine attribute that is purely a ‘potentiality’ is inconceivable, and a human being who by development appropriates the divine nature ceases to be a creature. Such a being cannot be the mediator between God and man since he is neither” (1 Tim. 2:5).⁶

Modern Forms

Bavinck traces this same adoptionist logic forward rather than treating it as settled at Antioch: Paul of Samosata was, in his assessment, “an important precursor of the Arians,” and Arianism itself, in denying the Son’s eternal, uncreated existence, “was subordinationist and adoptionist.”⁷ The error also resurfaced later: among the Carolingian theologians, Alcuin (d. 804) took up the task of “rebutting adoptionist errors with the same arguments that were advanced against Nestorianism in an earlier age.”⁸

Related Doctrines

References

Ronald E. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine: Introducing the Essentials of the Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), chap. 5, “He Who Has Seen Me Has Seen the Father,” 52. ↩ ↩²
Heine, 52-53. ↩
Heine, 53-54. ↩
Heine, 54-55. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 3. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 14, “The Only Begotten Son of the Father.” ↩ ↩²
Bavinck, chap. 9, “The Triune God and His Counsel.” ↩
Bavinck, chap. 2, “The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology.” ↩