Читать книгу Catholicism For Dummies - Rev. Kenneth Brighenti - Страница 93

The last significant heresy about Jesus was known as Monophysitism. This idea centered on a notion that the human nature of Jesus was absorbed into the divine nature. Say, for example, that a drop of oil represents the humanity of Jesus and the ocean represents the divinity of Jesus. If you put the drop of oil into the vast waters of the ocean, the drop of oil, representing His humanity, would literally be overwhelmed and absorbed by the enormous waters of the ocean — His divinity.

The Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon in A.d. 451 condemned Monophysitism. A simple teaching was formulated that one divine person with two distinct, full, and true natures, one human and one divine, existed in Jesus. These two natures were hypostatically (from the Greek hypostasis, for person) united into one divine person. Thus the Hypostatic Union, the name of the doctrine, explained these things about Jesus:

 In His human nature, Jesus had a human mind just like you. It had to learn like yours. Therefore, the baby Jesus in the stable at Bethlehem didn’t speak to the shepherds on Christmas Eve. He had to be taught how to speak, walk, and so on. Likewise, His human will, like yours, was free, so He had to freely choose to embrace the will of God.In other words, in His humanity, Jesus knew what He learned. And He had to freely choose to conform His human will to the divine will. (Sin is when your will is opposed to the will of God.) Any human knowledge not gained by regular learning was infused into His human intellect by His divine intellect. Jesus knew that fire is hot just as you’ve learned this fact. He also knew what only God could know, because He was a divine person with a human and a divine nature. The human mind of Christ is limited, but the divine is infinite. His divinity revealed some divine truths to His human intellect, so He would know who He is, who His Father is, and why He came to earth.

 The divine nature of Jesus had the same (not similar) divine intellect and will as that of God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. As God, He knew and willed the same things that the other two persons of the Trinity knew and willed. Thus, in His divinity, Jesus knew everything, and what He willed, happened.

 As both God and man, Jesus could bridge the gap between humanity and divinity. He could actually save humankind by becoming one of us, and yet, because He never lost His divinity, His death had eternal and infinite merit and value. If He were only a man, His death would have no supernatural effect. His death, because it was united to His divine personhood, actually atoned for sin and caused redemption to take place.

It’s a mouthful to be sure, but the bottom line in Catholic theology is that the faithful fully and solemnly believe that Jesus was one divine person with a fully human nature and a fully divine nature. Each nature had its own intellect and will. So the divine nature of Jesus had a divine intellect and will, and the human nature of Jesus had a human intellect and will.

Some modern scholars have proposed that Jesus didn’t know that He was divine, as if His human nature were ignorant of His divinity. But the Catholic Church points to Luke 2:42–50, which says that when Jesus’s parents found the 12-year-old Jesus preaching in the Temple, the young Jesus responded that He was in His Father’s house and that He was about to do the work of the Father. So even the young Jesus knew that He was divine. To the Church, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30) and “before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58) dispel any identity crisis in Jesus.