DID GOD DIE ON THE CROSS?

helmut said:

In don't understand your question. I said resurrection would have been possible anyway, and you ask "Sure why not?" Not what?

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In general, I sensed a spiritual process at work in your post, so went with the yes, and conclusion. Thus why not.

Carl Emerson said:

Hi there,

How comfortable are we with this suggestion?

Is this a case of applying human reason to the mysteries of God and coming out with an invalid answer?

Your thoughts very much appreciated.

Do some churches insist on believing this?

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Only the body died.
He never dies.
He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit.
Father into your hands I commit my spirit.

hedrick said:

His agony in the garden shows his humanity, his miracles his divinity.

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That sounds almost like a quote from Mar Narsai. I should state that I disagree with every proposition Mar Narsai makes in the linked to song. The whole beauty of communicatio idiomatum is the glorification of Christ’s humanity by His divinity, so that even the most mundane human act is now divine.

It also has no bearing on the ability of humans to commit miracles, but the Gospels say these are done in the name of our Lord, or the Holy Trinity, and not the Father. Our ability to work them comes from the indwelling Spirit and the glorification of our human nature by the natural (St. Cyril) or hypostatic (Chalcedon) union.

By the way Nestorius claimed when Chalcedon occurred that it said precisely what he had been trying to say Christologically, which was obviously inaccurate because the acts of Chalcedon anathematize any who do not accept Ephesus or refuse the term “theotokos.”

Thus I myself pay little credence to the Bazaar of Heraclides because it has the ignominious status of having been written by a man who exposed himself elsewhere as not entirely reliable on matters of the historical record.

hedrick said:

It was very important for Nestorius that Jesus was the second Adam, that he reversed Adam’s sin. Where Adam had disobeyed, Jesus obeyed. For that, he had to be an actual human being. If he is simply a human body, soul, etc, used by the Logos, then his obedience isn’t a true reversal of Adam. I mean, obviously God will act perfectly. To truly reverse Adam, there has to be a full human being, making human choices.

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That is the Orthodox position.

His three-level metaphysics lets him give Jesus a real human existence, but still have a single prosopon. But the question is in what sense an actual human person can be said to be the same person as the Logos. Orthodox theologians concluded that this was not possible. Hence the orthodox position is anyhypostasia.

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Anhypostasia is a partially relic of Chalcedonian hypostatic union theology and an artifact of the Tome of Leo. St. Cyril the Great offers a possible alternative to hypostatic union with a union of nature without confusion, change or division, which basically deletes the word “hypostasis” from Christology, and this simplification explains perhaps the Oriental Orthodox eagneress at embracing the miaphysis doctrine (also, there is no easy way to translate into Syriac the word Hypostasis wihout using qnume, which has proven to be the bane of Assyrian theologians, even non-Nestorians like Mar Babai*).

Anhypostasia however is definitely more Scriptural than Nestorianism, because it reflects the reality of the Incarnation. It is a scriptural fact that the Incarnation of our Lord was miraculous, without being the result of a natural sexual union, and this quality to the Incarnation is often referred to by Eastern Orthodox theologians as our Lord being “enhypostatized.”

*By the way the notorious difficulty in translating Greek Christological language into Syriac is another reason to use a certain caution when reading the Bazaar of Heraclides because in being translated via Syriac, much of the original meaning of any Christological discussion may have been lost in translation. English, with its remarkable ability to Anschluss foreign language terms, to the extent that a Greek economist once gave a famed address in English but with a completely Hellenic vocabulary, would do less damage but unfortunately in the case of Nestorius we only have the Classical Syriac. And in many more cases we only have Ge’ez or Sahidic Coptic remmants. And the nuances of these languages, although some cling to life in altered forms, is less familiar to us than those of Greek or Latin.

Carl Emerson said:

Hi there,

How comfortable are we with this suggestion?

Is this a case of applying human reason to the mysteries of God and coming out with an invalid answer?

Your thoughts very much appreciated.

Do some churches insist on believing this?

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The Son of God died on the Cross, but God the Father did not.

Three persons (Father, Son, Holy Ghost) are distinct enough that one can die and the others not, but are similar enough that they are of the same essence and not conflicting with each other.

If I divide a fire into three brands, and extinguish one of them, the fire is still there, and it's the same fire, and the other brands can rekindle the extinguished one.

The Liturgist said:

That sounds almost like a quote from Mar Narsai. I should state that I disagree with every proposition Mar Narsai makes in the linked to song. The whole beauty of communicatio idiomatum is the glorification of Christ’s humanity by His divinity, so that even the most mundane human act is now divine.

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Here's what I meant, from the third council of Constantinople:

"our Lord Jesus Christ himself, who is true and perfect God, and true and perfect man, in his holy Gospels shews forth in some instances human things, in others, divine, and still in others both together, making a manifestation concerning himself in order that he might instruct his faithful to believe and preach that he is both true God and true man. Thus as man he prays to the Father to take away the cup of suffering, because in him our human nature was complete, sin only excepted, "Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt." And in another passage: "Not my will, but thine be done."

I don't find the communicatio idiomatum a very convincing solution to the problem.

I think I've seen something similar in Athanasius. But I just glanced at "on the Incarnation," and I can't find it. What I find there is worse. The impression is very clear that the Logos is using the human body as a tool, but there's no actual human. This is, of course, anhypostasia, but it's a pretty extreme form of it. Norris (who edited a book of classical text on the Christology that I use) commented he gives the impression of being Apollinarian, but avoids quite saying so. I would agree.

I think the whole approach of using ancient ontology has serious limitations. I see where it came from. I agree that the heresies it's trying to deal with were problems. But in the end it seems to deny the existence of Jesus.

I believe that Jesus is the Word made flesh. But I'm not so convinced that denying his metaphysical existence is the best way to talk about that. You may be right that Cyril's approach is an alternative. I've never seriously looked at it, but will. I also think the late medieval tradition, and particularly Aquinas, developed workarounds for some of the difficulties. Sometime soon I'll give my understanding of Aquinas, and why I think he deals with the issues, although not in quite the way I would (because he's not allowed to say that there were weaknesses in Chalcedon).

N T Wright, of course, explicitly rejects Chalcedon. I think most other mainstream theologians avoid doing that, but instead accept the spirit but not the letter. (That's how I would approach it.)

hedrick said:

The impression is very clear that the Logos is using the human body as a tool, but there's no actual human.

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I’m pretty sure St. Athanasius did not endorse Apollinarianism in De Incarnatione, which is basically what you are equating Chalcedon to, which is bizarre, since Miaphysite OOs weee more frequentlt accused of being Apollinarian (due to a belief that Eutyches doctrine, which they ananthematize and which is in some respects similiar to Apollinarianism, was their doctrine, which it was not).

Speaking of which, if you are concerned about the humanity of our Lord using his humanity as a puppet, Nestorianism has a serious problem with that, because that precisely is what the “union of will” entails, based on the scriptural texts we have. Either there was a union of nature or a hypostases, or a scenario like what Nestorius or Apollinarius, or Pope Honorius I when he denied that Christ had a human will in his support of the Monothelite heresy, argued. St. Athanasius never said that.

Regarding Chalcedon, its good that it is no longer accepted as a sine qua non in its textual entirety, because it libels the Oriental Orthodox and condemns Dioscorus based on false testimony. It also led to the collapse of the Byzantine Empire and the rise of the Ummayid Caliphate and a succession of Islamist dictatorships, so there’s that.

The important councils are Nicea, Constantinople I, Ephesus, Constantinople III and Nicea II.

Inkfingers said:

If I divide a fire into three brands, and extinguish one of them, the fire is still there, and it's the same fire, and the other brands can rekindle the extinguished one.

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That’s true, but its also triadological error, for as the Eastern Orthodox like to sing, and their hymns are jam-packed with theological information to the point where I suppose someone exposed only to praise and worship music of the dreadful Hillsong variety might wrongly accuse them of being prolix, “Glory to the Holy, Consubstantial and Undivided Trinity!”

I have come through painful personal experience to discover that it is vitally important to carefully choose Trinitarian formulae around here or else someone will invariably link us to LutheranSatire’s video with the annoying leprechaun twins.

The Liturgist said:

I should state that I disagree with every proposition Mar Narsai makes in the linked to song.

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Hmm ... every line (or at least most lines, I didn't check them all) is an allusion to an incident in the Gospels, you can hardly disagree with them. The actions of Jesus described are commented with "as a man/a God", I understand that they are used to show Jesus is man, and Jesus is God. So what do you disagree about?

in Rom 1, Paul liks the descent of Jesus with Him being a man, and the resurrection with Him being son of God, do you also disagree with that?

The Liturgist said:

English, with its remarkable ability to Anschluss foreign language terms

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Anschluss is a noun in German, the corresponding verb is anschließen. I doubt that "the ability to connection foreign language terms" makes distortion via translation impossible.

EDIT: Another translation for "Anschluss" would be annexation ...

The Liturgist said:

I’m pretty sure St. Athanasius did not endorse Apollinarianism in De Incarnatione, which is basically what you are equating Chalcedon to, which is bizarre, since Miaphysite OOs weee more frequentlt accused of being Apollinarian (due to a belief that Eutyches doctrine, which they ananthematize and which is in some respects similiar to Apollinarianism, was their doctrine, which it was not).

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No, I'm not equating Chalcedon with Athanasius.

In De Incarnatione, Athanaius almost always talks about the Logos using his human body. There's no indication of an actual human. He doesn't specifically deny the existence of a spirit or soul, but it's certainly the impression.

I'm quoting from the introduction to "The Christological Controversy", which is a set of key texts. The editor is not Norris, as I suggested above, but Rusch.

"It is clear from this brief account of Athanasius’s basic argument that he shares with the Arians not their view of the Logos, but their view of the constitution of Jesus’ person. He argues explicitly that it is wrong to perceive the incarnation as the Logos’ indwelling of a whole human being. That, he thinks, would make the incarnation a case of mere inspiration. No, in the incarnation what happened was that the Logos took to himself—made his own—“flesh” or “body” or what we might call “the human condition” and so became the self or subject in Jesus. Naturally
enough, therefore, Athanasius does not mention a human soul—a conscious human selfhood—in Jesus. For practical purposes, he regards Jesus, as the Arians did, as Logos plus body or flesh (though he nowhere openly denies that Jesus had a human soul). The result of this is that when Athanasius has to deal with the question of Jesus’ ignorance, his account of the matter inevitably seems strained."
...
"Athanasius was certainly not in the ordinary sense a Docetist. He did not question the reality of the flesh which the Logos took. Even so, his position suggests that Jesus was less than a complete human being."

I agree with him. Unfortunately I think this problem is shared with much of classical Christology. Indeed I've had discussions in which people who think they're orthodox claim that it's a heresy to assert that Jesus was a human being.

I don't think we need Nestorianism to deal with this, though. I agree that his union of will doesn't really do justice to the incarnation.

hedrick said:

"Athanasius was certainly not in the ordinary sense a Docetist. He did not question the reality of the flesh which the Logos took. Even so, his position suggests that Jesus was less than a complete human being."

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And that academic remark is shockingly off the mark, unless I am misreading it entirely (which is possible due to immense fatige) a point I should argue as best demonstrated by the Athanasian maxim “God became man so man could become God” that is to say, united with God as God took on humanity.

I believe I can speak with some confidence having studied the great Alexandrian theologian, his writings, writings anout him, and Arius, indeed, exhaustively Arius, using the retired Archbishop of Canterbury’s treatise on the heresiarch, that St. Athanasius the Apostolic, the Pillar of Orthodoxy, who was no more Docetic than St. John the Divine. Indeed it was St. Gregory the Theologian, like his fellow Cappadocians, ever on the lookout for Christological error, who wrote “to praise Athanasius is to praise virtue.” If any of these faults existed, in antiquity Athanasius would not, from the desolation of ancient Triers (as opposed to the charming modern city), been able to carry the day despite at times fighting almost literally contra mundum.

The Liturgist said:

And that academic remark is shockingly off the mark, unless I am misreading it entirely (which is possible due to immense fatige) a point I should argue as best demonstrated by the Athanasian maxim “God became man so man could become God” that is to say, united with God as God took on humanity.

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OK, I'm rewriting this.

The impression I got of the Logos wielding a human body without being human was from "On the Incarnation." Oddly enough, however, the book that Rusch edited quotes the third oration to the Arians. In it, Athanasius says multiple times that the Logos became a man. He also explains his use of body, saying that in the Bible it speaks of being flesh when it means to talk about a whole human being.

The most interesting quote seems to be “Being God, he had his own body, and using this as an instrument, he became a human being on our account.”

This combines the language of On the Incarnation, of using the body as an instrument, with becoming a human being. I'll have to explore further to get a better sense of just what he meant.

I noted that there seems to be a tendency to make Christ's two natures opposed to each other, distributing works between them. I quoted the 6th Council. Athanasius says "When he was doing the works of the Father in a divine way, the flesh was not external to him. On the contrary, the Lord did these things in the body itself." However he spoils it somewhat by saying "Thus, when it was necessary to raise up Peter’s mother-in-law, who was suffering from a fever, it was a human act when he extended his hand but a divine act when he caused the disease to cease. Likewise, in the case of “the man blind from birth” [John 9:6] it was human spittle which he spat, but it was a divine act when he opened the man’s eyes by means of clay." This seems to blunt the impact of the previous quote.

He does make it clear, as Rusch said, that the Logos is the sole subject. "so that just as we say the body was properly his, so also the passions of the body might be said to belong to him alone, even though they did not touch him in his deity. So if the body had belonged to someone else, its passions too would be predicated of that subject. If, however, the flesh belongs to the Logos (for “the Logos became flesh”), it is necessary to predicate the fleshly passions of him whose flesh it is." However this is a bit weird at times. "Rather, let people see that the Logos himself is impassible by nature and that he nevertheless has these passions predicated of him in virtue of the flesh which he took on, since they are proper to the flesh and the body itself is proper to the Savior." That is, of course, pretty standard for orthodox understandings of the Incarnation.

cancelled

hedrick said:

Athanasius says "When he was doing the works of the Father in a divine way, the flesh was not external to him. On the contrary, the Lord did these things in the body itself." However he spoils it somewhat by saying "Thus, when it was necessary to raise up Peter’s mother-in-law, who was suffering from a fever, it was a human act when he extended his hand but a divine act when he caused the disease to cease. Likewise, in the case of “the man blind from birth” [John 9:6] it was human spittle which he spat, but it was a divine act when he opened the man’s eyes by means of clay." This seems to blunt the impact of the previous quote.

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Forgive me Hedrick, because I think we are in closer alignment on this issue than one might think, for we both fully desire a Christological expression which conveys the complete humanity and divinity and the perfection of that union without change, confusion or division.

Now, in the specific case of the above quote, I don’t entirely see how those statements blunt the previous ones, because Christ throughout his Incarnation glorified our fallen humanity by imparting to it, through the entire course of His Incarnation from conception, which is a mystery, but from that point on, through a natural nativity, a childbirth which also according to the Fathers did not physically alter St. Mary in any respect that might cause someone of a primitive understanding of the concept of virginity, which is to say, most people until very recently, and even today the majority of the population in less educated countries and developing nations, who hold to primitive notions about this, which required a further miracle so as to stress that aspect of His birth. From then on, His life was a process of sanctifying and glorifying, from childhood, through constructive work (carpentry being both an art and a vital craft, even more so then than now given the lack of mass production, and widespread use of other materials; in antiquity our Lord could have been involved in some way in nearly everything that was built), through baptism (his Baptism by St. John in the Jordan elevated further this act, which itself can be understood as St. John cleansing people in the ancient tradition of the Judaic ritual bath of purification, the mikvah, used as you doubtless know but our readers might not, to remove any uncleanness under the Mosaic Law, or Torah, for example, to attain the ritual purity required of priests before serving in the Temple after any act or experience that was under the Torah defiling, of which there were many, and transformed this means of ritual purity which required, and among Jews, Samaritans and the Mandaean Gnostics who regard John the Baptist as the Messiah, continues to require, frequent repetition, into a singular act of spiritual purification, an indellible washing away of the faith, owing to the glorification of Baptism when St. John baptized Christ, the Spirit descended as a dove and the voice of the Father was heard.

This process of glorification and deification continued, with the incarnate Word of God actually dying and being resurrected, and then ascending to Heaven before returning in the Eschaton*

Communicatio idiomatum, which we see foreshadowed in St. Athanasius, can be understood as the imparting of divinity to ordinary human activities, and the glorification of humanity by imparting it to divine activities. However, in St. Athanasius we do not see communicatio idiomatum in a complete form, but rather, we see a prototype of all modern Christological texts, because De Incarnatione, like the other magnum opus of St. Athanasius, The Life of Anthony trod new ground; whereas the latter was the first biography and hagiography of a monastic hermit, who himself is only the second such hermit, the first such hermit, St. Paul the Hermit, being known of only through the testimony of St. Anthony and his hagiographers, chiefly St. Athanasius, and on the whole the work was at the time quite unique as it introduced the world to a new form of Christian living which developed from the isolated hermitage to the confederated hermitage, or skete, from Scetis, where these appeared, and from thence to coenobitic monasticism, in just a few decades, the importance of that work in promoting the angelic life cannot be overstated (I imagine it must be a bit weird hearing a Congregationalist praising monastic living, but I see myself as a Congregationalist Evangelical Catholic, like the LCMS, but seeking to if possible retain some aspect of the tradition which the UCC seems to be losing, who also fully accepts episcopal polity, for the early bishops presided over single congregations). Perhaps the UCC could be turned around through a monastic order, but I digress.

Just as the Vita Antonis was vital, if you will forgive the feeble pun, in fueling the fires of monastic zeal which did so much good for the early Church, and then literally held Christendom together, in the East as much as the West, durimg the Dark Ages, with the Eastern Roman Empire in irreversible decline and the Western Roman Empire defunct, De Incarnatione was even more revolutionary, for it set forward a basic set of Christological principles which remain accepted more or less without reservation by all Christian churches which follow the creed. We can quibble a bit over how St. Athanasius viewed the precise nature of the Incarnation, although I fear that would be unproductive, for three reasons: firstly, we obviously are not drawing the same conclusions from the same texts (perhaps because I have less than a sterling opinion of Rausch, and only encountered him after having read about St. Athanasius through the writings of CS Lewis, Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, and Pope Benedict XVI, among other very high churchmen, and also through the writings of other Patristic figures like St. Gregory Nazianzus, and through his own writings; Vita Antonis is the most riveting piece of Christian literature outside the realm of sacred Scripture, in my opinion, an absolute page-turner which deeply moved me to repentence, so I am admittedly biased to an extreme extent concerning St. Athanasius.***

Secondly, the texts themselves are clearly prototypical, in that we can extract the kind of “The Divine Word did this, and the Man Jesus did this” antiphonal cadence of Mar Narsai’s hymn I linked you to earlier, from what St. Athanasius wrote, almost as easily as Communicatio Idiomatum. The Nestorians never anathematized, and indeed venerate, St. Athanasius, because he can be interpreted, like St. Ephrem the Syrian, whose Syriac hymns are used by both the Church of the East and their one-time Christological opponents, the Miaphysite Syriac Orthodox Church, and both call him the “Harp of the Spirit” (however, while the Church of the East calls the very Nestorian Mar Narsai “The Flute of the Spirit”, the Syriac Orthodox bestow this title on Mar Jacob of Sarugh, whose metrical homily “Haw Nurone” is my favorite Eucharistic liturgical hymn specifically on the subject of Holy Communion. It really deserves a good English adaptation, like that received by Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silent, or the numerous excellent settings of Phos Hilarion, Te Deum Laudamus, and other ancient hymns).

Thirdly, and most importanrly, owing to the prototypical nature of the work of St. Athanasius, which I would argue has, like the Nicene Creed itself, universal applicability, and there is no doubt Nestorius opposed Arius as much as St. Cyril or St. Celestine, I would argue we are debating the wrong Christological figure.

Theopaschism, which is the topic at hand, was never explicitly addressed by the august Pope of Alexandria who we have been debating, but St. Gregory Nazianzus did make an explicit remark in favor of a Theopaschite Christology (despite, for reasons which became ironic under the rule of Justinian, who we should also be talking about, being a fan of Origen and one of the compilers of the Philocalia), saying “We needed [...] a Crucified God.” St. Augustine and his followers also entered into the discussion by stating that any suffering of the humanity of our Lord would be much greater than that of His divinity, to avoid the twin perils of Patripassianism and Modalism. Which in the end, Severus of Antioch, who we should be talking about the most, because it was he who wrote the hymn Ho Monogenes that planted into the liturgy of all Eastern churches, due to Justinian, clear Theopaschite language, and it was his arguments which persuaded Justinian and the bishops of the Second Council of Constantinople (the Fifth Ecumenical Council in EO-Lutheran-RC reckoning) to anathematize any who denied that Jesus Christ who was crucified was the incarnation of God (in Canon X, which I quote in full, below).

So really, Theopaschism began with an event, the Theopaschite Controversy, wherein the Scythian Monks forced the issue by exerting pressure on Justinian to allow St. Severus, the Oriental Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, to debate his Chalcedonian opponents, owing to a silent majority of Chalcedonians who while accepting the Tome of Leo rejected the anti-Theopaschite sentiment which animated Nestorius and the Nestorians.

*There have of course been occasional Christophanies, such as the appearance of our Lord at Holy Etchmiadzin in the early fourth century, an event that enabled St. Gregory the Illuminator to convert the entire nation of Armenia from Paganism and making it the first Christian sovereign country, , the city state of Edessa once ruled by King Agbar which had at some prior point embraced Christ, being at best a city state, and more likely than not a suzerain power under Roman protection, notwithstanding).

**I myself regard the anathema of Origen by Emperor Justinian as unfair and wrong, and while I feel I lack the authority to declare him a saint, privately regard him as venerable, but I also venerate St. Epiphanius who had justifiable objections to Origen, so this is a complex issue for me.

*** Indeed, regarding St. Athanasius, I am biased to the point where I think he is one of around a dozen Patristic figures who modern day Christianity depends upon entirely, the others being Origen**, and Ignatius, Clement, Irenaeus of Lyon, Victor, Ephrem the Syrian, Athanasius, the Cappadocians, Cyril of Alexandria, Celestine, Ambrose of Millan, Augustine of Hippo, John Cassian, Jacob of Sarugh, Maximus the Confessor, Theodore the Studite and John Damascene, and of course Empress Theodora and her son Emperor Michael III, and the Docetic, Gnostic, Arian, Nestorian, Monothelite, Iconoclast and other heretical adversaries of the above. St. Gregory of Nazianzus is also of particular importance for introducing into the discussion Theopaschism, as noted above.

Also, a few other Oriental Orthodox saints, and a group of Chalcedonians known as the Scythian monks, are of similiar importance to St. Athanasius and were of particular relevance to this discussion, as they dealt directly in the realm of Theopaschitism, which Chalcedonians initially regarded as heretical, under the influence of crypto-Nestorians, including: Severus of Antioch, Peter Fullo, and Jacob of Sarugh, and their counterparts, Emperor Justinian (who did nonetheless incorporate the hymn Only Begotten Son, probably written by Severus, into a prominent place in the Byzantine liturgy; the Antiochene West Syriac liturgy naturally features it even more prominently as an introit, and whose anathemas, despite naming people who I think by virtue of their ascetic lives, scholarship, and their repose in the peace of the church, did not deserve it, namely Origen and Theodore of Mopsuestia, who the Assyrians do venerate, which is good, but they also venerate Nestorius and attribute an East Syriac style reordering of what was probably the Byzantine form of the Divine Liturgy of St. Basil, which Nestorius would have used while Patriarch of Constantinople, and in my opinion Nestorius simply did too many objectionable things to be venerated. Neither Mar Theodore the Interpreter, as the Assyrians call him, or Origen, ever violently persecuted anyone.

But it was St. Severus who provided the intellectual framework for Theopaschitism, and St. Peter Fullo who, by inserting into the Oriental Orthodox version of the hymn known as the Trisagion the controversial Theopaschite clause, which I will quote below with his addition in bold, who seem to me as the main advocates of Theopaschitism:

Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal One, Who Was Crucified For Us, Have Mercy on Us.

Now, pressure from the Scythian monks forced Justinian to allow a debate between St. Severus and the majority of anti-Theopaschite bishops, and this evidently persuaded Emperor Justinian to, for a time, become Theopaschite, for he inserted Canon X into the Second Council of Constantinople which reads “"If anyone does not confess that our Lord Jesus Christ who was crucified in flesh is true God and Lord of glory and one of the holy Trinity, let him be anathema.” And the aforementioned hymn Only Begotten Son and Word of God, also known by its Greek title Ho Monogenes, which was written by St. Severus, was interpolated into the Byzantine liturgy as described above.


Only-Begotten Son and Immortal Word of God,
Who for our salvation didst will to be incarnate of the holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary;
Who without change didst become man and was crucified;
Who art one of the Holy Trinity, glorified with the Father and the Holy Spirit:
O Christ our God, trampling down death by death, save us!


This council was convened largely to legitmize the anathemas that Justinian unilaterally proclaimed in the Three Chapters, against people the Oriental Orthodox viewed as crypto or prot-Nestorian, such as Theodore of Mopsuestia, in a failed attempt to heal the Chalcedonian schism (when it failed, Justinian resorted to arrests and executions of Oriental Orthodox bishops on a massive scale, and it was only through the aid of his Oriental Orthodox wife that Jacob Bar Addai was able to consecrate, in many cases using the emergency procedure of acting solo, for bishops are under normal conditions supposed to be ordained by three or more other bishops, a new hierarchy for the Oriental church in Syria and Egypt) and also a few other people some has gripes with, such as Origen.

Now this is where things get interesting and bizarre. For whatever reason, Justinian no longer desired to embrace theopaschism, and instead sought to ameliorate Canon X by embracing as doctrine a theological idea that originated, like so much else, good and bad, with Origen, that being apthartodocetism.

Apthartodocetism is a long and complex subject, deserving of a follow-up post by you or me, for the edification of other members, and it has never been anathematized as a heresy, but I strongly suspect @hedrick that you are both familiar with it and also very much opposed to its implications.

Indeed the problems with Apthartodocetism are such that Patriarch Eutychius of Constantinople managed to dissuade Justinian from declaring Apthartodocetisim an official Eastern Orthodox doctrine. Which is probably for the best.

By the way @hedrick while we have not yet reached common ground, I have to say this discussion with you is the first time I have ever enjoyed talking about Christology, a subject which usually fatigues me for reasons well summarized by St. John Chrysostom’s Homily on the Nativity.

But in your case, you are friendly, decent, polite and exceedingly learned, and this makes it actually interesting. I enjoy having my views challenged, and having to dive deep and double check my own understanding of things, and this thread has been immensely gratifying for me. I don’t see it as a debate to be “won” by either of us, but instead am a believer in the Socratic method and see this as a dialogue for mutual enrichment, and I hope you feel the same.

If I sounded grumpy in some earlier posts, I beg your forgiveness, as I had a bout of unbelievably bad acid reflux.

God bless you my brother!

ViaCrucis said:

No, it really was the case that the entire fullness of Deity--in the Eternal and distinct Person of the Son--that dwelt bodily; because Jesus Christ is Himself, as the very Son and Word of the Father from all eternity, the true and very God. God, in toto, became flesh. The Divine Person of the Son became flesh. And since the Son is fully God, it was the full Godhead, the full Deity, that became man.

The Father is God. All of God.
The Son is God. All of God.
And the Holy Spirit is God. All of God.

One God, one indivisible Essence, one Ousia as it is called in Greek, one Being.
Three consubstantial, co-eternal, distinct and fully Divine Persons.

That which the Father is, so is the Son and the Holy Spirit.

For the Father is unbegotten, and proceeds from none; but is the One from Whom the Son has His eternal generation, and the Holy Spirit His eternal procession.

The Son has His eternal Origin, His Source, in and from the Father, as the only-begotten Son of the Father, the very Word of the Father, eternally begotten without beginning or end: He is very God of very God, begotten, not made.

The Holy Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father [and the Son], and is with Father and Son worshiped and glorified.

For the Three are One in Being, and each is fully God truly in Himself, and each is God in and with the Other. For the Father is in the Son, and the Son is in the Father; and they are both in the Spirit, and the Spirit likewise in each.

As Christ says, "The Father is in Me and I am in the Father" and "The Father and I are One". And as He also says that He will ask the Father and He will send another helper, the Holy Spirit; and at the same time promises that He will not leave His disciples as orphans but will come to them. So that the Spirit is distinct from the Father and the Son, but Christ is in the Spirit with us, and the Father also, as Christ says that both He and His Father will make their dwelling us. So that each Person being fully God, indwelling one another, in what we refer to as their eternal perichoresis--their eternal co-inhabiting, interpenetrating, inter-dwelling with and in One and the Other. So that we can never separate any Person from the other.

Each is truly distinct, but never separate.
Each is fully God, and all are one and the same God, in absolute and indivisible unity.

The Son, distinctly, became man.
It is therefore the Son--who is Himself eternal and true and full God--that became flesh. Was conceived. Was born. Grew up in wisdom before both God and man. It was God who watched Joseph in his carpentry shop. It was God whose hand Mary took as they went shopping in the market. It was God was baptized by John the Baptist in the Jordan. It was God who said that He would make some fishermen fishers of men. It was God who calmed the wind and the waves. It was God who wept when He came to Lazarus' tomb. It was God who broke bread and shared the cup of His Supper. It was God who knelt and prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane. It was God who was betrayed by Judas Iscariot. It was God who was taken before Pilate, was flogged, had a crown of thorns placed upon His head, and was forced to carry His cross to be crucified. It was God who was nailed to the cross. It was God who shed blood, whose flesh was pierced. It was God who cried out, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" It was God who cried out, "Father, forgive them". It was God who "gave up the ghost" and died. It was God who was wrapped in burial clothes and buried in a rock-hewn tomb. It was God who descended into She'ol. It was God who destroyed the power of death and the devil. It was God who rose again on the third day. It was God who ascended to the Father. It is God who is seated at the right hand of His Father. And it is God who will return, in glory, to judge the living and the dead.

-CryptoLutheran

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Quoted for truth. Thank you, brother!

It seems obvious that Athanasius intended to see Christ as a single subject. I agree that suffering (and, I'd assume, death) was a weak point. I quoted above "Rather, let people see that the Logos himself is impassible by nature and that he nevertheless has these passions predicated of him in virtue of the flesh which he took on, since they are proper to the flesh and the body itself is proper to the Savior." That sounds suspiciously like Nestorius talking about the theotokos. Perhaps you're right that it hadn't been raised as a serious issue yet.

My concept of the Incarnation is more straightforward. I see Jesus as showing us God. If he suffers, then in some sense God suffers. Our idea of God should start with Jesus, not with assumptions like impassibility. I think every action of his should be understood in both human and divine terms.

Does suffering imply that God changes, in some inappropriate way? I don't know, because I don't claim to understand the divine nature. The problem is that the Bible is willing to talk about him changing his mind and other things that imply change. Likely this isn't meant literally, but it doesn't appear to me that the Bible is as concerned about impassibility as classical theologians are. I've always assumed that time is different for God than for us, so that in some sense he sees all of history at once. But it seems that Scripture attributes something like experience to him, even if it doesn't hit him the same way it hits us.

I think that static descriptions of the Incarnation, which try to explain in terms of ontology, are a dead end. They may say lots of useful things, but in the end I think they run into trouble. (I should note that I'm only tentatively committed to the approach I'm taking here, for Scriptural reasons that are inappropriate for CF.)

I see Jesus as an actual human person, who was nevertheless God acting in history. Imagine an author who has a character in a novel that represents them. The actions of that character are in one sense just like any other character. The motivations are all there in the novel. Yet when you’re outside the framework of the novel you realize that the character is really the author. While this is pushing it, you can imagine the author truly experiencing what the character experiences, even though they are not actually living in the world of the novel.

Much like this, I think that Jesus, when viewed in human terms, is a normal human person. But I also think his actions are God’s actions, and looking at him we see God. But this is not because of metaphysics, but because of how God is present in him and uses him.

I think the weakness of the hypostatic union is that the philosophy on which it is based was too rigid. No one could imagine that Jesus could be a full human hypostasis, but still be united with the Logos into a single hypostasis.

At any rate, if you think of hypostasis as “entity” or “thing,” it seems obvious that how you use it depends upon viewpoint. A human being is a single thing. When looked at from that point of view, an arm is just part of a human. Yet if it’s cut off, it is clearly a thing, and surgeons view it that way anyway. Our organs are things. The molecules of which we’re made are things. But they become things on different levels. When we’re looking at chemistry, we think of molecules as the main actors. The persons or chairs or trees of which they are part are not even in the picture. Similarly, I think Jesus was a human thing when you are working on the human level, but when you understand what was going on at God’s level you see that he was actually just the human form of a single thing, the Logos.

Thus everything Jesus does can be understood on two levels, as the actions of a human, and as the actions of the Logos. You can't separate them and say some actions are from the Logos and others are from the human that is united to the Logos. If this challenges your concept of God, so be it. The point of the Incarnation is that we understand God from Christ. I admit that understanding Jesus' ignorance in this way is challenging, but if we're serious about incarnation we have to find a way.

I think you see this in Aquinas. He said in the Summa that Jesus is just like any other human. He would be a human hypostasis. There’s nothing missing that is required in a human. However if looked at as a human he isn’t complete. You can’t understand him just as a human because from the beginning he was intended as the human form of the Logos. I’m obviously paraphrasing and interpreting, and Aquinas might possibly not agree. But I think you can understand what he says that way. As far as I can see, the only reason Aquinas doesn't admit a human hypostasis is that his rules don't allow him to call something a hypostasis if it's not "complete," i.e. if there's a higher-level concept which sees it as only part of the Logos.