Tritheism (Noun)
Meaning
(Christianity) the heretical belief that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are three separate gods.
Classification
Nouns denoting cognitive processes and contents.
Examples
- Tritheism is often regarded as the heresy that occurs when individuals give worship and obedience to each of the members of the Godhead in an unrelated or exclusive way, and consequently distinguish and dissociate each one as though there were no unbreakable harmony within.
- It would, on this argument, undermine or in the most extreme version render impossible any univocal, conceptual account of God by suggesting that there are three mutually exclusive, ontologically discrete, coequal divine hypostases.
- Hence modern scholars argue that even the term "Tritheism" was not used before the modern period and only then probably to summarize what the early Fathers and Churchmen already understood as the tri-theistic and subordinationist import of Eunomian and pneumatomachian teachings.
- John Calvin argued that this heresy was a consequence of Eutychianism and Nestorianism and hence had to be firmly excised and repressed, in the Confession of Faith and in Reformed liturgies, along with these.
- In condemning polytheistic worship, Coptic Christians also ran the risk of either monarchian or Sabellian practices - respectively which seem perilously near Unitarian or Semi-Polytheistic perspectives.