by Giuseppe Monno
Adoptionism is a heretical Christological current that developed within dynamic (or dynamistic) monarchianism, a theological doctrine aimed at safeguarding the absolute unity of God. According to this perspective, Jesus Christ is not divine by nature, but was “adopted” by God as His Son at a specific moment in His earthly life, generally identified with His baptism in the Jordan.
Among the earliest proponents of Adoptionism was Theodotus of Byzantium, a learned and influential leatherworker active at the end of the second century. He maintained that Jesus was a man born of a woman, morally perfect and without sin, yet not divine by nature. According to his teaching, at the moment of His baptism the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus, granting Him a special divine power and making Him the “Christ” and “Son of God” by adoption rather than by nature. This position entailed an explicit denial of the ontological divinity of Christ.
When he arrived in Rome around the year 190, Theodotus spread his ideas, provoking a prompt response from ecclesiastical authority. Pope Victor I (c. 189–198) condemned him as a heretic and excommunicated him, reaffirming the traditional doctrine of the full divinity of Christ.
In the third century, Adoptionism found a new and significant proponent in Paul of Samosata, bishop of Antioch from 260 to 268. He taught that Jesus was a man born of the Virgin Mary in whom the “wisdom of God,” identified with the Word, had come to dwell. However, this Word was understood not as a distinct Person of the Trinity, but as an impersonal divine force or energy. Paul therefore denied the hypostatic union between the divine and human natures in Christ, proposing instead a unity of will, grounded in the perfect obedience of the man Jesus to the divine will.
Paul’s teachings were condemned by a synod held in Antioch in 268, which decreed his deposition and excommunication. Nevertheless, his followers continued to spread and uphold his positions.
The definitive condemnation of Adoptionism, together with other Christological interpretations deemed heterodox, came with the Council of Nicaea in 325. On that occasion, the consubstantiality (homoousios) of the Son with the Father was solemnly affirmed: Jesus Christ is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father.” This formulation, destined to become foundational for Trinitarian doctrine, decisively excluded every form of Adoptionism, thereby affirming the full divinity of the Son.