Teaching About the Bible, Not Just Its Content

I've been thinking about writing more about apologetics, maybe book length.  One major topic, though, I'm thinking of working on is that of the Bible itself.  I'd like to see more education in churches about the Bible.  Not just what's in the Bible but its nature, origins and prehistory, ancient context, etc.  That is, we should have more that is not just about the content of the Bible but the Bible itself.  There are many, many myths and misconstruals floating around about the Bible among more moderate to conservate Christians, Evangelicals, and also Fundamentalists.  And I don't mean "secular" or "liberal" myths either - I mean myths perpetuated largely by traditional, orthodox-leaning Christians.  (To give a couple examples: the idea that every command in the Bible is a timeless moral imperative and the Bible is basically a life handbook; the idea that there cannot be any reasonable doubt about the exact text or meaning of a passage; the idea that absolutely everything ought to be taken as completely literally and describing exact historical, scientific reality and conforming to, say, modern scientific-writing genre conventions, etc.)

The trouble is that many take these myths to be integral to the Christian view of the Bible and to the faith as a whole and when these bubbles get popped, their world comes crashing down and they must either remake their views of the Bible or reject the faith entirely.  I have personally known several people who left the faith because of these myths when they could not handle their dismantlement.  And these were very intelligent people; they were simply dealing with the destruction of what they had believed and likely taught to believe for most of their time as Christians.

Now, most good Evangelical biblical scholars will reject most of these myths, and often explicitly, but that just doesn't often make its way down into the church pews.  Instead, most people's first brush with thinking about the Bible itself outside of these myths and outside well-worn cliches comes in the form of, say, the "facts" presented in the Da Vinci Code or some disturbing bit of modern biblical scholarship.  It's all very sad and, in my mind, completely unnecessary - there are people out there who are having serious doubts about the Bible and hence their faith precisely because of what we aren't (and, sadly, sometimes what we are) teaching them.

Time Travel, Prenatal Ethics and other Miscellania

Random thoughts, mostly things I have posted online elsewhere:

Wow, this is simply HORRIBLE journalism. There are so many things wrong with this article - it's simply sensationalism. A text from hundreds of years after Jesus' death, written in the area from which we get all Gnostic writings which mixed up Jesus and Christianity with the mystery religions, has Jesus mention a "wife", a fact that even the person working on the text admits has nothing to do with whether Jesus was ever married, and what does the journalist say? "A small fragment of faded papyrus contains a suggestion that Jesus may have been married...The discovery, if it is validated, could have major implications for the Christian faith. The belief that Jesus was not married is one reason priests in the Catholic Church must remain celibate and are not allowed to marry. It could also have implications for women's roles in the church, as it would mean Jesus had a female disciple." Ugh. Then the journalist proceeds to undermine everything they just said. Way to go.

The real title of this article should be "I Like Incoherent, Logically Inconsistent Stories because I cannot Understand the Concept of Time Travel", but I think that would've been too long. It's because of writers like this that we have all the incoherent time travel stories that we do (and which I therefore despise, though I tend to give Doctor Who and Back to the Future a pass since criticizing them for lack of logic is like criticizing the Hitchhiker's Guide for letting Arthur turn into an infinite number of penguins). Seriously, this is horrible. Not all of the 4 options are even KINDS of time travel at all, nor even necessarily incompatible options. Number 3 is simply incoherent, 4 isn't really time travel but universe-hopping. Number 2, which is how non-contradictory time travel would work, has nothing to do with predestination, pre-ordination of events, or lack of any agency.

(1) New-born infants have a right to live;
(2) If there is no relevant intrinsic difference between the members of two sets, then the members of one set will have the same rights as the other;
(3) There is no relevant intrinsic difference between new-born infants and late-term, un-born fetuses;
(4) Therefore, late-term, un-born fetuses have a right to live.
This is a deductively valid argument, which means the only way to avoid the conclusion would be to reject at least one of the premises 1-3. But 2 seems to be a basic principle about rights and 3 is a scientific fact. 1 is therefore the most vulnerable, but few, I think, would be able to stomach the idea that infants have no right to live - to accept that would be pretty implausible. Since 1-3 are fairly certain and the argument is valid, then, we have to accept 4 as well.

Obama seems to deny 4, though, which makes me wonder which of 1-3 he would reject. But I'm sure he hasn't really thought about it (remember the "above my paygrade" remark?). This is just one of the reasons why I cannot understand people's enthusiasm for Obama (his unprecedented rolling back of various freedoms including religion and conscience are some of the other reasons). I understand people really liking some things about him or liking him more than Romney or liking him in general, but the unqualified enthusiasm some people have I cannot relate to. (Almost no one has any kind of enthusiasm for Romney (I certainly don't), so that's not an issue on his side!)

Since I did a potshot at Obama, here's one aimed at Romney: I think the rich should be taxed a lot more than the poor sheerly as a matter of fairness. Suppose we tax everyone 10% - then the person making 20,000 a year will be forced to pay 2000 - a chunk of their income they would be much better off holding onto. For them, missing that money is going to make a noticeable difference in their life. But suppose then we have someone making 100 million - 10 million is just a drop in the bucket and won't affect the quality of their lives in any noticeable way. Money has a diminishing marginal value as income goes up - 10% for a rich person, say, is an entirely different beast from 10% for a poor person. Suppose we actually scaled taxes according to the actual value money has for the individuals concerned (our tax brackets go some way towards this), then the rich person would be paying a much higher percentage of their income then the poor person and the two would be equally affected (or not affected) by the tax. And that's not even taking into account arguments you might make concerning the increased debt the rich have towards society for creating the possibility and infrastructure for such wealth in the first place. Those are just my own opinions, though.

 I don't always agree with him or think he's always fair to conservatives, but Jon Stewart is reliably hilarious. Apropos the above on taxation, this is pretty entertaining (be sure to click to watch on part two too).


I don't agree with all of this, but some interesting thoughts from a Christian philosopher on reforming higher education.

Why the Reformed Tend to be Nestorian and the Lutherans Monophysite: The Degeneration of Christological Language in Incarnation-Talk

Something I wrote up for an online class:

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COMPOSITION VERSUS HYPOSTATIC UNION IN THE INCARNATION

The goal of this paper is to explore what Evangelicals should think about the Incarnation and argue that we should think about it in terms of a hypostatic union. My main thesis is that much confusion and argumentation over the Incarnation could be avoided by a proper understanding of the Incarnation as hypostatic union rather than some other form of union. This is extremely important since a proper understanding of the Incarnation as hypostatic union preserves the orthodox Christian viewpoint that the person of Christ is identical with the Divine Person of the Eternal Word of God and that this Divine Person has become human. Otherwise, various difficulties occur, which push one either in the direction of Monophysitism or Nestorianism.

In the course of my paper, I will first examine the views of Eutyches and Nestorius who each have an understanding of the Incarnation as a composition of Christ out of the two natures. I will then show how a common way of speaking about Christ’s two natures encourages this viewpoint and that this tendency, when coupled with different assumptions, has led to Monophysite tendencies among Lutherans and similar-minded thinkers and Nestorian tendencies among Reformed thinkers. A common way of stating the communicatio idiomatum is involved in these tendencies. Following this, I will show how the ancient, traditional Christian notion of the Incarnation as hypostatic union avoids these negative tendencies, affirming unity and yet maintaining the integrity of each nature.

I. The Problem: Incarnation as Composition

I.1. The Early Heresies: Nestorius and Eutyches

In much discussion throughout Christian history, both the divine and human natures of Christ have had a tendency to be spoken of as if they were subjects of attribution in their own right and the unity of Christ has similarly thus often been spoken of as if it was a matter of combining of the two natures to form one person out of this combination. This tendency, of course, derives from the early church and such a tendency was taken to its logical conclusion in the theologies of Eutyches and Nestorius, where the person of Christ was seen as a result of a combining of divine and human natures, understood as distinct entities and subjects of attribution. On such a view, Christ is said to be divine because he is partly produced out of divinity and he is said to be human because he is partly produced out of humanity.

The difficulty of attaining a unified person out of this combination was resolved by mingling the natures in some way. Nestorius does this not by an actual mingling of the two themselves but, following Theodore of Mopsuestia, by a mingling of their respective appearances, that of God and that of man, so as to produce the appearance of a single person, Christ. Because of this, human predicates could be applied to the divinity and divine to the humanity, but this was only in appearances, a matter of words only. Strictly speaking, the divine only applied to the divinity and the human to the humanity, but because of the single appearance of Christ, they could both be applied to Christ.[1] So one could say, for instance, “Christ died on the cross” or “The man died on the cross” in virtue of Christ being partly compounded out of the human, but not “God died on the cross”, even though one could also say “Christ is God” in virtue of being partly compounded out of the divinity. The subjects of the divine properties and human properties, respectively, however, remain the divine nature on the one hand and the human nature on the other.

Eutyches, on the other hand, took the same starting point – Christ as the result of the combination of the two natures – but when he gained unity for Christ through the exchange of properties, it was not merely a matter of words as with Nestorius. Instead, this was a real exchange of properties for Eutyches, resulting in a kind of Monophysitism as the distinction between the two natures was blurred or lost. If this was understood as the Word actually changing by taking on human attributes, it would result in a loss of divinity. If, on the other hand, it was understood as the humanity being overtaken by divinity, it would result in a kind of Docetism and a loss of full humanity.[2]

Considering Christ a result of the compounding of the two natures, then, requires finding a tight unity between the natures, the tightest on this picture being a blending of the two, anything less failing to account for the unity of the person in Christ. If one takes this blending as merely notional, we have Nestorius’s view. On the other hand, if one takes this blending as a real, metaphysical blending then we have Eutyches’s view, some form of Monophysitism which renders Christ either not fully human or not fully divine, with either both natures being destroyed or one taking backseat to the other. A more Docetist version would uphold the divinity at the expense of the humanity, whereas a Kenotic view would uphold the humanity at the expense of the divinity. In either case, Christ ends up a third thing in addition to the two natures, composed out of the two.

I.2. Modern Turns: Reformed and Lutheran

In modern times, people still often speak as if the two natures were themselves the subjects of the divine or human attributes, giving at least the appearance or tendency because of this way of speaking, even if it is not meant literally, of a notion of Incarnation as a compounding of the two natures to form a single person out of them. This tendency, unchecked, gives rise to precisely the Nestorian and Monophysite troubles enunciated above: Christ is seen as unified in virtue of an exchange of properties between the natures and the key division between those holding to this is whether to opt for a mere verbal exchange or a real one.[3]

In the Reformed tradition, one sees the tendency towards composition-talk resulting in a distinctly Nestorian tendency as Reformed thinkers tend, in contrast to Lutherans, to speak of an exchange of attributes between the two natures as a merely verbal one. John Calvin, for instance, could speak of some things as attributed to one nature, some to the other, and some to the composite whole, as if Christ was this third, composite thing just as a man is an additional thing dependent on and composed out of body and soul. Being combined into one thing, the attributes of one nature could be spoken of as if they belonged to the other, even though in reality they did not.[4]

On the Lutheran side, there is the opposite Monophysite tendency either in a Docetist or Kenotic direction. There is here a tendency to speak of a real exchange of attributes between the two natures rather than a merely verbal one. Diverse writers, for instance, have accused Martin Luther himself of believing that the person of Christ is the result of the union of the two natures – the unity of the person results from the unity of the natures rather than vice versa.[5] Lutheran Jan Siggins, for instance, both holds that Luther’s early work treated the two natures as sometimes too distinct[6] and also speaks as if for Luther the union of the two natures results from the fact that we can attribute the properties of one nature to the other and that this is so since “we can understand how Christ’s human properties can be predicated of God, or divine properties of man […] because the human nature shares in the glory of all the properties which otherwise pertain to God, ‘to worship this man is to worship God’”.[7] That is, worshipping the man Jesus is worshipping God since God’s properties have been bestowed upon the man. Or at least that is what Siggins’ language suggests, whether that is what he intended or not. It certainly seems that we have two subjects: the human nature, “Jesus,” and the divine, “God”, and that by an interchange of properties they form a single unit.

Because of this Incarnation-as-composition tendency, we also have the tendency to speak of the communicatio idiomatum – the fact that we can say things like “God the Son suffered and died” and “The man Jesus created the world” – as an exchange of properties between the two natures since these themselves are viewed as the subjects of these respective kinds of properties. Hence “God the Son suffered and died” could mean that the divine nature, understood as the subject of the properties, suffered and died, and “The man Jesus created the world” could mean that the human nature, again understood as subject, created the world. “God” then is understood as referring to the divine nature, being the subject of divine properties, “Jesus” as referring to the human nature, being the subject of human properties, and the union of the two “Christ”, resulting from some kind of exchange of these properties between the two. Hence, the frequent claims that followers of Calvin make the communicatio merely verbal and the uncomfortableness of some Reformed thinkers to say that things like “God died” go beyond something merely verbal.[8] From this we get claims such as that of G. C. Berkouwer, that “the man Jesus Christ has his existence immediately and exclusively in the existence of the eternal Son of God”,[9] appearing thereby to give separate referents to “the man Jesus Christ” and “the eternal Son of God”. Hence also the felt need of many Lutheran thinkers to combine or mix the properties in some way to come out with a single person as result, so as to be able to truly say things like “Jesus created the world.”

While the Reformed tendency is clearly Nestorian, then, the Lutheran tendency is towards either a Docetic or a Kenotic Christ.[10] By tending to speak of the Incarnation as if it was by a compounding of the natures, there is the obvious danger of getting a third thing, neither God nor man but a mixture or compound of the two. If one tries make sure the person so compounded is fully God, the humanity must thereby suffer – we have a Docetic Christ, the divinity pushing out the human. On the other hand, if one tries to make sure the person is fully human, the divinity must somehow suffer or be put in check – we have a Kenotic Christ, the humanity pushing out the divinity.[11] Moderate Kenoticist Millard Erickson, for instance, considers it obvious that in order for Christ to be fully human, he must give up “the privilege” of exercising his divine attributes.[12] Tellingly, he speaks of the attributes of one nature being added to the other, the divine attributes being restricted to their exercise through the humanity.[13]

The respective Nestorian and Monophysite tendencies of the Reformed and Lutheran camps, then, seems to arise largely as a result of the tendency to see and speak as if the two natures, as subjects of attribution, are compounded together in the Incarnation so as to form a single Christ. One need only look back to the church’s history, however, to see that the view of the Incarnation taken by the Church Fathers as it was developed in the great Christological controversies provides a very different take on things, one which avoids these tendencies and indeed was meant to combat them.

II. The Solution: Incarnation as Hypostatic Union

Evangelicals should avoid the heretical-seeming tendencies of both the Reformed and Lutheran camps. To do this requires abandoning seeing or speaking of the natures as subjects of attribution or of Christ as being a compound out of these. Otherwise, the natures invariably come to be seen as opposing one another and something must be done resolve that tension – either by making the union more a verbal one or by restricting or modifying one of the natures. The traditional, orthodox view, however, defended and developed in the Ecumenical Councils, treats the Incarnation not as a compounding of one person out of two other entities but rather as hypostatic union. That is, the unity of Jesus in the Incarnation is not founded on any special relations between two independent subjects but rather in the single hypostasis or person of the Divine Word who assumed a human mode of being (i.e., became human).

This is Incarnation as a coming to be a man, not a metamorphosis into one, a single person possessing two natures by first being divine and then being human as well. The two natures are not the subjects of the divine or human attributions but the Word Himself is that subject, who has both divine and human characteristics. Rather than the unity of the person resting in the unity of the natures, the opposite is the case, one person possessing both natures as hypostatic or personal modes of being, one subject of attribution existing as both human and divine.

The Divine Word in the Incarnation did not change in regard to his atemporal divinity but rather from eternity assumed temporal humanity to himself as an additional way of existing.[14] Rather than requiring some restriction or alteration of one nature or the other, this version of the Incarnation is both real, not merely verbal, and yet without conflict between the natures as the Word has two modes of existence and there is no need to try to smash or assimilate them together in order to get a relation of unity between them, since the unity comes via the one Person who exists in both manners. In fact, it is precisely because the Word in his divine nature remains unchanging and omnipotent, unrestricted and unchanged in his divine attributes, that God here is able to become man – that is, to take on a new mode of existence.[15] And this can happen without any restriction or alteration of either of the two natures since it is not they who are the subject or grounds of unity but rather the Divine Person of the Word Himself.

Hence, strictly speaking, the communicatio idiomatum which allows us to say “God the Son suffered and died” and “The man Jesus created the world” is, contrary to how it is often formulated, not a matter of one nature trading attributes with the other – the natures are not the subjects of attribution, nor are they referred to by “God” or “Jesus”.[16] The only referent and only subject of attribution here is the Divine Second Person of the Trinity. Hence, since this person created the world in his divine nature and suffered and died in his human nature and is the referent of both “God the Son” and “the man Jesus”, both “God the Son suffered and died” and “The man Jesus created the world” are literally true and not merely verbally so and this is the case even without the two natures exchanging properties since it is one person who is in possession of both the divine and the human properties and hence who is both God and man.

The communicatio idiomatum, then, is not about an exchange of properties between natures but rather the possession of both sorts of properties – having both natures and being the subject of their respective attributions – by a single hypostasis existing in both ways. Much confusion can be cleared up by this point alone – some attributes are indeed only human and hence are only had by the Word in virtue of having a human nature (that is, in virtue of being human), but it is still the Divine Word who possesses them (and all that without the divine nature changing or being restricted in any way).[17]

III. Conclusion

Against Stanley Grenz, then, the ancient notion of Incarnation as hypostatic union in no way involves a mythological god transforming into a human, any implicit Docetism, or a conception of the Word apart from Jesus.[18] On the contrary, it is precisely the hypostatic union which guarantees the falsity of these pictures by guaranteeing the integrity of the two natures and the singleness of the person who is both fully human and fully divine[19] – it is Jesus the man who is eternal God who takes upon himself a temporal, human life without any change in his divinity. Grenz’s criticisms, instead, find a target only in the ancient misunderstanding of the Incarnation as composition.

In sum, then, there is a common mistaken way of speaking to the effect the natures are the subjects of divine or human attributions and this leads to a mistaken view of Incarnation as composition and hence to a view of the communicatio as sharing of properties between natures, which in turn leads to grave difficulties with Nestorianism or Monophysitism and all the problems attending these. To avoid this, we should speak only of Jesus Christ as the single subject of these attributions, the Divine Person who took on humanity. We should not speak of “God the Son” or “Jesus” any differently, since these are not two natures, but one and the same person existing both fully divinely and fully humanly. Doing this will hopefully then resolve some of the difficulties between Reformed and Lutheran thinkers as we think more clearly about the Incarnation.

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[1] J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, Fifth Edition (New York: Continuum, 1977), 315-316; Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?: The Word’s Becoming in Incarnation (Still River, Massachusetts: St. Bede’s Publications, 1985), 43-44.

[2] This, at least, was how the consequences of Eutyches’s views were seen – his own thoughts are widely thought now to be rather more muddled and inconsistent. See J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 331-335; Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 61-62. In keeping with common usage, however, I will continue to attribute these views to Eutyches in the interests of brevity.

[3] Cf. Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 105-106.

[4] See, for instance, John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. J. Allen (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Education, 1936), 527-529.

[5] E.g., Yves M.-J. Congar, Dialogue Between Christians: Catholic Contributions to Ecumenism, trans. P. Loretz (Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press, 1966), 394; Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 104-105.

[6] Jan D. Kingston Siggins, Martin Luther’s Doctrine of Christ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 219.

[7] Jan Siggins, Martin Luther’s Doctrine of Christ, 231-232.

[8] For this distinctly Nestorian phenomenon in Calvin, see John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 529.

[9] G. C. Berkouwer, The Person of Christ, trans. J. Vriend (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1954), 309.

[10] It is no accident that some Reformed thinkers have also ended up with a Kenotic Christology, since the underlying Christological tendency in thinking of the Incarnation as a union by composition is the same.

[11] Cf. Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 106. For a criticism of strong versions of Kenoticism, see Stanley Grenz, Theology for the Community of God (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1994), 307.

[12] Millard Erickson, The Word Became Flesh: A Contemporary Incarnational Christology (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1991), 549-550.

[13] Millard Erickson, The Word Became Flesh, 555.

[14] See, for instance, Donald Bloesch, Jesus Christ: Savior and Lord (Downer’s Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 54; Thomas V. Morris, The Logic of God Incarnate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 104; and the discussion of Cyril of Alexandria in Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 54-55.

[15] Weinandy quotes Karl Rahner to this effect in Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 174.

[16] Veli-Matti Kärkäinen, Christology: A Global Introduction: An Ecumenical, International, and Contextual Perspective (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 77-81 assumes precisely this confused manner of speaking of Incarnation and the communicatio in his exposition of Christological history and the Lutheran-Reformed debates. Unsurprisingly, there is no mention of the hypostatic union.

[17] Cf. John McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy: Its History, Theology, and Texts (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 202; Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 98. Note that the truth of the Lutheran view of the acquisition by the human nature of the divine attributes occurs in the belief of the Church Fathers that Christ’s human nature was divinized in its union with the Divine Person. That is, Christ was the original subject of theosis, a process we too can undergo without any injury to our human nature, this process being understood as a perfection or completion of human nature rather than its transformation into something else (which Lutherans have a hard time avoiding). Theosis was seen, after all, as a participation in God’s energies or operations, which indwell us, not as a taking on of God’s essence. See J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 321-322; John McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria, 133-134; Michael Pomazansky, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology: A Concise Exposition, trans. and ed. S. Rose (Platina, California: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1994), 184.

[18] Stanley Grenz, Theology for the Community of God, 309.

[19] On the issue of a divine being leaving heaven to become human, see Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 86.

Notes on Stanley Grenz's Christology

I'm now reading Stanley Grenz's Theology for the Community of God for an online class. Here are some thoughts about his Christology so far:

Grenz’s Christology is based on the idea of Jesus as both revelation of God and revelation of true humanity. The strength of Grenz’s view is how he derives such ideas from Scripture and then uses them both to demonstrate Jesus’ divinity and humanity, and to show how Jesus’ humanity reveals to us how we are to live loving each other as a community. Unfortunately, there is not much more to his view and very little in the way of explanation, despite claims otherwise. The key problem is that Grenz continually confuses demonstration of Christological truths with explanation of them. Over and over, when he goes to explain something all he does instead is offer evidence for it, which is not in any way the same thing. In particular, he uses a “from below” method, focusing on Jesus’ earthly life, to demonstrate Christological truths but then confuses this with having explained them.

The key problem is found in his attempt to explain how Christ is both God and human (303-305). He says, looking at Christ’s human life, that Christ reveals both God and true humanity. The most full representation or revelation of a thing, of course, is something which is identical to it. Hence, it follows that Christ is both God and true human. But this does not explain how he is both God and true human. Being fully God or fully human is what makes it the case that he reveals God or true humanity, not vice versa. So that Jesus is both God and man follows from his revealing God and humanity but it is the former that explains the latter. Hence revealing both cannot explain being both since the dependence is the other way around. Grenz has confused demonstration (that Christ is God and man) with explanation (how Christ is God and man).

His attempted explanation of the Incarnation, for instance, does little more than simply say again that the man Jesus reveals God and true humanity and hence Jesus is both divine and human, another instance of confusing demonstration with explanation. If Jesus is God, though, then he is eternal and the question remains how then to explain an eternal God becoming human, something which a view of the Incarnation ought to do. Grenz (308-311), however, simply sidesteps the issue by offering misgivings of standard views (which really affect popular expositions of such views or ways people have taken them rather than the views themselves) but without offering any actual alternative.

Grenz’s problems lead to a problematic take on pre-existence, where Grenz claims that Jesus “belongs to” God’s eternity but does not really explain this and instead changes the subject – he shifts from ascribing the revelation of God to Jesus to ascribing it to his 30-something-year-long earthly life. He then speaks as if this series of events was eternal, which it literally speaking is not. He then proceeds to use pre-existence as a metaphor for the significance of Jesus’ life in history, which is a distinct issue, even if literal pre-existence is what makes this significance possible. Grenz, ultimately, seems to tie Jesus so closely to his earthly life that he does not seem to address in any satisfactory way a divine life logically prior to it and existing in eternity. This seems to be due mostly to his confusion between a “from below” method of demonstration with an actual explanation, which may require taking the results of that method and going further to explain them. Unfortunately, he does not do this, either in his take on pre-existence or in the other Christological issues I already discussed.

Some Soteriological Notes

This paper consists of some personal reflections on some of the Soteriological material presented in class. My initial reaction to most of the material was how far removed talk of Christ’s atoning work on the cross was from the actual biblical source material and its Jewish-Christian context. While Anselm, for instance, retains the notion of substitution one finds in the New Testament (unfortunately ὑπέρ in these contexts is often translated “for” or “for the sake of” when the sense “in place of” is in fact syntactically more probable), he sets it in a very different frame of reference than the salvation-historical framework one finds in the New Testament, where Jesus’ atonement is linked with Torah and Israel’s plight under its curse (particularly in Galatians and Romans). Paul, for instance, seems to see Israel’s transgression of the Torah and subsequent condemnation by it as playing some important, non-accidental role in producing salvation (see especially Galatians 3, Romans 5, 9-11).

None of this, however, makes it into the considerations of the mostly ahistorical, abstract accounts of Christ’s work that we have studied. That is not to say that there is not much valuable in these accounts and that a more biblically-oriented account would not be understood at least partly in these terms when elaborated philosophically, but it does mean that these accounts necessarily leave out some of the key data that must be taken into account when constructing a view of the atonement. On the other accounts, Jesus might as well have come and died as a Greek, an Arab, or a Bantu – his Jewishness and Jewish context does not seem to play any part in the makeup of his saving work.

While Aquinas keeps much of Anselm’s view, it looks like Aquinas (at least according to our reading from Caesario (81)) eventually held that Christ’s satisfaction on the cross was not ultimately necessary for God to justly save us. It was simply more convenient in obtaining (mostly subjective) goods which more naturally flow from Christ’s satisfaction on the cross than from elsewhere. Of course, since it is the omnipotent God we are speaking of, it is not clear what it would mean to speak of him doing something more easily or conveniently in one way than another. It seems to me, however, that this makes it difficult to see the point of the atonement. If God could just as well accomplish our salvation in some other way, Christ’s crucifixion seems to represent pointless, unnecessary pain and suffering. Sure, it gets us redemption and all sorts of goods, but it was not really necessary for all of that. It certainly seems that we need some kind of stricter, less contingent connection between Christ’s work and our salvation.

Herbert McCabe (in his 2002 book God Still Matters) takes the problems with Anselm and Aquinas recounted above, however, and makes them even worse. This is something that bothered me quite a bit when I read him. He at least tries to put in some historical context but his grasp of that context is questionable and gets both Second Temple Judaism and its relation to Jesus and the New Testament wrong, importing much later (and ironically often more Protestant) Christian criticisms of Jews as unloving and legalistic (and Christ as the ancient equivalent of the stereotypical 1960s hippie – pro-love and anti-law or anti-authority) back into the first century, thus divorcing Jesus from his Jewish context in a way not justified by the New Testament or Second Temple evidence.

In any case, the nod to apparent historical context essentially functions in the McCabe work as a mere foil to press yet another basically ahistorical understanding of Christ’s work. It becomes all about an abstract principle of love and the preaching of that love, and the kingdom of God becomes more or less just the realization of that love on earth. Indeed, only the humanity of Christ seems to be important in McCabe’s chapter, as it is Christ’s full humanity and the perfect love wherefrom that does all the work here – the divinity seems to be well-hidden indeed.

What is worse, however, is that, while at least Aquinas had some kind of goal for the crucifixion, even if it could have been accomplished differently, McCabe does not even seem to retain this much. Questions such as “Why did Jesus opt for crucifixion?” are basically replaced with “Why would humans crucify someone like him?” The second question would certainly be an interesting one, but it completely changes the subject so that we are no longer even speaking of Christ’s saving work or its goals anymore but rather fallen human psychology. McCabe’s answer, that this is what fallen people do to people who truly love and preach the same, does not really address or even acknowledge the need for Jesus to die, or why he would go to Jerusalem in order to die in accordance with God’s will, both of which are forcefully presented in the New Testament, especially in the Gospels (but which several of our readings would appear at first glance to want to avoid). McCabe, in other words, substitutes essentially ahistorical principles of armchair human psychology for the divine objectives of the cross – a pale substitution indeed.

McCabe completely ignores the perspective in the Gospels whereby Jesus in fact purposely provokes the hostile reaction of the leaders leading to death, going to Jerusalem in order to die precisely as the climax of his ministry and not, as McCabe would have it, the failure of it. It is precisely the culmination of his mission, not its failure (or even a failure then used victoriously by God). McCabe’s chapter, in effect, seems to make Jesus’ crucifixion just an accidental effect of telling people to love each other, without any real point, purpose, or objective effect. It is difficult to see in McCabe’s crucifixion any real, objective redemption rather than just an accident of history. It instead becomes a mere pastoral illustration of what happens when people talk “too much” about love.

What many of these accounts lack, then, would need to be remedied in a more serviceable account of the atonement of Christ on the cross. What we need is an account that is based firmly in the biblical data and actually takes it all into account, taking the event of the crucifixion in its historical context and its biblical place within the salvation-historical narrative of Scripture rather than simply trying to abstract from it a mere instance of some acontextual timeless principle. From these beginnings, it can then engage philosophically and systematically with the biblical theology and concepts and understand what is contained therein in new ways. At this point, however, it would be best I think to draw a tighter connection between Christ’s death and its results, making the crucifixion once again an actual need of ours met by God in Christ according to the divine plan for our salvation.

Aquinas and Christmas

Like the great councils of Nicea, Constantinople I, Ephesus, Chalcedon, and Constantinople III, Aquinas addressed, in his own theory of the Incarnation, many of the Christological concerns that had been prevalent during the patristic period. Indeed, one way to see what he is doing is to try to do justice in a philosophical framework to the insights of these great councils, seeing Christ as having both a human nature and a divine nature and these as united in the one person of the divine Word, each with its own characteristic activity and operations. In my previous paper, I showed how the councils just mentioned addressed these concerns; in the present paper my concern will be to show first of all how Aquinas addresses these. As his own views entail that in some sense Christ is not a human person, I will also show how Aquinas can maintain this in light of Christ’s full humanity. Similarly, in regards to Christ’s full divinity and full humanity, I will describe how it is that Aquinas thinks Christ’s human will can be the principle of its own self-determining action but always as an instrument of and in cooperation with his divine will.

In the Incarnation, what is most essential perhaps is that God becomes man. However, to do justice to the divine transcendence requires explaining this in a way that does not impinge on the transcendence and immutability of God. The distinction between the two natures in Christ provides the beginning of a way to do justice to this. Since God qua God – that is, as existing in and through the divine nature – cannot change, then it must be something else that undergoes a change, since obviously some change does occur with the advent of the Incarnation. So it must be the Creation itself which undergoes change, not the Creator. After all, one can say that the divine Word does change in the sense that at one time certain predicates (such as being a man) cannot be applied to the Word but then later one is indeed able to apply such predicates. But that is compatible with there being no actual change in the Word himself as existing in his divine nature since the change which results in a change in which predicates can be appropriately applied may be in something outside of that divine nature.

This change, which is not in the Word in his divinity but in creation, involves the creation by God of a human nature in personal dependence on the Word as the Word’s own. A bit of creation, in this way, has been taken into the divine life, conjoined to God. It is not a pre-existing human nature but a created nature created precisely as a way of being for the divine Word, itself dependent upon the Word and lacking its own separate individual existence distinct from and apart from the Word since it is itself a mode of the Word’s own existing.

For Aquinas, this change in creation and subsequent relation of dependence of the humanity of the Word on the person of the Word involves the coming into being of new mixed relations rather than relations in which each term is really related to the other. Instead, the human nature is really related to the Word as one of its two modes of existence. The relation is real in it as it comes into existence united to the Word. This involves a real effect in the humanity without a change or any kind of effect in the Word in his divine existence, guaranteeing thus both the possibility of full humanity and full divinity since the two natures thus remain unmixed yet united in the one person of the Word, the human nature subject to change and really related to the divine but the divine nature still immutable and only in ideal relation to the human nature, the relation being in the human nature alone. Because God thus remains immutable in becoming human, we can truly say that it is God in Christ who has become a mutable man, not some other entity which in becoming a human would be subject to change and hence devoid of the divine transcendence proper to God. This works precisely because it is one and the same divine Word who, in addition to his divine nature, has conjoined to him a human nature in addition, thus permitting the communication of idioms when speaking of Christ.

Christ has a full human nature, however, composed of a fully human soul united to a fully human body. The problem is having this body/soul compound and full humanity in Christ yet not have it constitute its own person in addition to the divine person of the Word. A Boethian conception of personhood would let any concrete nature capable of consciousness and freedom to be a person, in which case there would be a human person in addition to divine person of the Word. Aquinas, however, requires of personhood or being a hypostasis that it be complete and existing independently of other things. In this sense, there is only one person in Christ for Aquinas, the divine person of the Word.

A union of joined body and soul, however, would in normal circumstances result in the existence of a human person. In Christ there is no such person but only a human nature since the human nature of Christ does not exist apart from all other hypostases but instead exists only in dependence on the person or hypostasis of the Word. Otherwise, the human nature would have its own human person, existing apart from the Word. The divine person, then, takes the place of the human person, preventing the human nature of Christ from being the mode of existence of a separate human person. If we understand a human person as a human nature existing hypostatically in itself, then on Aquinas’s view, there is no human person of Christ, only a divine person existing compositely in both divine and human natures.

For Aquinas, a person or hypostasis is not equivalent to the modern notion of a personality or a stream of consciousness but an individual existent. Personhood is a matter of who, not of what. The hypostasis of someone specifies who it is, its nature specifies what it is, giving the way in which that who exists. Being fully human, however, is a matter of what one is – one’s nature – not who one is – one’s hypostasis. Whether or not the person who has the human nature is divine or human does not impact the full humanity of that person, since being a divine person in no way effects what that person is. Insofar as they have a full, working human nature, that person is thereby fully human. The absence of a human person does not, in Christ, involve an absence of anything in his humanity but rather is the result of its addition to the divine person. Christ, then, is fully human and in that sense, subsisting in a human nature, can be said to be a human person. But Christ’s personhood does not arise from the human nature on its own, existing apart from everything else, and in that sense Christ is not a human person, but in such a way that his full humanity remains intact.

All this shows, then, that on Aquinas’s views it is truly God who is redeeming us as a man, but in such a way that the divine Word retains his divine transcendence and yet also possesses full humanity and unites both divinity and humanity in a single person. To show, however, that Jesus’ humanity is truly a mediator in our salvation and not simply an instrument of God (and hence is a full humanity and able to save human beings through his life, death, and resurrection), Aquinas must elaborate a dyothelite position which allows for truly human acting and willing. Otherwise, the divine will and activity crowd out the human and it becomes the divine nature alone which is active, the human nature being merely a passive participant and not a truly human source of human willing and human activity. It is the human suffering and willing of the divine Word in a genuinely human fashion that is redemptive, after all.

In Aquinas’s view, it seems that there is first of all a coordination of the divine will and human will in Christ rooted precisely in the fact that it is one person who possesses both wills, both principles of genuinely divine and human activity. The human will of Christ receives its principle of activity and is moved towards the intentions of God by the divine will. In this way, the human will of Christ acts as an instrument of the divine will in bringing about the divine ends. It is not a mere instrument, however, as the actions of the human nature of Christ are mediated by his human will, which is free and self-determining. It is, hence, a conjoined will as the will of the very divine person using it as an instrument, but also an instrument of the rational order with its own principle of action moved via that principle by another principle of action, the divine. It is hence not passive in this interaction but actively pursues and chooses for itself the intentions and goals of the divine will.

The human will of Christ, hence, is moved by the divine will to freely act and is graced by God in its hypostatic union with the person of the Word with the grace necessary to do so. This grace perfects in some way the human nature of Christ, as human nature is always perfected through the infusion of divine grace, which thereby makes Christ’s will free to always follow the good. In this sense of freedom, freedom to do the good, the hypostatic union and corresponding instrumentality of the human will of Christ in fact guarantee the freedom of that will rather than take away from it. The divine will, then, moves the human will of Christ towards freely pursuing the good and the divine ends, but through the self-determining and active principles of the human nature, not directly and without that mediation. As a conjoined will being used by a divine will, the influence of that divine will is one from the inside (internal to that person), as it were, not an external or coercive one. This may very well require, as perhaps Aquinas, White and Crowley seem to think (see, for instance, White 415, 421), a progressive human knowledge in Christ of who he is and of God’s will in given situations, graced upon him as part of the cooperation of his human nature with his divine, thus helping to secure a psychological unity for Christ as a single, integrated person of unmixed humanity and divinity. As already said, this grace perfects Christ’s humanity rather than detracts from it. By always being aware of the good and will of God, Christ, because of his graced human nature and will, always acts in accordance with the good and divine will, the human and divine wills thus being coordinated and yet their own principles of genuinely free activity in the person of Christ.

The person of the divine Word, then, acts as a single person precisely through this coordinated cooperation of his two natures and two wills. The Word is fully God, transcendent and unchanging even in the Incarnation. The Word is fully human, possessed of a union of body and soul with a functioning human life and active, self-determining will. It is one divine person who exists in and acts through each of these natures; there is not a distinct human person in Christ. Hence, it is in Christ truly God who redeems and truly through his own humanity and its activities and will that he does so. Aquinas appears, then, to have further elaborated and defended the very balancing of the various Christological concerns that was so vigorously defended by the great councils of the church.

Patristic Christology

I have finally finished all my commitments for this semester at the GTU! I'm currently applying both for philosophy employment (please pray for that) and for New Testament PhD programs at the same time and will see where Providence takes us. In the meantime, I'll make a couple of posts from the papers (mostly summarizing my own synthesis of course materials) I wrote for my Historical Development of Christology class. Here's the first one:

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Arius, Apollinaris, and Nestorius represented respectively for the early church three different foils for the development of Christological doctrine. In response to the Christological imbalances in the views of these thinkers and others after them, the successive ecumenical councils of the early church progressively centered in on a truly balanced Christology, taking into account Christ’s full humanity, full divinity, and unity, while at the same time maintaining the transcendence of God within the mystery of the Incarnation. In this essay I will consider each of the three heterodox thinkers listed above and show how Nicea, Constantinople I, Ephesus, Chalcedon, and Constantinople III all redressed in their particular ways the doctrinal mistakes of those three.

Arius was the first early heretical thinker to provoke his own ecumenical council devoted to adjudicating his views. It is arguable that one of the key determining factors in Arius’s Christology was his concern to protect the transcendence of the divine as he understood it – to keep the divine immutable and well-removed from the earthly realm of becoming and corruption. Arius’s God is, in effect, not so different from modern Deist versions of the deity, if not even more aloof from his creation, if that is possible.

The Logos serves in Arius’s thinking, as in Origenist theology of the period, as the intermediary in creation between God and the world, keeping the two firmly apart. But since the Logos is thus involved in creation, the Logos cannot be transcendent in the same way God is. With the rejection of a Platonic view of levels within God and a focus on divine transcendence as essential to divinity, this apparently lower being, the Logos, cannot have a share in that divinity. As such, the Logos must be created by God Himself, all else coming from the Logos directly rather than God in his unsullied distance from Creation.

Apart from cosmological considerations, Arius’s understanding of transcendence also pushes him towards a rejection of the Son’s divinity because of his view of the Incarnation and the nature of the unity of the Incarnate Son. Arius takes onboard the Logos-sarx framework then fashionable in Alexandria, according to which Jesus Christ had a human body but instead of a rational soul in the way other humans do, he had the supreme Logos as his rational, animating principle (I will return to this framework below in discussing Apollinaris). As such, since Christ underwent suffering and change, the Logos as his vital principle also underwent these. But since the divine nature is immutable and impassible, not to mention transcendent, the Logos cannot possess the divine nature as its own.

Arius, then, certainly protects divine transcendence as well as the unity of Christ – the Logos is not an additional entity but rather takes the role of the soul in the man Christ, thus combining Logos and human body in one incarnate being. The Platonically-influenced thought was that if something is the rational, animating principle of a human body then that basically makes it a human soul. However, the Logos was very different from a human soul, hence the worry with Logos-sarx Christology that Christ’s full humanity had been compromised. Christ becomes a kind of super-creature with a human body but something very different from the human mind or soul possessed by the rest of the human race. While preserving the need for Christ to actually suffer and die, thus entering into human reality, that very human reality is compromised by replacing the soul with the Logos. Christ, rather than being a human being, becomes in this view of the Incarnation a new kind of entity, compounded of human bodily parts and the super-creature who mediates between God and man. And if Christ, as many argued, needed to be fully human in order to fully save humans – possessing every bit of human nature in order to redeem every bit of it – then this Christ is not able to redeem us as whole human beings, bodies and souls. Jettisoning divinity for Christ, Arius thus also ran afoul of the objection that his Christ, lacking divinity, could not save, since only God can save.

The Council of Nicea, called to address Arius’s views, succeeded in theologically resolving at least some of Arius’s imbalanced theology. Without addressing issues relating to the divine transcendence or Christ’s humanity or unity, Nicea did affirm the full divinity of Christ, declaring him same in substance or being (ὁμοούσιος) with the Father. The Origenist notion of levels of divinity in the Godhead via emanation from the ultimate, transcendent, unitary God was abandoned. This safeguarded both Christ’s full possession of the divine nature shared with the Father as well as his ability to save in virtue of this fact.

Since Nicea did not address the other issues involved in Arius’s view, however, it is not surprising to see Apollinaris accept Nicea and the full divinity of Christ (or at least attempt to do so) and yet fall into other problems related to Arius’s view, all stemming from Apollinaris’s acceptance of the same Logos-sarx framework as Arius. Like Arius, Apollinaris views Christ as a composite of the Logos and a human body, the former again replacing the human soul in Christ. But once the Logos is recognized as fully divine, the combination with the Logos-sarx view, while rendering Christ a true unity, in fact causes problems in almost every other area.

Since the Logos, on Apollinaris’s view, joins with a human body, it seems to form a new, composite entity, Christ (similar to the way it does in Arius’s view) – a tertium quid neither fully human nor fully divine but something else. Just as in Arius’s view, a human body with the Logos instead of a human soul is not fully human. Christ apparently also cannot be fully divine for the additional reason that since it would seem that the Logos, as the replacement for the human soul, would have to serve as the seat of Christ’s suffering and other experiences. But that would make the Logos passable. The Logos in such a case could not have the full divine nature, lacking divine transcendence and its impassibility. Being neither fully God nor fully man, Christ would then neither save as God nor be able to redeem whole human persons since he would lack whole human personhood himself. While it could be claimed that the Logos retains its impassibility, this would require a mere appearance of suffering and human experience and hence a retreat to a docetic Christ, a denial of the true reality of the man Jesus and his real suffering, human life and free obedience for our salvation as he is swallowed up in the transcendent divine.

The First Council of Constantinople condemned Apollinaris and affirmed the true, full humanity of Christ. Rather than a mere human body, his humanity was a full one, involving a combination of both body and soul, complete humanity for the salvation of human beings. It thus also safeguarded against a violation of divine transcendence as well as the danger of docetism since the Logos was not directly compounded with a human body (and hence helped save the reality of the man Jesus).

Without the Logos-sarx framework, however, the problem of accounting for the unity of Christ returned. If we start with the divine Logos on one hand – God – and this complete human being on the other – the man Jesus – then how do we account for their unity in Christ? The unity of Christ thus provides the central problem affecting Nestorius’s Christology. Nestorius accepted both a full human nature and a full divine nature in Christ, but seems to have had problems putting them together in such a way as to form a convincing unity, so averse he was to the danger of forming a tertium quid out of the two as Apollinaris or Arius did. Nestorius’s notion of a nature was that of an concrete individual entity and hence he thought of the incarnation as the coming together of two concrete individuals, which results in one new prosopon or phenomenal reality of unity. On Nestorius’s view, then, there is not a single subject who is the Logos and hence has divine properties and who is also the man Jesus and hence has human properties – existing both as God and as man. Hence, there can be on his view no communication of idioms – no applying of predicates of divinity to the man Jesus and no applying of predicates of humanity to the divine Logos, as would have followed were the subject identical. Mary, on this view, cannot be rightly said to be the Mother of God – the Theotokos (Θεοτόκος) or God-Bearer.

Nestorius, in trying to maintain full divinity and divine transcendence on the one hand, and full humanity on the other, thus trips over the issue of the unity of Christ, which in turns raises the issue of whether Christ on Nestorius’s view would be able to save, given that only God can save, since it would seem that one would not then be allowed to say that God lived, suffered, died, and was raised for our salvation. Human mediatorship in salvation is secured, but the role of the divine, being pushed out of the created world as in Arius’s view, seems to be damaged.

The Council of Ephesus responded to Nestorius by rejecting his views as providing insufficient unity for Christ. It is one and the same Logos who is at once God and man, to whom both divine and human attributes accrue and hence Mary is indeed Theotokos. As Cyril noted, divinity and humanity are united in the one hypostasis or person of the divine Logos, hence the communication of idioms is completely appropriate (it is, in fact, just an application of the logical rule Leibniz’s Law, also known as the Indiscernibility of Identicals) – we can say both that God truly suffered on the cross and that the man Jesus is creator of the world, Second Person of the Trinity, since these are really one person, God the Son. Unity is hence found in the person of the Logos, not in some special extra relationship added as an outside extra to Christ’s divinity and humanity. Hence the unity of Christ and the divine role in salvation were secured for the time being by the council.

Ephesus, however, did not solve the question that Nestorius’s view seems to have addressed fairly well; that is, how to maintain divine transcendence and full divinity in the face of full humanity, taking both the divinity and humanity seriously as demanded by Nicea and Constantinople I. The idea of dividing humanity and divinity into two distinct, unmixed natures seems to do this, allowing for full humanity without being distorted or altered in nature by mixing with divinity and for full divinity without being distorted or altered in nature by mixing with humanity. Hence, in divinity Christ can remain transcendent and divine, whereas in humanity he can be a full, though sinless, human.

The Council of Chalcedon takes on this important usage of the notion of two natures, but without adding in Nestorius’s interpretation of the notion. That is, Constantinople does not interpret the notion of a nature in terms of a concrete individual entity. The natures are not independent things added together to form Christ but, instead, the human and divine natures are distinct sets of characteristic properties or ways of being, united in the person of Christ as the one subject of these properties who thus exists in two fully distinct ways – the divine way and a particular human way. Without changing in the divine nature, the single person of Christ took on a new mode of existence in the Incarnation, which is a change in the created order rather than in Christ qua God. Chalcedon thus takes on the important insights of the two-nature view held by people like Nestorius but without the distortions caused by too-concrete a notion of what a divine or human nature might be. Chalcedon thus successfully integrates the insights of Nicea – that Christ is fully God – and of Constantinople I – that Christ is fully human – with that of Ephesus – that Christ forms a unity in the person of the divine Logos.

The Third Council of Constantinople clarified and further developed the Chalcedonian trajectory of Christology by addressing Christ’s full humanity not merely in the sense of the possession of an abstract, though concretely realized, nature but also in terms of a fully human way of life and activity, a human use of human freedom to form a truly human life, giving truly human obedience to the Father unto death. Without a distinctly human will and human activity, which were rejected by the monothelites, there is an inherent danger of a kind of implicit Apollinarism or even docetism, where the human life of Christ is consumed by rather than perfected by the divine life he also possesses. There is a danger then in the two directions of either failing to respect divine transcendence by, in effect, replacing much of the functionality of the human soul with that of the divine Logos, or, on the other hand, failing to respect the true reality of the man Jesus. In either case, a truly human life has been compromised and, if as in the West, it is thought that such a life and human obedience are important for our salvation, then such a view will certainly not do. If Christ is to save us by humanly taking on as free, human action, a human obedience unto death on the cross, this would seem to require that he actually act and will in his human nature and that he both have a human will and source of activity and that these not simply sit there inert, as good as absent from him.

The Third Council of Constantinople addresses this concern by investing in Christ a fully human reality – Christ, in addition to his divine will, has and uses a human will, a human principle of activity. Christ, in other words, acts in both of his natures, not simply the divine one. The real human existence, activity, and freedom of the man Jesus are thus at last properly ascribed to the one Logos who is at once also in possession of a divine existence, activity, and freedom, unified together in that one divine person who acts and exists in each nature.

In conjunction with the councils before it, then, Constantinople III guarantees that Christ is truly one of us – the perfect human being and representative of us as human beings before the Father and to us of what we as Christians can and must become in Christ. At the same time, however, Christ is guaranteed as where we are able in this life to directly meet God – not mediated through creation but the divine Son himself who, in virtue of his consubstantiality with the Father, reveals to us the Father as well. In Christ, we encounter God himself in the only way we are currently able to do so – the infinite taking on the finite in order to be revealed to the finite.

The orthodox view developed in the councils examined in this paper, then, does something that the heterodox thinkers do not – that is, present a picture of Christ which balances all the important considerations and truths we get from theology and Scripture. While the heterodox views latch onto and appear to do extremely well with certain considerations, they do so at the cost of others, failing to take into account other important considerations or truths and thus ending up with a lopsided theology as a result or even a Christ who perhaps cannot even save.