Your words are very kind and reveal a beautiful spirit. You didn't need to apologize, no offense taken
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Thank you for the kind words! I think we are going to have a great relationship on Christian Forums!
I admit having a problem with the concept of "God's Immutability" in the context of the incarnation. I don't see my inability to uphold this belief affecting the doctrines of hypostatic union and Theopaschitism.
Ok, I think I see the source of how you got confused here, and you have nearly everything right; depending on how good your parish is, I could probably tell you to wait for Trinity Sunday and ask your vicar to break it down, but I might as well do it for you now, and then you can simply verify what I say with your vicar. If your parish has an extremely, umm, shall we say, modernist, vicar, they might say I am being doctrinaire and exclusivist, but usually the ACC seems pretty Christologically focused, and you can also cross-check my Christology with other Anglican members like
@Philip_B
So Divine Immutability is a challenging context; how did Christ become incarnate without God changing? The way to understand this is through the principle of communicatio idiomatum and divine extra-temporality; and we get Divine Immutability directly from Scripture; it is a Biblical doctrine, upheld by the ancient church and Anglicanism, and it is logical, so it rests comfortably on the Anglican tripod of Scripture, Tradition, and Reason. The easiest way to explore it in depth is to use Apophatic theology after the fashion of the Eastern Orthodox church, but we don’t need to go there yet.
Before we get to the subject of Divine Immutability, I first want to write a reply to you on Christology, and then rest my hands, because I have arthritis coming on.
For the moment, I want you to read this hymn, which is used by the Chalcedonian Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholics, in addition to the Oriental Orthodox churches (specifically, the Syriac and Armenian churches during every liturgy, and the Coptic Orthodox during Holy Week).
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 hymn, aside from being very beautiful, is extremely useful as a creedal hymn. I have heard somewhere, perhaps in a post on this forum, that this creed precludes Christological error; it is not that much of a silver bullet unfortunately, because Justinian liked it (although did not write it) and he subscribed to apthartodocetism, and not Theopaschitism. I also don’t see it precluding Monothelitism.
However, it does address all Fifth Century Christological errors, including errors like Arianism, Adoptionism and Apollinarianism inherited from the Fourth Century, and the pressing new Fifth Century heresies of actual Monophysitism and Nestorianism.
(Perhaps Immutability was never explained to me in a way that made sense or perhaps it is sufficient to uphold that the Son of God himself did not change when He took flesh, after all, God is not static He has feelings and thoughts, etc.)
I doubt immutability was properly explained to you; I would propose that the or you put in bold in the preceding sentence should read “and.” As the hymn Ho Monogenes says, the Son of God did not change when He took flesh, and God, while being immutable, is not static, but dynamic. There is one particularly good book that touches on issues like this from an Eastern Orthodox perspective but is also extremely popular among Anglicans,
The Orthodox Way, by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, which is not to be confused with his eponymous profile of
The Orthodox Church.
The Son of God was born / begotten of God the Father. It is quite orthodox to talk of the double births of the Son of God. Because Jesus the God-man is one hypostasis he was born only after the incarnation. This is a matter of semantics and has no theological implications, but I think my expression is more precise.
I'm not sure how this relates to whether the person JESUS, whom people saw, talked with, and touched was born of Mary or was born in eternity?
So this is where we have to clarify things. The Only Begotten Son of God is begotten of the Father before all Ages (remember, since space is created by God, time also is created by God; this ancient theological belief understood even by the Greeks and Romans has been reinforced by Einsteinian relativity; spacetime is created). By the way I should dryly observe that is probably the only time you will hear me mention physics and theology in the same sentence; I absolutely loathe it when people who have no understanding of particle physics or quantum mechanics attempt to use quantum mechanical concepts in the context of mystical theology, something that the greatly tormented particle phycisists of the world refer to as Quantum Woo. Deepak Chopra and Gwyneth Paltrow are among prominent offenders in terms of the dangerous production, trafficking and distribution of Quantum Woo, a destructive force ruining communities across North America.
So, we don’t really need to think about the time between God the Father having begotten our Lord, and His incarnation, because it is irrelevant; there never was a time when He was not and by Him all things were made, so, that takes us to the Annunciation and the Nativity.
Did Jesus Christ exist before He was born, or more properly conceived, as we commemorate on December 25th at Christmas and March 25th on the Feast of the Annunciation? Yes, because Jesus Christ and the Word of God are not two people in hypostatic union, but one person. The hypostatic union is between the human nature and the divine nature. The divine nature is eternal, the human nature, which Jesus put on in order to save us, by becoming incarnate through His birth in the womb of the Virgin Mary, is created, but Jesus Christ is not created; He assumed our mortality so that we could assume His immortality; He assumed our imperfection so we could assume His perfection; through faith, we are granted these things with the promise of resurrection, as we look forward to incorruptibility in the world to come.
But to be clear, Jesus Christ, though he existed before all ages, was born of the Virgin Mary. This is why we call her Theotokos, or The Mother of God. She did not give birth to God in the heavens before all time; our Lord was begotten of the father in eternity, just as the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father in eternity. Rather, Mary, the Theotokos, gave birth to God in a manger, just as God would die on the cross and be buried in a tomb, the stone of which He would roll back on the first day, having risen from the dead, trampling down death by death. Which is to say, through communicatio idiomatum, the communication of properties of the human nature to the divine nature and from the divine nature to the human nature through the hypostatic union. But it was these two natures, divine and human, which were united in one hypostasis; there was only ever one person, who we know as Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son and Word of God. And He did exist before He was born as a human or even conceived by the Spirit, for he was begotten of the Father before all ages, although it is to a large extent pointless to talk about “the pre incarnate Christ” because for an eternal being, according to His divinity that period would be meaningless. And in being born of the Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ our God did not change; he was and is the only begotten son and word of God, but He did assume our mutable nature.
There is what might seem a paradox here, but this is really the fundamental mystery of the incarnation: that without change, the Creator put on Creation so that he could save His Created, because of His infinite love for us.
Albert Camus wrote, "all the misfortunes of mankind came from not stating things in clear terms."
This is definitely the case with some Christological errors; in particular, the schism between the Oriental Orthodox and the Chalcedonians would never have happened, except for a confusion resulting from the use in the Tome of Leo of terminology which confused some bishops and seemed close to what Nestorius had taught, and furthermore, Nestorius himself, being the evil man that he was, tried to exploit the controversy by claiming the Council of Chalcedon was teaching exactly what he had fought for before being deposed at Ephesus. Which is completely false, because what Nestorius had fought for was a ban on the word Theotokos; the Christological error that infuriated St. Cyril and caused Nestorius to be deposed was one Nestorius made in order to justify his opposition to Theotokos, which made no sense otherwise. The other problem was that St. Cyril himself explained the Incarnation using miaphysite terminology, and so this apparent contradiction caused the Chalcedonian Schism. There was also a real Monophysite, but he had lied to Dioscorus, and Dioscorus had anathematized him by the time of the council.
This schism, amazingly, is now behind us, because the three Oriental Orthodox churches with close Eastern Orthodox neighbors have gotten very close to each other, in terms of ecumenical respect and appreciation in the case of Russian and Armenian Orthodoxy; in the case of the Syriac and Coptic Orthodox churches, there now exists limited intercommunion with the Antiochian Orthodox Church in the case of the former and something similar facilitating marriages between Copts and Alexandrian Greeks in the case of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria. So perhaps that might put you more at ease concerning Miaphysite Christology. If not, there is a really good book on the subject by Fr. Peter Farrington, called
Orthodox Christology, which you may find interesting.
At any rate, I do hope this post has been edifying and enjoyable for you to read, and that you have a blessed weekend!
