adoptionism

In early Christianity, the understanding of Jesus as a human being of sinless life adopted by God as son, usually thought to be at the time of his baptism by John in the R Jordan. Such teaching was declared heretical, in that it implied that Jesus could not have had a fully divine nature. Associated with Arianism, it figured in 4th-c controversies over the person of Christ, in Spain in the 8th-c, and in some scholastic theology (eg Abelard, Lombard).

Adoptionism, or adoptianism, is a view held by some Early Christians, that claims Jesus was born human, and later became divine during his baptism, at which point he became the adopted son of God. Adoptionism held that in his divinity Jesus was the son of God by nature, but in his humanity by adoption only. Adoptionism held that Christ as God is indeed the Son of God by generation and by nature, but Christ as man is Son of God only by adoption and grace, dispensed from the moment of his baptism. This position was one in a long series of Christian disagreements about the precise nature of Christ (see Christology) in the developing dogma of the Trinity, an attempt to explain the relationship between Jesus Christ, both as man and God and God the Father, while maintaining Christianity's monotheism.

There were three waves of Adoptionist speculation.

The second movement of adoptionism, called Hispanicus error, in the late 8th century maintained by Elipandus, bishop of Toledo in the Caliphate of Cordoba and by Felix, bishop of Urgell in the foothills of the Pyrenees; Against Felix he wrote:

"As the Nestorian impiety divided Christ into two persons because of the two natures, so your unlearned temerity divided Him into two sons, one natural and one adoptive"

Beatus of Liébana, from the Kingdom of Asturias, also fought Adoptionism, which was a cause of controversy between Christians under Muslim rule in the former Visigothic capital of Toledo and the peripherical kingdom.

A third wave was the revived form ("Neo-Adoptionism") of Abelard in the 12th century. The defeat of Adoptionism was a check upon the dyophysitic and dyotheletic feature in the Chalcedon Christology, and put off indefinitely the development of the human side in Christ’s Person.