The Early Church’s Attempts to Understand the Relationship Between the Human and Divine Natures of Christ

     We have a tendency in modern times to think of what one believes as not particularly important. However, this tendency doesn’t always serve us well. Beliefs are like dominoes– one belief logically impacts another. Our belief about one topic is in some way connected to our belief about another topic, and our beliefs cannot help but impact our actions, attitudes, and well-being. So it is for how we view Christ’s divine and human natures.

     The early church was capable of seeing how a false belief about Christ’s nature could impact other beliefs, such as the atonement. For Christ to be joined to humanity, which was necessary for us to be saved, He had to be truly human. For Him to be be capable of fully saving us and connecting us to God, He had to always be truly God. This was also important for maintaining consistency with the biblical witness, which painted a picture of Christ as genuinely human and genuinely divine (John 20:20-29). There were numerous attempts to reconcile these biblical claims, finally culminating in the Council of Chalcedon (451 A.D.) which defended the orthodox view of Christ’s two natures. Before then, however, there were many missteps.

     Though the textual critic Bart Ehrman might argue that adoptionism/exhaltation was perhaps the church’s earliest attempt to make sense of who Jesus was, the biblical witness seems to argue otherwise. In any case, this view can be found as early as the second century in the views of Theodotus of Byzantium and Paul of Samosata. Adoptionists thought of Jesus as a holy man who was adopted as the Son of God at baptism due to His good works. Paul of Samosata’s concern in particular was of protecting strict monotheism, so he spoke of Jesus as, “a man adopted by God as his special human son. Jesus entered into a unique position in relation to God without actually becoming God. Paul of Samosata placed Jesus somewhere above other humans due to his elevation to sonship by the Father and somewhere below God due to his humanity and God’s absolute oneness” (Olson). After this adoption, He was thought of as divine in a sense, though not before, meaning He could not be the eternal God– the One who could say, “before Abraham was, I AM” (John 8:58). While this was an attempt to reconcile the biblical data, it leaned so far toward one truth that it ultimately failed to affirm the other truth. In this view, Jesus was 100% man at His birth.

     Another attempt to explain why scripture talked of Jesus as being divine but also of having a human body erred in the opposite way from adoptionism. Docetism comes from the Greek dokein, meaning “to seem.” In other words, Jesus was written about as if He was human because He pretended to be so. One variant of this view was more Gnostic influenced– if Christ was a pure being, it would have been improper for Him to have a body: “According to some docetists, Christ was so completely divine that he could not be human… For these docetists, Jesus’ body was a phantasm” (Ehrman, p. 15).

     Another variant had Christ abducting the body of a man named Jesus and then leaving the man to die on the cross: “For them, Jesus was a real flesh-and-blood human. But Christ was a separate person, a divine being who, as God, could not experience pain and death” (Ehrman, p. 15). A view somewhat similar to this latter one was called Apollinarianism, wherein the divine Logos took a human body. In this view, there is no human mind, but only a divine mind inhabiting a human body. These views ultimately failed as well. There can be no atonement if God did not fully join Himself to humanity. Further, Jesus makes it abundantly clear that He had a true human body: “Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24:39, ESV). He also had a human mind (see Luke 2:52, Mark 13:32).

     After these early and more extreme attempts to reconcile Jesus’ humanity and divinity, there were two more complicated solutions proposed. The first was Nestorianism. Nestorius’ view was that within Christ there were in fact two distinct persons– one human and one divine. This view allowed for side-stepping the difficult truth that God was born of a woman. By strongly separating the natures, Nestorians could claim that it was not God who has born, but simply Christ. As Nestorius wrote in his second letter to Cyril:
“Everywhere in Holy Scripture, whenever mention is made of the saving dispensation of the Lord, what is conveyed to us is the birth and suffering not of the deity but of the humanity of Christ, so that by a more exact manner of speech the holy Virgin is called Mother of Christ, not Mother of God. Listen to these words of the Gospels: ‘The book of the birth of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham’ [Matt. 1:1]. It is obvious that the son of David was not the divine Logos” (Noll).

     This view failed to join humanity in divinity in one person, and was rejected at the Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D., though it still lives on in the Church of the East (not to be confused with the Eastern Orthodox Church). It was followed by a Christological view that was essentially an extreme reaction to it: Eutychianism.

     Eutychianism, far from separating the natures of Christ, joined them together. For Eutyches, the human nature of Jesus was subsumed by the divine, creating what was essentially a new nature. Christ was therefore not human enough to be joined to us nor divine enough to be truly consubstantial (of the same nature) with the Father. The Council of Chalcedon sought to deal with the Eutychian issue and to re-affirm Ephesus’ condemnation of Nestorianism, arguing for a truly orthodox view of Christ’s two natures.

     The one thing that all of the aforementioned views have in common is that they go to one extreme or another in an attempt to hold on to one piece of truth about who Christ was. In contrast, the Council of Chalcedon’s orthodox definition managed to keep Christ’s natures in their proper balance. Chalcedon confessed, “one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood… to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person (prosopon) and one Subsistence (hypostasis), not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten God, the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ…” (Chalcedonian Creed, 451 A.D.) In other words, Christ was one person who possessed two natures– one fully human and the other fully divine. There was no confusion of natures, nor separating Christ into two different person. This also allowed for Jesus to be a true savior of mankind, “for we would not be able to overcome the author of sin and of death unless he whom sin could not stain nor death hold took on our nature and made it his own” (Noll).

 Sources Cited

Ehrman, B. D. (2003). Lost Christianities: the battle for Scripture and the faiths we never knew. P. 15. New York: Oxford University Press.

Noll, M. A. (1997). Turning points: decisive moments in the history of Christianity. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books. Kindle Edition.

Olson, R. E. (1999). The story of Christian theology: twenty centuries of tradition & reform. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition.

The Holy Bible: English Standard Version : the ESV Study Bible.. Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Bibles, 2008.