The OP was directed at churches in the apostolic succession, so I didn’t give my own position.
But I have a concern not so much about the results as about the process and the assumptions that underlie it. First, as Gxg notes, the politics and violence associated with the councils is very troubling. In Christology it is particularly visible. Antiochene theology provided the structure for Chalcedon. Yet the major forms of it were rejected shortly thereafter. Pretty much everyone acknowledges that the anathema against Theodore was done for political reasons. But to deal with monothelites something like it had to be restored.
If you read the documents, they do not impress me as showing a Christian tone. People they disagree with are all impious and God-haters. There was no attempt to understand the concerns of other people or see if they might have something legitimate to say, but perhaps have gone about it in the wrong way. It’s pretty clear that Nestorius was lynched because of Mariology. Christology was just an excuse. The whole thing suggests a kind of Stalinist view of Christianity: There’s a party line, and you’re dead if you don’t toe it.
There were and are certainly Christological errors, and they have consequences. But I don’t think the early church dealt with it in a Christ-like way.
So might the results be OK, even if the process was un-Christian? Perhaps, at least within a limited context. The Trinity and Incarnation as they emerged from the smoke can certainly be defended as good ways, maybe even the best way, to understand Scripture within 5th Cent thought. There have been many fine Christians guided by this. But the Stalinist approach associated with them has made the Church unwilling to recognize that those doctrines aren’t Scripture. Originally they weren’t intended to replace it, but to set limits against certain misunderstandings. Yet over time they have effectively superseded Scripture in understanding Christ and the nature of God.
Of “traditional Christians,” Reformed have probably the most concerned about this. Calvin seems to have been ambivalent about the creeds. He certainly cited them. But at times he was also opposed to using them as authorities. His concern about the Athanasian Creed is best-known, but this seems to have been part of a more general concern about requiring Christians to subscribe to specific creeds, even if what those creeds said was right.
Of course some later Reformed Christians have not shared this concern, and have added Reformed confessions to the list of things to which one must subscribe. But during the 20th Cent, Reformed Christianity has largely (with some conservative exceptions) returned to Calvin’s skepticism. It has been open to use of recent Biblical scholarship, much of which has focused on understanding Jesus in 1st Cent terms.
I close with a quotation from N T Wright’s “Jesus and the Identity of God.” Remember that Wright is actually a fairly conservative representative of current Reformed thought.
“Let me put it like this, no doubt overstating the point for the sake of emphasis. Chalcedon, I think, always smelled a bit like a confidence trick, celebrating in Tertullian-like fashion the absurdity of what is believed, and gave hostages to fortune which post-Enlightenment fortune has been using well. But the NT writers, by re-using the Jewish god-language in relation to Jesus and the Spirit manage to say everything that needs to be said, and to make it look, from one point of view at least, so natural, so obvious, so coherent with the nature of God and with the full humanity of Jesus that fortune receives no hostages at all. Ironically, the Jewish setting and meaning were either misunderstood or forgotten so soon within the early Church that the fathers struggled valiantly to express the truth, but with one hand, the biblical one, tied behind their backs. We now have crowning irony after a long tradition in which orthodox theology has been “playing away from home” expressing Christian truth in non-biblical patristic and subsequent formulations, we are now told that if we wish to go back and discover what the NT meant within its own universe of discourse—in other words, the world of Second Temple Judaism—it is we who are playing away from home. And let us not be put off by the sneer that if these meanings were what God had intended us to have they would not have been forgotten for two thousand years. Those who stand in the Reformation tradition should remember what Luther said when people tried to pull that trick on him.”
But I have a concern not so much about the results as about the process and the assumptions that underlie it. First, as Gxg notes, the politics and violence associated with the councils is very troubling. In Christology it is particularly visible. Antiochene theology provided the structure for Chalcedon. Yet the major forms of it were rejected shortly thereafter. Pretty much everyone acknowledges that the anathema against Theodore was done for political reasons. But to deal with monothelites something like it had to be restored.
If you read the documents, they do not impress me as showing a Christian tone. People they disagree with are all impious and God-haters. There was no attempt to understand the concerns of other people or see if they might have something legitimate to say, but perhaps have gone about it in the wrong way. It’s pretty clear that Nestorius was lynched because of Mariology. Christology was just an excuse. The whole thing suggests a kind of Stalinist view of Christianity: There’s a party line, and you’re dead if you don’t toe it.
There were and are certainly Christological errors, and they have consequences. But I don’t think the early church dealt with it in a Christ-like way.
So might the results be OK, even if the process was un-Christian? Perhaps, at least within a limited context. The Trinity and Incarnation as they emerged from the smoke can certainly be defended as good ways, maybe even the best way, to understand Scripture within 5th Cent thought. There have been many fine Christians guided by this. But the Stalinist approach associated with them has made the Church unwilling to recognize that those doctrines aren’t Scripture. Originally they weren’t intended to replace it, but to set limits against certain misunderstandings. Yet over time they have effectively superseded Scripture in understanding Christ and the nature of God.
Of “traditional Christians,” Reformed have probably the most concerned about this. Calvin seems to have been ambivalent about the creeds. He certainly cited them. But at times he was also opposed to using them as authorities. His concern about the Athanasian Creed is best-known, but this seems to have been part of a more general concern about requiring Christians to subscribe to specific creeds, even if what those creeds said was right.
Of course some later Reformed Christians have not shared this concern, and have added Reformed confessions to the list of things to which one must subscribe. But during the 20th Cent, Reformed Christianity has largely (with some conservative exceptions) returned to Calvin’s skepticism. It has been open to use of recent Biblical scholarship, much of which has focused on understanding Jesus in 1st Cent terms.
I close with a quotation from N T Wright’s “Jesus and the Identity of God.” Remember that Wright is actually a fairly conservative representative of current Reformed thought.
“Let me put it like this, no doubt overstating the point for the sake of emphasis. Chalcedon, I think, always smelled a bit like a confidence trick, celebrating in Tertullian-like fashion the absurdity of what is believed, and gave hostages to fortune which post-Enlightenment fortune has been using well. But the NT writers, by re-using the Jewish god-language in relation to Jesus and the Spirit manage to say everything that needs to be said, and to make it look, from one point of view at least, so natural, so obvious, so coherent with the nature of God and with the full humanity of Jesus that fortune receives no hostages at all. Ironically, the Jewish setting and meaning were either misunderstood or forgotten so soon within the early Church that the fathers struggled valiantly to express the truth, but with one hand, the biblical one, tied behind their backs. We now have crowning irony after a long tradition in which orthodox theology has been “playing away from home” expressing Christian truth in non-biblical patristic and subsequent formulations, we are now told that if we wish to go back and discover what the NT meant within its own universe of discourse—in other words, the world of Second Temple Judaism—it is we who are playing away from home. And let us not be put off by the sneer that if these meanings were what God had intended us to have they would not have been forgotten for two thousand years. Those who stand in the Reformation tradition should remember what Luther said when people tried to pull that trick on him.”
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