A Beggar At The Table

Often, while researching people I know of for this antiheresy antibreviary, I run into other, lesser lights in the heretical universe, who yet were the shoulders upon which the true heretical giants stood.

For Sabellius and those of his ilk, Praxeas and Noetus were the lesser lights, the twin stars crashing to form the supernova. Or whatever metaphor you prefer. But the long and the short of it is that these two basically gave the Western and Eastern churches a background from which to deal with Sabellius himself.

It all starts with Noetus, who came up with the idea in Asia Minor, sometime in the second half of the second century. He brought it to Rome, where Praxeas took it up around the end of the second century or start of the third, inspiring Tertullian to write his great defense of the Trinity called Adversus Praxean. Here, I’ll let Bengt Hägglund, History of Theology speak about Noetus:

To Noetus the Father alone is God, and even though He is hidden to man’s sight, He has come forth and made Himself known according to His own pleasure. God is not subject to suffering and death, but He can suffer and die if He chooses to do so. In saying this, Noetus sought to emphasize God’s oneness. The Father and the Son are not only of the same essence; they are also the same God under a different name and form. Noetus refused to differentiate between the three Persons of the Godhead. As he saw it, one could as well say that the Father suffered as to say that Christ suffered. (71)

So Noetus is really the originator of the whole modalist heresy, as best as we can tell. Praxeas tried to smooth things over by insisting there was a certain separation, but he still taught that the Father suffered alongside the Son… patripassianism by any other name is still patripassianism! He also minimized the role of the Holy Spirit. So Tertullian made a pithy comment to the effect that Praxeas made two errors: “He threw out prophecy and brought in heresy; he put the Paraclete to flight and crucified the Father.” (Tertullian, Adversus Praxean, chapter 1.) Note that the reference to throwing out prophecy is a slant reference to Praxeas’ assistance in having Montanus removed from fellowship with Rome… (thus the “Paraclete in flight”!) so even here Praxeas was both right and wrong.

So, as Pelikan notes, “This effort to clarify the relationship between Christ and God seems to have foundered at the very place where its bête noire, the pluralistic speculation of Marcion and the Gnostics, did: the crucifixion and death of the one who was called God.”

It completely fascinates me that, as is the case with most heresies, the make-or-break question for this deviance from orthodoxy can be summed up in how it ruins the event of the Cross. Any theological system which arranges things in such a way that the Cross is either impossible or unnecessary is heretical. This is equally true today. Beware those churches which claim the Cross to be a mere moral victory, or which claim something more than the Cross is needed for your salvation!

As was noted last time, the net result of the teaching of Praxeas and Noetus was that Sabellius took up the charge and developed a full, and fully heretical, monarchian concept of the three modes of God–which we looked at last time. Modalism is alive and well, but we have already examined that too. And so we lay Patripassianism to rest now, moving to another heresy next time.

Verse for the Commemoration of Noetus and Praxeas
—
Noetus and Praxeas
Make us thankful we can be us
With the Trinity clearly defined–
So we don’t just speculate from our own mind!