• Corpus ID: 20242371

“ EARLY CHRISTIAN BINITARIANISM ” : FROM RELIGIOUS PHENOMENON TO POLEMICAL INSULT TO SCHOLARLY CONCEPTmoth

@inproceedings{Segal2010EC,
  title={“ EARLY CHRISTIAN BINITARIANISM ” : FROM RELIGIOUS PHENOMENON TO POLEMICAL INSULT TO SCHOLARLY CONCEPTmoth},
  author={Allan Segal and Larry W. Hurtado},
  year={2010}
}

• A. Segal, L. Hurtado
• Published 2010
• Philosophy

The pages to follow propose a critical consideration of the use of “binitarianism”, “binitarian monotheism” and related concepts (e.g., Geistchristologie/ “Spirit Christology”, and “angelic” or “angelomorphic Pneumatology”) in scholarship on Christian Origins and Early Christianity. I will provide, first, a brief review of past and present uses of “binitarian monotheism”. This review must include the use of “ditheism” in the course of second–, third–, and fourth–century intra-Christian polemics, which, together with the rabbinic polemic against “two-power” theologies, falls conceptually under the same rubric of “binitarianism” or “binitarian monotheism”. As will become apparent, there are at least two distinct uses of this term, developed in distinct scholarly contexts, each informed by specific theological presuppositions, and assuming specific theological agendas. In the second part of the article, I argue that a doctrinal and methodological discrepancy exists between the early Christian phenomenon termed “binitarianism” and its scholarly descriptions, and that this discrepancy has become more evident thanks to recent scholarship on the early Christian tradition of “angelomorphic pneumatology”. If the observations proposed in this article are correct, it becomes necessary to ask whether the flaws of “binitarianism” and related concepts outweigh their usefulness for scholarly reconstructions of early Christian thought, and whether acknowledging their various flaws is enough to guarantee that they are no longer perpetuated in the further application of