Theopedia

Patripassianism

Definition

Patripassianism is the teaching that God the Father himself became incarnate, suffered, and died on the cross, because the Father and the Son are not two distinct persons but one and the same person under two names.1 The name itself, meaning “the Father suffers,” was coined by opponents of the view rather than by its own teachers.1 It is the earliest identifiable form of what later writers call modalism or Sabellianism: the same error that Sabellius developed further by adding the Holy Spirit as a third successive mode of the one divine person.2

Historical Origin

Hippolytus of Rome, writing against Noetus of Smyrna in the early third century, is the main source for patripassianism’s earliest form: “[Noetus] said that Christ himself is the Father, and that the Father himself was born, suffered, and died.”1 Hippolytus preserves the argument Noetus’s own followers gave for it: “If, then, I confess Christ to be God, then he is the Father, if indeed he is God. And Christ himself, being God, suffered. Therefore, the Father suffered, for he was the Father.”1 Around the same time, in Asia Minor, Praxeas taught a similar position, prompting Tertullian’s treatise Against Praxeas.2 Gill names a further contemporary, Victorinus, and traces the same basic move back to Simon Magus, who reportedly claimed to be the Father in Samaria, the Son in Judea, and the Holy Ghost elsewhere.3

Sabellius, active in Rome during the episcopate of Zephyrinus (AD 199-222), took up Noetus’s identification of the Son with the Father and carried it further, introducing the Holy Spirit as a third successive “mode” of the same one divine person: Father as Creator and Lawgiver, Son as Redeemer, Spirit as Vivifier.42 Sabellius’s name became attached to the error generally, but the specific claim that the Father himself suffered and died belongs to Noetus first, and Sabellius continued it: he “was like Noetus in identifying the Son with God the Father and holding the patripassianist view that when the Son suffered and died, it was the Father who suffered and died.”4 Mastricht records an alternate name the error carried in some later sources, “Deopassians,” used by the sixth-century chronicler Marcellinus Comes.5

Core Tenets

Patripassianism’s motive was to guard God’s oneness: if Father and Son were two separate beings, its adherents reasoned, Christianity would be worshiping two Gods rather than one.6 Starting from the conviction that there is only one divine monarchia, Noetus and his followers concluded that “Father” and “Son” name the same one person in different relations, before and after the incarnation, so that the Father himself was born, suffered, and died.2 Because Scripture plainly says that Christ, who is God, suffered on the cross, and because on this view Christ simply is the Father, the Father’s own suffering followed as a direct inference from Christ’s deity, not as a separate claim requiring separate support.1

Confessional and Biblical Response

The confession states that God is “a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions,”7 which excludes a “suffering” Father in the sense patripassianism requires: the Godhead as such does not suffer. Its Christology chapter supplies the positive alternative. The Son “took upon him man’s nature,” so that “two whole, perfect, and distinct natures were inseparably joined together in one person, without conversion, composition, or confusion; which person is very God and very man.”8 On this formulation, the person who suffered is the Son, a person really distinct from the Father, and he suffered in the human nature he assumed, not in the divine nature he shares with the Father.

Mastricht answers the Patripassian argument on its own philosophical ground. Against the claim that the same divine nature is common to Father and Son, so that if it suffered in the Son it must have suffered in the Father too, he responds: “The divine nature suffered in neither, but rather, the person of the Son suffered. The Son indeed had a divine nature, the same as the Father’s, but, acting by his characteristic or personal properties, he assumed a human nature that was bound, as it were, to the second person. It was, finally, in this nature that the Son of God suffered.”9 Elsewhere he states the same point about texts like Acts 20:28, which speaks of God purchasing the church “with his own blood”: God “suffered death… not in himself, but in the assumed human nature.”10

Charles Hodge draws on the same distinction, the communicatio idiomatum, to explain how Scripture and the church can rightly speak of “the blood of God” without implying that the Father suffered or that the divine nature itself bled. Because Christ is “not a mere man, but God and man in one person,” what belongs properly to one of his two natures can be predicated of the one person who has both: “An indignity offered to a man’s body is offered to himself.”11 This, Hodge is careful to add, does not vindicate patripassianism’s own inference: “This does not imply, as the Patripassians in the ancient Church assumed… that the divine nature itself suffered,” a claim he notes the Second Helvetic Confession and the Lutheran Form of Concord reject as firmly as the Reformed churches do.11

Gill brings the same distinction to bear on the text patripassianism’s later, Sabellian form leaned on most, “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30). Read as one person speaking of himself, he argues, the verse becomes absurd, since it would have Christ saying that he and himself are one, or that he and some other person are somehow the same single person; the natural reading requires two persons, the Father and the Son, united rather than identical.3 Opponents of Noetus and Sabellius in the early church made a parallel argument from John 1:18, “the only-begotten Son who is in the Father’s bosom,” and John 20:17, where Jesus distinguishes “my Father and your Father”: both presuppose a real, addressable distinction between the Son who speaks and the Father he speaks of.12

Modern Forms

Jürgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God (1974) makes the Father’s own grief at the Son’s death part of what Moltmann calls God’s triune life, a claim regularly discussed in connection with patripassianism. Moltmann himself denies teaching the ancient error: “We cannot therefore say here in patripassian terms that the Father also suffered and died. The suffering and dying of the Son, forsaken by the Father, is a different kind of suffering from the suffering of the Father in the death of the Son.”13 Theologian Daniel Castelo, as reported by Alex Tibbott, questions whether that distinction actually escapes the charge, since Moltmann still holds that God’s own nature is capable of suffering, “characteristics native to the patripassianist agenda.”13

Related Doctrines

References

  1. 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,” 48. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  2. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 9, “The Triune God and His Counsel.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book I, chap. 26, “Of the Unity of God.” ↩ ↩2

  4. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine, 50. ↩ ↩2

  5. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 7, “The Immutability of God,” 199. ↩

  6. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine, 47. ↩

  7. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩

  8. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 2. ↩

  9. Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, 199-200. ↩

  10. Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, 198. ↩

  11. Charles Hodge, “Chapter VII. Satisfaction of Christ,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 478-479. ↩ ↩2

  12. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine, 49-50. ↩

  13. Alex Charles Tibbott, “Conclusion,” in “De Impassibilitate Et Satisfactione: An Examination of the Methodological Implications of Trinitarian Classical Theism for the Doctrine of the Atonement” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2024), 315-316, quoting Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (1974), 359. ↩ ↩2