A Brief for Sabellius

Christian Faith, Brian Gerrish’s new dogmatics, is well named, echoing as it does Schleiermacher’s classic text. Gerrish is Schleiermachian in many ways, not least in his repetition of what has become, after Barth, one of Schleiermacher’s most notorious gestures: His placement of the doctrine of the Trinity at the end of his dogmatics.

Gerrish defends Schleiermacher’s decision: “It is a mistake, frequently made, to dismiss Schleiermacher’s conclusion on the Trinity as a feeble afterthought that only proves he attached no importance to the doctrine. On the contrary, his conclusion treats the Trinity as the ‘keystone’ of Christian doctrine (Schlußstein: Eng. trans. ‘coping-stone’). As a keystone is set in place to finish an arch and lock the whole together, what is essential in the doctrine of the Trinity draws together everything he has been saying about redemption, which presupposes the union of the divine essence with human nature in both the personality of Christ and the common Spirit of the church. But there Schleiermacher calls a halt because, given his dogmatic method, he sees no way to trace the twofold union back to a distinction within the divine essence itself. In any case, our living fellowship with Christ needs no knowledge of any such transcendent fact.” 

This goes to the heart of Schleiermacher’s theology, which is about God-in-relation and not, speculatively, about God-in-Himself.

Not surprisingly, Schleiermacher published an article on Sabellius to supplement the first edition of The Christian Faith. Gerrish claims that it was not “simply an endorsement of Sabellius,” but an effort to sort through what Sabellius taught, how it differed from other modalisms, and whether Sabellianism is worthy of reassessment.

As Gerrish summarizes it, Schleiermacher “argues that Sabellius at least, properly understood, was not exposed to the two standard criticisms but should be hailed as the one who could save the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity from its ineradicable subordination of the Son to the Father. Sabellius held that the Son is not derived from the Father: all three persons of the Trinity proceed from the One, and as such they are equal. . . . The divine One is the hidden God; the Trinity is God revealed. The Father is God continually revealed in the works of creation; the Son is God revealed in human flesh; and the Spirit is God revealed in the church. But what first comes to be in the Son and the Spirit is not transient but enduring. . . . Father, Son, and Spirit, though not eternal hypostases, are not mere names or attributes of the One; they are particular modes of revelation. . . . In Sabellius’s term they are prosōpa, and Schleiermacher takes a prosōpon to be, for Sabellius, a figure of speech signifying a countenance or visage presented to our apprehension . . . – meaning, I take it (in Schleiermacher’s language), the way we perceive and represent the twofold union of the divine essence with human nature. “

It is not clear from this summary how this is any different from other forms of modalism, or how it escapes the standard criticisms. After all, one of the most common critiques is that modalism leaves us with a hidden, unrevealed God. Schleiermacher doesn’t deny it, according to Gerrish; the fact that the One God is hidden is essential to the theory.

And in the end, Gerrish, like Schleiermacher, finds Sabellianism commendable. There is sense in his observation that “God in the order of being may recommend discussion of the doctrine at the beginning of dogmatics, the priority of revelation in the order of knowing justifies placement at the end, when the history of redemption and its sequel in the beginnings of the church have been told.” He is also right to stress that  there can be no treatment of the Trinity as “a self-contained locus that follows a general locus de Deo and precedes even a brief, proleptic account of redemption. “

But then he concludes, “although the possibility of distinctions within the Godhead (Deus in se) need not be ruled out, the supposed logical inference from what the New Testament says of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to what ‘must’ be affirmed about an immanent Trinity is not self-evidently convincing.” 

John 1:1-3 teaches rather than implies eternal distinctions in God. Besides, the whole of Athanasius’s anti-Arian corpus can be deployed against this conclusion. If there is no eternal Son, can there be an eternal Father? Schleiermacher seems OK with saying No; the eternal hidden God is not Father but the one God. But if we worship an eternal Father, He must be eternally the Father of Someone – either that, or he is an unfruitful Father. Call it a logical inference, but it’s pretty compelling.