Trinity

TRINITY & OTHER DOCTRINES OF GOD:
PROF. M. M. NINAN
IV
DOCETISM, EBIONISM & SUBORDINATIONISM
A: DOCETISM
Docetism is the belief that Jesus only seemed to have a physical body and to
physically die, but in reality he was a spirit, and thus unable physically die
Docetism (from the Greek, “to seem/phantom”) is taken as the belief that Jesus only
seemed to be human, and that his human form was an illusion. It appears to have arisen
over theological contentions concerning the meaning, figurative or literal, of a sentence
from the Gospel of John: “the Word was made Flesh.”
Docetism is easily explained: It is a belief that Jesus Christ did not actually die, and
therefore was never resurrected bodily. A number of Christian theologies have arrived at
this conclusion, in different ways, so Docetism comes in a number of forms.
Gnostic Docetism
As I explained in my book on Gnosticism, one of the tenets of Gnosticism is that Christ
had not actually had a physical existence. What the apostles had interacted with, and
what had been killed by the Romans, had actually been an illusion. This was
necessitated by Gnostic dualism, which posited that matter, or the physical, was evil,
and only light was good. Since they believed Christ to have been "good," then logically,
the Gnostics were forced to assert that he had not actually had a physical form.
Docetism is in essence a Christology heavily influenced by basic Greek assumptions of
both the Platonic and Aristotelian varieties. Plato taught the idea of gradations of reality.
Spirit or mind or thought is the highest. Matter or the material is less real. With this
distinction of ontological gradations of reality, there came to be ethical gradations as
well. Thus, matter came to be thought of as morally bad. (Erickson 1998: 729)
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