Monarchian

• Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary
  • n Monarchian (Eccl. Hist) One of a sect in the early Christian church which rejected the doctrine of the Trinity; -- called also patripassian.
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• • n monarchian One of a body of Antitrinitarian Christians in the latter part of the second and the third century. They were divided into two groups — the dynamic (dynamistic) or rationalistic Monarchians, who regarded Christ as filled with a divine power and denied his divinity, and the Patripassians, who regarded the Father and the Son as the same; the latter were called modalistic Monarchians, from their advocacy of a threefold mode or manifestation of the deity.
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• • ns Monarchian a Christian who denied the personal independent subsistence of Christ—dynamic, when regarding the divinity of Christ as only a power (dynamis) communicated to Him; modalistic, when regarding Christ as God Himself incarnate, the Father who had assumed flesh, a mere modus of the Godhead
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