Orthodox Christology

Dear Gene:

    I hope I can begin to answer your question: what is orthodox Christology?

    The simplest approach is to understand what these two terms mean. Christology is the attempt to answer the question "Who is Jesus Christ?" Orthodox is one of those Greek terms we have adopted in the Church: "ortho" means right and "doxa" is opinion: then orthodox Christology literally means to have the right opinion about who Jesus Christ is. My Greek dictionary has some notes about the translation of "doxa", noting that it can also mean glory or worship, so we should remember that our phrase can also mean to have the right worship: so our opinion or understanding of who Jesus Christ is can affect our worship (think John 4:23).

    As the Church was organizing and structuring itself, the leaders were struggling to have a "standard party line" with regard to the things we could say about Christ. What were the arguments pulling people one way or another?     The core of the first big argument is "Who was Jesus Christ?" The first Council of Nicea met to answer this question and to provide a means for believers to have a statement (creed) to be able to provide all Christians with a single answer: the driving force behind this was many of the heresies we have discussed, but primarily to discuss and dismiss a presbyter in Alexandria, Egypt called Arius. Arius could only understand Jesus as a created being – creation produces something different than the creator – therefore, for the Arians, Jesus could not be of the same essence or substance as God, since there would have been a time when God existed but, Jesus did not. The response to this understanding was led by a Bishop named Athanasius (he was actually only a deacon at the time), who upheld the understanding of the Christian God as Trinitarian. The Athanasian counter argument was that the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are all co-eternal and consubstantial – the fancy Greek term is homoousios. Co-eternal means that the Trinity has existed for eternity and there was no time when all three did not exist, and consubstantial means that all three persons of the Trinity are of the same being (one God – three persons) and that the Son was generated "eternally of the Father's own being" which is also the source "from which the Holy Spirit proceeds": we use the term begotten rather than generated, but this means that Jesus is of the same essence/substance of God, instead of being created, and therefore being different. Athanasius and the Trinitarians won the day and formulated the Creed of Nicaea, around C.E. 325, with some editing occurring in C.E. 381.

    The second of these ecumenical councils which directly impacts our understanding of Christ, was the Council of Chalcedon, which met in C.E. 451. The purpose of this council was to answer the question "What was Jesus?" This council did not deal with only one heresy, but several. The Nestorian's belief that Jesus had two natures, and one body, but that the two natures are only in a moral kind of union – Christ is not God, but God is in Christ – which leaves Christ in a kind of schizophrenia. The Eutychian camp believed that the Divinity of Christ was so fused into the humanity of Jesus that Jesus Christ became a hybrid of sorts – a God-Man – and therefore He is really neither fully God nor fully human. The Apollinarianist's believed that Jesus had a human body and a human soul, but had the mind of Christ, rather than a human mind, since having a human mind leads us to sin, and Jesus Christ could not sin.

As if all of these were not enough, there was a dispute between Eastern & Western Christians. The Eastern Christians were influenced by Origen, philosophers like Plato, and even Athanasius who all understood that Jesus had a human body, but a Divine Soul, and while this continued to allow the unity (consubstantiality) of the Trinity, the Eastern Church struggled to keep Jesus fully human. Unfortunately this led to many seeing Jesus as a single Divine person, rather than fully God and fully human. The Western Church, influenced by leaders such as Tertullian and Aristotelian philosophy, taught that the Divine Word is known only through the human Jesus. While this allowed the Western Christians to accept the two natures of Jesus Christ, they sometimes struggled with the unity of the person of Jesus.

The result of this discussion at Chalcedon was not a single answer to the East-West differences, but rather to set limits within which, both sets of Christologies worked, and to provide responses to the heresies. The ultimate purpose of Chalcedon was to create a formula in which the unity of the person (one being) had two equal, but full natures – fully human, and fully Divine. And so Jesus Christ was described as having two natures, but one person (hypostasis): this is called the hypostatic union.

So what is orthodox Christology? Orthodox Christology is an understanding of Jesus as the second person of the Trinity, traditionally called the Son, or Logos: He has existed for all time and is of the same substance as the Father, and the Holy Spirit. The Godhead exists as three persons (hypostases) but as one nature. Furthermore Jesus Christ is understood as existing as a single human being, with two distinct natures – one completely human, one completely Divine, with neither nature subtracting from the fullness of the other.

I hope this helps answer your question.

In Christ,

Mark