Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of the Trinity.

Part 6.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

Last time we were together, we talked about the Lagos Christology of the early Greek

apologists.

And this doctrine was taken up into Western theology through the Church Father Ireneus.

During the following century, the third century, a very different conception of the divine

personages emerged in contrast to the Lagos doctrine of the Greek apologists.

People such as Noetus, Praxis, and Sibelius enunciated a quite different view of God, a Unitarian view of God,

which goes under various names, modalism, or monarchianism, or Sibelianism.

According to this view, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit

are not distinct persons. There is only one person who is God, and either it was the Father

himself who became incarnate and suffered and died on the cross.

The son was at most the human side of the father, so to speak, the human face of God the father.

Or else, alternatively, the one God sequentially assumed three roles in his relationship

to humanity.

First, the Father, then the Son, and then the Holy Spirit.

One of the finest treatises written against this early modalism is by the North African

Church Father, Turtullian, who wrote a treatise called Against Praxius, a refutation of the views

of Praxius.

And this is very much worth reading today. If you want to read a treatise

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