Theophilus Monk’s Christian Internet Ministry

Coffee Talk Redux is a reflection on things God is teaching me. In some cases the ideas for these topics come from the Coffee Talk group that I meet with weekly at the Vintage Coffee Bistro located in Lambertville, Michigan. At other times the Redux topic may arise from some conversation I may have had with someone, or a thought that crossed my mind, or perhaps something I read somewhere, or maybe a combination of all of these. In any case think of this as a discussion on what God is teaching us to help us grow in our understanding of His will.

So last night at Coffee Talk we got into a great discussion on the subject of some modern day heresies regarding Jesus as expressed by some popular religions that although claiming to be Christian are really not. So here is some stuff I wrote for a recent essay that outlines how the church’s thought about Christ developed over the first 600 years or so following Christ’s crucifixion. This all resulted in the Nicene Creed and the Chalcedonian formula which is the essence of our Christian faith, if you not believe in this, you are not Christian.

The writers of the New Testament Gospels and Epistles laid the foundation for the development of the understanding of who Christ was as a Person and what He did. These books of the New Testament proclaimed Christ’s two-fold nature as true man and true God, fully human and fully divine. Therefore Christ is the Messiah or the one anointed by God and sent to fulfill the messianic hope of Israel as priest, prophet, and king. This messianic hope that was revealed in Christ reflects the fact that God did not abandon man after the Fall of Adam and Eve. Through His first promise of a Savior in what is known as the Protoevangelium in Genesis 3:15 He provided a means through Christ for man’s sins to be forgiven and for man to attain salvation. The essence of the Gospel message and the related writings of Paul is that man’s salvation was accomplished by Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, which redeemed mankind and restored man through his faith in Christ to the promise of eternal life.

The Gospel accounts are quite clear on who Jesus Christ was. The accounts of Jesus’ birth show that He was conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the virgin known as Mary. For example, in Luke 1:35 the angel Gabriel says to Mary, The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy; the Son of God. In Matthew 1:18 a similar account is given wherein Mary was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit. Both of these Gospel accounts say that Mary’s conception of the Christ or the Messiah was by an action of the Holy Spirit. Mary’s immaculate conception through the grace and power of the Holy Spirit is also known as the incarnation. Christ incarnate means literally that God became man and shared His divinity with the humanity and flesh formed through and within Mary’s womb. In this way God became a true man and lived among us or as John says in his Gospel, And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.  Jesus Christ according to these Gospel accounts, which are the Word of God, is therefore true man and true God, fully man and fully God. More importantly though if Christ was not God incarnate then He could not save us and His death would have been no different than any other human sacrifice that was made throughout history.

Although this message seems pretty clear from what is recorded in the Gospels it still left the door open for many people in the days of the early Church and even for that matter today to challenge how these two natures became the Christ. In some respects it can be said that folks no longer accept or have forgotten the testimony of their own tradition. These questions about Christ’s nature resulted in a rather large number of heresies that were at times not only deeply theological but in many cases even had political implications. To address these heresies concerning just who Christ was the Church had to convene six ecumenical councils over a period of more than 600 years to condemn these heresies and clearly state the true nature of Christ. Hence the focus of this Redux is to present a brief summary of these Christological heresies in order to show that defining Christ was very controversial and was really not that easy.

One of the earliest heresies from the second century was known as Monarchianism that so stressed the unity of God that the Holy Trinity of three Persons as one God was denied. In one crude form of this heresy no distinction was made between the three Persons of the Holy Trinity. Only the Father was seen as God hence it was the Father who became incarnate as Christ. In another variation of this heresy the other two persons as Christ and the Holy Spirit were seen as being subordinate to the Father as the one true God. Also known as Subordinationism or Adoptionism, Jesus was seen as just a man who was later adopted by God and granted special powers through the action of the Holy Spirit. Other forms of the Monarchianism heresy included Modalism and Sabellianism that believed that Christ and the Holy Spirit were only modes that distinguished different functions attributed to the Father. Hence God was a single Person with three different functions or modes. Another form of Monarchianism was known as Patripassianism that believed in the divinity of Christ but still held there was only one person in the Trinity. In other words the Father became man as Jesus Christ and it was the Father that suffered and died on the Cross.

While the heresies of Monarchianism reflected the struggles to accept the idea of the Holy Trinity as three Persons but one God, other heresies began around just who Christ was as a Person. At one extreme the Docetists and the Gnostics because of their dualistic view could not imagine that God would inhabit a creature so they said that Christ only seemed to be a man thus stressing His divinity. At the other extreme Arius in the fourth century denied Christ’s divinity and saw Him as a creature saying, there was a time when He was not. Arius argued that there was a time when God was not a Father and therefore the Word or the Logos as represented by the incarnation of the Son was not coeternal with God. In other words, the Father existed before the Son. Furthermore, Arius believed that the Son was created by God ex nihilo or from nothing, and therefore the Son was a creature.

Because these controversies regarding the nature of Christ were causing such unrest throughout the Roman Empire and especially in the church of the East, the Emperor Constantine, a recent convert himself, decided to intervene. An isolated conflict that began between the Bishop of Alexandria and his priest Arius had now grown to such a level that the Emperor was compelled to become involved and settle the issue and restore unity to the Church. This was the first time that the authority of the state was invoked to settle a theological argument. Hence Constantine in 325 AD called the first ecumenical or general council of bishops in the town of Nicaea, located in Asia Minor not far from Constantinople.

The assembly of bishops at Nicaea rejected the views of Arius and any thoughts that the Son was a creature or a being less divine than the Father. The assembly of bishops at Nicaea recognized that relying on verses from Sacred Scriptures alone would not end the controversy in a decisive manner. It was therefore necessary to write a creed that expressed the faith of the Church while clearly excluding the views of Arius. Eusebius of Caesarea claimed after Nicea that the Emperor Constantine supported the creed from his own church and that this creed served as a basis for the subsequent creed that was approved by the council of bishops gathered at Nicaea. However, Eusebius of Caesarea points out that Constantine under the advice of Bishop Hosius of Cordoba, wanted to insert the word homoousios to emphasize that the Son is of the same substance as the Father and that He exists with the Father from eternity. Eusebius of Caesarea said that the word homoousios suggests that the Son of God bears no resemblance to the originated creatures, but that to His Father alone Who begat Him is He in every way assimilated, and that He is not of any other subsistence and essence, but from the Father. Hence, the Son is not made but is begotten, that is God from God. The term homoousios therefore describes the fact that there is absolute equality between the Father and Son. The Nicene Creed therefore states that the Son is begotten and not made and that He is of the same substance as the Father, which is attested by the claims “God of God, light of light, true God of true God.”

Unfortunately the creed developed by the council of bishops that gathered in Nicaea did not end the controversy. Many objected to the use of the word homoousios since there was no scriptural basis for its use. As a result, Arianism resurfaced and to resolve the continuing Arian crisis, Emperor Theodosius called the Second General Council, now known as the First General Council of Constantinople, in May 381 AD. At this Council Arianism was once again condemned and the teaching developed at Nicaea regarding Christ as true God and true man was confirmed. The Church’s belief and understanding of the Trinity was also finalized asserting that the Holy Spirit is also God being of the same substance as the Father and the Son, thus putting to rest the heretical ideas of Monarchianism and the Pneumatomachoi’s. As a result of the Council it was agreed that there is one God who is three divine Persons, that is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. These three divine Persons are also consubstantial (homoousios), coequal, and coeternal. Accordingly an expanded version of the creed developed at Nicaea that addressed the full divinity of the Holy Trinity was formulated. This is the expression of the faith that is now known as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed or just the Nicene Creed.

Following these first two councils the debate about the nature of Christ continued unabated. Although the debate was settled regarding the equality of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, folks still wondered about the nature of the union of God and man in Christ. Apollinarius (310-390) who was a bishop in Syria said that Jesus was human as far as his body was concerned but the Word replaced the human spirit. In this view Christ was true God but not true man. This idea was rejected since if Christ did not have a human soul He was not true man and could not be the Savior of man.

But the idea to totally separate the human nature from the divine nature continued and came to a head in the heresy known as Nestorianism. Nestorius was the Bishop of Constantinople and around 428 he began to attack the idea that Mary was the mother of God, also known as theotokos. Nestorius believed that Mary could not be the Mother of God or theotokos since Christ was in fact two distinct persons, one human and one divine. Nestorius was basically saying with his two-person model of Christ that Jesus was an ordinary man born of Mary and that after his birth the Word of God descended upon him. Once again the Emperor intervened in this debate and Theodosius II called for a council to be held in Ephesus in 431. This council condemned Nestorius and asserted the teachings of Nicaea now emphasizing the fact that the divine nature and the human nature exist in the One Hypostasis, which is in the one Person of Christ who is the eternal Son of the Father. The word hypostasis refers to the idea of a thing that exists individually, which in the case of Christ refers to Him as a distinct person with two natures, that is His humanity and divinity. This also resolved the issue of whether or not Mary was theotokos. Since Christ’s divinity was united with His flesh while in Mary’s womb she is in fact the Mother of God, the theotokos.

Once again the heretics continued their assault and were lead now by Eutyches who was a monk from Constantinople. Eutyches claimed that within Christ the human nature was absorbed by the divine nature. This one nature in Christ was also known as Monophysitism. Flavian who was the Patriarch of Constantinople made an appeal to the Pope now known as St. Leo the Great. Pope Leo responded with a document known as the Tome of Leo. Concerning the two natures of Christ the Tome says, a nature which could not suffer was united to one which could suffer so that One and the Same Mediator between God and man, the man Jesus Christ, was able to die in the one nature while not able to die in the other… Each nature performs what is proper to itself in union with the other; the Word doing what is proper to the Word, and the flesh what is proper to the flesh. The new Emperor Marcian then called a general council that met in Chalcedon in 451. At this general council the Nicene Creed and the Tome of Leo were read aloud to the assembled bishops who responded, “This is the faith of the Fathers, the faith of the Apostles! This is what we believe! Anathema on those who do not believe! Peter has spoken through Leo!”

Chalcedon building on the foundations of Nicaea and Ephesus provided the definitive Christological formula stating that Jesus Christ is a single person (hypostasis) endowed with two natures and each nature expresses its own will; although the human will is subordinate to the divine will since Christ was without sin. These two natures are then His humanity (true man) and His divinity (true God). This is also known as the hypostatic union wherein these two natures exist in the single person known as Jesus Christ, without confusion or division, whole and entire. After Chalcedon the final issue that arose concerned the true will of Christ. At the 3^rd Council of Constantinople in 681 the heresy of Monothelitism, which claimed that in Jesus Christ there were the two natures but only a common will, was condemned based on the formula developed at Chalcedon.

The hypostatic union formula of Chalcedon that Christ is true God and true man in a single Person has been held for more than 1500 years by the Church and continues to the form the basis four our continued reflection on the mystery of Christ. This so-called hypostatic union of the two natures in the single Person of Christ is also a fundamental mystery of our faith and represents a further development of our understanding of those Gospel accounts of the incarnation.   © Ronald L. Fournier – 2008