The Dogma Of Christ In The Ancient Councils
The main lines of orthodox Christian teaching about the person of Christ were set by the New Testament and the ancient creeds. But what was present there in a germinal form became a clear statement of Christian doctrine when it was formulated as dogma. In one way or another, the first four ecumenical councils were all concerned with the formulation of the dogma regarding the person of Christ his relation to the Father and the relation of the divine and the human in Christ.
Such a formulation became necessary because teachings arose within the Christian community that seemed to threaten what the church believed and confessed about Christ. Both the dogma and the heretical teachings against which the dogma was directed are therefore part of the history of Jesus Christ.
The Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople
Early heresies
From the outset, Christianity has had to contend with those who misinterpreted the person and mission of Jesus. Both the New Testament and the early confessions of the church referred and replied to such misinterpretations. As the Christian movement gained adherents from the non-Jewish world, it had to explain Christ in the face of new challenges.
The misinterpretations touched both the question of his humanity and the matter of his deity. A concern to safeguard the true humanity of Jesus led some early Christians to teach that Jesus of Nazareth, an ordinary man, was adopted as the Son of God in the moment of his baptism or after his Resurrection; that heresy was called adoptionism. Gnostics and others wanted to protect him against involvement in the world of matter, which they regarded as essentially evil, and therefore taught that he had only an apparent, not-real body; they were called docetists. Most of the struggle over the person of Christ, however, dealt with the question of his relation to the Father. Some early views were so intent upon asserting his identity with the Father that the distinction of his person was lost, and he became merely a manifestation of the one God. Because of that idea of Christ as a “mode” of divine self-manifestation, proponents of that view were dubbed “modalists”; from an early supporter of the view it was called Sabellianism. Other interpretations of the person of Christ in relation to God went to the opposite extreme. They insisted so strenuously upon the distinctness of his person from that of the Father that they subordinated him to the Father. Many early exponents of the doctrine of the Logos were also subordinationists, so that the Logos idea itself became suspect in some quarters. What was needed was a framework of concepts with which to articulate the doctrine of Christ’s oneness with the Father and yet distinctness from the Father and thus to answer the question put forth by Adolf von Harnack:
Is the Divinity which has appeared on earth and reunited men with god identical with that supreme Divinity which governs heaven and earth, or is it a demigod?
Nicaea
That question forced itself upon the church through the teachings of Arius. He maintained that the Logos was the first of the creatures, called into being by God as the agent or instrument through which he was to make all things. Christ was thus less than God but more than a human being; he was divine, but he was not God. To meet the challenge of Arianism, which threatened to split the church, the newly converted emperor Constantine convoked in 325 the first ecumenical council of the Christian church at Nicaea. The private opinions of the attending bishops were anything but unanimous, but the opinion that carried the day was that espoused by the young presbyter Athanasius, who later became bishop of Alexandria. The Council of Nicaea determined that Christ was “begotten, not made,” that he was therefore not creature but creator. It also asserted that he was “of the same substance as the Father” (homoousios to patri). In this way it made clear its basic opposition to subordinationism, even though there could be, and were, quarrels about details. It was not equally clear how the position of Nicaea and of Athanasius differed from modalism. Athanasius asserted that it was not the Father or the Holy Spirit but only the Son who became incarnate as Jesus Christ. But in order to assert that, he needed a more-adequate terminology concerning the persons in the Holy Trinity. So the settlement at Nicaea regarding the person of Christ made necessary a fuller clarification of the doctrine of the Trinity, and that clarification in turn made possible a fuller statement of the doctrine of the person of Christ.
Constantinople
Nicaea did not put an end to the controversies but only gave the parties a new rallying point. Doctrinal debate was complicated by the rivalry among bishops and theologians as well as by the intrusion of imperial politics that had begun at Nicaea. Out of the post-Nicene controversies came that fuller statement of the doctrine of the Trinity which was needed to protect the Nicene formula against the charge of failing to distinguish adequately between the Father and the Son. Ratified at the Council of Constantinople in 381 but since lost, that statement apparently made official the terminology developed by the supporters of Nicene orthodoxy in the middle of the 4th century: one divine substance, three divine persons (mia ousia, treis hypostaseis). The three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—were distinct from one another but were equal in their eternity and power. Now it was possible to teach, as Nicaea had, that Christ was “of the same substance as the Father” without arousing the suspicion of modalism. Although the doctrine seemed to make problematical the unity of God, it did provide an answer to the first of the two issues confronted by the church in its doctrine of the person of Christ—the issue of Christ’s relation to the Father. It then became necessary to clarify the second issue—the relation of the divine and the human within Christ.
The Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon
By excluding several extreme positions from the circle of orthodoxy, the formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity in the 4th century determined the course of subsequent discussion about the person of Christ. It also provided the terminology for that discussion, since 5th-century theologians were able to describe the relation between the divine and the human Christ by analogy to the relation between the Father and the Son in the Trinity. The term that was found to express that relation in Christ was physis, “nature.” There were three divine persons in one divine essence; such was the outcome of the controversies in the 4th century. But there were also two natures, one of them divine and the other human, in the one person Jesus Christ. Over the relation between those two natures the theologians of the 5th century carried on their controversy.
The abstract questions with which they sometimes dealt in that controversy, some of them almost unintelligible to a modern mind, must not be permitted to obscure the fact that a basic issue of the Christian faith was at stake: How can Jesus Christ be said to partake of both identity with God and fellowship with humanity?
The parties
During the half century after the Council of Constantinople, several major points of emphasis developed in the doctrine of the person of Christ. Characteristically, these are usually defined by the episcopal see that espoused them. There was a way of talking about Christ that was characteristic of the see at Alexandria. It stressed the divine character of all that Jesus Christ had been and done, but its enemies accused it of absorbing the humanity of Christ in his divinity. The mode of thought and language employed at Antioch, on the other hand, emphasized the true humanity of Christ, but its opponents maintained that in so doing it had split Christ into two persons, each of whom maintained his individual selfhood while they acted in concert with each other. Western theology was not as abstract as either of those alternatives. Its central emphasis was a practical concern for human salvation and for as irenic a settlement of the conflict as was possible without sacrificing that concern. Even more than in the 4th century, considerations of imperial politics were always involved in conciliar actions, together with the fear in countries like Egypt that Constantinople might come to dominate them. Thus, a decision regarding the relation between the divine and the human in Christ could be simultaneously a decision regarding the political situation. Nevertheless, the settlements at which the councils of the 5th century arrived may be and are regarded as normative in the church long after their political setting has disappeared.
The conflict between Alexandria and Antioch came to a head when Nestorius, taking exception to the use of the title “Mother of God” or, more literally, “God-Bearer” (Theotokos) for the Virgin Mary, insisted that she was only “Christ-Bearer.” In that insistence, the Antiochian emphasis upon the distinction between the two natures in Christ made itself heard throughout the church. The Alexandrian theologians responded by charging that Nestorius was dividing the person of Christ, which they represented as so completely united that, in the famous phrase of Cyril, there was “one nature of the Logos which became incarnate.” By that he meant that there was only one nature, the divine, before the Incarnation but that after the Incarnation there were two natures indissolubly joined in one person; Christ’s human naturehad never had an independent existence. There were times when Cyril appeared to be saying that there was “one nature of the incarnate Logos” even after the Incarnation, but his most-precise formulations avoided that language.
The Council of Ephesus in 431 was one in a series of gatherings called to settle this conflict, some by one party and some by the other. The actual settlement was not accomplished, however, until the Council of Chalcedon was convened in 451.
The settlement at Chalcedon
The basis of the settlement at Chalcedon was the Western understanding of the two natures in Christ, as formulated in the Tome of Pope Leo I of Rome. Chalcedon declared:
We all unanimously teach…one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, perfect in deity and perfect in humanity…in two natures, without being mixed, transmuted, divided, or separated. The distinction between the natures is by no means done away with through the union, but rather the identity of each nature is preserved and concurs into one person and being.
In that formula the valid emphases of both Alexandria and Antioch came to expression; both the unity of the person and the distinctness of the natures were affirmed. Therefore, the decision of the Council of Chalcedon has been the basic statement of the doctrine of the person of Christ for most of the church ever since. The Western church went on to give further attention to the doctrine of the work of Christ. In the Eastern church the Alexandrians and the Antiochians continued the controversies that had preceded Chalcedon, but they clashed now over the question of how to interpret Chalcedon. The controversy was an effort to clarify the interpretation of Chalcedon, with the result that the extremes of the Alexandrian position were condemned just as the Nestorian extreme of the Antiochian had been. The Alexandrian position was known in the Western church as the heresy of monophysitism, or the teaching that Jesus had only a divine nature, until the 20th century.
Emerging from all that theological discussion was an interpretation of the person of Christ that affirmed both his oneness with God and his oneness with humanity while still maintaining the oneness of his person. Interestingly, the liturgies of the church had maintained that interpretation at a time when the theologians of the church were still struggling for clarity, and the final solution was a scientifically precise restatement of what had been present germinally in the liturgical piety of the church. In the formula of Chalcedon that solution finally found the framework of concepts and of vocabulary that it needed to become intellectually consistent. In one sense, therefore, what Chalcedon formulated was what Christians had been believing from the beginning, but, in another sense, it represented a development from the earlier stages of Christian thought.
The Interpretation Of Christ In Western Faith And Thought
With the determination of the orthodox teaching of the church regarding the person of Christ, it still remained necessary to clarify the doctrine of the work of Christ. Although it had been principally in the East that the discussion of the former question was carried on—though with important additions from the West—it was the Western church that provided the most-detailed answers to the question, Granted that this is what Jesus Christ was, how are we to describe what it is that he did?
Doctrines of the person and work of Christ
The medieval development
The most-representative spokesman of the Western church on that question, as on most others, was St. Augustine. His deep understanding of the meaning of human sin was matched by his detailed attention to the meaning of divine grace. Central to that attention was his emphasis upon the humanity of Jesus Christ as humanity’s assurance of salvation, an emphasis to which he gave voice in a variety of ways. The humanity of Christ showed how God elevated the humble; it was the link between the physical nature of human beings and the spiritual nature of God; it was the sacrifice which the human race offered to God; it was the foundation of a new humanity, recreated in Christ as the old humanity had been created in Adam—in these and other ways Augustine sought to describe the importance of the Incarnation for human redemption. By combining this stress upon the humanity of Christ as the Saviour with a doctrine of the Trinity that was orthodox but nevertheless highly creative and original, St. Augustine put his mark indelibly upon Western piety and theology, which, in Anselm and in the reformers, sought further for adequate language in which to describe God’s deed of reconciliation in Jesus Christ.
During the formative centuries of Christian dogma, there had been many ways of describing that reconciliation, most of them having some precedent in biblical speech. One of the most-prominent pictures of the reconciliation was that connected with the biblical metaphor of ransom: Satan held the human race captive in its sin and corruptibility, and the death of Christ was the ransom paid to the Devil as the price for setting humanity free. A related metaphor was that of the victory of Christ: Christ entered into mortal combat with Satan for the human race, and the winner was to be lord; although the Crucifixion appeared to be Christ’s capitulation to the enemy, his Resurrection broke the power of the Devil and gave the victory to Christ, granting to humankind the gift of immortality. From the Old Testament and the Epistle to the Hebrews came the image of Christ as the sacrificial victim who was offered up to God as a means of stilling the divine anger. From the sacrament of penance came the idea, most fully developed by St. Anselm, that the death of Christ was a vicarious satisfaction rendered for humankind. Like the New Testament, the Church Fathers could admonish their hearers to learn from the death of Christ how to suffer patiently. They could also point to the suffering and death of Christ as the supreme illustration of how much God loves humanity. As in the New Testament, therefore, so in the tradition of the church there were many figures of speech to represent the miracle of the reunion between human beings and God effected in the God-man Christ Jesus.
Common to all these figures of speech was the desire to do two things simultaneously: to emphasize that the reunion was an act of God and to safeguard the participation of humanity in that act. Some theories were so “objective” in their emphasis upon the divine initiative that humanity seemed to be almost a pawn in the transaction between God in Christ and the Devil. Other theories so “subjectively” concentrated their attention upon human involvement and response that the full scope of the redemption could vanish from sight. It was in Anselm of Canterbury that Western Christendom found a theologian who could bring together elements from many theories into one doctrine of the Atonement, summarized in his book, Cur Deus homo? According to that doctrine, sin was a violation of the honour of God. God offered human beings life if they rendered satisfaction for that violation, but the longer a person lived, the worse the situation became. Only a life that was truly human and yet had infinite worth would have been enough to give such a satisfaction to the violated honour of God on behalf of the entire human race. Such a life was that of Jesus Christ, whom the mercy of God sent as a means of satisfying the justice of God. Because he was a true human being, his life and death could be valid for all human beings, and, because he was true God, his life and death could be valid for all of humanity. By accepting the fruits of his life and death, humankind could receive the benefits of his satisfaction. With some relatively minor alterations, Anselm’s doctrine of the Atonement passed over into the theology of the Latin church, forming the basis of both Roman Catholic and orthodox Protestant ideas of the work of Christ. It owed its acceptance to many factors, not the least of them being the way it squared with the liturgy and art of the West. The crucifix has become the traditional symbol of Christ in the Western church, reinforcing and being reinforced by the satisfaction theory of the Atonement.
Scholastic theology, therefore, did not modify traditional ways of speaking about either the person or the work of Christ as sharply as it did, for example, some of the ways the Church Fathers had spoken about the presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist. The major contribution of the Scholastic period to the Christian conception of Jesus Christ appears to lie in the way it managed to combine theological and mystical elements. Alongside the growth of Christological dogma and sometimes in apparent competition with it was the development of a view of Christ that sought personal union with him rather than accurate concepts about him. Such a view of Christ appeared occasionally in the writings of Augustine, but it was in men like Bernard of Clairvaux that it attained both its fullest expression and its most-adequate harmonization with the dogmatic view. The relation between the divine and the human natures in Christ, as formulated in ancient dogma, provided the mystic with the ladder needed to ascend through the human Jesus to the eternal Son of God and through him to a mystical union with the Holy Trinity; that had been anticipated in the mystical theology of some of the Greek Fathers. At the same time the dogma saved mysticism from the pantheistic excesses to which it might otherwise have gone, for the doctrine of the two natures meant that the humanity of the Lord was not an expendable element in Christian piety, mystical or not, but its indispensable presupposition and the continuing object of its adoration, in union with his deity. As a matter of fact, another contribution of the medieval development was the increased emphasis of St. Francis of Assisi and his followers upon the human life of Jesus. Those brotherhoods cultivated a more practical and ethical version of mystical devotion, to be distinguished from speculative and contemplative mysticism. Their theme became the imitation of Christ in a life of humility and obedience. With it came a new appreciation of that true humanity of Christ, which the dogma had indeed affirmed but which theologians had been in danger of reducing to a mere dogmatic concept. As Henry Thode and others have suggested, this new appreciation is reflected in the way painters like Giotto began to portray Jesus, in contrast to their Western predecessors and especially the stylized picture of Christ in Byzantine icon painting.
The Reformation and classical Protestantism
The attitude of the reformers toward traditional conceptions of the person and work of Christ was conservative. Insisting for both religious and political reasons that they were orthodox, they altered little in the Christological dogma. Martin Luther and John Calvin gave the dogma a new meaning when they related it to their doctrine of justification by grace through faith. Because of his interpretation of sin as the captivity of the will, Luther also revived the patristic metaphor of the Atonement as the victory of Christ; it is characteristic of him that he wrote hymns for both Christmas and Easter but not for Lent. The new attention to the Bible that came with the Reformation created interest in the earthly life of Jesus, while the Reformation idea of “grace alone” and of the sovereignty of God even in his grace made the deity of Christ a matter of continuing importance.
In the ideas about the Lord’s Supper set forth by Huldrych Zwingli, Luther thought he saw a threat to the orthodox doctrine of Christ, and he denounced those doctrines vehemently. As that controversy progressed, Luther interpreted the ancient dogma of the two natures to mean that the omnipresence of the divine nature was communicated to the human nature of Christ and that therefore Christ as both God and human being was present everywhere and at all times. Although he repudiated both Luther’s and Zwingli’s theories, Calvin was persuaded that the ancient Christological dogma was true to the biblical witness, and he permitted no deviation from it. All this is evidence for the significance that “Jesus Christ, true God begotten of the Father from eternity, and also true man, born of the Virgin Mary,” to use Luther’s formula, had in the faith and theology of all the reformers.
At one point the theology of the reformers did serve to bring together several facets of the biblical and the patristic descriptions of Jesus Christ. That was the doctrine of the threefold office of Christ, systematized by Calvin and developed more fully in Protestant orthodoxy: Christ as prophet, priest, and king. Each of these symbolized the fulfillment of the Old Testament and represented one aspect of the church’s continuing life. Christ as prophet fulfilled and elevated the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament while continuing to fulfill his prophetic office in the ministry of the Word. Christ as priest brought to an end the sacrificial system of the Old Testament by being both the priest and the victim, while he continues to function as intercessor with and for the church. Christ as king was the royal figure to whom the Old Testament had pointed while exercising his rule among men now through those whom he has appointed. In each of the three, Protestants differed from one another according to their theological, ethical, or liturgical positions. But the threefold office enabled Protestant theology to take into account the complexity of the biblical and patristic pictures of Christ as no oversimplified theory was able to do, and it is probably the chief contribution of the reformers to the theological formulation of the doctrine of the person and work of Christ.
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