other · 220 · Rome
Sabellius taught at Rome in the early third century and was excommunicated by Callistus about 220. That is close to the whole biography. The teaching, as reported by his opponents — chiefly Hippolytus, who was a party to the same Roman quarrels and lost them — is that Father, Son and Spirit are not three who are one but one who appears in three ways, three faces or modes of a single person: God as creator, then as redeemer, then as sanctifier, successively rather than eternally. It is an attempt to protect monotheism, and it was rejected because it makes the incarnation a costume and the prayer of Jesus to the Father a soliloquy. What happened next is the reason he is here. Sabellianism became the standard accusation to throw at anyone who stressed the unity of God too warmly. Marcellus of Ancyra was condemned for it; Athanasius was accused of it; the synod of Antioch in 268 rejected the word homoousios partly because Paul of Samosata was thought to be using it in a Sabellian sense — which left the fathers of Nicaea, fifty-seven years later, adopting a word their own predecessors had condemned, and having to explain themselves.
Why is a man about whom almost nothing is known one of the most-cited names in theology?
Because his name became a weapon, and stayed useful for six hundred years.