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The Transition of the Early Church from Being

a Sect Within Judaism to a Gentile Religion

In the centuries following Jesus’ public ministry and the rise of faith in his resurrection, the Christian church grew in numbers and spread throughout the Roman Empire. Though Christian faith was persecuted at times, it came to permeate Roman society. Constantine, who became sole ruler of the Roman Empire in 323 CE, was “in all practical respects” a Christian.1 He and Licinius granted Christianity legal equality with other religions of the empire in 313 CE. Christianity, originally a sect within Judaism, had become an influential and well established religion in the empire. The church was now a significant institution with its own internal politics. When it was rent by doctrinal debates, Constantine and emperors after him attempted to restore its unity, as disunity in the church undermined the unity of the empire.

There were cultural dimensions to this transition. Second Temple Judaism, from which Christianity emerged, had long been influenced by Hellenistic culture. This influence is evident in varying degrees throughout the New Testament. But as the church became a Gentile religion a deeper encounter occurred between the gospel and Hellenism. The cultural and religious background in terms of which Paul understood Jesus was Hellenistic Judaism. As the church grew in numbers, fewer and fewer members had this kind of background. More and more, the church came to be formed of Gentiles who tried to understand the gospel in relation to the values and practices of their predominantly Hellenistic ethos.

This brought a gradual shift in the questions occupying Christian intellectuals. From roughly 120 to 200 CE Christian theologians asserted that Jesus was both divine and human, but did not ponder at length how Jesus’ person was related to God, though the question was raised. As Christian theologians began to consider this, a fundamental axiom of their thinking deriving in part from their Hellenistic ethos was that the divine is absolute and impassible.2 This was both a presupposition of and a central problem for developments in Christology occurring in the first five centuries of church history and the ecumenical councils of Nicaea (325), Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451).

Appropriating Nicaea and Chalcedon Today

Of these four councils, the declarations of Nicaea concerning the triune nature of God and Jesus’ relation to the first person of the Trinity and those of the Chalcedonian Definition regarding the presence and relationship of divine and human natures in Jesus’ person have been particularly influential for subsequent Christologies. Until the Enlightenment these provided the basic presuppositions for many Christologies. Even today they are affirmed officially by most churches. Yet the differences between the Gospel portrayals of Jesus and the technical terminology of these affirmations and the equally great difference between their terminology and content and contemporary thought3 make them controversial and subject to wide-spread criticism.

The understandings of Jesus promulgated by the councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon are part of the legacy of the church’s first centuries as it struggled to understand Jesus and his saving significance. The questions wrestled with here are partly posed by the variety of Christologies in the New Testament,4 which require subsequent generations to determine their own. This means that the questions of Jesus’ relationship to God and the nature of Jesus’ person have to be asked and answered in every age. These kinds of questions and the diversity of New Testament answers to them make theology necessary.5 Part of answering them in the present is critically appraising the answers given to them in the past. The affirmations of Nicaea and Chalcedon were given partly as guides to how the New Testament, particularly the Gospels, should be read. They offer guidelines as to how an interpretative framework for understanding Jesus as the Christ should be formulated. These guidelines do not end theological discussion. Instead, they open it up by raising further questions that continue to challenge theologians today.

The questions wrestled with here were also partly posed by the challenge of inculturating the gospel in a Hellenistic milieu, a process necessitated by the church moving from being a Jewish sect to a Gentile religion. In this particular process of inculturation there were gains and losses. The inculturation of the gospel is part of the history of revelation, through which its truth continues to be revealed and appropriated. While this particular inculturation is finished, the inculturation of the gospel continues today as the church moves into new cultural contexts in the course of history.6 Western churches have now entered into a cultural context of postmodernity. Within this context two contrasting demands meet. One demand is for critical inquiry and recognition of the genuine humanity of Jesus.7 This requires that all truth claims about Jesus’ divinity be critically investigated and acknowledged as open to revision. The other demand is for recognition of the transcendence and otherness of God in relation to human finitude.8

What follows will examine the christological developments leading to the affirmations of Nicaea and Chalcedon, tracing their roots, noting their continuities and discontinuities with what can be known historically about Jesus and with the early church’s faith in him as the risen Christ. The conclusion will examine how the process leading to Nicaea is continued in a theological development begun by Karl Barth, in which the affirmations of Chalcedon became a basis for rethinking the nature of God in light of Jesus Christ.

The Impact of Jesus’ Resurrection

on How Jesus Was Understood

Jesus’ resurrection and experiences of the Holy Spirit connected to it led some Jewish-Christian groups to interpret his person in light of passages like Psalm 110:1, with the result that Jesus was seen to have a unique relationship to God and a divine status in relation to creation and salvation history.9 Through his resurrection Jesus was seen to have become God’s Son.10 The worship of these Christians became “binitarian” in that they began to worship Jesus as the risen Christ along with God.11

Jesus did not really “become a god.” Instead, he was given devotion that expressed the distinctively Christian recognition that Jesus was God’s unique emissary, in whom the glory of the one God was singularly reflected and to whom God “the Father” now demanded full reverence “as to a god.”12

Within two decades of Jesus’ resurrection this kind of reverence seems to have become widespread within the early church.

This reverence for Jesus was also expressed through titles such as Wisdom or Sophia, Christ and Lord. Some early Christians continued to view Jesus more as a martyred prophet who had been inspired by the Spirit and vindicated by God.13 Even within groups viewing Jesus as having become the Son of God there were variations in how this was understood.14 In the New Testament generally, this understanding of Jesus as having a special status and relationship to God did not displace others, such as interpretations of him as an eschatological prophet. Instead it functioned as an overarching metaphor that could be enriched and made concrete by these, but which in turn expressed a fuller understanding of Jesus’ relationship to God in light of his resurrection. This relationship is the basis of his ultimate saving significance.15 Tensions remain between these various Christologies. For the early churches that produced the writings making up the New Testament, Jesus had been inspired by the Holy Spirit. But through his resurrection he had become more than an inspired prophet and teacher. As the risen Christ he was the basis of a new relationship to God and a new experience of the Holy Spirit was available through him. Titles such as Lord, Wisdom of God, and Son of God were used to express this sense of Jesus’ transcendence and ultimate saving significance that reached beyond what notions of Jesus as an inspired teacher or prophet could express.

Developing in the first two decades after Jesus’ resurrection, this affirmation of Jesus’ distinction from and yet closeness to God sowed seeds that, through sustained debate over Jesus’ relationship to God, would eventually culminate in the doctrinal affirmations of Nicaea and Chalcedon. It was the Johannine understanding of Jesus as the pre-existent Word that particularly provided impetus for this development. Here the understanding of Jesus as the Son of God and the personification of divine wisdom blossomed into a notion of Jesus’ pre-existence as the Word of God. While notions of Jesus’ pre-existence may be found elsewhere in the New Testament, Johannine Christology was a dramatic development in the clarity and emphasis with which this was expressed.

[Here] the word of God is identified with a particular historical person, whose pre-existence as a person with God is asserted throughout. Now the Christian conception of God must make room for the person who was Christ, the Logos incarnate.16

The notion of Jesus as becoming Son of God in his resurrection has continuities with what can be surmised about Jesus’ sense of himself and his calling. But the Johannine notion of Jesus as the pre-existent Son of God goes beyond this.17 There is no evidence that Jesus ever thought of himself in this way. Yet there is continuity between the understanding that Jesus became God’s Son through his resurrection and the Johannine understanding of Jesus as the pre-existent Word. Throughout the New Testament Jesus is understood to bring a new era of salvation and a new relationship with God. How is this possible? Already in the New Testament this question was raised and answered through Christologies like those identifying Jesus as God’s Sophia or Son.18 The Gospel of John went further by equating the creative love that appears in Jesus with the being of God and the being of Jesus. Jesus is able to be the basis for a new era of salvation because he is both one with God and distinct from God (John 1:1, 18). This radicalizes the understandings of Jesus as divine Wisdom and as God’s Son and takes them further, but not in a different direction.19

The understanding that Jesus became God’s unique child through his resurrection and the Johannine understanding of Jesus’ pre-existence as the Word of God make distinct affirmations. Christian theology needs to recognize both.20 The first sees Jesus becoming something more through his death and resurrection than he had been in life. The events of his life, death, and resurrection have a real significance for his person, and beyond that for God and God’s creation. Jesus as eschatological prophet and Jesus as the risen Christ do not fit into the world as it is, but call for and promise its transformation. The second understanding affirms the radical transcendence of God’s Word to creation, yet also that this radically transcendent Word became incarnate in Jesus, experienced the human condition, suffered, died, and rose again. In this way God has already entered into a new relationship with creation that is the basis of what the first understanding promises. Both understandings are oriented to Jesus’ special status and relationship to God, not his gender. This relationship and status can also be expressed through the feminine image of Sophia, divine Wisdom.21

The decision made in the early church to understand Jesus in this way rather than simply as inspired by God is one that has to be rethought in the present generation. Some argue that this was a departure from Jesus of Galilee, a mystification that helped enshrine a patriarchal worldview in the church and that lost sight of Jesus’ prophetic practice.22 There is some truth in this.23 Notions of Jesus as God’s Son or as fully human and fully divine need to be made concrete by recurrence to accounts of Jesus’ life in the Synoptic Gospels,24 and at times subjected to an ideological critique. But conversely, notions of Jesus as a moral exemplar need to be undergirded by understandings of his ultimate saving significance that mediate the courage to love in the face of radical sin and evil.25 Understandings of Jesus as the Son or Wisdom of God can do this, and also express how the risen Christ is continuous with but not restricted to Jesus’ historical particularity.26

The early Christian experience of salvation in Jesus was one of inspiring example and authoritative teaching, but also of reconciliation to God and others despite one’s sin, hope for a new heaven and a new earth, and for life after death. These different aspects of salvation can conflict, but they also remain unfulfilled without each other. The salvation Jesus brings, like the Reign of God he preached, includes all aspects of the person and creation. Christologies have to offer an adequate explanation of how Jesus can mediate this kind of radical salvation.27 As only God can save and if salvation is experienced through Jesus, Jesus must in some way have a unique relationship to God. The divinity of Jesus is inferred from the experience of his saving significance.28 Affirmations of this and Jesus’ ultimate saving significance can become mystifications distracting people from urgent tasks within history that Jesus calls them too. But these can also be powerful moral sources enabling people to oppose radical evil without becoming fanatical in the quest for justice or falling into contempt for those they care for.29 Understandings of Jesus as God’s Sophia or Son explain how Jesus is able to mediate this kind of salvation30 and by doing so be this kind of moral source.

From Binitarian Worship in the New Testament to Trinitarian Faith at the Council of Nicaea

There are passages in the New Testament that speak of Jesus Christ, God, and the Holy Spirit (2 Cor13:13) or of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (Matt 28:19), and a Trinitarian understanding of God can be discerned “retrospectively” within John’s Gospel.31 But the full doctrine of the Trinity as affirmed at the council of Nicaea is not present in the New Testament. In hindsight one can say that its roots are present there. A number of New Testament passages are “functionally Trinitarian.”32 They speak of how salvation is mediated to humanity from God through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit. But the council of Nicaea was concerned not only with Jesus’ saving function, but also with what enabled him to fulfill this, the nature of his person and relationship to God. In this respect the council of Nicaea said things about Jesus that the New Testament does not. Through the process of inculturation that led to this council, the church attained greater metaphysical precision in its understanding of Jesus.

The church’s journey from the New Testament to Nicaea was a search for an understanding of God adequate to certain aspects of the gospel.33 It was “a process of trial-and-error,”34 influenced by political, religious, ecclesiastical, and personal factors. It did not end at Nicaea. What follows will sketch some of the stages of this development.

As the church took shape as an institution in the second century CE, ecclesiastical writers sought to harmonize the disparate teachings of the New Testament.35 At roughly the same time Christian theologians entered into a prolonged dispute with Gnosticism, which saw Jesus as representing a higher divinity over against a lesser divinity who had created the world. This controversy led the early church to emphasize the oneness and sovereignty of God, 36 which in turn raised the question of Jesus’ relationship to God. Use of the formula “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” became increasingly common in Christian worship and was used by theologians like Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 135–200) to understand the dynamics of salvation history. By the late second century Christian theologians were asking about Jesus’ relationship to God.37 The term “the Logos”38 was seized upon by some to describe Jesus’ relationship to God in opposition to a theological movement known as Monarchianism, which more sharply distinguished the two. This term was chosen because of its use in the Gospel of John and its resonances in Hellenistic culture. By this time Christian theologians had begun to seek greater clarity in their understanding of the gospel through the use of Hellenistic philosophy. This produced various ways of understanding Jesus’ relation to God that led to the affirmations of Nicaea and Chalcedon39 and made them necessary as part of defining the theological parameters of Christian faith in the Hellenistic world.

Early in the third century, in dispute with the Monarchian Praxeas, Tertullian (c. 160–225) developed the first explicitly Trinitarian understanding of God. Tertullian developed an economic40 theory of the Trinity, concerned with how God acts and is experienced in history. Subsequently Origen of Alexandria (c. 186–255) went further, describing God as existing in three hypostases. This term “hypostasis” became important in subsequent Trinitarian discussion. In this usage it means concrete reality, individual entity or subsistence.41 Origen also argued that the divine Logos was united to Jesus’ human soul as the heat of fire infuses a piece of iron placed in it. In arguing this Origen stated a principle that became central to christological teachings judged to be orthodox at Nicaea and Chalcedon: those elements of human nature which are not assumed by God in the incarnation are not saved.42 Origen was a highly significant and transitional figure to the subsequent Arian debate.43 Both sides followed trajectories of interpretation influenced by his attempt to understand the person and work of Jesus Christ within a Neoplatonic worldview.

Neoplatonism was a prevalent philosophy within the Roman Empire that Christian theologians used along with Aristotelianism to develop their understandings of the gospel. A key assumption of both philosophies was that the divine is immutable. As the divine was thought to be perfect it was understood to be unchangeable, existing in eternity beyond the fluctuations of history. This notion of divinity underlay what is known as the Arian controversy, named after Arius, whose teachings helped instigate it. Theologians on both sides of this controversy assumed God to be immutable. Arians argued that Jesus who suffered on the cross could not be fully divine because the divine was unchanging and so could not “become” something. The Word that became incarnate in Jesus was therefore a lesser god,44 created by a higher and greater divinity that was unchanging and fully divine. The Word mediated between this fully divine God and creation but did not share God’s nature.45 Athanasius’ contrary argument was based on the same premise but determined by soteriological concerns. Only God whose existence is unchanging and beyond the power of sin and death is able to save humanity from these. In order for Jesus to save he must share this divine nature. For Athanasius, only if human nature is assumed by the radically transcendent God through the Logos becoming incarnate in Jesus is humanity saved from sin and death. Therefore Jesus as the mediator of salvation could not be a lesser divinity, but must be fully divine, one with the God whom Jesus called “Father” in John’s Gospel, where the two are said to be one (John 10:30).

The New Testament could not be decisive in this debate because it was a source for both sides. Resolving this question of the nature of Jesus’ person and relationship to God involved developing doctrine that went beyond explicit statements of Scripture. The Arian debate was not about what the Bible said but about how its witness should be interpreted.46 This question became pressing partly because the notion of divine immutability was so deeply embedded in Hellenistic thought and culture.47 The biblical witness describes God as absolute and immutable. But it also describes God as living and, to a certain extent, internally related to creation.48 Understanding these two affirmations in a coherent way is one of the greatest challenges of Christian theology. In the Arian debate both sides were sure that God was absolute and unchanging. But if Jesus was fully divine, God also has to be understood as living and able to act in new ways. The way the church found to understand God as both living and absolute was the doctrine of the Trinity. It was the experience of salvation mediated through Jesus Christ and a sense of God’s radical transcendence that compelled the church to understand God in this way.

The Arian controversy that led to the council of Nicaea began about the year 318, when a priest named Arius objected to the teachings of his bishop Alexander that the Son was always with and eternally generated from the Father.49 At this time there was no consensus or explicit church teaching on what was orthodox in this regard. Arius’ dispute with his bishop “ignited a fire waiting to happen.”50 It began a wide-ranging controversy involving church polity as well as doctrine. Bishops lined up for or against Arius and his teaching. Lay people became caught up in the debate. In its later stages Gregory of Nyssa complained about the extent of this.

If you ask for change, the man launches into a theological discussion about begotten and unbegotten; if you enquire about the price of bread, the answer is given that the Father is greater and the Son subordinate; if you remark that the bath is nice the man pronounces that the Son is from non-existence.51

These were issues that moved church members and so concerned the Emperor.

In order to restore unity to the church Constantine convened the council of Nicaea in 325, which he paid for and presided over. Between 250 and 300 bishops attended, most from the Eastern church.52 The results of their meeting can be summarized as follows:

The council issued a creed which said that the Son was generated “from the essence of the Father” and was hence “homoousios” (the same thing or being or essence) with the Father. The creed also condemned anyone who said that the Son was from an ousia or hypostasis other than that of the Father. Arius was condemned and exiled.53

Arius himself soon ceased to be important to the controversy, which continued until shortly before the council of Constantinople in 381.54 Part of the reason it went on so long was that theologians were developing technical terms like hypostasis and homoousios to conceptualize Jesus’ relationship to God. In effect, they were developing a new understanding of God under the impact of Christology. The result was the doctrine of the Trinity affirmed at Nicaea, but only subsequently conceptualized more fully by the Cappadocians55 in the East and Augustine in the West.

The doctrine of the Trinity affirmed at Nicaea expresses the otherness and freedom of God in relation to creation.56 God is not an aspect of the universe or even its highest element. Rather, God is able to become present in history in a new way, and in so doing bring the promise of a future beyond the limits of created life as presently experienced. The doctrine as eventually worked out by Augustine and the Cappadocians affirms that God is one in nature (ousia) but exists in three persons (hypostasis). The affirmation that Jesus was of one nature, homoousios with the first person of the Trinity meant that the divine being was essentially and eternally Trinitarian. Tertullian and others had understood God as Trinitarian in terms of God’s relationship to history. But Nicaea pushed beyond this to affirm that God was Trinitarian in eternity, before and apart from creation. This remarkable innovation in church teaching57 led to the development of a distinction between the immanent Trinity, God in eternity apart from creation, and the economic Trinity, God as revealed and active in history.58 This problematic but important distinction helped the church understand how God could be living, involved in history, and radically transcendent to it. The affirmation of the Trinitarian nature of God at the council of Nicaea was in effect a new beginning that came to provide the framework for Christian understanding of God and Jesus Christ in centuries to come.59

From Nicaea to Chalcedon

The council of Nicaea did not end the Arian controversy. Decades of debate and polemic followed until roughly 360,60 although Arianism continued to be present in the church long afterwards and still is today. However, after 360 the focus of controversy shifted from Jesus’ relationship to God to the nature of Jesus’ person. The questions now became, given that Jesus was fully divine, was he also fully human and if so to what extent, and how were his human and divine natures related? Disputes over these questions led to the council of Chalcedon in 451 and continued afterwards.61

These issues first surfaced at the synod of Alexandria of 362 in connection with the Christology of Apollinaris.62 Athanasius had argued against Arians that the Logos, which came to be known as the second person of the Trinity, assumed flesh. Appollinaris carried this Logos/sarx Christology further to the point of denying that Jesus had a human soul. In this way he wanted to exclude any possibility of there being a conflict between Jesus’ human and divine will, “thus safeguarding the sinlessness of Christ, without which there was no redemption from sin.”63 But opposition soon arose on the grounds that if the Logos did not assume a fully human nature, then that which was not assumed was not healed. To be human is to be subject to change. As the divine was understood to be immutable, the two seemed mutually exclusive.64 How could Jesus be both at once? Yet it was only by their coming together in the one person of Jesus that salvation in its fullest sense had been effected. For most theologians involved in this debate, the fundamental saving significance of Jesus lay in the appearance in his person of a new reality in which God and humanity were united while still distinct.65 In the Christ event, which included Jesus’ ministry, death, and resurrection, the new reality promised in his preaching of the kingdom of God became present in his person. The presence of this in his person is the basis of the hope for its coming in fullness in the future.66 The question was, how did this come about and how was it to be understood? Three major positions developed in this regard: the schools of Antioch and Alexandria in the East, and the Western tradition influenced by Augustine, which found expression at Chalcedon through Pope Leo the Great.

The greatest theologian of the Antioch school was Theodore of Mopsuestia, bishop of Antioch for 36 years until his death in 428.67 Theodore emphasized Jesus’ full humanity against Apollinaris. The Logos was not subject to Jesus’ human limitations. It became incarnate in Jesus by uniting itself to him at his conception and indwelling his person. This indwelling of the Logos in Jesus was continuous with the inspiration experienced by prophets and others before him but distinct in degree. Jesus’ resurrection revealed that the Logos and his person had always been a functional unity.68 For Theodore this was a moral unity occurring in the conjunction of their wills. The second person of the Trinity became incarnate in Jesus through Jesus continually choosing to follow the former’s inspiration. This was made possible by the special indwelling of the Logos, but it only happened through the decision making of the human being Jesus. Theodore’s focus was on the particular life and achievement of the individual Jesus who at times struggled to overcome temptation and follow God’s will. This was essential to his triumph over sin and evil. The whole of Jesus’ life and public ministry has redemptive significance. It culminates in his resurrection, in which the power of sin and death are broken in principle as a result of his moral obedience, achieved through the indwelling of the Logos and the “active agency” of Jesus’ humanity.69

Theodore insisted against Apollinaris that Jesus was only able to effect salvation because he had been fully human and lived a genuinely human life. But Theodore’s account of the unity of the Logos with Jesus’ humanity remains problematic. For Theodore and others in the school of Antioch there seem to be two subjects in the one person of Jesus Christ. The Logos inspires Jesus and identifies with him in his resurrection, but this was a functional unity. The danger here is that Jesus becomes only a moral hero rather than the person in whom a new reality appears within history, in which God and humanity exist in a reconciled and new state of differentiated unity. Jesus can only be the Christ if he is a moral exemplar. But as the Christ he is not simply a great person but a new person, in whom a new reality is present in which others can participate through faith and in him. Theodore and the school of Antioch celebrated the arrival of this new reality in Jesus but had difficulty conceptualizing the unity of his person.

The leading theologian of the Alexandrian school was Cyril of Alexandria (378–444), bishop of Alexandria for 32 years. Cyril followed the Logos/sarx way of understanding Jesus’ person70 but insisted on the fullness of Jesus’ humanity. The unity of Jesus’ person is central for Cyril. For him the “Gospels bear witness that there is one subject or person in Christ.”71 This person resulted from the Logos uniting itself to a human nature so that the two became one concrete reality. This happened through the initiative of the Logos. For Cyril Jesus is fully human but not simply human. He is a divine person, the second person of the Trinity, who chose “to live in the human condition.”72 The line of interpretation he follows stresses the newness and uniqueness of Christ73 and the freedom of God to act creatively to rescue humanity from sin and evil. With Jesus the Logos has entered history in a new way, becoming incarnate in Jesus’ person. The Logos did not change in this but did something new. It became the active subject of a human life.74 The result was an “indissoluble union”75 of two distinct natures, an ontological rather than a functional or moral unity. Cyril conceives it as occurring more on the level of being than will.

How was this union effected? This was a mystery.76 But Cyril conceived it as the paradigm of the salvation it effects. Cyril understood salvation as divinization, the transformation of humanity through union with God so as to no longer be vulnerable to sin and death. This was effected by Christ taking “what was ours to be his very own so that we might have all that was his.”77 The incarnation happens by the creative power of the Logos healing the humanity it took on as it assumed it, so that the two were able to become one in Jesus’ person while remaining distinct. As a result Jesus’ person becomes the paradigm of the fullness of humanity. By assuming human nature the Logos is able to experience the human condition, including suffering. Cyril is careful to affirm that Jesus suffered in his human nature. The divine Logos did not change even while experiencing suffering through being incarnate in Jesus.78 The Logos experienced sin and death in the humanity of Jesus and, by virtue of its impassible divine nature, overcame these in the resurrection.79 The transformation of this one concrete instance of humanity, revealed in Jesus’ resurrection, reveals the transformation that as a result will be the future of all humanity. Salvation is “an ontological rescue of the race,”80 effected by the Logos becoming incarnate.

Cyril took seriously “what Christ had done as man”81 during his ministry and death, but the danger in the Logos/sarx approach he followed is that while the full humanity of Jesus is affirmed in principle, it tends to be curtailed by the emphasis on the Logos as the sole subject of his person. It is difficult to find room in this understanding for the fear and temptation that the Gospels report Jesus suffered.

The schools of Antioch and Alexandria both affirmed that in Jesus’ person the Logos and Jesus’ humanity were united in a unique way that has saving significance for all people. Each approach has contemporary representatives. Karl Rahner and Roger Haight follow Theodore in emphasizing that the incarnation occurred through the indwelling of the Word in Jesus’ person.82 Cyril’s emphasis that in Jesus the Logos experienced human suffering was radicalized by Jürgen Moltmann in his theology of the cross.83

The controversy leading directly to the council of Chalcedon began through a clash between Nestorius, a leading representative of the school of Antioch who became bishop of Constantinople in 428, and Cyril of Alexandria. Nestorius attempted to enforce what he saw to be doctrinal orthodoxy, particularly around devotion to Mary as Theotokos, mother of God. For Nestorius Mary was the mother of Jesus, not of the Logos. But for Cyril and others following the Logos/sarx approach, the Logos had been present in Mary’s womb. In 429 Nestorius gave a series of sermons attacking this and related notions. As opposition to Nestorius’ teaching and person increased Cyril began to attack Nestorius’ views and promote his own in letters circulated throughout Egypt. The dispute was enflamed by the personalities of both. It was also about ecclesiastical primacy: Constantinople versus Alexandria and Rome. But it was primarily driven by each side’s belief that they were fighting for the truth of the gospel.84 Because their struggle threatened the unity of the empire, Emperor Theodosius called what became the council of Ephesus in 431. In 444 the dispute reignited. Theodosius II convened another council at Ephesus in 449, which was tainted by violence. Pope Leo I addressed the issue with his Tome (449), directed against the position of Eutyches, who developed an extreme version of Cyril’s early emphasis on the unity of Christ’s person. Leo’s Tome introduced the Latin tradition into the christological debate.

For Leo, “Christ was born of God and Mary and therefore possessed a divine and a human nature, and accordingly possessed both divine and human characteristics and ways of acting.”85 Leo followed Nicaea in seeing Jesus as originating from God. The presence of divine and human natures in Jesus’ person were not symmetrical. But it was only by becoming incarnate that the Logos could effectively communicate salvation to humanity, and it was only as Jesus was the Son of God that he could effect salvation.

The traditions of Alexandria, Antioch, and the Western or Latin tradition that would play influential roles at the council of Chalcedon each had different emphases:

The Alexandrine tradition emphasizes the unity of subject of the whole existence of Christ, the Antiochene the integrity of the nature of the man Jesus (of the homo assumptus), and the Latin the double solidarity with God and humankind.86

In 450 the Empire was threatened by external armies as Pulcheria and Emperor Marcian assumed power. They convened another council to restore unity to the church. It met at Chalcedon in October of 451. Their representatives insisted on the formulation of a new statement of faith that would end the christological controversy. The bishops reluctantly agreed and began by reading first the creed from the council of Nicaea, then subsequent documents, including the Tome of Leo.87 The creed of Nicaea was accepted by all as the “master text”88 defining orthodoxy. To answer the question of how the unity of divine and human natures in Jesus was to be understood, the bishops, under imperial pressure, finally produced the Chalcedonian Definition.89 This represented a genuine consensus among them, intended to make explicit what they believed Nicaea implied.90

The Definition affirmed that Jesus Christ was fully divine and fully human: “as to his humanity, being like us in every respect apart from sin.”91 These positive statements were balanced by four negative ones. In Jesus both natures were present “unconfusedly, unalterably, undividedly, inseparably . . . , the character of each nature is preserved and comes together in one person and one hypostasis.”92 While the Definition followed Cyril’s emphasis on the unity of Jesus’ person,93 it tried to affirm a position beyond the three alternatives94 that included the strengths of each: Cyril’s emphasis on the unity of Christ’s person and that the Christ event was a saving act of God, Theodore’s emphasis on the full humanity of Christ, and Leo’s emphasis that both must be stated simultaneously and clearly.95 It did not so much state an understanding of Jesus’ person as a way in which Jesus should be understood, a “grammar” that Christologies should follow, “based in the last resort on the logical form of traditional confessional statement about Christ.”96 Its combination of positive and negative affirmations can be seen as presenting a framework for developing an understanding of Jesus’ person.97

The Legacy of Chalcedon and Nicaea

The Chalcedonian Definition did not provide the doctrinal unity the emperor desired. Further christological controversies resulted after its promulgation, which lasted another two centuries.98 Yet it became and continues to be an important guideline for how Jesus can be understood as the Christ. While the language used and the questions answered by the Definition are different in many respects from those that occupied New Testament authors, it is concerned with a similar central theme: how to understand Jesus in light of the experience of salvation in and through him. In accordance with the Gospels the Definition affirms that Jesus is fully human and that his public ministry required the use of his human faculties and creativity. Jesus experienced the human condition of struggling to know and follow God’s will and of being inspired by God’s Spirit. Like the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament, the Definition also affirms that in Jesus the divine became present in history in a new way. This resulted from the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, but more fundamentally from a new initiative of God in the second person of the Trinity. Jesus’ person thus has a unique relationship to God and an ultimate saving significance. In arriving at this, the doctrinal development culminating in Nicaea and Chalcedon brought a new metaphysical precision to the understanding of Jesus as the Christ. If adopted as guidelines for understanding Jesus’ person, Nicaea and Chalcedon prevent the radical transcendence of God in Jesus from being domesticated. A Christology developed along these lines will point beyond the present to a greater reality in which sin and death have been overcome, inviting and empowering people to participate in this.

Yet this doctrinal development also involved significant losses. In emphasizing the uniqueness and transcendence of Jesus the theologians of this era “forgot that Jesus himself proclaimed a coming Kingdom of God.”99 The hope for liberation within history was forgotten and a repressive orientation towards Judaism developed.100 In order to be faithful to Jesus and create space within Christian consciousness for Judaism and other religions, Christian theology must reclaim Jesus’ proclamation of the coming reign of God, remembering that he looked to the coming of a reality that he prefigured, which includes more than the church and himself. The search for metaphysical concreteness in understanding Jesus also brought a loss of concern for Jesus’ historical concreteness,101 for understanding where and how he located himself within the social conflicts of his day, and with this came a loss of Jesus’ preferential option of the poor. Christology was assimilated to a patriarchal worldview and began to function “as a sacred justification for male dominance.”102

However, the Christology of Nicaea and Chalcedon also has liberating potential. The central principle of this Christology, “the unassumed is the unhealed,”103 suggests that what is salvific about the incarnation is not that Jesus was male, but that he assumed a human nature. If what he assumed does not include women’s nature then Jesus cannot be their savior. This principle thus undermines patriarchal distortions of Christology.104 It also has liberating potential in relation to the environmental crisis. In the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus, Jesus’ body, a piece of creation, was taken up into the glory of God. This transformation of one piece of nature “pledges a joyful future beyond death” for the rest.105 From this expectation can come a new understanding of nature in the context of the environmental crisis, as destined for glory and to be respected as such. The emphasis in Alexandrian and Antiochean Christologies that Jesus reveals the fullness of humanity also has liberating implications when Jesus’ historical concreteness is recovered.106 In a world plagued by sin and evil, Jesus reveals that the fullness of humanity is to be found in the struggle for justice.

Finally, Jesus proclaimed a radically transcendent God, yet a God who rejoices over the salvation of sinners (Luke 15:10), a God responsive to human need. The Johannine interpretation of Jesus also portrays God as radically transcendent to creation, yet as living and finding fulfillment through people receiving Jesus’ message and living in light of it.107 In the doctrinal development leading to Nicaea and Chalcedon, this living aspect of the divine nature was formally encoded in the doctrine of the Trinity. But substantively the Hellenistic notion of divine impassibility that Christian theologians used to understand God meant that God was no longer conceived as living in this way. This made it difficult to understand how Jesus’ divinity could be present in his suffering on the cross. The doctrine of the Trinity affirmed at Nicaea emphasized the radical transcendence of God and the freedom of God to do new things in history. But its emphasis on the living aspect of God’s being was undercut by the fundamental assumption that the divine being was immutable. In this respect the search for a Christian doctrine of God that led to Nicaea remains unfinished.

Chalcedon as a Starting Point for

a Descending Christology

The Chalcedonian Definition bequeaths Christian theologians the task of striving to understand how the second person of the Trinity and Jesus’ humanity are united in his one person.108 In this respect Chalcedon represents the end of a long process of doctrinal development. But as a guideline for how the person of Jesus Christ should be understood it also presents a starting point for further reflection.109 Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968) understood this in a particular way.

The outbreak of World War I, the fact that many of Barth’s liberal theology professors supported German participation in the war, and Barth’s reflections on Scripture in light of this led him to argue that humanity exists in a state of alienation from God and can only have authentic knowledge of God through God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ.110 Following a progressively developing approach informed by the Chalcedonian Definition, Barth went on to argue that Jesus did not simply embody what could be known of God from elsewhere, but that all Christian concepts of God must be developed in light of Jesus Christ.111 In keeping with this Barth undertook a far-reaching revision of the idea of God that was formulated during the period of Nicaea and Chalcedon.112 Theologians influential at these councils insisted on God’s otherness and understood this in terms of God’s absoluteness and immutability. But Barth argued that when Jesus Christ becomes the starting point for understanding God this conception is not enough. The immutable absolute is other to sinful humanity, but it is not the otherness of God. According to Barth, understanding God in light of Jesus Christ requires that one recognize a second otherness to God. God is not only absolute; God is also living. God’s being is moved and dynamic,113 at once radically transcendent yet also capable of entering into relationships with creation and humanity. The true otherness of God is only revealed in the freedom and love of God revealed in Jesus Christ. Barth’s demand that the doctrine of God be developed in light of Christology has been widely influential in recent Western Christian theology.114

In this way Chalcedon presents a starting point for what Karl Rahner called a descending Christology. This chapter and the two preceding it have attempted an “ascending Christology,” beginning with Jesus and seeking to understand the experience of salvation through him.115 But if an ascending Christology concludes with finding the conditions of possibility for this in Jesus being the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity, then this in turn calls for a descending Christology that seeks to understand God in light of Jesus. An ascending Christology begins with Jesus and studies the continuities and discontinuities between what can be known of him and the confession of him as the second person of the Trinity. A descending Christology reverses this direction of inquiry. It takes up Barth’s challenge to understand God in light of Jesus Christ. It begins with God understood as triune in light of Jesus. It then seeks to understand Jesus, his person and work, in light of what he reveals about God. At the same time it seeks to understand God in light of Jesus as the Christ. It asks, what must God be like if Jesus is the Word of God? For instance, if the second person of the Trinity became incarnate in Jesus, then God must be absolute and immutable, yet also capable of change in the sense of becoming incarnate.116 In this way a descending Christology seeks to provide a more consistently “Christian doctrine of God,”117 and with that a metaphysical framework for understanding Jesus and what it means to have faith in him. The next chapter will present a descending Christology of this kind.

1. Walker, History, 101.

2. Pelikan, Christian Tradition, 1:229.

3. These differences are summarized in Haight, Jesus, 273–74.

4. Dünzl, Brief History, 6, 9–10.

5. Williams, Arius, 236.

6. Niebuhr, Meaning of Revelation, 81–90, 114–20.

7. Johnson, “Jesus and Salvation,” 2.

8. Tracy, On Naming the Present, 40–44.

9. Hengel, Studies in Early Christology, 225.

10. Dunn, Christology in the Making, 36.

11. Hurtado, One God, One Lord, 122–23.

12. Hurtado, How on Earth, 30.

13. Dünzl, A Brief History, 7–8.

14. Dunn, Christology in the Making, 59–60.

15. Schnackenberg, Jesus in the Gospels, 312.

16. Dunn, Christology in the Making, 250.

17. Ibid., 253–54.

18. Schillebeeckx, Jesus, 549.

19. Schnackenberg, Jesus in the Gospels, 315–16.

20. Dunn, Christology in the Making, 267–68.

21. Johnson, She Who Is, 151–61.

22. Ruether, “Can Christology Be Liberated?,” 8–16, 23.

23. For a brief examination and correction of distortions the patriarchal worldview of the Greco-Roman world introduced into Christology and Christian anthropology, see Johnson, She Who Is, 151–56.

24. Sobrino, Christ the Liberator, 286.

25. Moltmann, Crucified God, 334–35.

26. Cahill, “Christology, Ethics, and Spirituality,” 202–4.

27. Haight, Jesus, 183.

28. Tanner, Christ the Key, 56.

29. Taylor, Secular Age, 695–703.

30. Haight, Jesus, 208–12.

31. Watson, “Trinity and Community,” 183–84.

32. Fee, God’s Empowering Presence, 839. See also Schweizer, Good News according to Matthew, 533.

33. This is R.P.C. Hanson’s description of the process of doctrinal development that went on in the Arian controversy (Hanson, Search, xviii–xx).

34. Ibid., 873.

35. Dünzl, Brief History, 6–7.

36. Ibid., 9.

37. Ibid., 18–19.

38. McGuckin, “Logos Theology,” 207–8.

39. Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, 40.

40. The “economic” Trinity refers to God as experienced in salvation history. The “immanent” Trinity refers to God as existing in eternity.

41. In Origen’s time it could also be translated in Latin as “substance,” but in the course of the development of Trinitarian theology the former became its technical meaning (McGuckin, “Hypostasis,” 174).

42. Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, 171.

43. For an overview of Origen’s theology, its ambiguities and subsequent influence in this regard, see Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 20–30.

44. Hanson, Search, 121.

45. Ibid., 102–4.

46. Ibid., 848.

47. Paul Gavrilyuk disputes this, arguing that “there was no consensus philosophorum amounting to an affirmation of divine indifference and non-involvement” among Hellenistic philosophers (Gavrilyuk, Suffering of the Impassible God, 35–36). However, a page earlier he admits that it “is true that among educated pagans, whose philosophical views tended towards later Platonism, the divine impassibility did acquire the status of a universally shared opinion” (ibid., 34).

48. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 1:242.

49. Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 430.

50. Ibid., 20.

51. Quoted from Hanson, Search, 806.

52. Ibid., 156.

53. Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 430.

54. For a brief overview of the history of the Arian controversy, see ibid., 430–35.

55. Hanson, Search, 676–737.

56. Ibid., 873.

57. Ibid., 167–68.

58. Studer, Trinity and Incarnation, 113.

59. The focus at Nicaea was on the relationship of Jesus Christ to God the Creator and Redeemer, with little attention given to the Holy Spirit. Only later at the council of Constantinople in 381 CE was the divinity of the Holy Spirit given explicit attention.

60. Ibid., 193.

61. For an overview of this, see Norris, Christological Controversy, 1–31.

62. Studer, Trinity and Incarnation, 194.

63. Ibid.

64. McGuckin, Saint Cyril of Alexandria, 138.

65. Daley, “’He Himself Is Our Peace’,” 173.

66. Moltmann, Way of Jesus Christ, 149.

67. Walker, History, 133.

68. Norris, “Introduction,” 25.

69. Pelikan, Christian Tradition, 1:236.

70. Wilken, Judaism and the Early Christian Mind, 106–7. For Cyril, the council of Nicaea endorsed this approach by placing “Christ entirely on the side of the creator” (Studer, Trinity and Incarnation, 114).

71. Weinandy, “Cyril and the Mystery,” 35.

72. McGuckin, Saint Cyril of Alexandria, 210.

73. Wilken, Judaism and the Early Christian Mind, 104–10.

74. For Cyril, the humanity assumed “belonged so intimately to the Logos that there was actually only one subject or subsistent reality in Jesus” (Norris, “Introduction,” 28).

75. St. Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ, 77.

76. Ibid.

77. Ibid., 59. This is known as the communication of attributes or communication idiomatum. It states that “there obtains between God’s eternal Word and the human reality of Jesus a unity . . . such that the attributes of Jesus’ human reality can be predicated of the eternal Word—the Word has become a human being, the eternal Word has suffered, the Son of the Father died, and so on. And, vice versa, wherever Jesus’ human reality is grasped in its definitive concretion, in which it may be no means be thought of as existing in separation from God, divine attributes can be predicated of Jesus—Jesus is God, and so on” (Rahner, Love of Jesus, 30–31).

78. Cyril likens this to the soul of a person, the nature of which remains unchanged even as it experiences the suffering of the body it is in, which is changed by the suffering (Cyril of Alexandria, “Scholia on the Incarnation,” 301). But while the soul of a person may remain unchanged even as it experiences suffering in a formal sense, experiences of great suffering do leave a mark upon the soul of a person.

79. McGuckin, Saint Cyril, 203–4.

80. Ibid., 187.

81. Wilken, Judaism and the Early Christian Mind, 200.

82. Rahner, Love of Jesus, 54–60; Haight, Jesus, 285–97, 445–66.

83. Moltmann, Crucified God, 227–49.

84. Sellers, Council of Chalcedon, 7.

85. Studer, Trinity and Incarnation, 208.

86. Ibid., 210.

87. For an account of the proceedings of the council of Chalcedon, see Slusser, “Issues in the Definition,” 63–65.

88. Ibid., 64.

89. For the full text see Norris, Christological Controversy, 155–59.

90. Norris, “Chalcedon Revisited,” 141.

91. Norris, Christological Controversy, 159.

92. Ibid.

93. Norris, “Toward a Contemporary Interpretation,” 75.

94. Pelikan, “Chalcedon after Fifteen Centuries,” 930.

95. Ibid., 932.

96. Norris, “Toward a Contemporary Interpretation,” 76.

97. Coakley, “What Does Chalcedon Solve?,” 161.

98. Norris, “Chalcedon Revisited,” 140.

99. Wilken, Judaism and the Early Christian Mind, 230.

100. Ruether, Faith and Fratricide, 246–48.

101. Ruether, “Can Christology Be Liberated?,” 23.

102. Johnson, She Who Is, 151.

103. Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ, 158.

104. Johnson, She Who Is, 153.

105. Johnson, “Passion for God,” 121.

106. Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus, 92–94.

107. Brown, Epistles of John, 555.

108. This can lead to very elaborate understandings of Jesus’ person, as in the later theology of Karl Barth (Jones, Humanity of Christ, 117–50).

109. Rahner, Theological Investigations, 1:150.

110. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Dialectical Theology, 245–50.

111. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/1:129.

112. Schweitzer, “Karl Barth’s Critique,” 231–44.

113. Jüngel, Doctrine of the Trinity.

114. Johnson, “Christology’s Impact,” 161 n. 9.

115. Rahner, Foundations, 177.

116. Ibid, 219–23.

117. Moltmann, Crucified God, 200.