ABSTRACT
During its first three hundred years the Christian church not only had to endure periodic persecutions; it was also threatened from within by var ious heretic or schismatic movements such as Docetism, Gnosticism in its various manifestations, Montanism, Sabellianism and Donatism. In the face of such challenges there was a need for the church to tighten its organization, to establish its canon of scripture and to define more clearly its doctrine. One point which needed clarification was the church’s teaching on the Godhead. In the West, never much given to philosophical or theological speculation, the church was largely in agreement on this subject, believing in the unity of the Godhead and in the equality of the three persons within it. Not so in the East, where Origen especially had given to the study of theology a more philosophical, specifically Platonic, character. The question that had been raised early in the fourth century was that of the exact relationship of the Son to the Father. As the distinguished German theologian Adolf von Harnack expressed it in 1905, “Is the divine that has appeared on earth and reunited man with God identical with the supreme divine, which rules heaven and earth, or is it a demigod?” The dogma of the Trinity, the climax of the doctrinal development of the early church, was eventually to answer that question.
