The divide between the Eastern and Western church rests upon two very different conceptions of Christology, cosmology, God, predestination, and salvation. Where the West would divide the Logos from the person of Jesus, the East has a long tradition of identifying Jesus directly with the Logos. Where the East has (mostly) consistently identified Christ’s suffering and death as divine suffering and death, the West has tended to mitigate through two natures the suffering and death so that it is only the human Jesus and not the divine Logos or divine Son of God who suffers. This has resulted in two very different pictures of God’s relation to creation and the nature of salvation (with the West focused on legal theory and the East focused on deliverance and healing). While in the name of ecumenism, it might do well to downplay this difference, the history of the difference is one of being glossed over until discussion has broken down and two very different Christianities have resulted.
The Lutheran theologian who devoted most of his life to recovering the unique sensibility of the East may be best qualified to tell this story. In Robert Jenson’s telling, the early creeds and councils did not so much resolve controversy as temporarily contain it through compromises which would ultimately end in schism. Even the power of the emperor, backing the impetus of the councils to reach a unified understanding (and the force of excommunication), did not contain the controversy and contradiction. It was not just Arianism, but even within the parameters of the creeds two irreconcilable positions, surrounding the issue giving rise to Arianism, survived. In the broadest terms, in one understanding the gospel tells of work done by a God antecedently and otherwise determined and in the other the gospel itself determines who and what God is.[1] The starkness of these two alternatives was mediated through a series of secondary issues such as the role of Mary (Theotokos?), the nature of the Logos, the nature of Christ as Son, distinctions within the Trinity, but what was at stake was the degree to which the story of Jesus of Nazareth could be identified with the story of God.
The identification of Jesus of Nazareth with God, certainly did not fit the philosophical understanding of God’s impassibility. Subordinationism was the initial response for those committed to a Greek understanding but Nicaea accentuates the dissonance in identifying “one who underwent gestation, birth, growth, a human career, rejection, torture and execution as ‘true God.’”[2] Subordinationism had said Jesus was less than God and had thus relieved the strain, as these things were assigned to one less than God. Nicaea forced a new expression of the same problem.
The Alexandrian school of Christology acknowledged the dissonance in a position Jenson summarizes as: “We have no idea how the Son, who is true— and therefore of course impassible—God, can have suffered, but somehow it happened.”[3] The Antiochene school refused the dissonance and attempted something like the Arian compromise by distinguishing between Jesus the Son who suffered and God the Son, who alone is “true God.” God the Son is divine, and therefore does not suffer but within this same person is another “nature” which suffers with humanity. The Antiochene escape is the Arian escape “moved a notch.” [4] Now instead of subordinating the one who suffers to less than God, no longer allowed by Nicaea, the Antiochenes make a distinction within Christ, assigning part of him to deity (the impassible) and part of him to humanity (the suffering). The philosophical ontology could be spared by prying open a different place within Jesus. The split within Christ would be negotiated in a variety of terms but the Antiochenes prevailed inasmuch as the unified image of Christ was displaced by distinctions identified with deity (e.g., Logos, Word, Son of God) which were something other than the human Jesus. “Thus theology was set a new problem: of construing a unity between two distinct and metaphysically polar entities.”[5]
The unified understanding of Jesus as “Christ,” “Logos,” “Son of Mary,” “Son of God,” the second member of the Trinity was once assumed, but a gap was opened, in which Jesus is “one with the Son” or “one with the Word” as a relation rather than as direct identity. As Theodore of Mopsuestia describes, in his development of physeis (natures): “He |Jesus| is God because of his close conjunction with that divine nature who really is God.”[6] In his commentary on John he sorts out each clause of the narrative so as to assign it to either the Logos (with its deified conjunction) or the man.[7] Jesus of Nazareth is not himself directly the Logos or one of the Trinity, but inasmuch as he is Son, Logos, or Word, he exists in relation to the second identity of the Trinity. There is a clear distinction between his two “natures,” conjoined as they might be. Even the saving assigned to Jesus is more a result of this conjunction of two natures. “Jesus saves,” or his flesh is “life-giving” only in being conjoined to God. While Jesus shares in the Logos, and is thus deserving of worship, this conjunction is not direct identity. The Logos precedes the man, and by the same token the Logos does not suffer nor is he son of Mary. Theodore’s distinction of Logos from the man Jesus, would become standard in Antiochene thought and among those subject to its influence.
According to Nestorius, even the popular liturgical expression acclaiming Mary “Mother of God” (Theotokos) is mistaken. Mary did not bear deity but a man and “the incarnate God did not die, but raised him in whom he was incarnate. . . .”!”[8] This was a step too far for the Alexandrians, and they find a champion in Cyril of Alexandria, who takes up the Alexandrian cause in opposing Nestorius. According to Jenson, “His great concern was for continuity of divine agency throughout the gospel narrative, for theological warrant to read the Gospels whole as God’s own story. It is throughout the story God the Son who becomes human and who by what he does as human unites us to himself and his Father.”[9] According to Cyril: “We confess that the very one. . . who is only-begotten God—and who is indeed according to his own nature impassible—suffered in the flesh for us. . . .” Confession must include “the death according to the flesh of the only-begotten Son of God.”[10] Cyril insists, everything one might denote by Christ, God the Son, Jesus, or any of the other biblical names or titles ascribed to him, all are predicated of the one subject, the incarnate God. As Cyril puts it, “The sacred writings proclaim him sometimes as a whole and single human who is, in the Incarnation, the understood subject of his deity, and sometimes, vice versa, as God who is the understood subject of his humanity.”[11] His point is a direct refutation of the Antiochene doctrine, aimed at dividing Christ.
In Theodore’s examples, “God the Son has a mother” and “Jesus is lifegiving,” demand two different natures (as God has no mother and God alone, and not Jesus, gives life), but Cyril identifies what is two, in Theodore, with one subject. “Therefore we say the body of Christ is divine since it is the body of God. It shines with unutterable glory and is incorruptible and holy and life-giving.” Likewise in the other direction: “When we read he “grew in wisdom and knowledge and grace’ this must be predicated of (the incarnate Son)… and so also hunger and thirst. And indeed, even when we read that he petitions the Father to escape suffering, we attribute also this to the same one.”[12] According to Cyril, we confess “one nature, of God the Logos, that has been enfleshed.”[13] Cyril is directly deploying Theodore’s term, not to refer to two natures but to show that there is a singular Subject (the Logos is human). Cyril acknowledges that it may be legitimate to speak of two natures, if by this we mean Jesus is everything required to be God the Son and this particular human being. He instantiates each in who he is. There is an abstract understanding allowing for two natures, but not a concrete distinction.
Unfortunately, the Council of Ephesus (449) and then the council of Chalcedon (451), though setting forth a statement in light of Cyril’s strong claims, once again aimed at appeasing the Antiochenes. Pope Leo sent representatives to the councils, along with his Tome or letter, which would be appended to the councils’ statements, including the following crude formulation: “For each nature is agent of what is proper to it, working in fellowship with the other: the Word doing what belongs to the Word and the flesh what belongs to the flesh. The one shines forth in the miracles, the other submits to the injuries.”[14] In other words, each nature does its own thing and goes its own way depending on the circumstance. Leo’s representatives insured that his views were reflected in the final statement by picturing the natures as existing “in” Christ rather than allowing that Christ is abstractly “from” these two natures hypostatically united in him. For the Western church, Chalcedon was identified with Leo’s position, while the Egyptian and Syrian churches remained suspicious of Chalcedon, eventually becoming separate churches.
Those of Cyril’s followers who remained in the imperial church would interpret Chalcedon and hypostasis with a Cyrillian slant. They made hypostasis mean what they thought it should, making it the “’synthetic’ agent of the whole gospel narrative, both of what is divine in it and of what is human in it and they identified the eternal Logos as himself this hypostasis.”[15] According to John of Damascus, “Since Christ is one and his hypostasis is one, it is one and the same who wills and works divinely and humanly. . .. And since Christ is one and the same who wills according to each nature, the concrete will is one and the same… .” Thus, “He did not do human things in the human way, for he is not only man but also God. Whence it is that his sufferings are life-giving and salvific. Nor does he do divine things in the divine way. . .. Whence it is that he performed divine signs by touch and speech. .. .”[16] Also John is clear, Jesus is the Logos: “God the Logos was not united to flesh antecedently hypostasized in itself, but… came in his own hypostasis to dwell in the womb of the holy virgin, and hypostasized .. . , from the holy blood of the virgin, flesh animated by a rational soul. . . .”[17] This understanding, which identified hypostasis with Logos as the one agent of salvation, marks Neo-Chalcedonianism. The Cyrillians insure that at the Second Council of Constantinople (made up mostly of Eastern bishops in 553) this Neo-Chalcedonian understanding was made dogma, though it had little effect outside the communion surrounding Constantinople (the Western church mostly ignored Constantinople of 553).[18]
Maximus the Confessor (579-662) inherits and builds upon the Neo-Chalcedonian identity. Neo-Chalcedonians included both Cyril’s “from which he is” and the Chalcedonian “in which he is” and Maximus adds “he (simply) is”: “Christ, being according to nature from both deity and humanity, and in deity and humanity, is by nature God and man. And another factor there is not at all.”[19] The hypostasis is not a synthesis in addition to the natures, but the hypostasis is both of the natures. He is not alternatively one and then alternatively another but he is directly “from” both. Not “from” as a sequential relation (e.g., in time or before time) but simply as an abstract description made concrete in Jesus Christ. According to Jenson, “the second identity of God is directly the human person of the Gospels, in that he is the one who stands to the Father in the relation of being eternally begotten by him.”[20]
What God is doing in Christ is not secondary to who he is, but Jesus in his healing, peaceable, kenotic love, is God. Thus, Maximus claims that one of the Trinity suffered in the flesh. This is not a suffering exterior to God but God suffering in the Son – “suffering God” in Maximus phrase.[21] The early church, from Melito of Sardis (100-180) affirmed straightforwardly and paradoxically, “The Impassible suffered… .” “God was killed. . . .”![22] The Neo-Chalcedonian developments of Maximus do not ease the paradox so much as accentuate it in that “the suffering Son is the Logos of the presumed impassible Father.”[23]
The near loss of this Neo-Chalcedonian insight in the West has stunted Western theology in nearly all of its phases, but most particularly it has helped foster a violent image of God and a violent atonement. While both East and West have embraced various levels of violence, it is ultimately the Neo-Chalcedonian understanding, in its identity of God with Christ, that most fully opens up the possibility of the peaceable nature of God and his Kingdom as the saving purpose of Christianity.
(Register now for the course Colossians and Christology which will run from June 3rd to July 22nd https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
[1] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology: volume 1, The Triune God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 165.
[2] Jenson, 125.
[3] Jenson, 125.
[4] Jenson, 126.
[5] Jenson, 126.
[6] Catechetical Homilies, 57, cited in Jenson, 127.
[7] Commentary on the Gospel of John, ed. & tr. into Latin, J.-M. Vospe, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium (Paris: Louvain, 1940), vols. 62-63. Cited in Jenson, 128.
[8] “First Sermon against “Theotokos,”” Friedrich Loofs, ed., Nestoriana: Die Fragmente des Nestorius (Halle: 1905), 251-252. Cited in Jenson, 128.
[9] Jenson, 128-129.
[10] Second Letter to Nestorius, ed. Schwartz, i.i.1.25-28.6. Cited in Jenson, 129.
[11] To Theodosius, on True Faith, ed. Schwarz, i.i.1.25-28.29. Cited in Jenson, 129.
[12] First Letter to Successus, ed. Schwartz, i.i.vi.151—157.10. Cited in Jenson, 129.
[13] To the Noble Ladies, on True Faith, ed. Schwartz, i,v,62—118.10. Jenson, 129.
[14] Epistola Papae Leonis ad Flavianum ep. Constantinopolitanum de Eutyche, cited here from Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner (Georgetown University Press, 1990), 1:79.3-7. Cited in Jenson, 131.
[15] Jenson, 133.
[16] John of Damascus, The Orthodox Faith, 59.193-196. Cited in Jenson, 133.
[17] John of Damascus, 46.24-30. Cited in Jenson, 133.
[18] Jenson, 133.
[19] Ambigua 91:121B. Cited in Jenson, 136.
[20] Jenson, 137.
[21] Ambigua, 91:1037B: “theos pathetos.” Cited in Jenson, 137.
[22] Antonius Caesar, 13.16. Cited in Jenson, 125.
[23] Jenson, 137.