Alexandrian and Antiochean Controversies

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Page 1
H.D. McDonald, “Development and Christology,” Vox Evangelica 9 (1975): 5-27.
Development and Christology
H. D. McDonald
[p.5]
The subject of Christology more perhaps than any other theological issue is one which best
illustrates the idea of doctrinal development in its inevitability, legitimacy and limitations. By
confronting the world with its proclamation that in Jesus Christ the holy God and sinful man
are reconciled, the church found itself compelled to think through its own faith. For faith must
ever come to an understanding of itself. Thus the question pressed, ‘Who precisely is this One
in whom God is so evidently encountered?’ Under the impetus of its own faith in its
Christological gospel, the church set itself to discover the implications of it. Yet, however
inevitable was such development it was not the result of some inherent principle within
history; for the Christian conception of history is neither that of Hegel nor of Marx. Thus,
while Christological development wears the appearance of necessity, it is still a contingent
factor in the account of Christian theology. It arose mainly under pressure from enemies
without the church and false interpreters within it. The emergence of critics of the church’s
gospel made the church consider carefully the essential content of its message: while the
appearance within the church’s own ranks of those who either misconceived or miscontrued
the reality of Christ as the one Mediator between God and man in either one or other―or
indeed both―of these relationships, virtually forced the church to put into a form of sound
words its more precise understanding of the person of Christ. Added to this was the
missionary programme accepted by the church which required an interpretation of its central
doctrine to meet the needs of the day. Thus in its contact with a critical and unbelieving world
it was vital, if its message were to be proclaimed effectively and defended adequately, that the
church should uncover the deeper glories of its Christological faith. It must always be that the
heralds of God should speak with reason and relevance to their time, ‘For’, as T. S. Eliot says:
‘For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.’
1
But there are limits to such development. It is not development, but deviation, when a
doctrine gets cut off from its biblical source. Consequently any Christology which is at odds
with the full and final revelation in Christ is not of the authentic Christian proclamation.
2
This
was one of the points made by Athanasius in his argument with the Arians. Referring to the
so-called Dated Creed propounded by the Anomoean party and dedicated on 22 May AD 359
to ‘the most religious and gloriously victorious Emperor Constantius Augustus’ Athanasius
contends that this recently Dated Creed, originating during the reign of the present Emperor,
cannot be ‘the ancient faith’.
3
This does not mean, however, that one is being true to the
biblical revelation by merely repeating the words of scripture. One reason for the hesitancy
over the introduction of the term homoousion at Nicaea was the objection that it is not found
in the New Testament. And the Arians made capital out of the fact that the Creed used extra-
biblical concepts. Athanasius
1
‘Little Gidding,’ The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (1969), 194.
2
Cf. Galatians 1:6f.
3
Cf. Athanasius, de Synodis iii; Socrates, Hist. Eccl., ii. 37. ‘After putting into writing what it pleased them to
believe, they prefix it to the Consulate, and the month and the day of the current year; thereby to show all
sensible men, that their faith dates, not from of old, but now, from the reign of Constantius’ (Athan. ibid.).
Page 2
H.D. McDonald, “Development and Christology,” Vox Evangelica 9 (1975): 5-27.
[p.6]
writes to a friend who was troubled by their reiterated question, ‘Why do the Fathers of
Nicaea use terms not in Scripture, “Of the Essence”, and, “One in essence”?’ He replied that
the Arians do indeed employ the designations ‘Son’ and ‘Logos’ which are certainly biblical;
but they do not mean by them what the faith and doctrine of the church understands. So,
contends Athanasius, the mere use of scriptural phrases is no guarantee of truth and no
safeguard against error. To be precise as to the meaning of a biblical statement, it is often
necessary to go outside the Bible itself. This was the more necessary, Athanasius argues, in
the context of the discussions at Nicaea, since every scriptural phrase suggested was emptied
of its true meaning by the Arian exegetes. When, for example, it was declared that the Son
‘always’ was Son, and ‘from’ God, they were ‘caught whispering to each other and winking
with the eyes’.
4
They sought to explain away the real import of the declaration by quoting the
usage of the words in other passages; for example, 2 Cor. 4:11―‘For we which live are
always delivered unto death for Jesus’s sake’; while they contended that to say that the Son is,
‘from the Father’, is to say no more than that He is among the ‘all things which are from God’
(2 Cor. 5:18 cf. l Cor. 8:6). Such ‘artful expressions and plausible sophisms’, as Athanasius
considered them to be, cannot be met by pitching quotation against quotation.
The only way to deal with such a situation is to make specific what a term intends to convey
in a given context. It was for this reason that homoousios was introduced at Nicaea. Although
an extra-biblical word it admits, says Athanasius, of no equivocation.
5
He was therefore
convinced that ‘the term has a sound sense and good reasons’.
6
Athanasius makes the further
point that the Arians themselves have been unable to avoid the use of non-biblical phrases.
They employ the designation ‘Unoriginate’ as a category for God which they have borrowed
from the Greeks, not from the scriptures.
7
Athanasius is not slow to indicate their
inconsistency, as well as the absurdity into which their borrowed term lands them.
8
Thus,
while Athanasius confesses that he himself is not concerned to defend a mere word as such,
he is still sure that some extra-scriptural categories can alone bring into the clear focus of
developing Christological thinking what is inherent in the biblical witness at its source.
It is, then, in the context of this understanding of the inevitability, legitimacy, and limitation
of doctrinal development that a true Christology operates, and within which its account must
be explored. This real development can be traced within the wide sweep of history where we
have demonstration of its inevitability; and in particular instances in, for example, the
writings of Athanasius, Augustine, Abelard, S. T. Coleridge, Horace Bushnell, F. D. Maurice,
Bonhoeffer, where we have attestation of its legitimacy. Both these contexts witness to the
controlling awareness of its limitation.
The contingent reason for whatever signs of development there are in the epistolary writings
of the immediate successors of the apostles was the desire to come to a clearer knowledge of
the Christological faith of which their authors were heir. Looked at in a general way it may be
4
Athan., de Decretis, 20.
5
ad Afros, viii; cf. vii-ix.
6
de Decretis, 23.
7
Ibid., 28; cf. ‘And “Unoriginate” is a word of the Greeks who know not the Son’. Ibid., 31. ‘For if they think
everything must be rejected which is not written, wherefore, when the Arian party invent such a heap of phrases
not from Scripture... do not they speak against these...? And in what Scripture did they on their part find
“unoriginate” and “the term essence”..?’ (de Synodis, 36).
8
Cf. de Decretis, 28; Orat. c. Arinos, i. 28.
Page 3
H.D. McDonald, “Development and Christology,” Vox Evangelica 9 (1975): 5-27.
admitted that the Christology of the Apostolic Fathers is, as Kelly says, ‘meagre and
tantalizingly inconclusive’.
9
At the same time the one outstanding feature of the post-apostolic
piety is its Christo-centricity. The key-note of all they believed about Christ is struck,
according to Harnack, in the opening words of the spurious Second Letter of Clement:
‘Brethren,
[p.7]
it is fitting that you should think of Jesus Christ as of God―as the Judge of the living and the
dead’.
It does not fall within our purpose to review the statements regarding the person of Christ of
the several post-apostolic writers: that is an oft repeated story. But on the whole, due to the
particular circumstances in which they found themselves and to the special need of the time,
they are content, for the most part, merely to quote the words of scripture. Yet we have in
Ignatius the beginnings of a Christological development arising out of his reflection on his
own faith and his desire to fortify the faith of the churches to which he wrote. His seven
authentic letters are marked by a deep devotion and a high conception of Christ. The mystic
strain throughout arises from the way he blends the Pauline doctrine of union with Christ with
the Johannine idea of life in Christ. Ottley considers his letters to be akin to St Paul’s later
writings, especially to his Ephesian epistle.
10
Mackintosh, on the other hand, says ‘His ideas
are Johannine in the main’
11
Perhaps in these two assessments we have the clue to the general
christology of Ignatius’s writings. For, as Johannes Quasten remarks, ‘All in all, the
foundation of Ignatius’s Christology is St. Paul but influenced by the theology of St. John’.
12
The apostle to the Gentiles had an exalted view of Christ’s person and John a profound belief
in Christ’s humanity. It is precisely these two ideas which are prominent in Ignatius.
Christ is truly God, he affirms; and faith in God and Christ are for Ignatius one and the same.
Christ’s blood and passion are God’s; while all that Ignatius knows of God and receives from
God are through Christ. The whole content of his thought is drawn from Christ: and in final
analysis his concept of God and of Christ merge in one. On the other hand, Ignatius had a
profound belief in Christ’s humanity. He starts from the historic figure of the gospels and
emphasises each stage in Christ’s human existence. He descended from David and was of
Mary: He was truly born and did eat and drink.
13
Nor was His human nature shed by His
rising from the dead, for ‘after His resurrection He did eat and drink with them (His disciples)
as being possessed of flesh, although spiritually He was united to the Father’.
14
Again and
again Ignatius attacks docetism: and he uses the word ‘truly’, or better perhaps rendered,
‘genuinely’ (¢lhqîj) as a sort of watchword against those who were tempted to regard
Christ’s human life as in any sense unreal. For Ignatius the Incarnation was no mere entry of a
pre-existent Spirit into human flesh as the Shepherd of Hermas seemed to conceive of Him.
15
It is the unbelievers, declares Ignatius, who say that His sufferings were make-believe.
16
For
9
J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (1958), 95
10
The Doctrine of the Incarnation, 3 (1904), 161.
11
The Person of Christ (1912), 13.
12
Patrology (1949), i. 66; cf. ‘Once again we hear Paul and John speaking’ (Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in
Christian Tradition (1968), 103).
13
Ignatius, To the Trallians, ix
14
To the Smyrnaeans, iii.
15
Cf. Hermas, Similitudes V, ch. vi; see, xi. ch. i.
16
Ignatius, To the Trallians, x.
Page 4
H.D. McDonald, “Development and Christology,” Vox Evangelica 9 (1975): 5-27.
Ignatius the coming of God in flesh is the central reality of the gospel: ‘For our God Jesus
Christ was according to the appointment (economy, dispensation) of God conceived in the
womb of Mary of the seed of David, but by the Holy Ghost’.
17
Two facts follow from Ignatius’s presentation of the person of Christ as at once both human
and divine. First, he focuses attention on the idea of two forms of existence in the one Christ.
He glories indeed in the paradox as the very ground of man’s salvation. ‘There is one
physician’, he tells the Ephesians, ‘both of flesh and of spirit; both made and not made; God
existing in flesh, true life in death: both of Mary and of God; first passible and then
impassible―Jesus Christ our Lord’.
18
Ignatius is, then, the first to state explicitly the
conception of Christ’s person as a duality of two natures. For He is both ‘Son of God and Son
of
[p.8]
man’.
19
He therefore desires the confession that ‘Jesus Christ, our perpetual Life, united flesh
with spirit’.
20
But with that duality there goes a fundamental unity; for He is thus God’s ‘one
temple’, and ‘one altar’.
21
The other fact is, Ignatius indicates that a unique relation subsists between God and Christ. In
Christ, the Son, the things wrought out in the primeval silence were made manifest.
22
But
Christ is not the mere revelation of the divine nous. In Him God’s saving will is made clear,
not in words only, but in the whole act and attitude of His work in the flesh. In one place
Ignatius uses the term ‘Logos’ ‘There is one God who has manifested Himself in Jesus Christ
His Son who is His eternal Word (Logos)’.
23
But it may be too much to find in this one
reference, as Ottley does, the germ of the Logos-doctrine of the Apologists and the antinomy
which they endeavoured to solve.
As we pass from the letters of the Apostolic Fathers to the literature of the Greek Apologists
we become immediately aware of a change of purpose and a contrast in method. The age of
testimony has now given place to the age of testing. The time has come for a more exact
formulation of the Christian message in face of pagan criticism and cynicism. Some specific
interpretation was required for the facts of the gospel. An effort had to be made to state and
co-ordinate the principles which underlay the Christian message. Thus with the Apologists of
the second century we have the starting-pad from which the whole Christological enterprise
was launched. With them we mark the beginnings of Christological dogma.
And the need for such an apologetic statement of Christology was pressing. There were a
number of men eminent in their day to whom the Christian proclamation appeared absurd. Of
such was Lucian of Samosata who satirized believers for their attitude of mutual love and
contempt of death. The orator, Fronto of Cirta, and the Platonist, Celsus, took special delight
in ridiculing the gospel.
17
To the Ephesians, xviii.
18
Ibid., vii; This passage is quoted by Athanasius in his de Synodis, iii, 47.
19
Ibid, xx; cf. xviii.
20
To the Magnesians, i, 2.
21
Ibid., vii, 2.
22
Ibid., viii, 2; To the Ephesians, xix.
23
Ibid., viii.
Page 5
H.D. McDonald, “Development and Christology,” Vox Evangelica 9 (1975): 5-27.
Two main purposes then dominated the activity of these Apologists. They had first of all to
unmask the absurdities of paganism by showing that the Christian faith holds the key to the
riddle of the universe. ‘In the theology of the Apologists’, observes Harnack, ‘Christianity as
the religious enlightenment directly emanating from God Himself, is most sharply contrasted
with all polytheism, natural religion, and ceremonial’.
24
Then, in the second place, they
sought to present Christianity to the cultured world of their day as the ultimate philosophy,
and to convince the outsider that the gospel was the highest wisdom and the absolute truth.
For the Apologists Christianity came as the last word on ultimate issues just because it held
the full and final revelation of God in the appearance in incarnate form of the Divine Reason,
or Logos, in Christ.
In their efforts to formulate and demonstrate the essential truths of the gospel the Greek
Apologists are rightly regarded as the first Christian theologians. Not of course that they set
forth a full compendium of Christian truth; they were, after all, primarily Christian apologists
seeking to set forth the gospel in a way which they believed would have contemporary appeal.
Unlike the Apostolic Fathers whose words were directed to the converted who needed
edification and counsel, theirs were directed to the philosophically minded pagan who had to
be convinced that Christianity is true.They thus took up the weapons that paganism sought to
use against them and cut off its head with its own sword. Yet they were no mere
[p.9]
Hellenizers in Christian garb. It is rather more correct to ‘speak therefore of a Christianization
of Hellenism but hardly of a Hellenization of Christianity, particularly if we attempt to
appreciate as a whole the intellectual achievement of the Apologists’.
25
Much of the Christological affirmations of the earlier church writers presuppose the teaching
of Ebionism and Gnosticism. Christianity came with its declaration of Christ as ‘Son of God’
to a people fanatical for their belief in one God: and at the same time, it was preached among
those to whom the Greek idea of ‘sons of God’ was not unknown. Hence, on the one hand,
arose in Ebionism ‘the tendency to look on the transcendence of Christ exclusively in the light
of the idea of the Messiah, thus placing Christ in the rank of the prophets and men especially
endowed by God’.
26
Gnosticism, on the other hand, rang the changes on the reality of a
transcendent Christ, but the Gnostics were unsure of a human Jesus and a relation between
them. ‘Sometimes the human Jesus is one of the forms in which the divine redeemer
manifests himself, the earthly vehicle of the transcedent Christ, or again, Jesus and Christ are
different beings, although each has soteriological functions.’
27
Almost instinctively the church saw the inadequacies of both Ebionism and Gnosticism. And
against that background, but with Gnosticism providing the larger element, the church’s
Christology developed; but almost by way of opposition. And in the ensuing conflict the
church discovered its real strength. Its doctrine of God; of sin, not as the result of any
necessity of nature, but as an effect of a moral fall; of a real incarnation; and of a God-man
whose presence can be vindicated as an historical reality, proved themselves too strong to be
swept away. It was then at this period, as a consequence of its clash with Ebionism and
Gnosticism, that the church was compelled to draw out the implications of its Christological
24
History of Dogma (1863), ii, 170, 171.
25
Quasten, Patrology, i, 187, 188.
26
Grillmeier, op. cit., 90.
27
R. McL. Wilson, The Gnostic Problem (1958), 218.
Page 6
H.D. McDonald, “Development and Christology,” Vox Evangelica 9 (1975): 5-27.
faith. And viewed in the light of the results, ‘hardly any one’, contends Dorner, ‘could wish
that the church might have escaped the Gnostic storm’.
28
There is one fundamental fact which emerged from the conflict between those who believed
themselves to be defending the essential Christian faith on the one hand, and the two contrary
views of Ebionism and Gnosticism on the other. While these latter two stood opposed to each
other each emphasised in its own distorted way an essential element in the Christian
proclamation, namely, that a solely human Jesus, on the one hand, or, a merely divine Christ,
on the other, is not the Jesus Christ of authentic Christian faith. Ebionism indeed asserted a
genuine church truth that however He differed from the rest of men Jesus arose out of
humanity. Gnosticism stands as a witness to the necessity of a Christ possessing an essential
divine nature. In this way Ebionism and Gnosticism are to be taken as ‘proofs mutually
supplementing each other, they are the last, and, as opponents, the indubitable credible
witnesses for primitive Christianity, attesting that, in its representation of Christ, the higher as
well as the human side was set forth. They are, further, in the same way, witnesses against
each other; for they reciprocally accuse of omitting an essential part of Christianity. In fine, as
has been said, each witnesses against itself; for each at the end of the Epoch, assumes that
very thing of which at the commencement it had demanded the rejection’.
29
It fell to Irenaeus and Tertullian to concern themselves with the danger they believed
threatened the church from Gnosticism. With Irenaeus we come to the first important
theologian of the second century, and with him the first definite
[p.10]
attempt to present Christianity in dogmatic form.
30
‘In Christology his approach was
conditioned negatively by his opposition to Gnosticism and Docetism, positively by his own
tremendous vision of Christ as the Second Adam’.
31
Irenaeus seeks to overcome the gnostic
dualism which sharply separated the heavenly ‘Christ’ from the human ‘Jesus’. The Word
became flesh in very truth: there was no mere temporary union of an aeon with a man. ‘For
Christ did not at that time descend upon Jesus neither was Christ one and Jesus another: but
the Word―who is the Saviour of all and the Ruler of the earth who is Jesus... did also take
upon Him flesh…’.
32
Here we have the central theme of Irenaeus’s Christology. Jesus Christ
is truly God and truly man.
33
And He is no less God than the Father, for ‘He who is born of
God is God’―‘and the Father is God and the Son is God’.
34
Nonetheless the incarnation was
a real taking of human nature. It is the gnostic error to maintain that Christ came ‘through’ the
Virgin Mother, but ‘took nothing from her’.
35
The purpose of His becoming flesh was that He
28
J.A. Dorner, The History of Development of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ (1861), 1, 1, 254.
29
Domer, op. cit., 252.
30
Cf. Hans von Campenhausen, The Fathers of the Greek Church (1963), 22; John Lawson, The Biblical
Theology of Saint Irenaeus (1948), 23.
31
Kelly, op. cit., 147.
32
Irenaeus, Adv. Haer., iii, 9, 3.
33
Ibid., iii, 16, 1.
34
Proof of Apostolic Preaching (Eng. tr. Joseph P. Smith, 1952), 47.
35
Adv. Haer., iii, 22, 1; ‘For if He did not receive the substance of flesh from a human being, He neither was
made man nor the Son of Man...’ (ibid.).
Page 7
H.D. McDonald, “Development and Christology,” Vox Evangelica 9 (1975): 5-27.
should ‘recapitulate’ human life by summing it up anew in Himself in order to restore it and
bring it back to its original.
36
Tertullian’s contribution to the development of Christology can hardly be exaggerated.
37
Tertullian makes much of the actuality of the incarnation as a veritable becoming flesh of the
Son of God who ‘is in His birth both God and man united’.
38
He speaks of Christ’s ‘twofold
states’,
39
‘two natures’,
40
and ‘two substances’.
41
And while Tertullian attributes to each
‘substance’ its own distinctive functions,
42
he does not set them in isolation; in fact, he may
be the first to introduce the idea of the communicato idiomatum by leaving the impression that
the attributes of one nature are taken up by the other.
With Tertullian, as Harnack declares, the character and course of Latin Christianity was
already announced. He set the pace for those who were to follow him; and the later
developments in Christology turn back to him for not a little of its teaching and terminology.
The heresies of Ebionism and Gnosticism which agitated the theological thought of the late
second century continued into the third, when, under the new term Monarchianism, the two
modes of thought reappeared to give rise to the controversies which were the main feature of
the third century, and the cause of further development in Christological understanding.
The declaration that God is One and a Unity is of course a fundamental doctrine of
Christianity as heir of the ethical monotheism of Judaism. But the question was posed, How is
the concept of God as a single Divine Monarchia to be harmonized with the idea of Christ’s
divineness which was evidently an integral factor in the Christian proclamation? The answers
returned by some put them outside the main stream of the church’s developing Christological
understanding. Yet the answers reflected the basic interest of their advocates. Where the
theological concern was the stronger and the intention was to safeguard the sole Monarchia of
God the tendency was to exalt the divine unity at the expense of Christ’s essential deity.
Christ was thus conceived of as the vehicle of a divine action: a special ‘dynamism’ of the
One Monarchia had come to reside in the man Jesus who was accordingly accepted Son of
God by adoption and grace. This view which goes by the name of Dynamistic
Monarchianism, reached its refined exposition in Paul of Samosata who was condemned at
the Council of Antioch in AD 269.
On the other side, where the Christological interest prevailed there was the
[p.11]
36
Cf. ‘But if the Lord became incarnate for any other order of things, and took flesh of any other substance, He
has not then summed up human nature in His own person, nor in that case can He be termed flesh’ (Adv. Haer. v,
19, 2; cf. v, 16, 1-3; iii, 21, 10; etc.).
37
Cf. Harnack, op. cit., iv, 121.
38
Tertullian, Apol, xxi.
39
Adv. Prax., xxvii. Cf. ‘But the truth is we find that He is expressly set forth as both God and man. We see
plainly the twofold states which are not confounded, but conjoined in one Person, Jesus Christ.’
40
Tertullian refers to the two goats of the ritual of the Day of Atonement as the ‘figure of the two natures of
Christ’; cf. de Carn. Christi, iii; Adv. Judaeos, xiv.
41
Cf. ‘The nature of the two substances displayed Him as man and God-in one respect born, in the other unborn;
in one respect fleshly, in the other spiritual; in one sense weak, in the other exceedingly strong; in one sense
dying, in the other living,’ de carn. Christi, v.
42
Cf. ‘It is not in respect of the divine substance, but in respect of the human, that we say He died,’ Adv. Prax.,
xxvii.
Page 8
H.D. McDonald, “Development and Christology,” Vox Evangelica 9 (1975): 5-27.
identification of Christ with the One Monarchia. In this case the incarnation was conceived of
as another expression, or mode, of God. This type of Modalistic Monarchianism, or
Sabellianism as it is otherwise known after its leading exponent Sabellius, rejected outright
any idea of a hypostasic Logos, and therefore asserted that it was the Father Himself who
became incarnate in Jesus, and in that state is called Son.
43
The decisive blow against Monarchianism was struck, according to G. P. Fisher, by the
Alexandrian school through its greatest representative Origen.
44
On the one hand he staunchly
maintained the eternal generation of the Son from the Father; and this side of his teaching was
a definite repudiation of dynamistic Monarchianism. In order to make good his case against
modalism, Origen sharply distinguished between God the Father and the generated Logos.
The Father alone possesses deity a se ipso, of which ‘fount of deity’ the Son ever partakes.
But Origen had however separated the Son to such an extent from the Father that he left the
idea that the Son must be less than, if not indeed inferior to, the Father.
45
And although he did
see the necessity of crediting to the Son a distinct hypostasis, he never succeeded in
reconciling the two streams of thought with the result that they lay in uneasy juxtaposition to
be called upon by either orthodoxy or heterodoxy as occasion required.
Beginning with Arius a number of teachers arose within the church itself whose views,
although themselves sometimes opposed to each other, occasioned further consideration of
the place of Christ in the church’s faith and tradition and further construction in Christological
dogma. Among these teachers the tendency was either to limit Christ solely to the earth, or
lose Him altogether in the heaven: either to see Him as originating ‘from below’ and
acquiring a little of what is ‘from above’, or as originating ‘from above’ and annexing
something ‘from below’. Under the leadership of Athanasius, the Cappadocian Fathers, and
others of like insight, the generality of Christians were led to reject such presentations of
Christ’s person mainly on the score that they undermined His soteriological significance and
because they could not be made to square with the total data of the Gospels’ record, and the
understanding of the church regarding Him from the first.
It was inevitable that the various ideas which were already present should coalesce into the
view of Christ’s person of which Arius (b. AD 256) became the first spokesman. There were,
for example, the strong subordinationism of Origen and the teaching of Lucian of Antioch of
which Arius was heir.
46
And as excuses for its appearance were the avowed desire of the
Arians to uphold monotheism,
47
and to combat Sabellianism by insisting upon the being of
the Son as a distinct entity from that of the Father.
48
But whatever were the creative ideas
which made Arianism inevitable, it nevertheless burst upon the church with a sense of
43
Cf. ‘For neither do we hold Son-Father, as doth Sabellius, calling Him of one but not the same essence thus
destroying the existence of the Son’. Athan., Expositio Fidei, 2; cf. Orat. c. Aria., iv, 9; Thomus, ad
Antiochenos, 6; Ambrose, de Fide, ii, 13; v, i, 8; Gregory Naziansen, Orat., ii; Defence of his Flight to Pontus,
17; On the Theophany xv; Cyril of Alexandria, Catechetical Lectures, iv, 8; xi. 13; xvi, 4; Hilary, de Trin., ii, 4;
iv, 12; vi, 5, 11.
44
History of Christian Doctrine (1902), 104.
45
Cf. Contra Celsum, ii, 9; v, 39; de Prin., i, 2, 13; on Jn. vi, 3; cf. ‘the Son is not mightier than the Father but
inferior to him’, Contra Celsum, viii, 15.
46
Cf. Theodoret, Eccl. Hist., 1, 3; Arius it seems took pride in calling himself a ‘Lucianist’ see Epiph., Haer.,
lxix.
47
Cf. F. J. Bethune-Baker, An Introduction to the Early History of Christian Doctrine (1903), 158. Arius’s
‘strongest interest was the maintenance of Monotheism’.
48
Cf. Athan., de Synodis, xxvi; Arius’s Letter to Alexandria; Athan., de Synodis, xvi.
Page 9
H.D. McDonald, “Development and Christology,” Vox Evangelica 9 (1975): 5-27.
novelty.
49
Setting out from a badly transcendent monotheism, Arius’s Christology was
vitiated from the start. For he had already assumed his conclusion, in spite of the exalted titles
which he referred to Christ, that His ultimate place is within the sphere of created realities. If
God alone is the only Unbegun, then the Son cannot be from eternity;
50
and if not eternal,
then He must be created;
51
and if created, then He must be alien to the nature of the Father,
52
and because of this He cannot be said to be free from change or altogether sinless.
53
Thus, to
speak of Christ the Word, as God, or even, Son of God, was to use these terms merely as
‘courtesy titles’.
54
The Christ of Arius cut at the foundation of biblical theism and the
Christian
[p.12]
doctrine of redemption. It allowed a place to creature-worship and so compromised the basic
element in the Christian doctrine of God.
55
It removed God from contact with creation so that
even to the Son, God remained unknown, and in this way the possibility of a personal
revelation of God was denied. The Arian Christology made unsecure the actuality of
atonement and redemption. For the Christ of Arius, Himself a creature, has no stake in the
ultimate nature of God and cannot unite man to Him. In truth, as Ottley observes: on the
Arian theory mediation is impossible. Man is capable at best of an ethical sonship, not of
receiving a communication of the Divine life. He cannot be a partaker of the Divine nature; he
must be content with an independent endeavour to follow the example of Christ. Thus ‘the
Arians had made their problem impossible by neglecting its spiritual conditions’. The Arian
Christ is a witness ‘not to the love of God, but to a gulf beyond the power of almighty love to
close... Revelation (on this theory) is a mockery, atonement an idle phrase, and therefore
Christ is dead in vain.... No mere creature can impart the principle of sanctification which
alone can re-create the creature separated from its Creator by sin’.
56
The simple fact is that the
Arian Christ may be enough for the Pelagian man; but He is not enough to span the infinite
abyss which man’s own act of sin has brought about between the holy God and himself. For,
as P. T. Forsyth reminds us, what it took a whole God to create a half God cannot redeem.
This is indeed the real issue of the Arian conflict which Athanasius, his chief protagonist, saw
clearly. It was for this reason that he became the champion of the homoousion, firm in the
conviction that a perfectly adequate redemption could only come through a perfectly adequate
Saviour. To Athanasius therefore, Christ is above all the Divine Presence among men; and as
such He is essentially one with the God whom He reveals. In contrast with all those who
viewed salvation as an aid to man’s best endeavours and consequently regarded Christ, less as
the Word incarnate than as an inspired, if perfect, man, Athanasius considered salvation to
consist in essential fellowship of men with God. And no inspired man could accomplish a
49
Cf. Athanasius’s remark to a friend: ‘Now I wonder who was it that suggested to you so futile and novel an
idea as that the Father alone wrought with His Own hand the Son alone...’ (de Decretis, vii).
50
At the close of a letter to Eusebius of Nicomedia Arius laments: ‘We are persecuted because we say that the
Son had a beginning, but that God is without beginning.” (Theodoret, Eccl. Hist., 1, 4).
51
In his Thalia Arius wrote: ‘the Son was made out of nothing’; and ‘He had an origin in creation’, and there
was ‘once when He was not’, cf. Athan., Orat. c. Aria., i, 5.
52
Cf. ‘the Word (is) alien and unlike in all things to the Father’s essence and property, and is therefore “not the
very God” ‘ (Athan. Orat. c. Aria., 1, 6; cf. de Synodis, xv, xxv.
53
Cf. Athan., ibid. v; de Decretis, xvi. 54
54
Kelly, op. cit., 229.
55
Cf. Athan., Orat. c. Aria., ii, 23; iii, 64.
56
Op. cit., 310; cf. Gwatkin, Studies in Arianism (1898), 28.
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H.D. McDonald, “Development and Christology,” Vox Evangelica 9 (1975): 5-27.
work so Godlike. Only the Logos, Himself divine, coming in flesh to gather men into
communion with God could bring to pass such a holy end.
In his two pre-Nicene tracts, as I take them to be, his Contra Gentes and de Incarnatione
Verbi, Athanasius set himself to make clear that it is only Christ the Word, truly God, who
can raise sinful man to the divine. In his various post-Nicene writings, in which Arianism is
his main concern, he seeks to show that unless Christ is regarded as God in a literal and full
sense He is but a creature: and fellowship with a creature however exalted can never bring
man near to God. For in this case redemption, as union with God in virtue of union with
Christ, is not possible. Thus is Athanasius concerned in his pre-Nicene writings to present
Christ as the Redeemer Divine. Here we have a soteriology with a stake in a Christology.
Against the Arians, Athanasius contends that the soteriological purpose of the gospel can be
safeguarded only on the assurance that Christ is the Divine Redeemer: here we have a
Christology with a stake in soteriology.
It was a dictum with Athanasius in his polemic against the Arians that if the Logos is not fully
divine He cannot redeem. ‘For what help could a creature derive from a creature that itself
needs salvation?’
57
A creature, Athanasius argues, can never be saved by a creature, any more
than it could be created by one. Thus if the Word is reckoned as something made there is no
salvation for humanity.
[p.13]
To establish that the Word is not a creature in the interests of man’s salvation, is, then,
Athanasius’s chief endeavour: and it is this concern which conditions all his opposition to
Arianism. Athanasius meets every fundamental Arian statement with an emphatic and
outright denial. God was never once alone and without a Son,
58
therefore the Son is no created
being;
59
consequently the Word even in His incarnate state cannot change. It is therefore
Athanasius’s assured conclusion that, ‘He was not man, and then became God, but He was
God, and then became man, and that to defy us’.
60
Although Athanasius speaks freely of the Logos as ‘assuming’, ‘being clothed by’, ‘putting
on’, and ‘bearing’, flesh,
61
he still desires to regard the body as a necessary factor in the Word
incarnate. In his Letter to Epictetus he comments upon the passage in 1 Peter about Christ
going in the Spirit to preach to the spirits in prison. He contends that it was not the Word that
went into the tomb; it was the body which lay in Joseph’s grave. ‘And so it is shown to all
that the body was not the Word, but the Body of the Word.’
62
In this way he is able to assert
against the Arians that it is the body qua body which is passible, the Word remaining
impassible. The Word nevertheless make His own the properties of His own body: and
57
Athan., ad Adelphium, Letter lx, 8.
58
Cf. de Decretis, xii; Orat. c. Aria., i, 23; 2, 32.
59
Cf. ‘For the Word is not created, but begotten; and a creature is not Son, but a production’ (ad Episc. Aegyp.,
xiv).
60
Orat. c. Aria., i, 29.
61
Cf. e.g. ‘the Son did not become different when He assumed flesh, but remaining the same was veiled in it,
putting on a body which came into existence and was made’ (Orat. c. Aria., ii, 8). Twice Athanasius speaks of
the body as a garment (himation in Orat. c. Aria., 1, 47, and esthes in ii, 8). He also says that the Logos works
and speaks ‘divinely through the instrument of His own body’ (Orat. c. Aria., iii, 15).
62
ad Epictetum, Letter lix, 6.
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H.D. McDonald, “Development and Christology,” Vox Evangelica 9 (1975): 5-27.
although the Word as such is impassible, yet He suffered as it were by association with His
body.
63
It is the flesh that is troubled, that suffers, that dies.
64
Still Athanasius does not leave the flesh and the Logos in juxtaposition. He seeks to stress the
personal unity of the Logos and flesh in the one Christ. As the approach is generally from the
Divine end, Athanasius regards the flesh as taken up into the Logos and itself virtually
deified. This means that the impression is given that the communicatio idiomatum is one way:
it is, that is to say, not clearly stated that the Logos gathers up the. properties of the human.
Consequently in his stress on the personal unity of the ‘two natures’ in Christ―an expression
by the way Athanasius does not use
65
―the divinity is given larger scope at the expense of the
human. Athanasius does however insist that the body taken by the Word was real flesh; a
human reality not a ‘heavenly’. This does not carry the conclusion that some have drawn that
this means a foreign element has been imported into the Trinity so that we have ‘a Tetrad
instead of a Triad’.
66
The truth is rather, Athanasius declares, that the Word became flesh, not
by reason of an addition to the Godhead, but in order that the flesh may rise again. The Word
did not proceed from Mary that He might be bettered, but that He might ransom the human
race.
67
By union with the Word the body benefited, not the other way round.
68
True, the flesh
is part of the created world, but it has become, in the case of the incarnate Word, ‘God’s
body’.
69
Therefore the object of Christian worship is Christ in the unity of body and Logos:
‘we neither divide the body, being such, from the Word, and worship it by itself, nor when we
wish to worship the Word do we set Him apart from the flesh, but knowing... that “the Word
was made flesh”, we recognise His as God also, after having come in the flesh’.
70
There are undoubtedly ambiguities in the way Athanasius has stated his Christology.
Especially vulnerable are his seeming doceticism,’
71
and his failure to give to the human soul
of Christ, if indeed he allowed its presence, ‘theological’ significance.
72
In spite of this
Athanasius was successful in his main concern that the church should continue to confess
Jesus Christ as Lord in an authentic biblical sense, and thus to keep secure the necessary
Divine basis for the world’s existence
[p.14]
63
Cf. Ibid.
64
Cf. ‘For to be troubled was proper to the flesh, and to have power to lay down His life and take it again, when
He will, was no property of men but of the Word’s power. For man dies, not by his own power, but by necessity
of nature and against his will; but the Lord, being Himself immortal, had power as God to become separate from
the body as to take it again when He would’ (Orat. c. Aria., iii, 57).
65
Athanasius does, of course, speak often enough of Christ as at the same time divine and human. And he
accuses the Arians of not acknowledging Him as God nor believing that He
has become man (Cf. ad Adelphium). Athanasius does speak of ‘two elements’ (duo pragmata), each with its
own properties existing in union.
66
ad Epictetum, Letter lx, 3.
67
Cf. ad Epictetum, Letter lix, 9.
68
Cf. ‘the Son, being God, and Lord of glory, was in the Body which was ingloriously nailed and dishonoured;
but the Body, while it suffered... because it was a temple of the Word, was filled full of the Godhead’ (ibid. x.).
69
ad Adelphium, Letter lx, 3.
70
Ibid.
71
Cf. Orat. c. Aria., iii, 37, 55, 113, 114.
72
Cf. Athan., Tomus ad Antioch, vii; Grillmeier, op. cit., 196f.; Kelly, op. cit., 287. ‘So despite his clear
exclusion of the soul as a “theological factor”, we may still consider it possible that his picture of Christ knew a
human soul as a “physical factor” ‘ (Grillmeier, op. cit., 216).
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H.D. McDonald, “Development and Christology,” Vox Evangelica 9 (1975): 5-27.
and man’s salvation. And such, too, was the purpose enshrined in the clauses of the Nicene
Creed in its repudiation of Arius.
Under the Cappadocian Fathers, Basil of Caesarea, his friend Gregory of Nazianzus and his
brother Gregory of Nyssa, the Nicene terminology was made definite and the Son’s place
within the Godhead made secure. They took over from Athanasius ‘the management of the
Trinitarian cause’.
73
Basil was a fully convinced Nicene. Indeed he tells us that he was
ostracised for being a ‘Homoousiast’.
74
The main thrust of Basil’s Christology was however
to distinguish between the divine and human in Christ rather than to stress the unity of His
person in terms of the communicatio idiomatum. He gave to the incarnate Word all the
characteristics of human nature including that of a human soul: and for him the human soul
was a ‘theological factor’ in the life of the incarnate Word. He regarded the flesh endowed by
soul, as the proper seat of grief, weariness, and the like, exhibited by Christ in the days of His
flesh. By distinguishing, as he did, between the human and divine in the person of Christ,
Basil left the impression of setting each nature in juxtaposition. In fact, in his Homily on
Psalm xlv, he makes a statement which the later Nestorius would have found satisfying: ‘The
flesh of Christ is “bearer of the Godhead” made holy by union with God’.
Gregory of Nazianzus’s attachment to the Nicene formula can be read from his panegyric On
the Great Athanasius.
75
And that allegiance is affirmed elsewhere: ‘I never have and never
can honour anything above the Nicene Faith, that of the Holy Fathers who met there to
destroy the Arian heresy, but am, and ever will be of that faith’, he declares.
76
Gregory gives
special emphasis to the possession by the Word incarnate of a human soul. In Christ he says
‘there are two natures, God and man, since there is a soul as well as a body in Him’.
77
And in
often-quoted words he gives soteriological import to the human soul in Christ. If, he argues,
Christ did not have a human soul then man is not fully redeemed ‘For that which He has not
assumed He has not healed’.
78
Gregory makes a special point of stressing the unity of Christ’s
person and often speaks of the human being taken up into the divine and becoming deified by
commingling therewith: ‘both natures are one by the combination, the Deity being made man,
and the Manhood deified or however one should express it’.
79
Gregory emphasises however
that this ‘strange conjunction’ does not involve the reduction of Christ’s full human nature.
80
Gregory seems to have found inspiration in the idea of the self-emptying of the Son in His
becoming man. ‘O self-emptying of Christ!’ he exclaims in his Panegyric on his sister
Gorgonia.
81
He sees in her suffering a pale copy of Christ’s supreme act of self-renunciation.
He gives soteriological significance to the kenosis by declaring that Christ assumed the
poverty of flesh that we may assume the richness of His Godhead.
82
73
Gibbon’s remark that Basil ‘succeeded Athanasius in the management of the Trinitarian cause’ (quoted by C.
N. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (Galaxy Books 1957), 399), applies equally to the other
Cappodocians.
74
‘To Patrophilus bishop of Aegae,’ Letter, ccxliv, 7.
75
Cf. On the Great Athanasius, Orat., xxi, 13; see R. R. Ruether, Gregory of Nazianzus: Rhetor and Philosopher
(1969), 18f.
76
Second Letter to Cledonius, cii.
77
To Cledonius ci.
78
Ibid.
79
Ibid., cf. The Second Oration on Easter, 9.
80
Cf. his two letters to Cledonius; On the Theophany, 13
81
Panegyric On his Sister Gorgonia, Orat., viii, 14.
82
Panegyric on Basil, Orat., xliii, 61; cf. On the Theophany, 13.
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H.D. McDonald, “Development and Christology,” Vox Evangelica 9 (1975): 5-27.
More indeed than the other two Cappadocians, Gregory of Nyssa shows his indebtedness to
Athanasius. He is specially concerned to affirm the eternal Godhead of the Son,
83
and to
repudiate the charge that the idea of two natures means the existence of two Christs.
84
And to
overcome the charge Gregory of Nyssa presses the unity of the two natures to such an extent
that the human seems to lose something of its authentic humanness through the impact upon it
of the divine. By mingling His life-giving power with our mortal nature the human is
somehow interfused by the divine.
85
Gregory uses the illustration, which was to become dear
to Eutyches later, in his effort to show the overwhelming and pene-
[p.15]
trating power of the Godhead upon the manhood in Christ: it is like a drop of honey mingled
in the ocean where ‘the natural quality of this liquid does not continue in the infinity of that
which overwhelms it’.
86
As a result of this ‘overwhelming’, ‘His body is called “Lord” (Matt.
xxviii. 6., cf. Jn. xx. 2, 13) on account of that inherent Godhead’.
87
Yet Gregory seems to
postpone this final transformation until after His resurrection.
88
The extreme contrary views arrived at regarding the structure of Christ’s person by
Apollinarius and Nestorius, as respectively advocates of the Alexandrian and Antiochene
approaches, led to further development in Christological doctrine. The reality and necessity of
the divine nature in Christ as of one essence with the Father was assured as a result of the
Arian controversy. But while the two-natures doctrine was firmly established it was given
excessive emphasis by the Antiochene theologians. The school of Antioch had always
insisted on Christ’s true and full human nature, but it tended to destroy the concrete unity of
His Person and to see Him, not as the God-man, but as a Man inspired by God. The
Alexandrians, on their side, laid stress upon the divinity of the incarnate Word and the
intimate unity of His person. Starting from Alexandrian presuppositions, Apollinarius
attacked what he conceived to be the dualistic Christology of Antioch, and bent his whole
energy against any teaching which appeared to make Christ less than fully divine, and other
than one person.
Apollinarius set out to refute the view that Christ was a God-inspired man. His dominating
thought was to secure the complete unity of Christ’s person without lessening His deity or
representing Him as an indwelt man. ‘If the Lord is not incarnate,’ he argues, ‘He would be
wisdom illuminating the heart of a man; but this is present in all men.’
89
Therefore, he
declares, ‘A man deriving energy from God is not God: but a body conjoined with God is
God: so Christ is not a man, receiving energy from God, but a body compacted with God’.
90
Apollinarius contends that Christ’s death has no atoning value if He is not essentially divine.
91
He must therefore be morally unchangeable possessing a nature not open to the possibility of
83
Cf. ‘the Son of Very God is Very God’ (Letter to Eustathia, Ambrosia, and Basilissa) xvii, cf. On the Faith:
Against Eunomius, i, 34, 42; ii, 9.
84
Cf. Against Eunomius, v. 5.
85
Ibid. Cf. By the ‘indwelling of God the Word’ the body which He took to Himself ‘was transmuted into the
dignity of Godhead’ (The Great Catechism, xxxvii).
86
Against Eunomius, v, 5.
87
Letter to Eustathia, Ambrosia, and Basilissa, xviii.
88
Against Eunomius, v, 5.
89
Apollinarius: Apodeixis Frag., 70.
90
From the Anacephalaeosis appended to Contra Diodorum, 21.
91
Cf. ibid., 9, 23, 28.
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H.D. McDonald, “Development and Christology,” Vox Evangelica 9 (1975): 5-27.
sinning.
92
To Apollinarius the Antiochene Christology was a menace to Christ’s proper
divinity and saving power. ‘Paulinisers,’ he calls them for slavishly following the Samosatene
in separating Christ’s person into two natures.
93
Apollinarius is emphatic that there are not
two natures in the Word incarnate, ‘one to be worshipped and one not to be worshipped’.
There is but one nature in Christ.
94
Against the external union of the two natures for which the
Antiochene school contended, Apollinarius argues for the absolute oneness of His being. In
place then of the two-nature view of Christ’s person, Apollinarius posits one new nature
which he designates ‘a marvellous mixture’. In Apollinarius’s structure Christ’s person is the
result of the ‘composition’
95
or, ‘commingling’,
96
of Logos and abridged human nature: He is
a commixture of denuded humanity and Divine Word. He is indeed a tertium quid; ‘a mean
between God and man, neither wholly man nor wholly God, but a combination of God and
man’.
97
Viewed in its full account there is something sensitive and suggestive about Apollinarius’s
Christology. It is to his credit that he sought the key to an understanding of Christ’s person in
His work. A divine act was needed for man’s salvation and in Christ as divine person the
reality of that divine act was accomplished. He may have been ‘in the main’, as Prestige
contends, ‘magnificently
[p.16]
right’; and he certainly was right in his affirmation that, ‘Jesus Christ was God and was doing
God’s work; and the fact that He did it was more important than the question how’.
98
Nevertheless even though Apollinarius seemed but to regularise and make explicit the
church’s own docetic tendencies his truncated manhood of Christ undercut the salvation of
man for which he strove. In his Christology that very constituent of human nature which in
man is intrinsically akin to God was absent. Thus by denuding Christ of the human soul or
mind, Christ is neither our entire example nor our complete Saviour. It was mainly on this
score that he was attacked by the Cappadocian Fathers as a result of which Apollinarius was
condemned by the Council of Constantinople in AD 381.
Although Eustathius is often regarded as the first spokesman of the dualistic Christology of
Antioch,
99
it is to Diodore to whom we must look as the founder of the Antiochene schoo1.
100
Against the Alexandrian stress on the unity of the two natures, Diodore sought to mark the
distinction of the human and divine in Christ. The Alexandrians had likened the human and
divine in Christ to, ‘the soul and body of a king’, and contended that, ‘the soul by itself is not
king and the body by itself is not king’. Diodore retorts: ‘the God-Logos is king before the
flesh and therefore what can be said of the body and soul cannot be said of the Logos-God
and the flesh’.
101
To retain the integrity of the two natures, therefore, a clear distinction
92
Cf. de Unit., Frag., 2; ad Julian Frag., 15.
93
Cf. Ep. ad Dion., 1.
94
Cf. e.g. ad Jovian, 3; Frag., 81; ad Dion., i, i-ix
95
Ep. ad Dion.
96
Contra Diodorum. Frag., 134, 137.
97
Syllog. Frag., 111; cf. de Incarn., Frag., 1, ‘a new creation and a wondrous mixture: God and flesh have
constituted one nature’. For almost identical words, see Anac., 23; Contra Diodorum Frag., 126; Frag., 45.
98
Fathers and Heretics (1956), 116, 117.
99
Cf. R. V. Sellers, Two Ancient Christologies (1954), ch. 6.
100
Cf. Theodoret, Eccl. Hist., ii, 19, 20; iv, 22f; v, 23f.
101
Frag., 39 (Brière); cf. Frag., 42 (Abram.).
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H.D. McDonald, “Development and Christology,” Vox Evangelica 9 (1975): 5-27.
between them, and the activities proper to both, must be made.
102
Grillmeier draws attention
to Diodore’s use of the ‘indwelling formula’ as the ‘Nestorian tendency’ in him.
103
He
conceives of the Word dwelling in the temple of flesh,’
104
but insists that the indwelling of
Logos in human flesh differs, at least in intensity, from that of the inspirational visitations of
God to the prophets. As a consequence of this indwelling the vessel of flesh shares the honour
due to that which it contains. In this way the two natures unite in the one worship; for as the
purple robe of a monarch shares in the reverent regard for his person, so must the Son of
David partake of the devotion offered to the Son of God. It was, however, by his clean-cut
separation of the two natures in Christ that Diodore, as Prestige says, was already greasing the
slipway down which Nestorianism was launched in the next century.
105
Diodore’s Christological declarations were given stronger statement by Theodore of
Mopsuestia.
106
Many attempts have been made to reduce his views to summary statement,
107
but his own summary can be found in his de Baptizandos.
108
Theodore regarded himself as
standing within the Nicene tradition in his endeavour to give to the humanity of Jesus
soteriological significance.
109
The work of Christ consists in restoring to human nature that
which was lost by the Fall of Adam: therefore, to accomplish this end, Christ had to achieve
moral perfection by the exercise of His own will. Theodore thus gives ethical import to the
obedience of the Man Jesus who by His own volition ‘joined Himself with an irresistible
affection to goodness’. To make real the redemptive presence of God in the man Jesus,
Theodore had recourse to the ‘indwelling formula’ as providing the key to the understanding
of the Word’s becoming flesh. In a comment on Ps. 45:8, he applies the term ‘garment’ to
Christ’s body in which His divinity was wrapped; and he sees Jn. 2:19, as authenticating his
view of the body as a ‘temple’ in which Godhead dwells.
110
But two natures, he insists, does
not mean that there are Two Sons in juxtaposition.
111
So ‘close’ (a term which he often uses)
102
Frag., 19 (Brière); Frag., 42 (Abram.).
103
Op. cit., 269.
104
Frag., 20, 35 (Abram.).
105
Op. cit., 115.
106
Of the multitude of his works the most important for Christological study are the recently discovered, ad
Baptizandos (or Commentary on the Nicene Creed); a number of fragments, especially those of his On the
Incarnation: these last have been preserved by Leontius of Byzantium in his treatise Contra Nestorianos et
Eutychianos. A full quota of fragments can be found in H. B. Swete’s Theodore on the Minor Epistles of S. Paul,
vol. ii, Appendix A, 292f. Theodore’s work, The Commentary on the Nicene Creed was edited by A. Mingana in
1932 (Woodbroke Studies vol. 5). Quotations below of fragments of Theodore, On the Incarnation are from
Swete and page numbers of Swete’s Volume are added.
107
For good summaries, see Bardenhewer, Patrology, 321; Quasten, Patrology, iii, 415; H. B. Swete, Theodore
of Mopsuestia on the Minor Epistles of S. Paul, vol. i, 338, 339.
108
Cf. Theodore, ‘The distinction between the natures does not annul the close union, nor the close union destroy
the distinction between the natures, but the natures remain in their respective existence while separated, and the
union remains intact, because the one who assumed is united in honour and glory with the one assumed
according to the will of the one who assumed Him’ (de Bapt., 89, 90).
109
Cf. ‘Since they (i.e. the Fathers of Nicaea) took pains to teach us concerning His humanity, it is with justice
that before everything else they set forth the reason for which the Divine nature humbled itself to the extent of
taking upon itself the form of a servant and of its caring for our salvation. It is with justice, therefore, that our
Fathers, in beginning their teaching concerning the Economy of His humanity, formed the starting-point of their
discourse from this purpose: For us children of men and for our salvation. It was also fitting on their part to place
the words ‘for our salvation’ after the words ‘for us children of men’, in order that they might show the aim of
His coming, which was not only for the ‘children of men’ but also ‘for their salvation’. He came down from
heaven to save and to deliver from evil, by an ineffable grace, those who were lost and given up to iniquities’ (de
Bapt., 52).
110
Cf. de incarn., ix, Frag., 1; Contra Apollin., iv, Frag., 2. (Swete op. cit., ii, 300, 319.)
111
Cf. de Incarn., ix, Frag., 1; (Swete, op. cit., ii, 300).
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H.D. McDonald, “Development and Christology,” Vox Evangelica 9 (1975): 5-27.
is the union between the Divine nature and the human in Christ that we can speak of this
Christ as one person.
[p.17]
Theodore distinguishes between three possible modes of ‘indwelling’. There is an ‘essential’
indwelling; but this he rejects because it suggests a localization or self-limitation of the being
of God. Neither does he find satisfaction in what ‘he calls an ‘effectual’ indwelling. For since
God is omnipresent in His exercise of power any extension of His divine energy to local
operation in Christ would not be sufficient to bestow on Him a special status. He therefore
opts for the third, the ‘moral’ indwelling. In elucidation of this he takes Lev. 26:12 as his
point of departure. Evidently God does not indwell all men indiscriminately. Some however
are accorded this special favour; theirs is an indwelling by reason of the divine approval. But
there are some, perhaps only One, who merit an affinity of God closer still. Such a union of
the Logos with flesh in Christ is indeed ‘unique’. And his usual word to describe this is
prosopon. ‘The mode of the natures according to good pleasure effects by reason of identity,
one will, energy, authority, majesty, lordship, power between them which nothing can
remove, there existing, and being shown, one prosopon between them in accordance with this
union’.
112
In his recently discovered work, Contra Eunomium, Theodore elaborates and
explains what he means by ‘prosopic union’.
113
Whether Theodore’s Christology is to be branded heretical because it is deemed to be
‘Nestorian’ is an issue much in debate. Norman Pittenger would exonerate him from the least
taint of heresy, as he would decontaminate Nestorius himself.
114
Kelly, too, but less
emphatically, would leave orthodoxy interred with his bones. Unquestionably however the
ideas which the later Nestorius was to make use of were there in him so that Prestige may be
right to state that, ‘All that Nestorius did was to put a razor-like dialectical edge on
Theodore’s tools and apply them to the cutting up of Apollinarianism’.
115
Nestorius’s extant writings
116
make it clear that he follows Theodore and sharply divides the
two natures: ‘Not one nature but two are we constrained to concede to Christ’, he declares.
117
Nothing seemed more evident to Nestorius than the reality of the duality.
118
He distinguishes
between the temple and Him who sanctifies and restores it,’
119
and states that, ‘the bodily
frame is the temple of the divinity of God the Word’.
120
But he denies that he conceives of the
‘indwelling’ as a matter of degree. True, God dwells in all the saints, but it is not said that He
became incarnate in any.
121
Nor indeed does God indwell all men in like manner; in some He
has no dwelling place at all.
122
112
Cf. Swete, op. cit., ii, 338f.
113
Cf. Grillmeier, op. cit., 352f.
114
The Word Incarnate (1959), 8.
115
Op. cit., 115.
116
The fragments of Nestorius’s writings were collected by F. Loofs in 1925; a number of these appear in
English in Appendix 1 of the Bazaar of Heracleides, attributed to Nestorius, and translated by G. R. Driver and
Leonard Hodgson, 383-398.
117
Frag., 216, Loof’s Collection, 379; cf. Bazaar 53, 143.
118
Cf. Bazaar, 143; Frag., 205b, Loofs, 218, 219.
119
Cf. Frag., 228, Loofs, 380; Frag., 306, Loofs, 329, 379.
120
Cf. Bazaar, 35, 50, 56, 59, 157, 228, 237.
121
Ibid., 35.
122
Ibid., 56.
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H.D. McDonald, “Development and Christology,” Vox Evangelica 9 (1975): 5-27.
By separating between the human and the divine nature Nestorius is able to fulfil his avowed
intention of giving reality to Christ’s humanity. He therefore gives the fullest statement to a
Word-man Christology. ‘He became man in truth,’ he declares, ‘since he had according to
nature all the properties of a man.’
123
Nestorius seeks to ascribe saving purpose to the
assumption by the Word of total human nature. Only one who sinned not, nor transgressed the
commandment of God, could suffer and die. ‘For this reason also it was needful for the whole
man, for the purpose of the Incarnation of God the Word, being completed in body and in
soul, to comport himself in the nature of men and to observe the obedience and the moral life
of human nature.’
124
All those human things which men are ashamed to predicate of Him, the
Evangelists had no inhibitions in crediting to Him.
125
Thus did He show weariness, joy,
surprise, ignorance, suffering: He who was born of a Virgin, grew to manhood: He ‘gradually
advanced’ until He came to maturity as God’s special Man.
[p.18]
Nestorius denied, however, that he sets the two natures ‘far apart’. He holds rather to a
‘conjunction’, but not to a ‘confusion’, of the two natures.
126
He therefore repudiates the
suggestion that he maintains the existence of Two Sons―‘Our Lord Christ’, he writes, ‘who
is double in His divinity and humanity is one Son by adhesion.... The Son of God is double in
His natures: God and man’.
127
Almost to the point of weariness however he reiterates his
disapproval of the unity of the two natures construed in terms of a ‘natural’
128
or, ‘hypostatic’
union.
129
He proposes instead, what Vine calls a ‘syntactic’ and ‘voluntary’ union.
130
The
adjective ‘syntactic’, Vine thinks, marks the difference between what Nestorius intends and
that connoted by the terms ‘natural’ and ‘ontic’. Yet it is a ‘voluntary’ union because, so to
speak, the reciprocity is not necessarily inherent. It is a union consequent upon mutual love,
adoption, and acknowledgement.’
131
Yet it is a union which existed from the beginning. However much it may be spoken of as
‘little by little’ this must not be taken as suggesting that ‘Christ’ existed other than in the
union of two natures.
132
From the moment of conception the manhood united with the Logos.
Christ is therefore ‘one even in the birth of the flesh’.
133
By this statement Nestorius means to
affirm that it is not a unity begun from birth, but a unity within the actuality of the birth.
Nestorius’s most frequent term to characterise the union of the two natures in Christ is
‘prosopic’.
134
The union took place in the prosopon, he declares, not in the ousia. ‘I make use
of one prosopon of union as (formed) of two ousias, as also Divine Scripture signifies.
135
Leonard Hodgson accepts Loofs interpretation of what Nestorius has in mind in his use of the
category ‘prosopon’: it means ‘external undivided appearance’. Every ousia must have its
own ‘appearance’, but prosopon is never a mere ‘appearance’. A prosopon which is not the
123
Ibid., 35.
124
Ibid., 184, 185.
125
Ibid., 92.
126
Frag., 289, Loofs, 380; Frag., 314, Loofs, 196, 197.
127
Frag., 262, Loofs, 282-4, 377.
128
Bazaar, 154-6; 222-5; 295-7.
129
Ibid., 36-43; 84-6; 179.
130
A. R. Vine, An Approach to Christology (1948), 165, 166
131
Ibid.
132
Cf. Bazaar, 237, 252, 304.
133
Ibid., 65.
134
Cf. e.g. ibid., 51f., 72, 205-7; 230-3; 413f.
135
Ibid., 153.
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H.D. McDonald, “Development and Christology,” Vox Evangelica 9 (1975): 5-27.
prosopon of an ousia would be sheer illusion, a figment of the imagination; and neither the
manhood nor the Godhead of Christ was that.
136
There is, therefore, a prosopon proper to the Godhead, and a prosopon proper to the manhood,
since each of these is a true ousia. But still there are not two prosopa, because the two, as it
were, coalesce to make one external undivided appearance. In spite of his stress on the unity
of the two natures, however, there is something artificial in the way it is resolved. It may well
be, as Hodgson suggests, that his theory was a brilliant attempt to solve the Christological
problem on the basis of a principle which rendered all solutions impossible.
137
And should it
be that the Nestorian doctrine does not, after all, provide a real union between the Godhead
and the manhood in Christ, nor allow for a real union between the believer and God, then,
from the point of view of religion, the one mediator between God and man has not been
found; while from the point of view of a philosophy of religion the universe remains an
unresolved dualism between two utterly opposed essences Godhood and manhood.
To Cyril of Alexandria Nestorius’s separation of the two natures in Christ was a grave and
dangerous error, and much of his literary activity was consequently directed against the
‘heretic of Constantinople’.
138
In Cyril’s judgement Nestorius’s doctrine must lead inevitably
to ‘two Christs’.
139
He therefore counsels none to ‘divide Christ after the Economy of the
Incarnation into a pair of sons’.
140
It becomes a virtual slogan with him, ‘Do not divide’,
141
for
we must ‘not sever the inseverable’.
142
Cyril thus seeks to accentuate the essential oneness of
Christ’s person. This is the burden of his book, That Christ is One. By taking the
[p.19]
bondman’s form, the incarnate Son assumed human flesh ‘by an inseverable union’;
143
and He
made the body His own in such a way that it is not possible for them to be ‘plucked
asunder’.
144
Cyril uses a number of analogies designed to show that different natures can become united as
one without loss to either. In his Commentary on John’s Gospel he illustrates from the union
of body and soul to constitute one individual.
145
Elsewhere he states that, ‘the union of the
Word with human nature may be not unaptly compared with our condition. For as the body is
of other nature than the soul, yet is one man produced and said to be of both; so, too, out of
the Perfect Person of God the Word, and the manhood perfect in its mood, is One Christ, the
136
Cf. Bazaar, Appendix iv, 416.
137
Cf. Bazaar, Appendix iv, p. 411 f.
138
From the point of view of Christology, most important are Cyril’s Commentary on S. John, of which a
translation has been made into English (vol. i, chs. i-viii, by P. E. Pusey, 1847, and vol. ii, chapters ix-xxi, by T.
Randell, 1885): also, The five Tomes against Nestorius; Scholia on the Incarnation; Christ is One; Fragments
against Didore of Tarsus: Theodore of Mopsuestia, The Synousiasts. All these appear in one volume, St. Cyril of
Alexandria on the Incarnation against Nestorius (translated by E. B. Pusey, 1881). The following quotations are
made from this volume with the page number added.
139
Commentary on S. John, i. 435; cf. on Jn. v, 69, 455.
140
On John, i, 563; cf. on Jn. ix, 37, ii, 56; on xii, 23; ii, 147.
141
Christ is One, Cyril against Nestorius, 270.
142
Contra Theodorum, ibid., 362.
143
Christ is One, ibid., 261.
144
Cf. Christ is One, ibid., 251; Contra Diod., Frag. 4, ibid., 322; The Synous., 6, ibid., 37.
145
On John xx, 30, 31, op. cit., ii, 693.
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H.D. McDonald, “Development and Christology,” Vox Evangelica 9 (1975): 5-27.
Same God and Man in the Same.’
146
The Old Testament furnishes Cyril with the most
abundant illustrations by reason of the fact that he follows the typical Alexandrian
hermeneutic method of allegorising. The live coal of the altar of Isaiah’s vision; the flowers
of the plain and the lilies of the valley; the tabernacle in the wilderness, are all made to yield
analogies of the union in the one Christ of the Godhead and the manhood.
147
It is along this line that Cyril considers that he has entered a corrective to Nestorius’s
severance of the person of Christ into two separate ‘parts’. In spite however of his
declarations and illustrations, Cyril, more than once, has to acknowledge that, ‘the mode of
union is clearly above man’s understanding’.
148
Nestorius’s response to Cyril’s exposition was to pronounce him an Apollinarian; but with
equal emphasis Cyril stoutly repudiated the charge. He goes so far indeed as to contend that
he knows of no single person who mingles or mixes the natures!
149
For his own part he can
proclaim his belief in Christ’s full human nature,
150
and accord to His manhood soteriological
value. It is because He is man that He raises us to divine life,
151
and makes us partakers of the
second Adam.
152
Thereby is our human nature ennobled;
153
and we are freed from
corruption.
154
Christ is then no ‘God-clad man’.
155
He is ‘unalterably and without confusion flesh’.
156
He is
the Word of God ‘embodied’.
157
His birth was a ‘fleshly birth’,
158
and from the womb the
Word united to His own flesh.
159
He rose in the body;
160
and no ‘fleshless Word ascended’.
161
Nor must His flesh be conceived as a garment; it was authentically human,
162
but of course
without sin. Cyril says much about the possession by Christ of a human soul. He was not, he
reiterates, ‘soulless’.
163
Yet for all that, Cyril does not make theological capital out of the
admission. He does not, that is, give significance to the soul of Christ; for even when he
grants that Christ advanced ‘little by little’, it is not due to the reality of His human soul, but,
rather, because ‘the Word of God permitted His humanity to advance by reason of the habits
of its proper nature, and willed as it were by little and little to extend the illustriousness of His
own Godhead’.
164
146
Scholia on the Incarnation, 8, Cyril against Nestorius, 193, 194; cf. ‘Just as everyone knows a man is not
double, although made up of body and soul, but is one of both’ (Cyril to Nestorius, Ep., xvi).
147
Cf. Scholia on the Incarnation 9, Cyril against Nestorius, 194.
148
Cf. ibid.
149
Cf. Contra Nest., iv, ibid., 153.
150
Cf. Christ is One, ibid., 265.
151
Contra Nest., v, ibid., 177f.
152
Contra Nest., iii, ibid., 105.
153
Christ is One, ibid., 286f.
154
Scholia on the Incarnation, 12, ibid., 198; Christ is One, ibid., 247.
155
Scholia on the Incarnation, 14, 19f., ibid., 206, 208f.; Christ is One, ibid., 247.
156
Against the Synous., ibid., 371; Contra Diod., 17, ibid., 328, 329.
157
Cf. Scholia on the Incarnation, 3, ad fin., ibid., 188. The term is frequent.
158
Cf. idem., 6, 7, ibid., 190-1.
159
Contra Diod., 5, ibid., 359.
160
Against the Synous., 12, ibid., 375f.
161
Idem., 11, ibid., 372f.
162
Contra Diod., 25, ibid., 334.
163
Cf. Scholia on the Incarnation, 27, ibid., 214; Christ is One, ibid., 242; cf. ibid., 248, 251; Contra Diod., 3f.,
ibid., 322f.; especially, To Nestorius, Ep. iv, and, To John of Antioch, Ep. xxxix.
164
Scholia on the Incarnation, 13, ibid., 202.
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It may be a merit with Cyril that he strove with such persuasiveness to bring out the living
unity of Christ’s person. But the vagueness of his phrase ‘one nature’, as well as the stress he
puts upon the unity against Nestorius, gave his language a monophysite colouring. Cyril states
definitely that there ‘is one nature of God the Word incarnate, worshipped with His flesh with
one worship’.
165
Christ was God in human nature.
166
So real is the union between Godhead
and humanity in the one Christ, ‘that One is the Son and One His nature even though He be
conceived of as having assumed flesh with a rational soul’.
167
Although He may
[p.20]
be said to have a body of the same nature with our bodies, yet it is ‘nevertheless august and
divine and far above our measures’.
168
The nature of man was in Him made illustrious;
169
and
to such an extent that He may be called the ‘heavenly man’.
170
In spite of this virtual divinization of the human, Cyril still insists that there are two natures in
the Word incarnate, which are united in the one Person of Christ, not by way of participation,
but hypostatically. And so indivisible is the union that it is proper to ‘transfer the human and
the divine to the same person’.
171
Cyril’s emphasis upon the unity of Christ’s person was a necessary corrective of Nestorius’s
juxtaposing of the human and divine. But having declared so often for the full humanity of
Christ, he ought to have abandoned the language of monophysitism. Nevertheless, it was a
supreme merit that he succeeded in transferring ‘the unity in Christ into the “personal realm”
while ascribing a duality to the natures. Here he has anticipated the distinction of the Council
of Chalcedon and has helped to lay its theological foundations. He has a greater depth of idea
just as the Antiochenes have the greater clarity of formula. The synthesis of the Church will
combine the two.’
172
In his effort to maintain the unity of Christ’s person Cyril had declared that there was ‘one
nature after the union’ of the Divine and human in the incarnate Word. It was this formula
which was taken up by Eutyches, after Cyril’s death in 444, and pressed to an unacceptable
conclusion. Compelled to answer the, question ‘Do you confess the existence of two natures
even after the Incarnation, and that Christ is of one essence (homoousios) with us after the
flesh?’, Eutyches replied, ‘I confess our Lord to have become of two natures before the union.
But I confess one nature after the union.’ But the resultant one nature was conceived by
Eutyches as virtually divine. For, according to Eutyches, in the coming together of the divine
and the human in the incarnation, the divine so overwhelmed and transformed―both these
terms are Eutyches’ own―the human, that the reality of the human was rendered innocuous.
Eutyches uses the Cyrillian illustration of a drop of honey mingled with the ocean to state his
view of Christ’s human natures becoming absorbed in His deity. In the act of the Incarnation,
165
Contra Theod., 11, ibid., 341.
166
Christ is One, ibid., 249.
167
Idem.
168
Against the Synous., 4, ibid., 368.
169
Scholia on the Incarnation, 1, ibid., 186.
170
Christ is One, ibid., 248; cf. Ep. xxxix.
171
To Nestorius, Ep. xvii.
172
Grillmeier, op. cit., 412
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H.D. McDonald, “Development and Christology,” Vox Evangelica 9 (1975): 5-27.
then, Eutyches teaches, according to Theodoret, that ‘the divine nature remains while the
humanity is swallowed up by it’.
173
In his letter of appeal for support to Leo of Rome, Eutyches affirms his adhesion to the
Nicene Creed, and asserts his belief in Christ’s ‘perfect manhood’. In view of such explicit
declarations, Kelly contends that he was neither docetic nor fundamentally Apollinarian in his
teaching.
174
But, both by the impression he gave, and, maybe, by the final logic of his
statements, Eutyches seemed to call in question the reality and permanence of our Lord’s
human body. And it was, in fact, on this score that Leo, in his famous Tome, judged Eutyches
to be in error. Leo contends for the reality of the two natures, each ‘perfect and
entire’―‘whole in what was His, whole in what was ours’. And he sees the unity of Christ’s
person in terms of the communicatio idiomatum. He regards Christ’s resurrection appearances
as demonstrating that ‘the properties of the divine and human nature might be acknowledged
to remain in Him without causing division, and that we might in some sort know that the
Word is not what flesh is, as to confess that the Son of God is both Word and flesh’. This is,
he contends, what Eutyches failed to see. He dissolved Jesus by separating the human nature
from Him. But to
[p.21]
rob Christ of real manhood is to make void the actuality of His cross and to deny efficacy to
His blood of cleansing. The Catholic faith in contrast, ‘lives and advances by this faith, that in
Christ Jesus we should believe neither Manhood to exist without true Godhead, nor Godhead
without true Manhood’.
It almost appears that with Eutyches the whole circle of possible views concerning the
structure of Christ’s person is complete. For all the controversies hinge on one or other of the
three main issues; firstly, the reality of the two natures; secondly, the integrity of two natures;
and thirdly, the union of the two natures in the one person of the incarnate Word. We have
seen how Ebionism and Docetism denied the first―the reality of the two natures: Arianism
and Apollinarianism denied the integrity of the two natures: it was left to Nestorianism and
Eutychianism to complete the circle and deny their proper unity.
The Council of Chalcedon sought to find the via media between all these conflicting
polarities. Here it was proclaimed that in the one person Jesus Christ there were two natures, a
human and a divine, each in its completeness and integrity. These two natures are organically
and indissolubly united, so that no third nature is formed thereby. In brief, then, the doctrine
hammered out at Chalcedon, under the compulsion of such heresies which robbed the person
of Christ of one or other of His relationships as the one Mediator between God and man,
forbids us, according to the ancient dictum, either to divide the person or to confuse the
natures.
Yet the findings of Chalcedon were in a sense merely negative. Its statements may be likened
to the buoys on the river, placed so as to prevent the boatman from losing depth of water and
becoming grounded on either bank. It left open the ultimate Christological problem of how
the two discrete natures can be said to coinhere in the one person of Christ. And in a sense all
subsequent Christological constructions can be said to be attempts to solve this problem.
173
Dial., ii.
174
Op. cit., 333.
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H.D. McDonald, “Development and Christology,” Vox Evangelica 9 (1975): 5-27.
Nevertheless, the unity of Christ’s person in the distinction of the natures which Chalcedon
asserted, ‘provides the dogmatic basis for the preservation of the divine transcendence, which
must always be a feature of the Christian concept of God. But it shows the possibility of a
complete immanence of God in our history, an immanence on which the biblical doctrine of
the economy of salvation rests’.
175
For Christianity the sov