I have written quite a bit on the person of Jesus Christ, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, for a start. In the series that I wrote on the subject last Fall, my concern was to do what I called “Christography,” that is, to trace the development of thinking about Jesus from his own lifetime down to the present, under the headings of the “historical,” “kerygmatic,” “dogmatic,” and “cosmopolitan” Jesus. At each stage, I attempted to reason through the Christological implications of the content and historical contexts of the various stages of Jesus’s reception, but I attempted no grand synthesis in the aftermath. In this post, my hope is to engage in a somewhat more focused manner on the kerygmatic outline of Jesus as Messiah, Son of God, and Lord, and how it feeds to some degree the disputes inherent in the dogmatic portraiture of Jesus, not just as consubstantial with God the Father, but as simultaneously consubstantial with us.
It needs to be clear from the outset that, just as the Nicene conception of the Trinity has no obvious basis in the New Testament or the earlier Christian Fathers in its full form as a theology of one divine ousia that is concretized in three hypostatic modes of existence (tropoi hyparxeos) as Father, Son, and Spirit, so, too, no single Christology is at play in either the New Testament or the early patristic literature that lends itself to a uniform theory of Jesus’s divinity or his humanity. If all one had was, for example, the undisputed letters of Paul, then one would get a Christology that went something like this: Jesus was once in the form of a god and lowered himself to human existence, humiliating suffering, and death, on the grounds of which God super-exalted him and honored him with the theonym Kyrios or Yhwh (Phil 2:6-11); Jesus is, in some way, God’s agent in creation and consummation (1 Cor 8:4), the last Adam (15:45; cf. Rom 5:15ff), the “man from heaven” (15:47), and the one in whom the glory of God is shown (2 Cor 4:6; compare with 1 Cor 11:3-16, a contentious pericope for issues of sex and gender, but also one where Paul connects the concept of “glory” to that of “image,” which suggests perhaps that Jesus as God’s glory also connotes Jesus as the one in God’s image). The crucified Jesus is God’s power and wisdom, that is, the manifestation of his creative power in the world (1 Cor 1:18-2:16). Jesus was, especially, designated messianic Son of God by the divine Spirit in anticipation of the eschatological resurrection of the dead (Rom 1:1-4), which will concur together with his eschatological subjugation of errant gods and human powers (1 Cor 15:20-28). It is possible, though uncertain, that Paul thinks of Jesus as the Son of Man from Daniel 7:9-14 and from Parables of Enoch; at least, Paul knows of a logion attributed to Jesus himself that evokes the imagery of Daniel in connection to the parousia (1 Thess 4:13-18). Paul, at most, thinks of Jesus as a particularly exalted divine being—perhaps the Angel of Yhwh from the Hebrew Bible (he seems to think Christ was present in the Torah with the Israelites in the wilderness; 1 Cor 10:1-4), but certainly the Yhwh mentioned in different biblical texts that Paul quotes in reference to Christ—who temporarily humbled himself and was exalted once more to the highest station in the universe, as viceroy to God the Father and instrument of the realization of God’s Kingdom in the universe.
If one had only the Gospel of Mark, which most scholars agree was probably the first to be composed, one’s Christology would be fairly different. First, one would have a detailed narrative of a portion of Jesus’s life, his earthly ministry, primarily centered in Galilee and climaxing in Jerusalem. One would have no information about Jesus’s conception, birth, or early life, meeting him as an adult going to be baptized by John the Baptist in the wilderness, at which point the divine Spirit descended upon him (Mk 1:11). One would observe that Jesus is largely misunderstood other than by divine beings, including demons: God knows that Jesus is God’s son (1:11; 9:7), demons know that Jesus is God’s son (3:11; 5:17), and also call him God’s “holy one” (1:24), and a gentile centurion knows that Jesus was God’s son (15:39). The closest anyone else comes to guessing is when the high priest asks Jesus if he is God’s son (14:61), though this is clearly not a confession of faith. Jesus only potentially calls himself God’s son in Mark on two occasions: once perhaps in the Olivet Discourse (13:32; but does he mean to say “Son [of Man]” here?) and once in an affirmative answer to the high priest (14:62). Otherwise, Jesus consistently calls himself the Son of Man (2:10, 28; 8:31, 38; 9:9, 12, 31; 10:33, 45; 13:26; 14:21, 41; and 14:62, where Jesus otherwise says yes in response to the high priest’s question if he is the son of God). Now, as scholars have argued at length, “Son of Man”—the angelic figure from Daniel 7:9-14 and, further back, from the Baal Cycle at Ugarit who ascends to the Ancient of Days, the patriarchal creator god, on a cloud to receive a universal and eternal kingdom over the other gods and the nations after the defeat of cosmic monsters from the sea—is something like a perionym for terms like “son of God” and “messiah” in Ancient Jewish texts. That is, it floats alongside the same conceptual vocabulary, such that, in Mark, when Jesus calls himself Son of Man, it is in fact a messianic title. But it is noteworthy that when Jesus’s disciples call him “messiah,” he tells them to shut up (8:27-30), and despite the fact that Jesus is called “son of David” (10:48) and otherwise connected to David (11:1-11), he himself is lukewarm about the messianic connection to David and specifically the title, “son of David” (12:35-37). Jesus does not go around preaching that he is the messiah or the son of God and when people begin to get the picture, he shuts them down or actively seeks to confuse them; this is Wrede’s so-called “Messianic Secret,” which, if attributable to the historical Jesus, implies either that the historical Jesus did not think he was the messiah or, more likely, that the historical Jesus was enough of a tactician to realize that open proclamation of himself as king would lead to immediate retribution from the Romans. Instead, Jesus preached about the Kingdom of God in parables, took on the role of a prophet (6:4, 15; 8:28), and his only “anointing” as messiah comes, unexpectedly, at the hands of a woman who is anointing him for burial (14:3-9). So, if all someone had was Mark, they would construct a Christology that looked very much like the following: Jesus was a man baptized by John and infused with God’s spirit, designated God’s son, who performed exorcisms, healings, and miracles, taught about God’s Kingdom in parables, and whose identity as messiah and son of God was connected not to things like kingly domination, which Jesus rejects in favor of service, martyrdom, and ransom (10:42-45). One would also lack anything more than an angelic proclamation of Jesus’s resurrection to the women, since Mark almost certainly ended, per scholarly consensus, in 16:8, with the women saying nothing to anyone because they were afraid. That is to say: no resurrection appearances; no worship or palpitation of the risen body of Jesus; no walking to Emmaus or eating breakfast by the sea. Instead, a proclamation that Jesus was alive and a commission to go and tell. A Markan Christology would be one that understands Jesus as a Messianic Prophet and Servant Messiah, whose role is as herald, teacher, healer, and martyr, not as king in the ordinary sense of kingship. When Jesus does come in glory as the Son of Man per the Markan Olivet Discourse, it will be to bring cosmic destruction and gather the saints together for the Kingdom (13:24-27).
If one had only Matthew’s Gospel, probably the first written after Mark, which most scholars think uses Mark and a second source that it shares with Luke, the so-called Q Document (the so-called Two Source Hypothesis, which remains the dominant hypothetical explanation in the academy, though there are resurgent alternatives), one would have slightly more. One would have a genealogy of Jesus (Matt 1:1-17), a story of Jesus’s miraculous conception, birth, and infancy (1:18-2:23), various collections of Jesus’s teachings not found in Mark (Matt 5-7; 10; 13; 18; 23-25), some corrections to Mark (such as who was high priest when David ate the holy bread; compare Matt 12:1-8 to Mk 2:23-28, and see that the former drops the erroneous allusion of the latter), and a more extensive account of the resurrection (Matt 28). A Matthean Christology, as most scholars acknowledge, would be one that emphasized Jesus’s connections to Moses and David. As the New Moses, Jesus is the definitive Lawgiver for Israel, and especially for Jews who survived the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE and lived in Galilee and lower Syria, where and when Matthew was probably written, as opposed to the Pharisees, who were Matthew’s main competition for interpreting the meaning of Judaism for Jews in his sphere (though Matthew’s Jesus is otherwise deferential to the Pharisees in some respects, commanding his followers to acknowledge their legitimate succession to Moses, too, and obey their rulings; 21:1-3). As the New David, Jesus is the eschatological Son of Man who will judge and reign over a renewed Israel and a renewed cosmos in the coming age (25:31-46; 19:28), in something of an expansion on the Markan eschatology. Mark’s messianic Servant is still there in Matthew, but is sublimated to the prophetic and royal roles that Matthew underlines.
The Lukan Jesus, like the Matthean Jesus, is conceived and empowered by God’s spirit (Lk 1:35), is designated God’s anointed prophet (4:18-19), and is connected to Davidic oracles of a future messianic kingdom (1:32-33, 69-71, etc.). But unlike Matthew, Luke’s Jesus is patterned less on Moses than on the prophetic careers of Elijah and Elisha (e.g., 4:24-30); and Jesus’s eschatological language is, by comparison to that in Mark and Matthew, softened to make room for an indefinite period of apostolic mission to Jews and non-Jews inaugurated by Jesus’s ascension and the gift of the divine spirit at Pentecost (Lk 24; Acts 1-2). Luke’s Jesus is also primarily a prophetic messiah, but in the mold of a prophet commissioned to call Israel to repent especially of abuses against the poor in light of the Kingdom, whose advent is less important than its present realization through the adoption of Jesus’s teachings. To be clear, Luke-Acts clearly has a sense of Jesus’s future return and fulfillment of traditional messianic expectations of Jewish scripture; but Luke-Acts also seems written from a much later vantage, when multiple generations expecting Jesus’s imminent return had been disappointed, and when the apostolic mission had largely cooled among Jewish communities.
Now, Mark, Matthew, and Luke all share a common scene in their Gospels of Jesus’s Transfiguration (Matt 17:1-8; Mk 9:2-8; Lk 9:28-36), in which he shines with divine light, is joined by the heavenly, deified Moses and Elijah, and is designated God’s Son a second time. This glorification of Jesus is, in narrative, treated as the coming of the Kingdom in power in the lifetime of his disciples (Mk 9:1; Matt 16:28; Lk 9:27). In all three, the Transfiguration is also keyed to the crucifixion, the point appears to be that Jesus is, like Moses and Elijah, a paradigmatic prophet of Israel who will suffer and be vindicated by God with divine life. If all one had was the Synoptic tradition, that is, one would get quite a bit of Paul’s Christology, but not all of it—particularly not much in the way of a sense of Jesus’s preexistence as a divine being alongside God the Father.
John’s Gospel shares much with Paul and the Synoptics: while John shows an “apparent paucity of Davidic material” and “sustained and systematic interest in Moses,” leading to an older consensus that John does not understand Jesus in Davidic terms directly, the argument can be made that John sees Jesus through the cipher of the Second Temple outline of David.1 In other words, Jesus’s Davidic connections are explicilty questioned (Jn 7:41-42); by contrast, Jesus is positively described as prophetic messiah in the style of Moses on multiple occasions (1:17, 21, 25, 45; 3:14; 5:45-46; 6:14, 32; 7:19, 22-23, 40; 8:5; 9:28-29), Jesus as messianic Son of Man (1:51; 3:13-14; 5:27; 6:27, 53, 62; 8:28; 9:35; 12:23, 34; 13:31). But John’s Jesus is also significantly different in other ways. For one thing, somewhat like Paul but unlike the Synoptics, John identifies Jesus as God’s Logos, the secondary divine principle in and through whom God created the world, who was made flesh (Jn 1:1-14); but curiously for the reader of Matthew and Luke, John has no story of Jesus’s miraculous conception, birth, and infancy, and the direct implication of his Gospel is that the Logos was enfleshed in Jesus when the Spirit descended on him at his baptism (or its equivalent, since John does not directly depict the baptism and may wish to distance Jesus from an implication of dependence on the Baptist, whose followers are more prominent in John; 1:29-34). And, even more curiously, this is so while John competes with Luke as the Gospel in which Mary’s role is most significant (e.g., 2:1-12)!
One more text to illustrate the point. In the Johannine Apocalypse, Jesus is the eschatological Son of Man (Rev 1:13; 14:14), the heavenly high priest and Davidic messiah (1:12-14; 5:5), and the one charged by God with vindicating righteous sufferers and punishing the wicked with destruction in the apocalyptic tribulation. But notably absent from this picture is the idea that Jesus is, as Servant of God, also the Servant of anyone else, whose mission is to extend mercy, salvation, and redemption.2 Instead, Jesus is the instrument of God’s wrath against the world. Unlike the Gospel of John, where Jesus is God’s Son sent because of God’s love for the kosmos to save it (famously in Jn 3:16), in Revelation, Jesus is sent to bring gratuitous violence to the world in punishment for its sins. It is unlikely that early readers of John’s Apocalypse had no other literature of the Movement, but hypothetically, if all one had were Revelation, one would have a very different Christology than the one can derive from the Gospels individually or collectively. What’s more, consider what Revelation does not talk about: a virginal conception or birth (we do get a birth scene, but no indication the woman is a virgin; Rev 12:1-6); Jesus’s baptism; no resurrection scenes; and so on.
So, that’s just the New Testament: the anthology embraces diverse takes on Jesus’s divinity, his humanity, and the character of his messianic identity, role, and activity across the forty to seventy years in which the texts were probably being composed. So one can understand why we find such different takes on Jesus in early Christian literature, both that deemed “orthodox” and “heterodox” by later Christians. Just as the New Testament itself reflects revised takes on Jesus from his lifetime in the years prior to and after the First Jewish-Roman War (66-74 CE), so Early Christian theological literature represents still newer contexts of reception of Jesus’s significance. For one thing, two more wars—the Kitos War (115-117 CE) and the Second Jewish-Roman War or Bar Kokhba Revolt (132-136 CE)—had been fought, resulting in genocidal decimation of Jewish communities in Syria-Palestine and changed relations for many Jews in the Hellenic Diaspora. Descendants of first-century Christian groups in the second century began to define themselves in contradistinction to Judaism. Philosophically, the second century saw the decline of Hellenistic and Imperial Stoicism in popularity in favor of a dogmatic Platonism that scholars often identify as “Middle Platonism”: not the Academic Skepticism of the Hellenistic period, and not quite the full system of Plotinus or his successors. When Christian writers developed theoretical understandings of Jesus in this climate, they did so by appeals to Jewish scripture constructed to exclude ongoing Jewish interpretations and by appeals to dominant models of metaphysics and cosmology in Platonist thought. So, angelomorphic Christologies of Jesus as the principal angel, the Angel of Yhwh and a variety of other divine bodies of Yhwh in the Hebrew Bible, prevailed, as did Christologies of Jesus as the Logos, while lower Christologies (some of them found in the New Testament itself) generally declined. Among gnostic Christians, the apocalyptic messianism of Paul and John, separated from their original Jewish milieu, in particular grounded a Christology of Jesus as hypercosmic savior and dispenser of world-conquering wisdom that permitted graduation from the pedagogy of the inferior craftsman-god of the material universe, sometimes understood as an evil prison warden. Systematicians like Irenaeus and Origen sought to unify scripturally based Christologies with philosophical ones in ways that could satisfy both Christians and non-Christians as to the relevance and coherence of Christian belief. But for virtually all of these thinkers, Jesus, even at his most divine, was still subordinate to God the Father, still a secondary or somehow lesser deity than Deity itself, the first emanation but also therefore the first diminution of God’s purest essence. In an older philosophical cosmology where there was no absolute divide between Creator and creature, this posited no serious problem for Christians as regards Christ’s soteriological work: Christ was still capable of saving or deifying human beings by the power of the Spirit in the liturgical and ascetical life even if he was not fully God given that divinity was a spectrum of qualities rather than an impermeable category. In the newer philosophical climate of the late third and fourth centuries, however, when Christians generally affirmed creatio ex nihilo (whether as hard differentiation of Creator and creature or as creatio ex Deo varied from author to author), Christ’s work as co-creator, authoritative revealer of the Father and teacher of his will, and savior of the human being by deification all required that what-it-is-to-be God should be fully shared by Christ, albeit in a different mode, that of generation rather than the ungenerated abyss of Being that the Father is. In the logic of the Nicene Fathers, this way of thinking of the divine nature, as embracing both an ungenerated and a generated mode, provided the very possibility of creation itself, since the immutable, ungenerated God of the Arians both would have to have become at a certain point both Creator and Father of Jesus Christ but would not have actually been able to do so without destroying his own essence; likewise, if Christ were simply the first, highest, and most exalted creature, then Christ would be ultimately just as ignorant about who and what God is as we are, and we could not trust the scriptural revelation of God as Father of Christ anyway.3
Arians did not disappear after the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople I, but the majority of the Christian world in and around the Mediterranean, in North and East Africa, in Southwest, Central, South, and East Asia, was thereafter Nicene. So if the first rule to keep in mind for thinking about Christ is that the scriptural character of Jesus is very diverse in the texts of the New Testament and the Early Fathers, the second rule to keep in mind is that the entirety of the Christological Controversy that erupted in the fifth and sixth centuries in the Christian East is happening on Nicene terms. Rightly or wrongly, Nicaea won the argument with the Arians, and the vast majority of Christians throughout history since the fourth century have thought of Jesus as being what-it-is-to-be God with respect to his divinity, a position that one can argue from the New Testament and the earlier Fathers if one applies a different lens to them than that appropriate to their original context, but which is nowhere exactly represented in any of the texts themselves (not even the particularly high Christologies of the likes of Paul and John). But once one has agreed to see Jesus as consubstantial with God the Father, one now has to address another topic that is also left mostly unresolved by the New Testament: namely, the status and character of Jesus’s humanity, and its relationship to his divinity.
We are accustomed to thinking of the idea that Jesus may not have been fully human, or at least that his humanity may have been of such a specialized sort as to be of dubious creaturehood, as a product of gnostic misreading of the earlier literature in the second and third centuries. What we miss when we take this attitude is just how ambivalent Jesus’s humanity can be in the New Testament itself, and how, even when the texts affirm his humanity, they often do so in ways that run afoul of later anthropological definitions espoused by the Christian Tradition. So, for example, Paul calls Jesus the “man from heaven,” as we noted above; but he also thinks that Jesus is now pure pneuma, that his corpse and soul have been transmuted into the divine fire of spirit, and that this is also what will happen to followers of Jesus at his parousia (1 Cor 15:42-54). And so one wonders, too, elsewhere in the Pauline corpus, whether Paul doesn’t mean it when he speaks of Jesus’s kenosis as his adoption of a human “form,” “likeness,” and “appearance,” but never a human “nature”: not quite docetism, but also not quite a full incarnational theology like one finds in Athanasius, Nazianzen, or Nyssen, still less in Maximus the Confessor. This is also true in John. A theme runs through John of the duality between pneuma and sarx, spirit and flesh, that heavily qualifies the emphasis we often put on the famous line of John 1:14, that the Logos “became flesh and pitched his tent among us.” That image, to begin with, is one of a temporary dwelling; but consider that nearly everywhere else flesh is an antithesis to the pneuma that is otherwise connected to the Logos and his speech. Just before the verse describing the Logos’s incarnation, we are told that “all who received him, who believedi n his name, eh gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God” (Jn 1:13). We are told that “[w]hat is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit [or spirit] is spirit” (3:6), with Jesus’s preference between the two obvious. Even in Jesus’s famous “bread of life” discourse in this Gospel, often interpreted eucharistically,4 in which he frequently insists that his followers eat his flesh and drink his blood to have life (6:51-56), Jesus concludes the Gospel by reminding that “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (6:63). Jesus condemns his interlocutors because they judge according to the flesh (8:15). Jesus says in his high priestly prayer to God that God has given him “authority over all flesh” (17:2). This is not the time or the place—perhaps in another post—but in brief, a web of connections exist that connect pneuma to themes like life, light, and glory in John, and flesh to themes like darkness, death, and the kosmos, such that Jesus’s general insistence in John 13-17 that he is returning to the Father suggests strongly that he will leave flesh behind. This is often denied of John’s Christology, since Jesus is after all seen alive again and shows Thomas his healing wound as evidence that he is alive (20:26-29). But notably, Thomas doesn’t actually do it in the Gospel; and Jesus himself has insisted that in his fleshy resurrected appearances he has not yet returned to the Father (20:17).
So just as the exact character of Jesus’s divinity is in question in the New Testament, so too his humanity. When we turn then to the Christological Controversy and we acknowledge the spectrum of language and views that it encompasses—competing, overlapping, and incommensurate definitions of hypostasis, prosopon, and qnome, all being coined in real time;—we can understand the source of the confusion. No single tradition about the nature of Jesus’s divinity or humanity had preexisted everywhere with universal consent, and the vicious polemic was a contest less about the past than about the present and the future, and less about the purity of abstract dogma and more about the patronage and prestige of individual theological and catechetical schools in places like Alexandria, Antioch, Edessa, and Nisibis, and the episcopal sees they supplied with bishops, priests, and monks (domestic in Alexandria, Constantinople for the Syrian cities). The patristic habit of reducing someone else’s opinion to the most easily dismissed absurdity, or their religion to a sanctimonious mask of hedonism—learned from the rhetorical font of Greco-Roman oratory, to be fair—is nowhere on greater display than in the debates that surged throughout the Middle Ages between East Syrian “Nestorian” Christians of the Church of the East, West Syrian “Jacobites” or Miaphysites, and Chalcedonians, both Syriac (Maronite and Melkite) and Greek-speaking, and later, too, Latin Catholic Crusaders.5
What is the issue, exactly? I want to give ample platform first the Syrian tradition, because it is often given short shrift in Western histories of the Controversy which are anxious to exonerate the Chalcedonians and, perhaps, the Miaphysites as well. In reality, Chalcedon was an imperfect balance of the very Alexandrian Council of Ephesus with an affirmation of Antiochian sentiments. Theodore’s argument as preserved in Greek and Latin fragments conveyed by his adversaries seems to have revolved around the logical differences between ousia or physis, hypostasis, and prosopon. In Book II of his now lost On the Incarnation, Theodore quotes Psalm 8:5, “What is a human being that You are mindful of him?”, in reference to Jesus per Hebrews 2:9, which predicates of him the rest of the line, that Jesus is “[t]he one whom we see who has been made a little less than the angels.” Theodore explains: “Jesus is a human being like all human beings, differing in no way from those sharing his nature, other than that [God] has graced him. But the grace given to him does not change his nature. Then, after incurring death, ‘God gave him a name above every name’ [Philippians 2:9]. God is the one giving, and the one given [this grace] is Jesus Christ, the first fruits of those who will rise. For he is ‘the firstborn of the dead’ [Colossians 1:18]. He has ascended, sits at the right hand of God, and is over all. What an all-surpassing grace has been given to Jesus—a grace that transcends every nature! Although he has the same nature as my own, he has been shown to be above the heavens, sitting at the right hand of the Father.”
Theodore, in other words, begins from the mystery of Jesus’s glorified and deified humanity, as the patient of divine grace. In the fragments that survive from Book V, Theodore adds: “God the Word is one by nature and the other is admitted to have been assumed (whatever this may mean). Yet this latter is said to be simultaneously (Latin persona = Greek prosopon) whose [two] natures are in no way confused, but [are one] because of the assumed one’s union with the assuming one.” How does the Father bestow on the man Jesus the transcendent graces Theodore describes? Through God the Word (Theodore is, again, Nicene) assuming the human Jesus, whose disparity requires some logic of unity: “if one willingly grants that the latter is other than the former by nature, it is evident that the one assumed is not equal to the one assuming. However, each will be clearly found to be the same one in a prosopic union. Therefore one has to make distinctions in regard to Christ without there being any contradiction here. For these [distinctions] closely conform to what the divine scriptures [state]. So the natures are not to be confused, nor the person to be perversely divided.”6 Theodore has a careful elucidation of the character of this “prosopic union”: “the way the natures relate to one another must stay unconfused and the person must be acknowledged as undivided. On one hand, the natures exist by what is proper to [each], with the assumed one being distinguished from [his] assumer. Yet, on the other hand, [they are undivided] in their prosopic union. For they are said to be as one because the natures of the assumer and the assumed are [each] considered as belonging to their [natures’] whole [union]. And if I may say so, we call God the Word by the name of Son and at the same time also affirm [the same] of the assumed nature on account of his union to the [Word].”
How is this not simple Christological dualism? “[I]f we learn how the indwelling takes place,” he says in the fragments of Book VII, “we will know both its mode and its modal difference. Some declare that the indwelling has occurred in a substantial way and others [that it has occurred] in an operational way.” (In what follows, read “substantial” as “hypostatic.”) Theodore first argues: “let us agree: does [the Word] dwell in all or not? But it is evident: not in all. For God has promised that his [indwelling] comes as a special relationship to the saints, or, generally speaking, to those whom he wants set apart for himself….if he does not dwell in all—and clearly I am speaking here not only of things but also of human beings—there needs to be some special reason for his indwelling, whereby he is present only to those in whom he said he would dwell. To say, therefore, that God dwells [in Christ’s humanity] in a substantial way is wrong,” because “one would have to restrict his substance to only those in whom he said he would dwell, and thereby being distant from all others—which is absurd to say about an infinite nature that is present everywhere and limited by nothing.” Notice the qualification offered by Theodore’s appeal to God’s infinite nature: “if someone states that God is present everywhere, by reason of his substance, he [must] also attribute his indwelling to all, not merely to humans but also to irrational and inanimate beings, [that is,] if we maintain that he dwells by means of his substance. Both of these statements are clearly false.”
The point of Theodore’s objection to the hypostatic union is that if God the Word’s indwelling of the humanity of Christ were something undertaken with respect to the divine essence which the Word hypostatizes, and the locus of union were therefore in the hypostasis, there would be nothing to especially differentiate the manner in which God the Word is present in the human Jesus from the manner in which God the Word is present in everything else with which the Word is coextensive. What about activity (surely energeia in Theodore’s Greek)? But this presents the same problem. The indwelling has nothing specialized about it if it is an operational union since “God foresees all things and governs all things and actus upon everything in an appropriate and correct way that accords in a consistent way with [each nature] by means of those serving as his agents in the universe,” and “since he endows all things with the power for each to be itself and to work according to its own nature, we [can] say that he does dwell in all things.” So, Theodore reasons, “[we can] clearly state that it is in neither a substantial nor operational way that God has effected these kinds of indwelling. What, then, is left? What reason can we offer that seems to preserve what is special about these [indwellings]?” How to account for the unity of Christ given the duality of divinity and humanity?
This is the argument of Margaret Daly-Denton, David in the Fourth Gospel: The Johannine Reception of the Psalms, AGJU 47 (Leiden: Brill, 2000); see also Joel Willitts, David’s Sublation of Moses: A Davidic Explanation for the Mosaic Christology of the Fourth Gospel,” 203-226 in Reading the Gospel of John’s Christology as Jewish Messianism: Royal, Prophetic, and Divine Messiahs, ed. Benjamin E. Reynolds and Gabriele Boccaccini, AGJU 106 (Leiden: Brill, 2018).
This is a point clearly and devastatingly made by Bart Ehrman in his recent Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says About the End (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2023).
See Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine (Grand Rapids: BakerAcademic, 2011) for an overview of the content and contexts of the debates.
But this is notably disputed: see Meredith J.C. Warren, My Flesh is Meat Indeed: A Nonsacramental Reading of John 6:51-58 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), which argues that the point of the discourse is Jesus’s own establishment of his heroic sacrificial meal. She provides a useful summary of interpretation here.
The best available introduction is Frances M. Young and Andrew Teal, From Nicaea to Chalcedon: A Guide to the Literature and its Background, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012).
I have elected to provide the translation in Michael Philip Penn, Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, Christine Shepardson, and Charles M. Stang, eds., Invitation to Syriac Christianity: An Anthology (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2022), 209-216.
Ooo! How to think about Christ article...let's see here. Yup, still confused.
Damn, what a cliffhanger!