Cyril of Alexandria's Christology Insights

So let's also talk about Cyril of Alexandria. Now, while Athanasius wrote on the Incarnation near the beginning of his ministry, Cyril composed his great work on the unity of Christ for the end of a long career of biblical exegesis and theological defense of the true Christ. The serial struggle to teach the true Christ against the innovations of Nestorianism was approved by the Ecumenical Council of Ephesus in 431. Where's our red one? Bad guys. We've already mentioned Arius. We also need to mention Nestorius. So what was it that originally prompted Cyril to launch what became a centuries-long struggle to define Orthodox Christology? A rival school of biblical interpretation to Alexandria had established itself at Antioch. One of its leading teachers, Diodorus of Parsis, the name like that, you know, he's got to be a bad guy. said the incarnation was composed of two sons, one divine and one human. Son of God, son of man, two different sons. Theodore of Mopsuestia, another leading Antiochian said Christ was two persons joined in a moral union or community of thought and will. For example, Theodore sundered Christ by asserting the one who assumed is not the same as the one who was assumed. Theodore's exaggerations, omissions, and dangerous tendencies were popularized by Nestorius, a controversial bishop of Constantinople. and his chaplains. The Nestorians, sundering the divine from the human Christ, therefore condemned the Orthodox belief that Mary was Theotokos, the woman who carried God in her womb. So this is an important term. They took us from each God bearer. So did Mary conceive God in her womb? By the Holy Spirit. Not that God has a beginning in the Virgin, but Mary certainly bore in her womb God. At least that's what Cyril thought. It's what everybody else thought, but not Nestorius. Because of this two sons, they wanted to keep the deity and the humanity distinct, such that they drove them apart. Yes, sir. It does bring up an interesting point, though, how Mary's sin nature didn't pass itself to Christ. Yeah. Anyways. Because he was conceived by the Holy Spirit. So that is an interesting question that has led, you know, Roman Catholics to affirm such things as the Immaculate Conception, not of Jesus, but of Mary, so that she didn't have a sin nature. But that's, we just know that he was conceived by the Holy Spirit and that it was a holy movement, not a sinful movement. The question is, can you affirm the theopokos that Mary is the god-bearer? That was the issue. Nestorius said no. Cyril said yes. Cyril's voluminous biblical studies and keen theological insights helped him defend the unity of Christ's person against Nestorianism's division of Christ. By the way, I ran into a seminary president who denied the theopokos. I don't think he understood what he was doing. Deny that, you're really stepping into historians, which is technically a heresy. So the historians portrayed Christ as composed of two subjects, while Cyril consistently depicted him as one subject. Cyril perceived how Nestorianism carried on the project of Arianism. So he said, listen, Nestorius is the new Arius, in a way. Arianism had diminished Christ before the incarnation. For their part, the Nestorians diminished Christ in the incarnation. And Cyril reminded them the scripture named Christ Emmanuel, God with us. That's his name. That's who's in Mary's womb. God with us. At the same time, he is God and he is human. You can't divorce him. He is God with us. There is not two sons. He's one. Christ is God and he was conceived as a man in the womb of the virgin. That's just Luke 2, Matthew 1. You can't get away from that. Cyril also pointed out how the Nestorians, in his words, bankrupt the economy of salvation by denying the same son who was eternally begotten of the father had become incarnate. Cyril replied, in short, he took what was ours to be his very own so that we might have all that was his. There's that exchange again, similar to what Athanasius was saying. You know, the debate between our two presidential candidates is about to happen. My wife told me that. She said, you're going to have low attendance tonight. I said, no, we've got a greater debate. This is between heresy and orthodoxy. I want to see somebody get slapped. Although I understand that, who was it? Nicholas. who was at the Council of Nicaea, actually slapped a librarian. That's tough. That's zeal for the Lord. Only the one whose word become man could reconcile a holy God with sinful man. He writes, the word who is God came down from out of heaven and entered our likeness, that is to say, submitted to birth. from a woman according to the flesh, while ever remaining what he was, that is, one from on high from heaven, superior to all things as God, even with the flesh. This sounds like Athanasius, doesn't it? The one who is God became a human being. He's still God, even as he is a human being. Cyril also repeated the partitive exegesis of Athanasius. assigning both divine acts and human acts to the one Christ. He refused to allow these distinct actions to be assigned to anyone but the one Christ. For there is only one Son, the Word, who was made man for our sake. I would say that everything refers to him, words and deeds, both those that befit the deity as well as those which are human. In summary, Christ is in no way divided. Did you notice the title on the unity of Christ? That's the emphasis for Cyril, unity. While emphasizing the unity of Christ, Cyril never lost sight of Christ's two natures. Christ is both God and man and not a third thing. His deity is not diminished by the incarnation, nor is his humanity. As noted above, Cyril recognized that holding the great truths about Christ requires humility. He suffers in his own flesh and not in the nature of the Godhead. It seems like a contradiction to us, but it's a mystery. The two natures of the one Christ are a scandal to the carnal mind, but the great mystery of the true Christ prompts true believers. worship. Finally, Cyril taught that the incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension of the eternal word is the only way humanity could be saved. drawing on the difference between Adam, who was a living being, and Christ, who's a life-giving spirit, Cyril said there was no other way for the flesh to become life-giving, even though by its own nature it was subject to the necessity of corruption, except that it became the very flesh of the Word who gives life to all things. So for Cyril, as for Athanasius, as for Justin, as for Augustine, human salvation. depends upon Orthodox Christology. Let me just walk you through some things in the book. I've mentioned several things out of the book, but I think there, just take a few minutes to look at it. The introduction is good. The introductions on these little books are always good, but the actual text begins on page 49 of this book. It's in the form of a dialogue. He says at the beginning, people of true and good sense who have intellectually gathered that knowledge which gives life are never jaded by the sacred sciences, the sacred sciences. Indeed, it is written that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. The word of God is food for the mind and a spiritual bread that strengthens the heart of man. As the book of Psalms sings. I love that. That's why I'm a theologian. I can't get enough of God. Think about him all the time. Rather do nothing else than think about him. Listen to what he says about the Arians on page 50, down towards the bottom. Some are foolish enough to bring down the word and only begotten Son of God from his supreme station. They reduce him from equality with God the Father by denying his consubstantiality and refusing to crown him with a perfect identity of nature. I'll read this next page. More or less. retrace the same path as those we have just mentioned. They fall into the snares of death and into the pit of hell as they pervert the mystery of the fleshly economy of the only begotten, teaching of folly which is in a way the twin of that of their predecessors. So that was Arianism. This is Nestorianism. In effect, the first group, insofar as life's within their power, drag down the word born of God the Father from the heights of divinity even before his incarnation, while the second group have decided to wage war. against the word even in his incarnation and that's when he argues but he is Emmanuel he is God with us um on page 55 he is said to have undergone a birth like ours while all the while remaining what he was so he has a human birth and he remains what he always was. That is the word of God. I've noticed this on page 59. He is going to refer here to the two generations of the Son. So eternally, the Son is begotten of the Father. When he becomes a human being. he is begotten of Mary by the Holy Spirit. God the Father engendered the Son from himself in one single act of generation, but it was his whole good pleasure to save the whole human race in him by means of the incarnation, or rather the enmanment, which of course evidently and entirely depended on birth from a woman. You have the exchange down below, 2 Corinthians 8-9. He was rich, but he came poor for our sake, so that we might be enriched by his poverty. Oh, there's so much good in here. Oh, here's one, page 62. As I have said at the bottom, the Son came, or rather was made man, in order to reconstitute our condition within himself. First of all, in his own holy, wonderful, and truly amazing birth and life. This was why he himself became the first one to be born in the Holy Spirit. I mean, of course, after the flesh, so that he could trace a path for grace to come to us. He wanted us to have this intellectual regeneration and spiritual assimilation to himself. who is the true and natural Son, so that we too might be able to call God our Father, and so remain free of corruption. Dr. Yeah, is he doing like, is he contrasting Christ with the historians there? It says Christ traces the past and graces for us, so the historians trace, or areas trace the past and the historians. Oh, I don't know that he's doing that, but yeah, I see your... an analogy. No, I think he's saying Christ traces the path for us through remaking humanity. That was clever though. Oh, the unity that Nestorius describes is rather weak, and we'll get into that in just a moment. So Nestorius wants to use the language of a conjunction of the Son of God and the Son of Man, whereas... And you can see this on pages 73 and 74, whereas, and he rejects union, whereas for Cyril, it's a union. The question becomes, what is it? Page 77 is beyond conception. Well, here's another thing on page 80. So, for the Arians, Christ is the Son of God by grace, whereas for the Nicene theologians, including Athanasius and Cyril, we are sons by grace. God is son by nature. There's a distinction between nature and grace. Oh, there's so many good things here, and I've mentioned many of them already. All right, let's move on to conciliar Christology. We're going to fill up with some more bad guys. Because of the precise exegetical insights of Cyril, his writings became the touchstone of orthodoxy in the four ecumenical councils which focus primarily on Christology. They all go back to Cyril. They're like, oh, let's get out our textbook that we were assigned in Systematic II, and we will hold a council. They didn't have Systematic II. and it will be helpful to review the development of Christology through these councils. I really would like you to know them. The first two ecumenical councils focused on clarifying how Christ was truly God, thereby helping the early church discern the lineaments of God and the Trinity. However, certain other teachings require judgment for other heresies, including those taught by some pronicing theologians to minister Jesus Christ in some way. The councils after 381 focused on discerning who Christ is in his person. So let's look first of all at Nicaea in 325. It will be remembered that the council of Nicaea anathematized Arianism for diminishing the son because it denied he was truly divine with the father. Arius also denied the son should be worshipped equally with the father. Setting the standard for subsequent Nicene hermeneutics and for Orthodox worship, Alexander of Alexandria. We're into our third bishop of Alexandria. Okay. He was before Athanasius. Alexander demonstrated the equality and lightness of the Son with the Father in all things. For instance, he recalled John 5.23, which I mentioned last week. Wherein Christ said humanity must... honor the son as it honors the father. If you honor the son, that means you're worshiping him. If you worship the son, you're worshiping the father, that means the son is God. Arius was like, no, a subordinate honor, not a real one. Alexander also argued that while the generation of the son is ultimately ineffable to humanity, His generation nevertheless establishes his equality with the Father. The Son is without beginning and has a perfect likeness in all things to his Father, except for his generation from the Father. Now, Alexander, of Alexandria's basic insights about the deity of Christ, a deity which requires our worship, became integral to the theology which was first described at the Council of Nicaea. So it is Alexander who really does the heavy lifting that ends up being the conclusions at Nicaea. And his successors became the intrepid defenders of the deity of our one Lord Jesus Christ. Let's move on to Constantinople, 381. Afterwards, the Council of Constantinople consolidated the gains made in both divine Christology and divine pneumatology, in other words, the Son and the Holy Spirit are God, and Nicaea. They also had to address new heresies about both Christ and the Holy Spirit. For instance, wayward doctrines of Christ were taught by Marcellus of Ancyra. We should have a session when we mention the heroes here. They're like, yay! Boom! So, Marcellus. And Apollinaris. You're getting the hang of it. Both of these men affirmed Nicaea but then proceeded to diminish the word of God in other ways. The teachings of both men were identified as heretical during the years leading into the Second Ecumenical Council. Marcellus lacked a doctrine of eternal generation to explain the Son's origin, and he collapsed the word back into the divine mind at the eschaton. Marcellus interpreted 1 Corinthians 15 28 which states the son will also be subjected to the one uh to he who's or the one who subjected everything to him to mean Christ's kingdom will cease now there's a problem in that because there's a whole lot of texts that talk about Christ's kingdom that's going on forever so somebody's misinterpreting here He did not know what to do with Christ's humanity at the supposed demise of his kingdom. Other Nicene theologians withdrew their support of Marcellus, so their friendship did not afford a blind eye to heresy. Marcellus and Athanasius were actually friends. Athanasius was like, no. For his part, Apollinaris defended the deity of Christ. also at the price of his humanity. But he blundered in a different way. Apollinaris said the word of God took a human body at the incarnation, but without a human mind. Gregory of Nazianzus responded that Christ had to be assumed the fullness of our humanity. In the first part of his justly famous Christological axiom, The chairman, Gregory of Nazianzus ended up being the chairman of the Council of Constantinople. He wrote, for that which he has not assumed, he has not healed. In other words, if Christ does not have a human mind, the human mind cannot be saved. In the second part of his axiom, Gregory turned from Christology proper to Christology's importance for a proper doctrine of salvation. He went on to show how humanity is reunited to God only through the union of the two natures in Christ. But that which is united to his Godhead is also saved. So for Orthodox theologians like Gregory, the true humanity of Christ is necessary to our salvation. The one who is eternally God assumed manhood also for our salvation, he wrote. So the Christologies of both Marcellus and Apollinaris compromised his humanity, but councils gathered to address their heresies among others. Ephesus, 431. The third ecumenical council gathered in Ephesus So we've had, we've stopped listening here. So we've had Nicaea, we've had Constantinople, and we're looking at Christology, not Doctrine of Trinity, although we've mentioned it. But, you know, these are the Trinitarian councils. The next one, Ephesus, is really the first of the great. Christological councils. It's particularly concerned with Jesus Christ. So these two councils address Jesus Christ. This one really gets into Jesus Christ. The third ecumenical council gathered in Ephesus to approve Cyril's theology of Christ's unity and to condemn Nestorius'division of Christ. Cyril preserved the real union of Christ against Nestorius, who was avoiding the attribution of the human experiences of Christ to the divine word. Cyril cooperated with Orthodox Antiochian theologians. In other words, not everybody from Antioch got it wrong in Cyril's mind. So he cooperated with John, the Bishop of Antioch, to affirm Nicaea and condemn Nestorius. And together they confessed Cyril's single subject, Christology. So back to our three rules, remember? One person, true deity, true humanity, right? So they both agreed, one person. At the same time, both Cyril of Alexandria and John of Antioch, remember Alexandria and Antioch are the two great schools in the ancient church. They both recognized the difference between his humanity and his deity too. They affirmed that the only begotten Son of God, a single subject, is perfect God and perfect man of a rational soul and body comprised of two perfections. He's perfect God, he's perfect man. Their formula of union also reaffirmed the importance of the divine narrative of the Incarnation. In unconfused union, God the Word took flesh and became man and from his very conception, united to himself the temple he took from her. Cyril emphasized the unity of Christ, but not at the loss of his divine attributes, nor at the loss of his human attributes. On the one hand, he said the deity of Christ was preserved at the incarnation, because although he assumed flesh and blood, he remained what he was, God in nature and truth. On the other hand, he said the humanity of Christ was not overwhelmed in the incarnation. We do not say that his flesh was turned into the nature of the Godhead. Cyril thus upheld Christ's distinct natures while emphasizing Christ's unity. We know only one Christ, the Word of God the Father, with his own flesh. By the way, we need to mention also another good guy. Leo. That kind of name has got to be. Right. Better than Theodore. Two decades later, so in 451, the Council of Calcine recalled the teachings of Cyril that Christ is one person in two natures, with each nature retaining its own qualities. The council specifically lauded Cyril's works for preserving the truth that Christ was not a mere man. Now, Seton also lauded the tome, Leo's tome, you know what I mean, of Pope Leo, which continued to hold in balance the single-subject Christology of Cyril with the two natures Christology emphasized by Orthodox Antiochians. Chalcedon, in turn, condemned the error of Eutychius. Boo! What is Eutychius'issue? You're getting into a lot of heresies here, aren't you? Lucky you. Eutyches was an Alexandrian, so he comes from the Alexandrian school, who taught there were two natures before the hypostatic union, but only one afterwards. So he's God who becomes man and then becomes one nature. Leo's letter to Flavian, the patriarch of Constantinople, is noteworthy for the way in which it summarizes. and explains the unity of the person of Christ without diminishing either his humanity or his deity. Like the theologians of Nicaea, Constantinople, and Ephesus beforehand, Leo rehearsed the gospel narrative of the divine economy of salvation, placing the divine word in human history. He writes, thus was the true God born in the undiminished and perfect nature of a true man, complete in what is his and complete in what is ours. Turning his attention to Christological ontology, Leo taught that Christ's deity is entirely one with the Father's deity. Are you starting to get the theme here about what's orthodox and what's not? The Son is, he writes, co-eternal with him, in no way different from the Father since he was born God from God. Almighty from the Almighty, co-eternal from the Eternal. Not later in time, not lower in power, not unlike in glory, not distinct in being. In other words, from his divine ontology to his divine economy, everything that the Father is, so is the Son. That's his deity. In addition, Christ's humanity is as complete as our humanity. The union of humanity with deity in Christ, moreover, did not diminish the humanity of Christ. Some were worried that, you know, by saying that the Word became flesh. became human, that somehow the humanity would be overwhelmed by the deity. And Leo says, no, as God is not changed by showing mercy, neither is humanity devoured by the dignity received. The activity of Christ's humanity remained human. There was, however, an enhancing of humanity. The matter of this enhancing became clearer in subsequent councils. Leo appropriated the teachings of the apostles to uphold the unity of Christ's person, even as he maintained his true deity and his true humanity. His review of the writings led him to make this claim, and I quote, The same one is both the Son of God and also the Christ. There is only one Christ in two natures according to the Apostolic Testimony. And to have believed that the Lord Jesus Christ was either only God and not man, or solely man and not God, was equally dangerous. Leo's careful exegetical theology was precisely stated in the formula adopted at Chalcedon, which was reviewed at the end of our last lecture. I think Chalcedon is really a good statement in many ways. But, Christology doesn't stop there. Constantinople II or II, 553. At the second council of Constantinople, mediating theologians, so by this time Antioch and Alexandria were just anathematizing one another. They couldn't stand one another. And so Alexandria, after Chalcedon, felt like it had been picked on because the two natures had been emphasized. And there was a bit of bad feeling in there. So mediating theologians sought to maintain the unity of the church from being damaged by radicals in the Antiochian tradition. The latter assumed that the balance of Chalcedon contradicted the Alexandrian tradition and Cyril's emphasis upon the unity of Christ. And the writings of three prominent Antiochian theologians, Theodore of Mopsuestia, But also, we've got to get in some more. Oh. And their theology is very alike. Theoderate. That's right. and Ivis, a good name to remember. So the writings of these theologians were examined and condemned by the council, are called the three chapters. Cyril's work at Ephesus and Leo's work at Chalcedon were also lauded. So they're building on each other. They're saying, listen, we go back and agree with that council and so on. And the dogmatic decrees of the four previous ecumenical councils were fully affirmed. This council emphasized the hypostatic union of Christ against alternative unities, which diminish Christ. So they're going to come back to the unity of Christ and do some focusing there. Let's listen to what they say. They noted how the type of unity advocated by Apollinaris. and eunuchies had confused the natures. Conversely, the type of unity advocated by Theodore and Nestorius was too weak to maintain true unity, for it was a union only by affection, the council writes. In response, the council declared that the true unity of Christ was a union between the word of God and human flesh, which is by synthesis. bringing the two together. That is by union of subsistence. Now there is a word for you, that's the Latin. The Greek translated into Latin as unitatioinem, subsistientem, was tanhenosin katupastasin, in other words, hypostatic union, or personal union, the union of the person. And that's where we get our language of hypostatic eating this day. That brings us to, oops, I've stopped listening to the councils. We've been through Calcedon, Constantinople II, now we're into Constantinople III. And you're saying, I'm glad there are only seven ecumenical councils. The last one, by the way, we're not covering, but it was Nicaea 2. And it concerned, what do you do with icons? And you have icons. And they ruled that you shouldn't worship icons because they're not God. But you can venerate them because they remind you of God. Like my grandmother, she never read her Bible, but she kept the Bible on the coffee table. And if you put anything on top of it, your grandmother did the same thing. You got in trouble. But she never cracked that thing. For her, venerate. You worship God, you venerate the Bible, right? It's the same thing that they came to the conclusion of. And so that's a definition. And that's... accepted universally. But let's talk about Constantinople 3. That's where we need to focus because there's really something, you know, Constantinople 2 is coming back and affirming the union of Christ. It does other things, but that's really where it puts its emphasis in the fourth anathema. Constantinople 3 introduces something that some of you asked me about last week. So it met in 680. and 681. At the Third Council of Constantinople, Christ's wills and principles of energies became a critical concern. And you're like, what? Christ's wills and principles of energy. We'll come back to that. You see, efforts to heal the ongoing division between the two major schools of Antioch and Alexandria continued, but some proposed solutions created difficulties too great for truly orthodox teachers to ignore. So somebody would come up with a bright idea. Let's do it this way. And I mentioned these with different types of Arianism. They were coming up with different formulas to try to replace homoousios. Remember? Well, they're not trying to come up with different formulas to try to bring together everybody again. So do we have a word here? Number three. i'm sorry are we continuing number three or all the academic people no we're not done sargis and we're not done all right what what was the problem with these guys uh a serious was the Bishop of Constantinople, Honorius was the bishop of Rome, the pope, who's a heretic. Now that doesn't help Roman polemics very much to have a heretic. They've got another one too, but we're not going to do that tonight. So Sergius proposed bringing the hypostatic union in two natures into easy conceptual grasp by affirming Christ had one energy. That was the solution. We'll just say he has one energy. Yeah, he's got two natures, but one energy. And he thought, well, this will please the Eutychians, who were emphasizing unity and the loss of the two natures. Well, we'll try to make peace with them by affirming one energy. Honorius added that Christ had one will. And Heraclius, who was the emperor, you know, the guy with all the power, liked the one will idea, and he condemned any teaching that Christ might have two wills. So this brings us to the debate between what is known as the heresy of monothelitism, which means one will. single will, only one will, and then diothelitism, which means two wills. And that became the Orthodox position, diothelitism. And this brings us to Maximus the Confessor. Maximus the Confessor stepped forward to argue that a simple reading of Matthew 26, verses 36 through 42, requires an affirmation that Christ has two wills. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Christ concluded through deep personal struggle, yet not as I will, but as you will. So how do we interpret that? The two wills under consideration here could not be that of the divine son vis-a-vis the divine father. Any doctrine of two wills or two energies belonging to the one God would contradict Nicene theology. Apostolic testimony depicted the Father and the Son as having one word, one will, one work. The work I do is not my own but the Father's. The words I speak are my Father's. I'm willing what the Father is willing. I mean, Jesus had said all these things. So they're coming up with a formula to try to please. Some of the heretics, and they're creating more problems is what they're doing. So naturally, Athanasius had taught the Father and the Son have one will and one work, because he read scripture. Maximus believed that when the Word assumed humanity, the humanity of Christ was granted personhood by the Word. This you don't necessarily need to know, but it's interesting nonetheless, but it's called in hypostasis. So how is it that we say that the humanity of Christ is, he's truly human, fully human? He is a human person. Yet we don't have two persons. So how does he become a human person? Well, he's the eternal word who's always a person. When he assumes human flesh, he also becomes a person. The humanity is brought into the person such that the humanity is a human person. Does that make sense? That's what in the hypostasis means. That's freedom. As a human person, Christ must have a human will. You are human persons. Do each of you have a will? You do. for Christ to save the human will, just like saving the human mind, he has to have a human will, doesn't he? That takes us back to Gregory's formula, doesn't it? What he does not assume, he does not heal. So he has to have a human will. He has to have a divine will. You can't just have one will. Moreover, Maximus said the struggle in the garden occurred within this human will of Christ. You see, he overcame the natural human desire to live. He's looking at death. Remember, he sweats drops of blood, doesn't he? His great sorrow and trouble, scripture says. So he overcame the natural human desire to live with the need to obey the father and go on to secure the redemption of humanity through his bodily sacrifice. The father sent him to go and die, and he decides to obey the father. Yet not my will, the natural human will to live. but thy will be done. Christ, in other words, obediently surrendered his natural human will to the divine will. Do you understand what this does for the doctrine of the human will for a Christian? It means that your will can start to be restored to what it should have been in the first place, which is good news for you in all of your struggles against sin. The human will of Christ was submitted to the will of God, and Christ is the mediator of the way back to God in numerous ways. Maximus is brilliant at all this. I don't have time to go through everything, but I recommend his works here. He argued that Christ restored the human ability to will according to God's command through his personal struggle with death and obedience to God. By the voluntary character of his suffering, Christ... broke the pattern of human nature, warring against itself, also reconciling us through himself to the Father and to one another. That's what Christ did. You and I don't have the ability, if we're in our right minds, to embrace death in order to give others life through our bodily sacrifice. But Christ did, and only he could do it. So the desire to live was submitted to obedience to the Father. And in doing so, he takes the human will and he perfects it by bringing it back into obedience to the Father. We can't obey on our own, but Christ can obey for us, which he did. And moreover, Christ, in obeying for us, has started to take our wills and make them what they are. things should be by the presence of his Holy Spirit. Christ can change your desires and bring you the desire to be what God wants you to be. That's Maximus'message. Maximus refused to surrender his powerful exegetical and theological insights about Christ and salvation. He was persecuted by the empire for not submitting to imperial wishes. And he died from his wounds in 662. They bore a hole through his tongue and cut off his hand because he would not agree with the one-wheel idea. And he ended up dying from his wounds. And it looked for about 20 years as if he was the bad man out. Nearly two decades later, the sixth ecumenical council gathered in Constantinople to declare this, which was in full agreement now with Maximus, because they had worked through the news and they were deciding, you know what, he actually was right. This happens, by the way, that sometimes you have a prophetic figure in the midst who nobody likes, and then later they're like, he knew what he was talking about, and that's what happened with Constantine. And they wrote in the sixth council in Constantinople III, and we proclaim equally two natural volitions or wills in him and two natural principles of action which undergo no division, no change, no participation, no partition, no confusion in accordance with the teaching of the Holy Fathers. Orthodox theologians argue that if one denies the human nature, it's a building of activity. which a one energy solution would surrender, Christ could not be truly human. He has to be able to act as a human to be human. He has to have a will as a human to be human. just as he has to have a mind to be human. This all is going back to Apollinaris. And Gregory, we didn't put Gregory down. And Gregory's dictum that what he does not assume, he does not heal. And so it's all going back to that basic axiom. Conversely, if one denies the divine nature its energy and will, Christ would not truly be divine. Maximus and Constantinople envisioned the restoration of the universe recurring in Christ. Christ must be truly human, which requires both the human will and human energy to reconcile humanity. He must also be truly divine, which requires both the divine will and divine energy to reconcile humanity with God. And so they... They said, we hold two natural wills and principles of action meeting correspondence for the salvation of the human race. Now, our conclusion. As we have already suggested, Orthodox soteriology, we're here in this lecture focusing on the person of Christ, right? But we've never been far from human salvation caused by Christ, have we? Orthodox soteriology depends on Orthodox Christology and proper biblical hermeneutics, and these were deemed to be integrated by the early church fathers. The first church father we reviewed, you remember, Justin Martyr, understood that who Christ is in his person determines how he saves us in his actions. More developed accounts of the person of Christ were worked out in the tussle of theological debate. The proponents of the true Christ often paid a great price for defending him. The last church father we reviewed, Maximus the Confessor, died a martyr like the first one we reviewed. The Orthodox conclusions about Christ were ultimately enclosed in the theological decrees of these various councils. The dogmatic Christological doctrines decreed by the ecumenical councils have been, as their name indicates, ecumenical meaning universal, have been almost universally recognized. Their understanding of Christ in his person and the impact of their discoveries upon our understanding of his gift of salvation must not be dismissed as some type of needless discussion. This gets to the heart of the faith about who Christ is. The... Councils believed they were being led by the Holy Spirit, and if the doctrine of biblical illumination is true, they just might have been. I would argue that these councils did get it right. We described the biblical consensus about the ontology of Christ as being comprised of three rules. We can now place them in the following grammatic construction. First, the Lord Jesus Christ is one person and his unity never changes. Can we agree on that? I think we've determined that both in Scripture and in history at this point. Second, the eternal word is truly God and his deity remains as always. His deity is not diminished whatsoever, even in and through his incarnation. And we can also mention under this second statement that his generation entails His perfect sharing of all that God is. Jesus Christ, the eternal word and being flesh is a human being. His humanity, like ours, is constituted of a body and a soul. Yet he did not sin. And his humanity was not somehow overwhelmed by the incarnation. We could also say that. Now, something new for this lecture. That's just reaffirming what we said in the last lecture. In a very similar way, the futuristic consensus about the grammar of soteriology has been described recently as comprised of three rules that are very similar. First, the two natures of Jesus Christ are united in his person. That is what we just said, right, about the ontology. So they would agree with that. Second, this occurred through the economic assimilation of human nature to his divine person. The gospel of salvation teaches that the eternal word became a human being. We see that in the economy that we have kept seeing from Athanasius on to Maximus the Confessor. Oh, you know who else we forgot in our list here? I'm sorry. Alexander. I guess we're almost equal in the number of fathers and heretics. So the gospel of salvation teaches that the eternal word became a human being. Third, human beings, and this gets to you and me, are invited into the eternal presence of the triune God through union with Christ. This is how people may be saved. You know, it's this way. You know, I know illustrations can lead to heresy, but I'm going to do it anyways. You're a creature. There's a creator. You have the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, right? And then we've got this great divide between us and God. We are his creatures. How is it that we can become saved? That's our question. Because we have rebelled against God. And we deserve eternal condemnation. And so God sent the Son, who is fully God and remains fully God, even as he becomes a human being in the incarnation, to become a human being. And he becomes a human being just like you and me. He now has humanity as well as deity. He is not just the divine person. He is also the human person. One person, truly human, truly divine. Because he's human, he can take and start correcting what is wrong with humanity. He corrects our will. He, moreover, unites us with the Father. He has come from the Father, remember, and he has returned. to the Father. And when he returns to the Father, we have access to God in Christ. And this is the message of the book of Hebrews in particular. Orthodox Christology and the saving gospel of Jesus Christ are inseparable, just as the two natures of Christ became inseparable through the divine work of incarnation. Orthodox Christology and Gospel Proclamation are inseparable. So when you read the Nicene Creed, when you read the Apostles'Creed, when you read the Athanasian Creed, they all have large sections. The largest section is on Jesus Christ. And Christ is described in who he is and in what he does. And in what he does, it's primarily about the work of salvation. and it's focused on his becoming a human being, dying on the cross, and rising from the dead. And that is the source of our salvation. So Orthodox Christology and gospel proclamation are inseparable. Only Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life. Salvation is found only in his name. There is no other Christ. The true Christ is the gospel. There is no other Christ, and there is no other gospel than Christ's gospel. And we will have more to say about false Christs in future lectures. Any questions about the true Christ? You said that when the Son came and then returned with humanity, his human body went to heaven. You said that he didn't gain anything, but before he came to earth and became man, there wasn't Jesus'human body in heaven, but now the body is there. Deity gained nothing. Humanity gained everything. God didn't change. He's immutable. He can't change. He's perfect already. There's no alteration in God. there is an alteration in humanity. So the assumption of humanity doesn't change God, it changes humanity. And that's the beauty of it for us. That's why the language, and you'll read by the way, theologians, theologians who are writing today and very popular that will talk about the incarnation as they'll deny typically, some of them don't. Some popular theologians will say that the word loses something or doesn't exercise something anymore about its deity. Others are much more careful and they'll say, well, there wasn't a subtraction, there was an addition. And both claims are actually false. And the reason they're false is because God is perfect and doesn't change. And in the incarnation, what is changed is humanity, not deity. Humanity is enhanced. God is not enhanced. Humanity has an addition. It was unrighteous, now it's righteous. But God always remains righteous. He just now shares his righteousness with us through the incarnation. God doesn't, the Word doesn't change except in his humanity. And by changing humanity in himself, he changes our humanity, thus making our salvation possible. And the key here is to hold on to the truth that as God, as Jesus Christ, same yesterday, today, and forever. He's immutable. So no change, no addition, no subtraction, but the humanity has an addition. So there's that verse in Matthew 24 that talks about concerning the day or hour no one knows, not even the angels or the Son, but the Father only. And I've heard people be like, oh, like Jesus, like, basically when he emptied himself. Right, and he lost knowledge at that point. Yeah. Okay. That's what they say. Right. How do you? That's wrong. How do you explain that? Okay. How do I explain that? Yeah. His humanity doesn't know. So, now this brings us into a future lecture. Okay, great. But let me, no, no, no. We've got five minutes, so let me just start you thinking. Yeah. Okay. There are times in Scripture where it's referring to Jesus Christ. in his deity, and yet it ascribes a human quality to it. There are times that it refers to his humanity, yet it ascribes a divine quality to it. And this is known as the communication of natures, the communicatio idiomato, and we're going to talk about this. And what this means is that, for instance, Paul writes of the blood of God. God shed his blood. God's immutable. God is spirit. He doesn't have blood, does he? Well, that's a reference we know to the divine son who has a body that did bleed. And so scripture can, in the person of Christ, under the name of Christ, one name that is a divine name or another name that is a... human name, ascribe the qualities of the other nature to that name. And that's known as the communication of properties or communication of qualities. And scripture does that. But we know that God is spirit and he doesn't bleed. In the same way, we know that God has perfect knowledge. Christ is the power and the wisdom of God. Wisdom, knowledge, he has perfect knowledge, perfect wisdom. Before, during, after, in his incarnation. So there is no loss of knowledge. That's known as canonicism, this idea that somehow Christ loses something. And we'll talk more about that. But that's known as canonicism, and it too is a grave error. But it's also very common to hear. Really good questions. I had a question. Going back to when we talked about Marcellus and liking... And you mentioned he interpreted 1 Corinthians 15-28 a certain way. What would be, I guess, a correct contextual... Let's go to that passage. So we understand from many passages, such as 2 Samuel 7, 14, that he's given an eternal kingdom. Daniel refers to his eternal kingdom. We know that the kingdom of Christ has no end. I mean, it even says that in a number of places. His kingdom shall have no end. So we know that from many texts, but then this text comes along and says, when everything is subject to Christ, then the Son himself will also be subject to the one who subjected everything to him, so that God may be all in all. Back to our affirmation that Christ is divine and human and part of exegesis, right? We've already seen this. You see it in Gregory of Nazianzus. You see it in Athanasius. You see it in Cyril. You see it in all the Orthodox fathers. And they affirm that when there is a text that seems to ascribe a diminishing, in this case, a diminishing of kingdom, it can refer to as humanity. So one understanding of this, which is the understanding of the eternal relations of authority and submission, which has so many other problems with it, is that the kingdom of Christ comes to an end. This is an Aryan view. It's a view that you find among many evangelicals now. The idea that Christ subjects himself, and they would say that this is in his deity. That's why they refer to it as an eternal relation of submission or subjection. So they're saying the eternal son is subject to the father. And what I would argue is this is a reference to his humanity. What is he doing right now? He is bringing the powers under subjection. One day, he will no longer have anything else to subject. The demons will be cast into the pit. The other, the human rebels, will be cast into the eternal lake of fire. There will be no more order to be restored, for all has been restored in Christ, and therefore... It's all subjected to him, and he returns that subjection to the Father. But that reference to the Father is not over against his sonship as the son of the Father, but to his humanity, because humanity was given to rule this world, right? That's what we were created to do. We turned the rule over to Satan. We introduced disorder. Now, the great human being, Jesus Christ. has come and restored the world to where it should be. And so the new Adam now reigns and subjects everything to God in himself. For he is one with the Father, sharing with the Father in all things, including his sovereignty. There is no subjection of sovereignty in the divine Son. There is subjection of sovereignty. in the human son, which we've already talked about. He subjected his human will to the divine will, and that occurred in himself because he has both the divine will and the human will. So does that piece occur at the new heavens and new earth? Well, it occurs when the powers are finally all subordinated where they should have been in the first place. then all things will be in all. God will be in all in all. In other words, everything will be restored to where it should have been before the fall. Yes, sir. So just to fill that out, make sure I'm understanding correctly. So Christ in his human nature as the new Adam, the representative of all humanity, will be subjected to God kind of in his deity. All this is occurring in Christ himself. Because he's God. And he's all in all. Which brings up another principle. Whenever you hear a reference to the Father, anything that can be said of the Father must be said of the Son. Except for one thing. The Son is begotten of the Father. That's the only difference. That's why in Isaiah 7, he's referred to in the names as Eternal Father. He's got an eternal kingdom. Because when you look at the son, you see the father. If you have seen me, you told Philip, you have seen the father. So you look at Jesus, you are looking at the father. All right.

We also need to mention Nestorius. So what was it that originally prompted Cyril to launch what became a centuries-long struggle to define Orthodox Christology? A rival school of biblical interpretation to Alexandria had established itself at Antioch.

One of its leading teachers, Diodorus of Parsis, the name like that, you know, he's got to be a bad guy. said the incarnation was composed of two sons, one divine and one human. Son of God, son of man, two different sons. Theodore of Mopsuestia, another leading Antiochian said Christ was two persons joined in a moral union or community of thought and will.

For example, Theodore sundered Christ by asserting the one who assumed is not the same as the one who was assumed. Theodore's exaggerations, omissions, and dangerous tendencies were popularized by Nestorius, a controversial bishop of Constantinople. and his chaplains.

The Nestorians, sundering the divine from the human Christ, therefore condemned the Orthodox belief that Mary was Theotokos, the woman who carried God in her womb. So this is an important term. They took us from each God bearer. So did Mary conceive God in her womb? By the Holy Spirit.

Not that God has a beginning in the Virgin, but Mary certainly bore in her womb God. At least that's what Cyril thought. It's what everybody else thought, but not Nestorius. Because of this two sons, they wanted to keep the deity and the humanity distinct, such that they drove them apart.

Yes, sir. It does bring up an interesting point, though, how Mary's sin nature didn't pass itself to Christ. Yeah. Anyways.

Because he was conceived by the Holy Spirit. So that is an interesting question that has led, you know, Roman Catholics to affirm such things as the Immaculate Conception, not of Jesus, but of Mary, so that she didn't have a sin nature. But that's, we just know that he was conceived by the Holy Spirit and that it was a holy movement, not a sinful movement. The question is, can you affirm the theopokos that Mary is the god-bearer?

That was the issue. Nestorius said no. Cyril said yes.

Cyril's voluminous biblical studies and keen theological insights helped him defend the unity of Christ's person against Nestorianism's division of Christ. By the way, I ran into a seminary president who denied the theopokos. I don't think he understood what he was doing.

Deny that, you're really stepping into historians, which is technically a heresy. So the historians portrayed Christ as composed of two subjects, while Cyril consistently depicted him as one subject. Cyril perceived how Nestorianism carried on the project of Arianism. So he said, listen, Nestorius is the new Arius, in a way. Arianism had diminished Christ before the incarnation.

For their part, the Nestorians diminished Christ in the incarnation. And Cyril reminded them the scripture named Christ Emmanuel, God with us. That's his name. That's who's in Mary's womb.

God with us. At the same time, he is God and he is human. You can't divorce him.

He is God with us. There is not two sons. He's one. Christ is God and he was conceived as a man in the womb of the virgin.

That's just Luke 2, Matthew 1. You can't get away from that. Cyril also pointed out how the Nestorians, in his words, bankrupt the economy of salvation by denying the same son who was eternally begotten of the father had become incarnate. Cyril replied, in short, he took what was ours to be his very own so that we might have all that was his.

There's that exchange again, similar to what Athanasius was saying. You know, the debate between our two presidential candidates is about to happen. My wife told me that. She said, you're going to have low attendance tonight.

I said, no, we've got a greater debate. This is between heresy and orthodoxy. I want to see somebody get slapped.

Although I understand that, who was it? Nicholas. who was at the Council of Nicaea, actually slapped a librarian. That's tough. That's zeal for the Lord.

Only the one whose word become man could reconcile a holy God with sinful man. He writes, the word who is God came down from out of heaven and entered our likeness, that is to say, submitted to birth. from a woman according to the flesh, while ever remaining what he was, that is, one from on high from heaven, superior to all things as God, even with the flesh.

This sounds like Athanasius, doesn't it? The one who is God became a human being. He's still God, even as he is a human being. Cyril also repeated the partitive exegesis of Athanasius.

assigning both divine acts and human acts to the one Christ. He refused to allow these distinct actions to be assigned to anyone but the one Christ. For there is only one Son, the Word, who was made man for our sake.

I would say that everything refers to him, words and deeds, both those that befit the deity as well as those which are human. In summary, Christ is in no way divided. Did you notice the title on the unity of Christ? That's the emphasis for Cyril, unity. While emphasizing the unity of Christ, Cyril never lost sight of Christ's two natures.

Christ is both God and man and not a third thing. His deity is not diminished by the incarnation, nor is his humanity. As noted above, Cyril recognized that holding the great truths about Christ requires humility. He suffers in his own flesh and not in the nature of the Godhead. It seems like a contradiction to us, but it's a mystery.

The two natures of the one Christ are a scandal to the carnal mind, but the great mystery of the true Christ prompts true believers. worship. Finally, Cyril taught that the incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension of the eternal word is the only way humanity could be saved. drawing on the difference between Adam, who was a living being, and Christ, who's a life-giving spirit, Cyril said there was no other way for the flesh to become life-giving, even though by its own nature it was subject to the necessity of corruption, except that it became the very flesh of the Word who gives life to all things. So for Cyril, as for Athanasius, as for Justin, as for Augustine, human salvation.

depends upon Orthodox Christology. Let me just walk you through some things in the book. I've mentioned several things out of the book, but I think there, just take a few minutes to look at it. The introduction is good.

The introductions on these little books are always good, but the actual text begins on page 49 of this book. It's in the form of a dialogue. He says at the beginning, people of true and good sense who have intellectually gathered that knowledge which gives life are never jaded by the sacred sciences, the sacred sciences.

Indeed, it is written that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. The word of God is food for the mind and a spiritual bread that strengthens the heart of man. As the book of Psalms sings.

I love that. That's why I'm a theologian. I can't get enough of God.

Think about him all the time. Rather do nothing else than think about him. Listen to what he says about the Arians on page 50, down towards the bottom.

Some are foolish enough to bring down the word and only begotten Son of God from his supreme station. They reduce him from equality with God the Father by denying his consubstantiality and refusing to crown him with a perfect identity of nature. I'll read this next page. More or less.

retrace the same path as those we have just mentioned. They fall into the snares of death and into the pit of hell as they pervert the mystery of the fleshly economy of the only begotten, teaching of folly which is in a way the twin of that of their predecessors. So that was Arianism. This is Nestorianism. In effect, the first group, insofar as life's within their power, drag down the word born of God the Father from the heights of divinity even before his incarnation, while the second group have decided to wage war.

against the word even in his incarnation and that's when he argues but he is Emmanuel he is God with us um on page 55 he is said to have undergone a birth like ours while all the while remaining what he was so he has a human birth and he remains what he always was. That is the word of God. I've noticed this on page 59. He is going to refer here to the two generations of the Son.

So eternally, the Son is begotten of the Father. When he becomes a human being. he is begotten of Mary by the Holy Spirit.

God the Father engendered the Son from himself in one single act of generation, but it was his whole good pleasure to save the whole human race in him by means of the incarnation, or rather the enmanment, which of course evidently and entirely depended on birth from a woman. You have the exchange down below, 2 Corinthians 8-9. He was rich, but he came poor for our sake, so that we might be enriched by his poverty. Oh, there's so much good in here.

Oh, here's one, page 62. As I have said at the bottom, the Son came, or rather was made man, in order to reconstitute our condition within himself. First of all, in his own holy, wonderful, and truly amazing birth and life. This was why he himself became the first one to be born in the Holy Spirit.

I mean, of course, after the flesh, so that he could trace a path for grace to come to us. He wanted us to have this intellectual regeneration and spiritual assimilation to himself. who is the true and natural Son, so that we too might be able to call God our Father, and so remain free of corruption. Dr. Yeah, is he doing like, is he contrasting Christ with the historians there? It says Christ traces the past and graces for us, so the historians trace, or areas trace the past and the historians.

Oh, I don't know that he's doing that, but yeah, I see your... an analogy. No, I think he's saying Christ traces the path for us through remaking humanity.

That was clever though. Oh, the unity that Nestorius describes is rather weak, and we'll get into that in just a moment. So Nestorius wants to use the language of a conjunction of the Son of God and the Son of Man, whereas...

And you can see this on pages 73 and 74, whereas, and he rejects union, whereas for Cyril, it's a union. The question becomes, what is it? Page 77 is beyond conception.

Well, here's another thing on page 80. So, for the Arians, Christ is the Son of God by grace, whereas for the Nicene theologians, including Athanasius and Cyril, we are sons by grace. God is son by nature. There's a distinction between nature and grace.

Oh, there's so many good things here, and I've mentioned many of them already. All right, let's move on to conciliar Christology. We're going to fill up with some more bad guys.

Because of the precise exegetical insights of Cyril, his writings became the touchstone of orthodoxy in the four ecumenical councils which focus primarily on Christology. They all go back to Cyril. They're like, oh, let's get out our textbook that we were assigned in Systematic II, and we will hold a council.

They didn't have Systematic II. and it will be helpful to review the development of Christology through these councils. I really would like you to know them.

The first two ecumenical councils focused on clarifying how Christ was truly God, thereby helping the early church discern the lineaments of God and the Trinity. However, certain other teachings require judgment for other heresies, including those taught by some pronicing theologians to minister Jesus Christ in some way. The councils after 381 focused on discerning who Christ is in his person.

So let's look first of all at Nicaea in 325. It will be remembered that the council of Nicaea anathematized Arianism for diminishing the son because it denied he was truly divine with the father. Arius also denied the son should be worshipped equally with the father. Setting the standard for subsequent Nicene hermeneutics and for Orthodox worship, Alexander of Alexandria. We're into our third bishop of Alexandria. Okay.

He was before Athanasius. Alexander demonstrated the equality and lightness of the Son with the Father in all things. For instance, he recalled John 5.23, which I mentioned last week.

Wherein Christ said humanity must... honor the son as it honors the father. If you honor the son, that means you're worshiping him.

If you worship the son, you're worshiping the father, that means the son is God. Arius was like, no, a subordinate honor, not a real one. Alexander also argued that while the generation of the son is ultimately ineffable to humanity, His generation nevertheless establishes his equality with the Father. The Son is without beginning and has a perfect likeness in all things to his Father, except for his generation from the Father.

Now, Alexander, of Alexandria's basic insights about the deity of Christ, a deity which requires our worship, became integral to the theology which was first described at the Council of Nicaea. So it is Alexander who really does the heavy lifting that ends up being the conclusions at Nicaea. And his successors became the intrepid defenders of the deity of our one Lord Jesus Christ.

Let's move on to Constantinople, 381. Afterwards, the Council of Constantinople consolidated the gains made in both divine Christology and divine pneumatology, in other words, the Son and the Holy Spirit are God, and Nicaea. They also had to address new heresies about both Christ and the Holy Spirit. For instance, wayward doctrines of Christ were taught by Marcellus of Ancyra. We should have a session when we mention the heroes here.

They're like, yay! Boom! So, Marcellus. And Apollinaris.

You're getting the hang of it. Both of these men affirmed Nicaea but then proceeded to diminish the word of God in other ways. The teachings of both men were identified as heretical during the years leading into the Second Ecumenical Council. Marcellus lacked a doctrine of eternal generation to explain the Son's origin, and he collapsed the word back into the divine mind at the eschaton. Marcellus interpreted 1 Corinthians 15 28 which states the son will also be subjected to the one uh to he who's or the one who subjected everything to him to mean Christ's kingdom will cease now there's a problem in that because there's a whole lot of texts that talk about Christ's kingdom that's going on forever so somebody's misinterpreting here He did not know what to do with Christ's humanity at the supposed demise of his kingdom.

Other Nicene theologians withdrew their support of Marcellus, so their friendship did not afford a blind eye to heresy. Marcellus and Athanasius were actually friends. Athanasius was like, no.

For his part, Apollinaris defended the deity of Christ. also at the price of his humanity. But he blundered in a different way. Apollinaris said the word of God took a human body at the incarnation, but without a human mind.

Gregory of Nazianzus responded that Christ had to be assumed the fullness of our humanity. In the first part of his justly famous Christological axiom, The chairman, Gregory of Nazianzus ended up being the chairman of the Council of Constantinople. He wrote, for that which he has not assumed, he has not healed. In other words, if Christ does not have a human mind, the human mind cannot be saved.

In the second part of his axiom, Gregory turned from Christology proper to Christology's importance for a proper doctrine of salvation. He went on to show how humanity is reunited to God only through the union of the two natures in Christ. But that which is united to his Godhead is also saved.

So for Orthodox theologians like Gregory, the true humanity of Christ is necessary to our salvation. The one who is eternally God assumed manhood also for our salvation, he wrote. So the Christologies of both Marcellus and Apollinaris compromised his humanity, but councils gathered to address their heresies among others. Ephesus, 431. The third ecumenical council gathered in Ephesus So we've had, we've stopped listening here.

So we've had Nicaea, we've had Constantinople, and we're looking at Christology, not Doctrine of Trinity, although we've mentioned it. But, you know, these are the Trinitarian councils. The next one, Ephesus, is really the first of the great. Christological councils. It's particularly concerned with Jesus Christ.

So these two councils address Jesus Christ. This one really gets into Jesus Christ. The third ecumenical council gathered in Ephesus to approve Cyril's theology of Christ's unity and to condemn Nestorius'division of Christ.

Cyril preserved the real union of Christ against Nestorius, who was avoiding the attribution of the human experiences of Christ to the divine word. Cyril cooperated with Orthodox Antiochian theologians. In other words, not everybody from Antioch got it wrong in Cyril's mind.

So he cooperated with John, the Bishop of Antioch, to affirm Nicaea and condemn Nestorius. And together they confessed Cyril's single subject, Christology. So back to our three rules, remember? One person, true deity, true humanity, right?

So they both agreed, one person. At the same time, both Cyril of Alexandria and John of Antioch, remember Alexandria and Antioch are the two great schools in the ancient church. They both recognized the difference between his humanity and his deity too.

They affirmed that the only begotten Son of God, a single subject, is perfect God and perfect man of a rational soul and body comprised of two perfections. He's perfect God, he's perfect man. Their formula of union also reaffirmed the importance of the divine narrative of the Incarnation.

In unconfused union, God the Word took flesh and became man and from his very conception, united to himself the temple he took from her. Cyril emphasized the unity of Christ, but not at the loss of his divine attributes, nor at the loss of his human attributes. On the one hand, he said the deity of Christ was preserved at the incarnation, because although he assumed flesh and blood, he remained what he was, God in nature and truth. On the other hand, he said the humanity of Christ was not overwhelmed in the incarnation. We do not say that his flesh was turned into the nature of the Godhead.

Cyril thus upheld Christ's distinct natures while emphasizing Christ's unity. We know only one Christ, the Word of God the Father, with his own flesh. By the way, we need to mention also another good guy. Leo. That kind of name has got to be.

Right. Better than Theodore. Two decades later, so in 451, the Council of Calcine recalled the teachings of Cyril that Christ is one person in two natures, with each nature retaining its own qualities.

The council specifically lauded Cyril's works for preserving the truth that Christ was not a mere man. Now, Seton also lauded the tome, Leo's tome, you know what I mean, of Pope Leo, which continued to hold in balance the single-subject Christology of Cyril with the two natures Christology emphasized by Orthodox Antiochians. Chalcedon, in turn, condemned the error of Eutychius. Boo! What is Eutychius'issue?

You're getting into a lot of heresies here, aren't you? Lucky you. Eutyches was an Alexandrian, so he comes from the Alexandrian school, who taught there were two natures before the hypostatic union, but only one afterwards. So he's God who becomes man and then becomes one nature. Leo's letter to Flavian, the patriarch of Constantinople, is noteworthy for the way in which it summarizes.

and explains the unity of the person of Christ without diminishing either his humanity or his deity. Like the theologians of Nicaea, Constantinople, and Ephesus beforehand, Leo rehearsed the gospel narrative of the divine economy of salvation, placing the divine word in human history. He writes, thus was the true God born in the undiminished and perfect nature of a true man, complete in what is his and complete in what is ours.

Turning his attention to Christological ontology, Leo taught that Christ's deity is entirely one with the Father's deity. Are you starting to get the theme here about what's orthodox and what's not? The Son is, he writes, co-eternal with him, in no way different from the Father since he was born God from God. Almighty from the Almighty, co-eternal from the Eternal. Not later in time, not lower in power, not unlike in glory, not distinct in being.

In other words, from his divine ontology to his divine economy, everything that the Father is, so is the Son. That's his deity. In addition, Christ's humanity is as complete as our humanity. The union of humanity with deity in Christ, moreover, did not diminish the humanity of Christ. Some were worried that, you know, by saying that the Word became flesh.

became human, that somehow the humanity would be overwhelmed by the deity. And Leo says, no, as God is not changed by showing mercy, neither is humanity devoured by the dignity received. The activity of Christ's humanity remained human.

There was, however, an enhancing of humanity. The matter of this enhancing became clearer in subsequent councils. Leo appropriated the teachings of the apostles to uphold the unity of Christ's person, even as he maintained his true deity and his true humanity. His review of the writings led him to make this claim, and I quote, The same one is both the Son of God and also the Christ.

There is only one Christ in two natures according to the Apostolic Testimony. And to have believed that the Lord Jesus Christ was either only God and not man, or solely man and not God, was equally dangerous. Leo's careful exegetical theology was precisely stated in the formula adopted at Chalcedon, which was reviewed at the end of our last lecture.

I think Chalcedon is really a good statement in many ways. But, Christology doesn't stop there. Constantinople II or II, 553. At the second council of Constantinople, mediating theologians, so by this time Antioch and Alexandria were just anathematizing one another.

They couldn't stand one another. And so Alexandria, after Chalcedon, felt like it had been picked on because the two natures had been emphasized. And there was a bit of bad feeling in there.

So mediating theologians sought to maintain the unity of the church from being damaged by radicals in the Antiochian tradition. The latter assumed that the balance of Chalcedon contradicted the Alexandrian tradition and Cyril's emphasis upon the unity of Christ. And the writings of three prominent Antiochian theologians, Theodore of Mopsuestia, But also, we've got to get in some more.

Oh. And their theology is very alike. Theoderate. That's right.

and Ivis, a good name to remember. So the writings of these theologians were examined and condemned by the council, are called the three chapters. Cyril's work at Ephesus and Leo's work at Chalcedon were also lauded. So they're building on each other.

They're saying, listen, we go back and agree with that council and so on. And the dogmatic decrees of the four previous ecumenical councils were fully affirmed. This council emphasized the hypostatic union of Christ against alternative unities, which diminish Christ.

So they're going to come back to the unity of Christ and do some focusing there. Let's listen to what they say. They noted how the type of unity advocated by Apollinaris.

and eunuchies had confused the natures. Conversely, the type of unity advocated by Theodore and Nestorius was too weak to maintain true unity, for it was a union only by affection, the council writes. In response, the council declared that the true unity of Christ was a union between the word of God and human flesh, which is by synthesis. bringing the two together. That is by union of subsistence.

Now there is a word for you, that's the Latin. The Greek translated into Latin as unitatioinem, subsistientem, was tanhenosin katupastasin, in other words, hypostatic union, or personal union, the union of the person. And that's where we get our language of hypostatic eating this day.

That brings us to, oops, I've stopped listening to the councils. We've been through Calcedon, Constantinople II, now we're into Constantinople III. And you're saying, I'm glad there are only seven ecumenical councils.

The last one, by the way, we're not covering, but it was Nicaea 2. And it concerned, what do you do with icons? And you have icons. And they ruled that you shouldn't worship icons because they're not God.

But you can venerate them because they remind you of God. Like my grandmother, she never read her Bible, but she kept the Bible on the coffee table. And if you put anything on top of it, your grandmother did the same thing.

You got in trouble. But she never cracked that thing. For her, venerate.

You worship God, you venerate the Bible, right? It's the same thing that they came to the conclusion of. And so that's a definition. And that's...

accepted universally. But let's talk about Constantinople 3. That's where we need to focus because there's really something, you know, Constantinople 2 is coming back and affirming the union of Christ. It does other things, but that's really where it puts its emphasis in the fourth anathema.

Constantinople 3 introduces something that some of you asked me about last week. So it met in 680. and 681. At the Third Council of Constantinople, Christ's wills and principles of energies became a critical concern. And you're like, what? Christ's wills and principles of energy. We'll come back to that.

You see, efforts to heal the ongoing division between the two major schools of Antioch and Alexandria continued, but some proposed solutions created difficulties too great for truly orthodox teachers to ignore. So somebody would come up with a bright idea. Let's do it this way. And I mentioned these with different types of Arianism.

They were coming up with different formulas to try to replace homoousios. Remember? Well, they're not trying to come up with different formulas to try to bring together everybody again. So do we have a word here? Number three.

i'm sorry are we continuing number three or all the academic people no we're not done sargis and we're not done all right what what was the problem with these guys uh a serious was the Bishop of Constantinople, Honorius was the bishop of Rome, the pope, who's a heretic. Now that doesn't help Roman polemics very much to have a heretic. They've got another one too, but we're not going to do that tonight.

So Sergius proposed bringing the hypostatic union in two natures into easy conceptual grasp by affirming Christ had one energy. That was the solution. We'll just say he has one energy.

Yeah, he's got two natures, but one energy. And he thought, well, this will please the Eutychians, who were emphasizing unity and the loss of the two natures. Well, we'll try to make peace with them by affirming one energy. Honorius added that Christ had one will. And Heraclius, who was the emperor, you know, the guy with all the power, liked the one will idea, and he condemned any teaching that Christ might have two wills.

So this brings us to the debate between what is known as the heresy of monothelitism, which means one will. single will, only one will, and then diothelitism, which means two wills. And that became the Orthodox position, diothelitism. And this brings us to Maximus the Confessor. Maximus the Confessor stepped forward to argue that a simple reading of Matthew 26, verses 36 through 42, requires an affirmation that Christ has two wills.

In the Garden of Gethsemane, Christ concluded through deep personal struggle, yet not as I will, but as you will. So how do we interpret that? The two wills under consideration here could not be that of the divine son vis-a-vis the divine father. Any doctrine of two wills or two energies belonging to the one God would contradict Nicene theology. Apostolic testimony depicted the Father and the Son as having one word, one will, one work.

The work I do is not my own but the Father's. The words I speak are my Father's. I'm willing what the Father is willing.

I mean, Jesus had said all these things. So they're coming up with a formula to try to please. Some of the heretics, and they're creating more problems is what they're doing. So naturally, Athanasius had taught the Father and the Son have one will and one work, because he read scripture.

Maximus believed that when the Word assumed humanity, the humanity of Christ was granted personhood by the Word. This you don't necessarily need to know, but it's interesting nonetheless, but it's called in hypostasis. So how is it that we say that the humanity of Christ is, he's truly human, fully human? He is a human person. Yet we don't have two persons.

So how does he become a human person? Well, he's the eternal word who's always a person. When he assumes human flesh, he also becomes a person.

The humanity is brought into the person such that the humanity is a human person. Does that make sense? That's what in the hypostasis means.

That's freedom. As a human person, Christ must have a human will. You are human persons.

Do each of you have a will? You do. for Christ to save the human will, just like saving the human mind, he has to have a human will, doesn't he? That takes us back to Gregory's formula, doesn't it?

What he does not assume, he does not heal. So he has to have a human will. He has to have a divine will. You can't just have one will. Moreover, Maximus said the struggle in the garden occurred within this human will of Christ.

You see, he overcame the natural human desire to live. He's looking at death. Remember, he sweats drops of blood, doesn't he?

His great sorrow and trouble, scripture says. So he overcame the natural human desire to live with the need to obey the father and go on to secure the redemption of humanity through his bodily sacrifice. The father sent him to go and die, and he decides to obey the father.

Yet not my will, the natural human will to live. but thy will be done. Christ, in other words, obediently surrendered his natural human will to the divine will.

Do you understand what this does for the doctrine of the human will for a Christian? It means that your will can start to be restored to what it should have been in the first place, which is good news for you in all of your struggles against sin. The human will of Christ was submitted to the will of God, and Christ is the mediator of the way back to God in numerous ways. Maximus is brilliant at all this.

I don't have time to go through everything, but I recommend his works here. He argued that Christ restored the human ability to will according to God's command through his personal struggle with death and obedience to God. By the voluntary character of his suffering, Christ... broke the pattern of human nature, warring against itself, also reconciling us through himself to the Father and to one another. That's what Christ did.

You and I don't have the ability, if we're in our right minds, to embrace death in order to give others life through our bodily sacrifice. But Christ did, and only he could do it. So the desire to live was submitted to obedience to the Father. And in doing so, he takes the human will and he perfects it by bringing it back into obedience to the Father.

We can't obey on our own, but Christ can obey for us, which he did. And moreover, Christ, in obeying for us, has started to take our wills and make them what they are. things should be by the presence of his Holy Spirit. Christ can change your desires and bring you the desire to be what God wants you to be.

That's Maximus'message. Maximus refused to surrender his powerful exegetical and theological insights about Christ and salvation. He was persecuted by the empire for not submitting to imperial wishes.

And he died from his wounds in 662. They bore a hole through his tongue and cut off his hand because he would not agree with the one-wheel idea. And he ended up dying from his wounds. And it looked for about 20 years as if he was the bad man out. Nearly two decades later, the sixth ecumenical council gathered in Constantinople to declare this, which was in full agreement now with Maximus, because they had worked through the news and they were deciding, you know what, he actually was right.

This happens, by the way, that sometimes you have a prophetic figure in the midst who nobody likes, and then later they're like, he knew what he was talking about, and that's what happened with Constantine. And they wrote in the sixth council in Constantinople III, and we proclaim equally two natural volitions or wills in him and two natural principles of action which undergo no division, no change, no participation, no partition, no confusion in accordance with the teaching of the Holy Fathers. Orthodox theologians argue that if one denies the human nature, it's a building of activity. which a one energy solution would surrender, Christ could not be truly human. He has to be able to act as a human to be human.

He has to have a will as a human to be human. just as he has to have a mind to be human. This all is going back to Apollinaris.

And Gregory, we didn't put Gregory down. And Gregory's dictum that what he does not assume, he does not heal. And so it's all going back to that basic axiom.

Conversely, if one denies the divine nature its energy and will, Christ would not truly be divine. Maximus and Constantinople envisioned the restoration of the universe recurring in Christ. Christ must be truly human, which requires both the human will and human energy to reconcile humanity.

He must also be truly divine, which requires both the divine will and divine energy to reconcile humanity with God. And so they... They said, we hold two natural wills and principles of action meeting correspondence for the salvation of the human race. Now, our conclusion.

As we have already suggested, Orthodox soteriology, we're here in this lecture focusing on the person of Christ, right? But we've never been far from human salvation caused by Christ, have we? Orthodox soteriology depends on Orthodox Christology and proper biblical hermeneutics, and these were deemed to be integrated by the early church fathers. The first church father we reviewed, you remember, Justin Martyr, understood that who Christ is in his person determines how he saves us in his actions.

More developed accounts of the person of Christ were worked out in the tussle of theological debate. The proponents of the true Christ often paid a great price for defending him. The last church father we reviewed, Maximus the Confessor, died a martyr like the first one we reviewed. The Orthodox conclusions about Christ were ultimately enclosed in the theological decrees of these various councils. The dogmatic Christological doctrines decreed by the ecumenical councils have been, as their name indicates, ecumenical meaning universal, have been almost universally recognized.

Their understanding of Christ in his person and the impact of their discoveries upon our understanding of his gift of salvation must not be dismissed as some type of needless discussion. This gets to the heart of the faith about who Christ is. The... Councils believed they were being led by the Holy Spirit, and if the doctrine of biblical illumination is true, they just might have been.

I would argue that these councils did get it right. We described the biblical consensus about the ontology of Christ as being comprised of three rules. We can now place them in the following grammatic construction. First, the Lord Jesus Christ is one person and his unity never changes. Can we agree on that?

I think we've determined that both in Scripture and in history at this point. Second, the eternal word is truly God and his deity remains as always. His deity is not diminished whatsoever, even in and through his incarnation. And we can also mention under this second statement that his generation entails His perfect sharing of all that God is.

Jesus Christ, the eternal word and being flesh is a human being. His humanity, like ours, is constituted of a body and a soul. Yet he did not sin. And his humanity was not somehow overwhelmed by the incarnation. We could also say that.

Now, something new for this lecture. That's just reaffirming what we said in the last lecture. In a very similar way, the futuristic consensus about the grammar of soteriology has been described recently as comprised of three rules that are very similar.

First, the two natures of Jesus Christ are united in his person. That is what we just said, right, about the ontology. So they would agree with that.

Second, this occurred through the economic assimilation of human nature to his divine person. The gospel of salvation teaches that the eternal word became a human being. We see that in the economy that we have kept seeing from Athanasius on to Maximus the Confessor. Oh, you know who else we forgot in our list here?

I'm sorry. Alexander. I guess we're almost equal in the number of fathers and heretics.

So the gospel of salvation teaches that the eternal word became a human being. Third, human beings, and this gets to you and me, are invited into the eternal presence of the triune God through union with Christ. This is how people may be saved.

You know, it's this way. You know, I know illustrations can lead to heresy, but I'm going to do it anyways. You're a creature. There's a creator.

You have the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, right? And then we've got this great divide between us and God. We are his creatures.

How is it that we can become saved? That's our question. Because we have rebelled against God.

And we deserve eternal condemnation. And so God sent the Son, who is fully God and remains fully God, even as he becomes a human being in the incarnation, to become a human being. And he becomes a human being just like you and me. He now has humanity as well as deity.

He is not just the divine person. He is also the human person. One person, truly human, truly divine.

Because he's human, he can take and start correcting what is wrong with humanity. He corrects our will. He, moreover, unites us with the Father.

He has come from the Father, remember, and he has returned. to the Father. And when he returns to the Father, we have access to God in Christ. And this is the message of the book of Hebrews in particular. Orthodox Christology and the saving gospel of Jesus Christ are inseparable, just as the two natures of Christ became inseparable through the divine work of incarnation.

Orthodox Christology and Gospel Proclamation are inseparable. So when you read the Nicene Creed, when you read the Apostles'Creed, when you read the Athanasian Creed, they all have large sections. The largest section is on Jesus Christ.

And Christ is described in who he is and in what he does. And in what he does, it's primarily about the work of salvation. and it's focused on his becoming a human being, dying on the cross, and rising from the dead.

And that is the source of our salvation. So Orthodox Christology and gospel proclamation are inseparable. Only Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life.

Salvation is found only in his name. There is no other Christ. The true Christ is the gospel.

There is no other Christ, and there is no other gospel than Christ's gospel. And we will have more to say about false Christs in future lectures. Any questions about the true Christ?

You said that when the Son came and then returned with humanity, his human body went to heaven. You said that he didn't gain anything, but before he came to earth and became man, there wasn't Jesus'human body in heaven, but now the body is there. Deity gained nothing.

Humanity gained everything. God didn't change. He's immutable.

He can't change. He's perfect already. There's no alteration in God.

there is an alteration in humanity. So the assumption of humanity doesn't change God, it changes humanity. And that's the beauty of it for us. That's why the language, and you'll read by the way, theologians, theologians who are writing today and very popular that will talk about the incarnation as they'll deny typically, some of them don't.

Some popular theologians will say that the word loses something or doesn't exercise something anymore about its deity. Others are much more careful and they'll say, well, there wasn't a subtraction, there was an addition. And both claims are actually false. And the reason they're false is because God is perfect and doesn't change.

And in the incarnation, what is changed is humanity, not deity. Humanity is enhanced. God is not enhanced.

Humanity has an addition. It was unrighteous, now it's righteous. But God always remains righteous. He just now shares his righteousness with us through the incarnation.

God doesn't, the Word doesn't change except in his humanity. And by changing humanity in himself, he changes our humanity, thus making our salvation possible. And the key here is to hold on to the truth that as God, as Jesus Christ, same yesterday, today, and forever.

He's immutable. So no change, no addition, no subtraction, but the humanity has an addition. So there's that verse in Matthew 24 that talks about concerning the day or hour no one knows, not even the angels or the Son, but the Father only. And I've heard people be like, oh, like Jesus, like, basically when he emptied himself. Right, and he lost knowledge at that point.

Yeah. Okay. That's what they say.

Right. How do you? That's wrong. How do you explain that? Okay.

How do I explain that? Yeah. His humanity doesn't know.

So, now this brings us into a future lecture. Okay, great. But let me, no, no, no. We've got five minutes, so let me just start you thinking.

Yeah. Okay. There are times in Scripture where it's referring to Jesus Christ. in his deity, and yet it ascribes a human quality to it. There are times that it refers to his humanity, yet it ascribes a divine quality to it.

And this is known as the communication of natures, the communicatio idiomato, and we're going to talk about this. And what this means is that, for instance, Paul writes of the blood of God. God shed his blood.

God's immutable. God is spirit. He doesn't have blood, does he? Well, that's a reference we know to the divine son who has a body that did bleed.

And so scripture can, in the person of Christ, under the name of Christ, one name that is a divine name or another name that is a... human name, ascribe the qualities of the other nature to that name. And that's known as the communication of properties or communication of qualities. And scripture does that.

But we know that God is spirit and he doesn't bleed. In the same way, we know that God has perfect knowledge. Christ is the power and the wisdom of God.

Wisdom, knowledge, he has perfect knowledge, perfect wisdom. Before, during, after, in his incarnation. So there is no loss of knowledge.

That's known as canonicism, this idea that somehow Christ loses something. And we'll talk more about that. But that's known as canonicism, and it too is a grave error.

But it's also very common to hear. Really good questions. I had a question.

Going back to when we talked about Marcellus and liking... And you mentioned he interpreted 1 Corinthians 15-28 a certain way. What would be, I guess, a correct contextual...

Let's go to that passage. So we understand from many passages, such as 2 Samuel 7, 14, that he's given an eternal kingdom. Daniel refers to his eternal kingdom. We know that the kingdom of Christ has no end.

I mean, it even says that in a number of places. His kingdom shall have no end. So we know that from many texts, but then this text comes along and says, when everything is subject to Christ, then the Son himself will also be subject to the one who subjected everything to him, so that God may be all in all. Back to our affirmation that Christ is divine and human and part of exegesis, right? We've already seen this.

You see it in Gregory of Nazianzus. You see it in Athanasius. You see it in Cyril.

You see it in all the Orthodox fathers. And they affirm that when there is a text that seems to ascribe a diminishing, in this case, a diminishing of kingdom, it can refer to as humanity. So one understanding of this, which is the understanding of the eternal relations of authority and submission, which has so many other problems with it, is that the kingdom of Christ comes to an end. This is an Aryan view.

It's a view that you find among many evangelicals now. The idea that Christ subjects himself, and they would say that this is in his deity. That's why they refer to it as an eternal relation of submission or subjection.

So they're saying the eternal son is subject to the father. And what I would argue is this is a reference to his humanity. What is he doing right now?

He is bringing the powers under subjection. One day, he will no longer have anything else to subject. The demons will be cast into the pit.

The other, the human rebels, will be cast into the eternal lake of fire. There will be no more order to be restored, for all has been restored in Christ, and therefore... It's all subjected to him, and he returns that subjection to the Father.

But that reference to the Father is not over against his sonship as the son of the Father, but to his humanity, because humanity was given to rule this world, right? That's what we were created to do. We turned the rule over to Satan.

We introduced disorder. Now, the great human being, Jesus Christ. has come and restored the world to where it should be. And so the new Adam now reigns and subjects everything to God in himself. For he is one with the Father, sharing with the Father in all things, including his sovereignty.

There is no subjection of sovereignty in the divine Son. There is subjection of sovereignty. in the human son, which we've already talked about. He subjected his human will to the divine will, and that occurred in himself because he has both the divine will and the human will. So does that piece occur at the new heavens and new earth?

Well, it occurs when the powers are finally all subordinated where they should have been in the first place. then all things will be in all. God will be in all in all. In other words, everything will be restored to where it should have been before the fall.

Yes, sir. So just to fill that out, make sure I'm understanding correctly. So Christ in his human nature as the new Adam, the representative of all humanity, will be subjected to God kind of in his deity. All this is occurring in Christ himself.

Because he's God. And he's all in all. Which brings up another principle.

Whenever you hear a reference to the Father, anything that can be said of the Father must be said of the Son. Except for one thing. The Son is begotten of the Father. That's the only difference. That's why in Isaiah 7, he's referred to in the names as Eternal Father.

He's got an eternal kingdom. Because when you look at the son, you see the father. If you have seen me, you told Philip, you have seen the father.

So you look at Jesus, you are looking at the father. All right.

Transcript for:Cyril of Alexandria's Christology Insights

Transcript for:
Cyril of Alexandria's Christology Insights