“…for Tertullian, with a defence of the Logos-doctrine as he had received it from Greek-speaking Christian authors. His defence, undertaken at some length in the treatise Against Praxeas, was directed by Tertullian the Montanist against people who wanted to assert the absolute unityof the divine in face of the apparent division and plurality which the Logos-doctrine introduced into the divine nature. These ‘Monarchians’ accepted a doctrine of incarnation, but since they held to the unitary natureof God, they had to insist that it was God himself who was incarnate in Christ—an idea which shocked Tertullian…”

(Richard A. Norris, Jr. Trans. and Ed., The Christological Controversy, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982, 13-14)

“What is important about the treatise Against Praxeas is that in it Tertullian not only develops a christological vocabulary which was to influence later thought but also appears as the first Christian thinker to raise the question of how the person of the incarnate Logos should be described. In chapter 27 of the treatise, he turns his attention to the Monarchian account of the distinction between Father and Son. His opponents had maintained that ‘Son’ refers to the humanity of Jesus, his flesh, while ‘Father’ refers to his deity. This troubled Tertullian…”

(Richard A. Norris, Jr. Trans. and Ed., The Christological Controversy, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982, 14)

“The Monarchians denied the doctrine of the Trinity. There were two principal classes of Monarchians. (1) Dynamic— that Jesus was a mere Man, but energized by the Holy Spirit at baptism when he received the divine attributes. This was first proclaimed by Theodotus, 190 A. D., in Rome. Paul of Samosata taught (260) that God is one Person. Jesus was a divinely-begotten Man, not the Logos, Word (John 1:1 and 6), but raised to dignity and glory by the Logos. (2) Modalistic Monarchianism. Sebellius is the most famous teacher of this doctrine. God the Father is the Source or Energy of all. The Son is the Father as Redeemer or Savior; the Holy Spirit is the Father giving holiness to men. Hence the Son and the Holy Spirit are only modes for activities of the one God.”

(Daniel Webster Kurtz, Nineteen Centuries of the Christian Church, Elgin, Illinois: Brethren Publushing House, 1914, 38)

Adoptionists/Dynamic Monarchianism

The Monarchians of the Latter third century were so called because they were anxious to rebut the charge that Christianity was polytheistic and to assert the unity of the Godhead. There could be only one Supreme Being. There were two types of Monarchians. The first type, a school of thinkers known as Dynamic Monarchians, held that Jesus was a Dynamis, a power or emanation of God. They are also called Adoptionists, because they believed that Jesus was a man who happened to be so good that God ‘adopted’ him in a special and perhaps unique sense as his Son.”

(Alan Richardson, Creeds in the Making: A Short Introduction to the History of Christian Doctrine, London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1951, 46)