Jesus Christ for Contemporary Life. Don Schweitzer
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a leading representative of the school of Antioch who became bishop of Constantinople in 428, and Cyril of Alexandria. Nestorius attempted to enforce what he saw to be doctrinal orthodoxy, particularly around devotion to Mary as Theotokos, mother of God. For Nestorius Mary was the mother of Jesus, not of the Logos. But for Cyril and others following the Logos/sarx approach, the Logos had been present in Mary’s womb. In 429 Nestorius gave a series of sermons attacking this and related notions. As opposition to Nestorius’ teaching and person increased Cyril began to attack Nestorius’ views and promote his own in letters circulated throughout Egypt. The dispute was enflamed by the personalities of both. It was also about ecclesiastical primacy: Constantinople versus Alexandria and Rome. But it was primarily driven by each side’s belief that they were fighting for the truth of the gospel.84 Because their struggle threatened the unity of the empire, Emperor Theodosius called what became the council of Ephesus in 431. In 444 the dispute reignited. Theodosius II convened another council at Ephesus in 449, which was tainted by violence. Pope Leo I addressed the issue with his Tome (449), directed against the position of Eutyches, who developed an extreme version of Cyril’s early emphasis on the unity of Christ’s person. Leo’s Tome introduced the Latin tradition into the christological debate.
For Leo, “Christ was born of God and Mary and therefore possessed a divine and a human nature, and accordingly possessed both divine and human characteristics and ways of acting.”85 Leo followed Nicaea in seeing Jesus as originating from God. The presence of divine and human natures in Jesus’ person were not symmetrical. But it was only by becoming incarnate that the Logos could effectively communicate salvation to humanity, and it was only as Jesus was the Son of God that he could effect salvation.
The traditions of Alexandria, Antioch, and the Western or Latin tradition that would play influential roles at the council of Chalcedon each had different emphases:
The Alexandrine tradition emphasizes the unity of subject of the whole existence of Christ, the Antiochene the integrity of the nature of the man Jesus (of the homo assumptus), and the Latin the double solidarity with God and humankind.86
In 450 the Empire was threatened by external armies as Pulcheria and Emperor Marcian assumed power. They convened another council to restore unity to the church. It met at Chalcedon in October of 451. Their representatives insisted on the formulation of a new statement of faith that would end the christological controversy. The bishops reluctantly agreed and began by reading first the creed from the council of Nicaea, then subsequent documents, including the Tome of Leo.87 The creed of Nicaea was accepted by all as the “master text”88 defining orthodoxy. To answer the question of how the unity of divine and human natures in Jesus was to be understood, the bishops, under imperial pressure, finally produced the Chalcedonian Definition.89 This represented a genuine consensus among them, intended to make explicit what they believed Nicaea implied.90
The Definition affirmed that Jesus Christ was fully divine and fully human: “as to his humanity, being like us in every respect apart from sin.”91 These positive statements were balanced by four negative ones. In Jesus both natures were present “unconfusedly, unalterably, undividedly, inseparably . . . , the character of each nature is preserved and comes together in one person and one hypostasis.”92 While the Definition followed Cyril’s emphasis on the unity of Jesus’ person,93 it tried to affirm a position beyond the three alternatives94 that included the strengths of each: Cyril’s emphasis on the unity of Christ’s person and that the Christ event was a saving act of God, Theodore’s emphasis on the full humanity of Christ, and Leo’s emphasis that both must be stated simultaneously and clearly.95 It did not so much state an understanding of Jesus’ person as a way in which Jesus should be understood, a “grammar” that Christologies should follow, “based in the last resort on the logical form of traditional confessional statement about Christ.”96 Its combination of positive and negative affirmations can be seen as presenting a framework for developing an understanding of Jesus’ person.97
The Legacy of Chalcedon and Nicaea
The Chalcedonian Definition did not provide the doctrinal unity the emperor desired. Further christological controversies resulted after its promulgation, which lasted another two centuries.98 Yet it became and continues to be an important guideline for how Jesus can be understood as the Christ. While the language used and the questions answered by the Definition are different in many respects from those that occupied New Testament authors, it is concerned with a similar central theme: how to understand Jesus in light of the experience of salvation in and through him. In accordance with the Gospels the Definition affirms that Jesus is fully human and that his public ministry required the use of his human faculties and creativity. Jesus experienced the human condition of struggling to know and follow God’s will and of being inspired by God’s Spirit. Like the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament, the Definition also affirms that in Jesus the divine became present in history in a new way. This resulted from the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, but more fundamentally from a new initiative of God in the second person of the Trinity. Jesus’ person thus has a unique relationship to God and an ultimate saving significance. In arriving at this, the doctrinal development culminating in Nicaea and Chalcedon brought a new metaphysical precision to the understanding of Jesus as the Christ. If adopted as guidelines for understanding Jesus’ person, Nicaea and Chalcedon prevent the radical transcendence of God in Jesus from being domesticated. A Christology developed along these lines will point beyond the present to a greater reality in which sin and death have been overcome, inviting and empowering people to participate in this.
Yet this doctrinal development also involved significant losses. In emphasizing the uniqueness and transcendence of Jesus the theologians of this era “forgot that Jesus himself proclaimed a coming Kingdom of God.”99 The hope for liberation within history was forgotten and a repressive orientation towards Judaism developed.100 In order to be faithful to Jesus and create space within Christian consciousness for Judaism and other religions, Christian theology must reclaim Jesus’ proclamation of the coming reign of God, remembering that he looked to the coming of a reality that he prefigured, which includes more than the church and himself. The search for metaphysical concreteness in understanding Jesus also brought a loss of concern for Jesus’ historical concreteness,101 for understanding where and how he located himself within the social conflicts of his day, and with this came a loss of Jesus’ preferential option of the poor. Christology was assimilated to a patriarchal worldview and began to function “as a sacred justification for male dominance.”102
However, the Christology of Nicaea and Chalcedon also has liberating potential. The central principle of this Christology, “the unassumed is the unhealed,”103 suggests that what is salvific about the incarnation is not that Jesus was male, but that he assumed a human nature. If what he assumed does not include