chistory_christ1a
CHRISTOLOGY
I. INTRODUCTION
There are two problems in the doctrine of Christ that is called Christology:
(1) the problem of the person of Christ and
(2) the problem of the work of Christ.
In this document, we shall restrict ourselves to the study of the first problem, the problem of the person of Christ. This problem of Christology may be stated in the following way: what is the relation of the divine and the human in Christ? This Christological problem was not fully treated until the fourth century, when the decision of the Council of Nicaea that the Word shared the same divine nature as the Father focused the attention of the theologians upon this problem. But in the centuries before then, there was an almost universal conviction that Jesus Christ was divine as well as human. The most primitive confession that “Jesus is Lord” (Rom. 10:9; Phil. 2:11) expressed this conviction.
The New Testament writers regarded Christ as pre-existent (John 1:1-14; Col. 1:15-17; Heb. 1:1-13; I John 1:12) and they attributed to Him a twofold order of being as the Apostle Paul expressed it, “according to the flesh” [kata sarka], that is, as a human being, Christ is the Son of David and “according to the spirit” [kata pneuma]. that is, as a spiritual being, Christ is the Son of God (Rom. 1:2-3; see also Heb. 2:9-15; I Peter 3:18; I John 4:23; 14-15).
This way of expressing the person of Christ that was so deeply embedded in their thinking became the fundamental datum of all later Christological discussion. It contained all the elements that gave rise to the Christological problem, what is the relation of the divine and the human in Christ? The theological solution to this problem took as its starting-point the double premise of apostolic Christology, that is, that Christ as a Person was indivisibly one, and that He was simultaneously fully divine and fully human. The task of theology was to show how these two aspects could be held together in synthesis.
In the first three centuries, the limits of orthodoxy was not so rigidly set as they later became, and certain currents of thought flowed outside the main channel. Among these were certain views of the person of Christ that were considered heretical because they denied aspects of the apostolic Christology. We shall look briefly at a few of them before examining the orthodox Christologies.
The first one-sided Christology of these in the second century is a type of Christology known as Ebionism, which solved the Christological problem by denying the divinity of Jesus completely. The Ebionites were an offshoot of that specifically Jewish form of Christianity which was a potent force in the apostolic age, when it was only prevented with difficulty from saddling the Church with the full observance of the Jewish law. The rapid expansion of Gentile Christianity meant that its influence was bound to diminish, and the dispersal of the main Christian community from Jerusalem to the Transjordan on the outbreak of the Jewish war (A.D. 66) completed its isolation from the mainstream apostolic Christianity. After that date, little is known of this Judaizing Christianity. It apparently dissolved into splinter groups, some of which, while strictly obeying the law and preferring a Judaizing gospel, were perfectly orthodox in their belief that Jesus was the Son of God. They were often called Nazaraeans. In contrast to these, the Ebionites rejected the virgin birth, regarding the Lord as a man normally born from Joseph and Mary. They held that Jesus was the predicted Messiah, and that in this capacity He would return to reign on earth. This was the core of their teaching, which in some places seems to have had a pronounced Gnostic character. Hippolytus and Tertullian connect their name with one Ebion, whom they presumed to be the founder of the sect; but in fact their name is derived from the Hebrew for “poor”, no doubt recalling the humble title by which the original Jewish-Christian community in Jerusalem liked to be known.
A second one-sided Christology of this same type, called adoptionism, was the theory that Jesus had the status of a “mere man” (psilos anthropos: hence “psilanthropism”) of blameless life, upon whom the Spirit of Christ had descended, adopting Him as Son of God, and pre-eminently endowing Him with power to work miracles. The originator of this theory is said to have been a learned Byzantine leather-merchant, Theodotus, who brought it to Rome about A.D. 190. His critics explained his position as a makeshift device to cover up a previous act of apostasy at Byzantium (“I have not denied God, but a man.”), but in fact it was a carefully worked out theory and shows no signs of improvisation. While in full agreement with orthodox views about the creation of the world, the divine omnipotence and even the virgin birth, Theodotus held that until His baptism, Jesus lived the life of an ordinary man, with the difference that He was supremely virtuous. At His baptism, the Spirit or Christ (“the anointing”) descended upon Him, and from that moment on He worked miracles, without becoming divine (others of the same school held that He was deified after His resurrection). Theodotus and his followers were much preoccupied with Biblical exegesis and textual criticism, and appealed to such texts as Deut. 18:15 and Luke 1:35, which the latter they amended to read “Spirit of the Lord”, to support their claim that Jesus was an ordinary man whom the Spirit had inspired rather than indwelt. They also scandalized other believers by their interest in logic and geometry, and the deference they paid to Aristotle, Euclid and the contemporary philosophical physician Galen. Theodotus was himself excommunicated by Pope Victor (A.D. 186-198), but his ideas were immediately taken up by another Theodotus, who was a banker, an Asclepiodotus, and an Artemas who lived in Rome beyond the middle of the third century A.D. This second Theodotus in his teachings put forth some bizarre speculations about Melchizedek, whom he regarded as “the supreme Power”, superior to Christ and the mediator between God and man, “spiritual and Son of God”, and whom he may have equated with the Spirit which descended on Jesus.
It has been suggested that the first Theodotus, the leather-merchant, and his followers belonged to the circle of Galen, and were stimulated by his friendly, but critical, interest in the Christian faith to work out a rationalistic version of it. Their scholarly sympathies and methods were akin to his, and their chief object was to eliminate the idea, so uncongenial to people with Greek philosophical background, of an incarnation of the Deity. The second generation of the adoptionists may well have blended this Greek rationalism with the suspicion that orthodoxy was virtually committed to ditheism. For Novatian puts in their mouths the following argument:
“If the Father is one and the Son another, and if the Father is God and Christ God, then there is not one God, but two Gods are simultaneously brought forward, the Father and the Son.” [1]
The adoptionist were attempting to avoid this conclusion by their view of Christ. By Artemon’s time, the adoptionists were claiming to be the trustees of the true apostolic tradition, and seeking to show that their views about Christ had been accepted in the Church from the beginning down to the reign of Pope Zephyrinus (A.D. 198-217), when, as they claimed, the official teaching had been tampered with. In reply to this argument, Hippolytus had little difficulty in pointing to the grand succession of teachers going back to the first century, “by all of whom Christ is theologized” [en hois hapasi theologeitai ho Christos], and whose writings “proclaim Christ as both God and man”.
Artemas, or Artemon, a Dynamic Monarchian, taught that “the Saviour was a mere man.” He maintained that his view had been orthodox at Rome until the time of Bishop Zephyrius (A.D. 198-217). Associated with Theodotus of Rome about A.D. 195, Artemas lived on to influence Paul of Samosata about A.D. 260. The Little Labyrinth, attributeed to Hippolytus of Rome, was written to refute him.
Paul of Samosata, bishop of Antioch from A.D. 260 to 272, who came from Samosata on the Euphrates, was perhaps the most interesting exponent of the adoptionist type of thought. He was formally condemned at the synod of Antioch held in A.D. 268. Although tradition alleged him to be the intellectual child of Artemas, Paul worked out his theory on original lines. His view of the Godhead was unitarian. According to a sixth-century writer:
“Paul did not say that it was the self-subsistent Word Who was in Christ, but applied the title ‘Word’ to God’s commandment and ordinance, i.e. God ordered what He willed through the man, and so did it …. He did not say that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one and the same, but gave the name of God to the Father Who created all things, that of Son to the mere man, and that of Spirit to the grace which indwelt the apostles.” [2]
What this view amounted to is that Paul was willing to use the officially accepted Trinitarian formula, but only as a veil to cover a theology which was nakedly unitarian. This conclusion is supported by the fact, reported in a fourth-century homoiousian document, that the bishops who outlawed him (they were Origenists committed to the belief in three eternal, subsistent Persons) thought it necessary to insist that the Word was an ousia, or being. By this they meant that He was not simply a verbal utterance, without any subsistence of His own (this was presumably Paul’s view), but a real Person distinct from the Father. It is further reported that at the synod he claimed that the Word was homoousios, that is, the same in ousia or being with the Father. If this report is correct, then Paul, taking his cue from the language of his judges, was protesting against the sharp division between the Father and the Son which their assertion that they were distinct ousiai seemed to imply.
The theology of Paul of Samosata is notoriously difficult to evaluate, but the view that he was strict unitarian, denying any subsistence or personality to the Word and teaching that the Son and Spirit were merely the Church’s names for the inspired man Jesus Christ and the grace which God poured upon the apostles, is probably accurate. He opposed the ideas that the Word or Son was other than, or a distinct subsistent Person, from the Father. This view of the Godhead is a form of monarchiaism proper, usually called modalsim. As an extreme monarchian, Paul held that Christ was (to use Eusebius’ phrase) “an ordinary man in nature”, drawing a sharp distinction between the historical figure and the Word. Jesus Christ, he declared, was “one” [allos], the Word “another” [allos], the former being from below and the latter from above; Mary did not, indeed could not, bear the Word. The relationship of the Word to Jesus Christ he described as a kind of “indwelling” or “participation” or “grace”; It was in Him as “a quality” [poiotes]. As we saw above, on his view, the Word was not a Person [ousias or hupostasis], so that there could be no question of the Godhead’s being united to the man in any concrete or substantial sense. In fact, the relationship of the Word to Christ, as Paul did not hesitate to make to make plain, was precisely analogous in kind to His relationship to the prophets, to Moses and to the saints, although more intense in degree. As he summed it up,
“Mary did not bear the Word, for Mary did not exist before the ages. Mary is not older than the Word; what she bore was a man equal to us, but superior in all things as a result of holy spirit.” [3]
A third one-sided Christology, known as Docetism, being diametrically opposite to the other one-sided Christologies, effectively eliminated the Lord’s humanity. Its distinctive thesis that gave it its name (dokein = “to seem”, “to appear to be”) was that Christ’s manhood, and hence His sufferings, were unreal, phantasmal, only an appearance. Clearly its ultimate roots were Graeco-Oriental assumptions about divine impassibility and the inherent impurity of matter. The first to mention expressly “Docetists” [doketai] was Serapion of Antioch (about A.D. 200). But Docetism was not a simple heresy on its own; it was a attitude which infected a number of heresies, particularly Marcionism and Gnosticism. This attitude was expressed explicitly in a remark of Justin Martyr’s:
“There are some who declare that Jesus Christ did not come in flesh but only as spirit, and exhibited an appearance (phantasian) of flesh”. [4]
Very early in the second century, we find Ignatius protesting against “godless” people who claimed that Christ had suffered in appearance only. In the New Testament itself, this view of Christ is opposed; in I John 4:23 the writer says,
“By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God; and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God; and this is the spirit of antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming, and now it is already in the world.” [5]
By itself this might imply simply the theory, common enough at the time, that someone else was crucified in Christ’s stead. But the vigor with which Ignatius defends the actuality of all Christ’s human experiences, as well as the hint that his opponents declined to admit that He was genuinely “flesh-bearing” [sarkophoros], suggests that their Docetism went the whole way. Shortly afterwards Polycarp was anathematizing the refusal to “confess that Jesus Christ came in the flesh”; and the apocryphal Gospel of Peter was to state that the Savior on the cross had “kept silence, as feeling no pain”, implying that His bodily make-up was illusory.
The Christologies of Gnosticism take us into a bizarre world of cosmic speculation. The purpose of salvation was the liberation of the divine element, the fragment of spirit, in fallen humanity, and this was accomplished by the bestowal of knowledge; it was salvation by knowledge. There was a great variety of Gnostic systems, but there is a common pattern that ran through them all. From the pleroma, or spiritual world of aeons, the divine Christ descended and united Himself for a time (according to Ptolemy, between the baptism and the passion) to the historical personage, Jesus; and according to most accounts the latter’s body was formed, not out of ordinary flesh, but out of “psychic” substance. Thus the Gnostics’ Christology was radically dualistic; Christ Jesus on their view, as Irenaeus pointed out, was compounded of two distinct substances [ousiai], being the heavenly Christ and Jesus, the son of the Demiurge, in a loose sort of liaison. It was also docetic, either as teaching that the heavenly Christ was invisible, impalpable and impassible, or as implying that the lower Christ himself, with whom the heavenly Christ joined himself, was not real flesh and blood. Marcion’s Christology also was docetic, at least to the extent that he regarded the Lord’s body (but not His sufferings) as phantasmal, but it contained no traces of Gnostic dualism. The Redeemer was the Son of the good God of the New Testament, but more than that; Marcion conceived of Him, almost in the fashion of the modalist, as the good God in person, clothed with the outward appearance of a man.
Gnosticism almost succeeded in swamping the apostolic tradition, but the fact that it did not was due in large measure to the unwavering insistence on the rule of faith, as expressed in liturgy, catechetical teaching and preaching, that the Son of God had really become man. This fundamental datum ensured that the Christological scheme of the primitive Church reproduced the pattern laid down in the New Testament of one Christ, at once human and divine, flesh and spirit. The most striking example of it are provided by Ignatius, who was the bishop of Antioch, or Syria in the first decades of the second century A.D. and who at a time of persecution was arrested and sent to Rome for martyrdom. On the way, he stopped at Smyrna, where he wrote letters to the churches of Ephesus, Magnesia, Trallia, and Rome, and then at Troas, where he wrote to the churches of Philadelphia and Smyrna, and also personally to Polycarp of Smyrna. Most of what we know of him is gleaned from these letters in which he engages in theological statement. He had intensely practical concerns, but these related to dangers arising out of careless or heretical doctrinal utterncies. His anti-heretical polemic prompted him to emphasize both the oneness of Christ and the reality of His twofold mode of existence. He delighted to proclaim these truths in balanced antitheses.
“There is one physician, composed of flesh and of spirit, generate and ingenerate, God in man, authentic life in death, from Mary and from God, first passible and then impassible, Jesus Christ our Lord.” [6]
He was accustomed to drive home the fact that the subject of these seemingly contradictory modes of existence was indivisibly one by using expressions such as “the blood of God”, “the suffering of my God”, and “God… was conceived by Mary”, which anticipated the later doctrine of the “transfer of properties” (communicatio idiomatum [antidosis idiomaton]), that is, that in view of the unity of Christ’s Person, His human and divine attributes, experiences, etc. might properly be interchanged.
This being the accepted formula expressed in the early Church about Christ’s Person, the suggestion once commonly proposed that the original type of Christology was naively adoptionist, that is, that it viewed Christ as a man promoted by divine favor to deity, has little to support it. The attribution of pre-existence to Christ was general among the Apostolic Fathers, and it is unlikely that even Hermas was an adoptionist in the strict sense. The vast majority of Christians in the early second century probably shared the faith and practice of the simple Bithynian believers who, as they confessed to Pliny, were in the habit of meeting together before dawn and singing a hymn “to Christ as to God”.
The Christological theory that was widely accepted in the second century A.D. and remained the accepted view beyond the second century, has been called a Spirit-Christology. By this is meant the view that in the historical Jesus Christ the pre-existent Son of God, Who is a divine spirit, united Himself with human nature. This view took a variety of forms, according to underlying view of human nature. The view seems to have been sometimes
(a) that the pre-existent Christ-Spirit indwelt the man Jesus, and sometimes
(b) that He actually became a man.
“Barnabas“, a second century Christian writer, is an example of the former, with his statements that the Son of God “came” or “manifest himself” in flesh, or in the form of flesh, and that the body which Christ offered in sacrifice was “the receptacle of spirit”. An even more impressive illustration of the former is Hermas‘ theory that “God caused the holy, pre-existent spirit which created the whole of creation to dwell in flesh that He desired”, [7] that is, in the human Jesus, Who cooperated with it.
As an example of the latter is the Christology of Ignatius expressed in passage quoted above. Jesus, belonging primarily to the supernatural order (compare pneumatikos, agennetos, apathes, etc.), was fully and characteristically human. He was born “of the seed of David, but also of the holy spirit”; He was “of the seed of David as regards the flesh, but Son of God according to God’s will and power”. In agreement with this approach, Second Clement declares that “Christ the Lord, Who saved us, being first of all spirit, became flesh”; while First Clement says that the Christ addresses us in the Psalms “through holy spirit”.
Going beyond the second century, the same theory laid behind the doctrine of Callistus that what became incarnate of the Blessed Virgin was “holy spirit”. Both Hippolytus and Tertullian were exponents of the Spirit-Christology; and Cyperian‘s statement that at the incarnation God’s Son “descended into the Virgin and as holy spirit clothed Himself with flesh” illustrates this view’s persistence. It should be noted that there was almost an unanimous exegetical tradition of Luke 1:15 that equated “the holy spirit” and “the power of the Most High”, which were to come upon Mary, not with the third Person of the Trinity, but with the Christ Who, pre-existing as spirit or Word, was to incarnate Himself in her womb. It is highly probable that the ancient clause of the Old Roman Creed, “who was born from holy spirit and the virgin Mary”, reflects the same idea that Jesus Christ, the historic human being, was the product of the union of divine spirit, the Son of God, with human nature in the womb of the Blessed Virgin.
The Apologists, except Justin Martyr, add little to Christology, being preoccupied with the Logos, showed little interest in Jesus as an historical figure. Their language about Jesus Christ reflects the Spirit-Christology. In the late 2nd century A.D., Tatian speaks of Him as
“God in the form of a man”; while Aristides of Athens (2nd century A.D.) in his Apology, which he addressed, not to the emperor Hadrian (A.D. 117-128), as said by Eusebius, but to Antoninus Pius (A.D. 138-161), states in language colored by the Spirit-Christology that
“it is confessed that this Son of the most high God descended from heaven as holy spirit [en pneumati hagio] and took flesh from a virgin”. [8]
Melito of Sardis (c. A.D. 170) says that He was “by nature God and man”; he strongly stressed His pre-existence and complete identification with the Godhead. Justin Martyr (c.105-c.165 A.D.), himself reaffirmed the familiar affirmations of the rule of faith. He states that the Word became man by being born from the Virgin. As he expresses it:
“He Who was formerly Logos, and appeared now in the semblance of fire, now in incorporeal fashion, has finally by God’s will become man for the human race”. [9]
He pre-existed as God, and was made flesh of the Virgin, being born as man. His incarnation involved the assumption of flesh and blood, and Justin insists, in spite of the scandal thereby occasioned to Jewish critics, on the reality of the Messiah’s physical sufferings. Yet He did not cease to exist as Word, being in fact at once “God and man”.
Passages like these emphasize the reality of the two natures, but throw no light on the manner of their co-existence in the one Person of Christ. Melito of Sardis speaks of “His two essences” [tas duo autou ousias] but provide no explanation how this was possible. Justin Martyr hints at an explanation that is suggested by his doctrine of the germinal Logos [logos spermatikos]. He argued, since we agree that the Logos manifested Himself in various forms to Abraham, Isaac, and Moses [he is thinking of the Old Testament theophanies], why should we shrink from believing that He could be born as a man from the Virgin? Moreover, the Logos has been active in all men, imparting to them whatever goodness and knowledge they possessed. The idea lurking in his mind seems to be that His presence in Jesus Christ should be understood as similar in kind to this universal presence, though much greater in degree. Yet he does not follow up or develop the idea, and in any case he leaves the presence of the Word in other men in all ages itself unexplained. Sometimes he speaks of His dwelling in them or being implanted in them like a seed, sometimes of them as living with the Logos, sometimes of their having a share or portion of Him. There is one crucial passage that has often been pointed to as providing an explanation. This is Justin’s statement that Christianity is manifestly superior to all other human teaching
“for the reason that the rational principle in its entirety became the Christ Who appeared because of us, body and Logos and soul” [dia tou to logikon to holon ton phanenta di’ hemas Christon gegonnenai, kai soma kai logon kai psuchen]. [10]
The implication of the last clause, it has been suggested, must be that the Logos took the place in the man Jesus of the human rational soul [nous or psuche]. If this interpretation is correct, Justin must have been a pioneer exponent of the “Word-flesh” type of Christology which we shall be studying later; and it is certainly the case that, except for one or two passages, he shows little or no interest in Christ’s human soul. The Stoic influences in his environment must have prompted him to regard the Logos as the governing principle, or hegemonikon, in the God-man.
On the other hand, the whole point of the passage is that the difference between Christ and ordinary men lies, not in any essential disparity of constitution, but in the fact that, whereas the Logos works in them fragmentarily [kata meros], or as a seed, He works in Christ as a whole. Indeed, if that had been what he intended, nothing could have been easier for Justin than to say quite frankly that the Logos had substituted Himself for the kind of soul ordinary men possessed. From this point of view, it might be more plausible to regard the text cited as bearing testimony to Justin’s belief that Christ’s humanity was complete, including a soul [psyche] animated and enlightened by the Word, as well as a body. As a matter of fact, he has other passages, for example, where he refers to the crucified Christ’s surrendering His spirit [pneuma], or to His feelings when faced with His passion, which suggest that he may have allowed for His possession of a human soul. It is difficult to be certain of Justin’s view where there is so little evidence to go on; and while speculation opens up fascinating vistas, Justin’s final conclusion on the matter must remain a mystery.
But both of these interpretations of this passage assumes the Greek philosophical view of man; that is, that man is a rational animal consisting of rational soul or mind and an animal body. But this Greek philosophical understanding of man is not the Biblical understanding of man. An examination of the problem of nature of man will show what is the Biblical understanding of man. It is the Biblical view of man that Justin has here in the this passage assumed. According to the Biblical view, man is a personal being in a created physical world and is as such a union of spirit (person or self) and body (physiological organism).
“Then the Lord God formed man of the dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul [nephesh]” (Gen. 2:7 KJV).
When God breathed into the nostrils of the body of man the breath of life, He created man’s spirit and man became a living soul. The soul of man is the union of this created spirit and the body formed from the dust of the ground. Thus man is a dipartite being having two parts, spirit and body; the soul is not a part of man but is the union of man’s created spirit and his body. Man’s soul as the union of spirit and body is the expression of the human spirit or person in and through the body. And his existence as a person is found in his ability to choose, to make decisions. “I choose, therefore, I am”, not, “I think, therefore, I am”. To be is to choose, not to think nor to perceive. Man’s reason is a function and an expression of his will.
In the incarnation, the divine Word, the Son of God, took the place, not of the human soul (psuche), but of the human spirit (pneuma) in the man Jesus. This is what Justin indicates in the final clause: “body and Logos and soul” (kai soma kai logon kai psuchen). The divine Word or Logos (logon) has replaced the human spirit (pneuma), not the human soul (psuchen). Justin was not the pioneer exponent of the “Word-flesh” type of Christology, but was expressing the Spirit-Christology, which is the view that in the historical Jesus Christ the pre-existent Son of God, Who is divine spirit, united Himself with human nature. This was not just a temporary indwelling along with the human spirit of the man Jesus by the pre-existent Christ-Spirit, but was a permanent replacement in man Jesus of human spirit by the divine pre-existent Christ-Spirit. This shows why Justin shows so little or no interest in Christ’s human soul; it has not been replaced by the divine pre-existent Christ-Spirit. From this point of view, it is more plausible to regard the text cited as bearing testimony to Justin’s belief that Christ’s humanity was complete, including a human soul [psyche] animated and enlightened by the Word, as well as a body. As a matter of fact, Justin has other passages, for example, where he refers to the crucified Christ’s surrendering His spirit [pneuma], or to His feelings when faced with His passion, which suggest that Justin did allowed for His possession of a human soul.
Although influenced by the Apologists, Irenaeus (c.125-202 A.D.) was most directly impacted by the New Testament writers, especially the Apostles Paul and John. His approach to Christology was conditioned negatively by his opposition to Gnosticism and Docetism, and positively by his own deep understanding of Christ as the second Adam, Who summed up in Himself the whole of humanity, including the first Adam, thereby saving it and creating a new, redeemed race of men. This was expressed in his doctrine of recapitulation [anakephalaiosis]. His approach to Christology was frankly soteriological; only if the divine Word entered fully into human life could the human race be saved from death and sin. Thus he insisted almost monotonously on the unity of the God-man, repudiating the Gnostic separation of the heavenly Christ from the man Jesus. As he read the Gospels and the rule of faith, it was the eternal Word Himself Who became flesh; and he never tires of applying the formula “one and the same” to the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ was “truly God” and “truly man”; if His flesh had differed in any respect (sinlessness excepted) from ordinary human flesh, the parallel between Him and the first Adam would not have been valid, and man could not have been reconciled to God, saving him from death to life. The Word fashioned His own humanity in the Virgin’s womb; and if it be asked why He did this instead of creating some altogether novel substance, the answer is that the humanity of Jesus, which was to be the instrument of salvation, had to be identical with that which needed to be saved. Thus Irenaeus’ view, even more emphatically than Justin, is a representative of the view that at the incarnation the pre-existent Logos, Who revealed Himself in the creation of the world and in the Old Testament theophanies, actually became man. The difference between them is that, while Justin accentuates the distinction between the Logos and the Father, even calling the former a “second God”, for Irenaeus (here he is akin to Ignatius) He is the form in which the Godhead manifests Itself. Two further points must be noted.
a. First, while it is not absolutely clear whether he attributed a rational human soul to the incarnate Lord (the question had not been raised in his day), the probability is that he did in so far as he thought about the matter at all. At any rate, he was satisfied that human nature in it completeness includes such a soul, and that the Word became whatever human nature is.
b. Secondly, there are passages in his writings which suggest that he was aware of some at any rate of the problems involved in the union of divinity and humanity. For example, he states that when the Lord was tempted, suffered and died, the Word remained not quiescent [hesuchazontos], but cooperated [suggignomenou to anthropo] with the humanity in its victory, endurance and resurrection.
In the period before Niceae, the West was quicker in formulating a mature Christology than the East. Its success in doing so was in part due to it possessing theologians of the calibre of Hippolytus and Tertullian. Let us first look at the Christology of Hippolytus and then that of Tertullian.
1. First, like his teacher Irenaeus, Hippolytus (c.160-c.236 A.D.) followed the Johannine model, “The Word was made flesh”. Some of his utterances at first sight seem to imply that the Logos simply assumed human flesh as an outward garment, as when he compares Christ’s humanity to a bridegroom’s robe. Again, like Irenaeus, he sometimes speaks of it as “the man”, as if Christ’s humanity constituted an independent person. His true meaning, however, comes out in the statements that “the Logos became flesh and was made man”, that entering into the Virgin He took flesh from her and “became everything that a man is, sin excepted”, and that (as against the Docetists) “He became man really, not in appearance or in a manner of speaking”. Like the Apostle John and Irenaeus, he used “flesh” to connote human nature in its integrity, without raising the question of a rational soul, and he referred to the divine element in Christ as “spirit”.
2. Secondly, Hippolytus had a firmer grasp than most of his predecessors of the duality of natures in Christ as attested by the difference of operation and manifestation. More than once, in passages packed with eloquent antitheses, he contrasts the weakness of the humanity (what he calls ta anthropina) with the sublimity of the divine nature.
3. Thirdly, Hippolutus has an interesting passage in which he states,
“Neither the Logos without flesh and by Himself was Son in the full sense … nor could the flesh exist [hupostanai] by itself apart from the Logos, since it has its support [sustasin] in the Logos”. [11]
Hippolytus is not here anticipating the much later doctrine that the human nature derived its subsistence from the Word. He is merely emphasizing his well-known view that the Sonship, properly speaking, dated from the incarnation, and adding that the Word was the creator of His own flesh. But the introduction of the fateful term hupostanai (cognate of hupostasis) into Christological discussion deserves notice, as does the implied hint that the Person of the Word is the basis of the God-man.
The central feature of the Christology of Tertullian (c.155-c.222 A.D.) was its grasp of the two natures in Christ; using the term that he preferred, he says that the Savior was composed of “two substances”. The Word in his view has existed alongside the Father from all eternity, a distinct Person at any rate from His generation, but one with the Father in essence. He became man for man’s salvation, since only as man could He accomplish His work on our behalf. So He was born from the Virgin; as Son of God He needed no earthly father, but it was necessary for Him to derive His manhood from an earthly source. Consequently, being divine spirit (here again we have an echo of the Spirit-Christology), He entered into the Virgin, as the angel of the annunciation foretold, and received His flesh from her. The birth was a real one; He was born from Her and not, as the Gnostic Valentinus alleged, simply through her, as if she were a mere channel through which He passed. Tertullian does not shrink from claiming that in the process Mary, who had conceived as a virgin, lost her virginity. Christ’s humanity was in every respect genuine, and also complete; it included, as indispensable to man’s constitution, a soul as well as a body; indeed, the assumption of a soul was necessary if man was to be saved. As a result, He was obliged to put up with the passiones humanas, such as hunger and thirst, tears, birth and death. The governing principle in His makeup was always the Word; Tertullian leaves one in no doubt that it was He, the divine spirit, Who “took the man to Himself” [suscepit hominem], and “mingled God and man in Himself”. If Jesus Christ, then, consists of “two substances” (compare, utramque substantiam Christi et carnis et spiritus non negas), what should we say about the relation between them? Tertullian has the distinction of being the first theologian frankly to tackle this issue. He writes,
“Thus the Word is in flesh. But this provokes the inquiry how the Word became flesh. Was He, so to speak, metamorphosed [transfiguratus] into flesh, or did He clothe Himself in it [indutus carnem]?” [12]
Tertullian has no hesitation in choosing the second alternative. A transformation is unthinkable, for the reason that God and His Logos are by definition immutable, and that the result of such a metamorphosis would be the destruction of both the Godhead and the manhood and the emergence of a monstrous tertium quid, a mixture of amalgam.
The logical conclusion is that both “substances” continue unaltered and unimpaired after the union. So, anticipating later definitions, Tertullian can say that each of them preserves its peculiar qualities [salva est utriusque proprietas substantiae] and activity [substantiae ambo in statu suo qauaeque distincte agebant], the spirit performing the miracles and the humanity enduring the sufferings. Yet while the flesh remains flesh and the spirit spirit (he cites the Lord’s remark to Nicodemus in John 3:6 as Scriptural confirmation), they both belong to a single subject [in uno plane esse possunt]; He Who was both Son of God and Son of man was one and the same Person. In summary, Tertullian says:
“We observe a twofold condition, not confused but conjoined, Jesus, in one Person at once God and man” [vidmus duplicem statum, non confusum sed coniunctum, in una person deum et hominem Iesum]. [13]
Side by side in that indivisible Person can be seen Godhead and manhood, divine spirit and human flesh, immortality and mortality, strength and weakness. When it is said that Christ suffered and died, the reference is to the human “substance”. God does not suffer; the Christ-spirit cannot even have “suffered with” [compassus] the flesh, as the modalists like to plead. The cry of dereliction on the cross came from Christ’s human flesh and soul, not from His divine nature; and we should say that His death was in respect of His human, not His divine, “substance”. So when the Savior said that His soul was troubled, He was referring to His human soul. Yet these careful distinctions did not prevent Tertullian from using expressions like, “God allows Himself to be born”, “the sufferings of God”, “God was truly crucified, truly died”; such language foreshodowed the “transfer of properties” [communicatio idiomatum] which was later taken as orthodox.
On the other hand, Tertullian was convinced that the man Jesus had preserved intact the substance and form of human flesh in heaven. In certains moods, the sheer absurdity of these paradoxes [certum est quia impossibile] strikes him as the best argument in their favor. His final position, with its recognition of the part played by the Lord’s human soul, is one which allows full scope to the humanity as an active principle, without thereby undermining the unity of the subject, that is to say, the divine Word.
Novatian to a large extent modeled his ideas on those of Tertullian. Like his master, he declares that Christ is both God and man, combining “both substances” [utramque substantiam] in Himself. Like Tertullian also, he stresses the reality of the human nature, picturing the eternal Word as putting it on like a garment or joining Himself to it as a bridegroom joins himself to his bride. Indeed, he carries Tertullian’s tendency to hold the two natures apart so far that he has been accused of being a Nestorian before Nestorius. For example, he speaks of the man being joined with the God, and the God linked with the man. Again, commenting on Luke 1:35, he distinguishes between “the holy thing” which was to be born from Mary, that is, the man Jesus, and the divine spirit which was to come upon her. Only the latter was in the strict sense the Son of God; He “assumed” the Son of Man, and by attaching Him to Himself made Him Son of God. Notice that Tertullian’s exegesis of the Lucan passage was similar, and Novatian’s strong emphasis elsewhere on the unity excludes the suspicion that he thought of two Sons yoked together in a purely moral union. On the other hand, in the sharpest possible contrast to Tertullian, Novatian apparently did not view the Lord’s humanity as complete. Not only does he describe it exclusively as “flesh” or “body” (the concern, which he shared with Tertullian, to rebut the Gnostic disparagement of the body would account for this), but he nowhere refers unambiguously to Christ’s human soul or mind. What is decisive, Novatian regarded Jesus’ death as consisting simply in the laying aside of His body; and, drawing a parallel between His death and ours, Novatian clearly suggests that, whereas ordinary men consist of body and soul, Jesus Christ was composed of flesh and the divine Word.
At Alexandria, under the influence of the Greek speculative and ascetic ideas current there, an important new movement in Christology developed there in the third century A.D.. Though outwardly and by intention, loyal to the Church’s rule of faith and doctrinal tradition, this development took certain Hellenizing presuppositions for granted; its sympathies laid much more with Justin Martyr and the Apologists than with a theologian like Tertullian. We can see this development at work in Clement of Alexandria (A.D. 150-215). Much of his teaching conforms to the conventional pattern. He says that the Logos “has come to us from heaven”; the Lord has “entered into”, or “attached” Himself to, human flesh. In becoming incarnate and so making Himself visible, He has begotten Himself, that is, created His own humanity. So Christ is both human and divine, “alone both, God and man”. He has “clothed Himself with a man”, being “God in the form of man, unsullied”, and as such, He has really suffered.
Though criticized as such by Photius (c.820-c.895 A.D.), Clement was no Docetist, and defended the reality of the incarnation; but many of his statements, for example, that Christ was no ordinary man with physical passions, have a distinctly docetic ring. But it seems certain, despite the questionings of many scholars, that he attributed a human soul or mind to the God-man. The problematical element in his picture of Him springs from the way he allowed it to be colored by the Greek ascetical ideal of apatheia, or emancipation from passion. Clement was convinced that the Lord must have been exempt from all desires, both those necessary for maintaining the body and those peculiar to the soul, since His constitution was sustained by “divine power”. His view seems to have been that the directive principle (in Stoic language, to hegemonikon), which was the ground of His organic unity, was the Logos. He it was Who in effect was Christ’s “inner man”. On this assumption, since Christ’s human soul was a mere copy of the divine Word, it is difficult to see what practical part Clement can have envisaged it as playing. Soteriologically considered, the humanity of Jesus had little theological importance in his scheme.
The Hellenizing presuppositions are much more explicit in the Christology of Origen (A.D. c.185-254). He says,
“We believe that the very Logos of the Father, the Wisdom of God Himself, was enclosed within the limits of that man who appeared in Judaea; nay more, that God’s Wisdom entered a woman’s womb, was born as an infant, and wailed like crying children.” [14]
The problem of how this came about Origen solved with brilliant simplicity. He believed that the world of spiritual beings [ta logika], including human souls, pre-existed from all eternity; Origen applied this as the key to the incarnation. One of these souls, the one destined to be the soul of the man Jesus, in every respect a human soul like the rest, was from the beginning attached to the Logos with mystical devotion; it burned with love and desire for justice. All the other souls, by the misguided exercise of their free-will, fell away from the Logos, to Whom they ought to have adhered; but this unique soul, as a result of its adoring contemplation, became inseparably united with Him. The union is as complete as that of a lump of iron with the fire into which it has been plunged, becoming red-hot; and Origen quotes I Cor. 6:17 as Scriptural confirmation that it formed “one spirit” with Him. But since this soul, while cleaving to the Logos, properly belonged to a body, it formed the ideal meeting-point between the infinite Word and finite human nature. So when it was born from the Blessed Virgin with pure flesh created by the action of the Spirit, God-head and manhood were inextricably united. Furthermore, it was natural that, in union with the flesh with which it was conjoined, it should be designated God’s Son, Power and Wisdom, being so fused with and penetrated by Him Who in very truth is God’s Son, just as it is natural that He in His turn should be saluted as Son of Man and that we should speak of Him as being born as an infant and dying. With this theory of the mediating role of Christ’s human soul as its basis, Origen expounds the doctrine of the incarnation [enanthropesis: the verb enanthropein occurs frequently].
1. On the one hand, he insists on the duality of the natures, speaking of Christ’s manhood [anthopotes] and divinity [theotes], and of “His divine and human nature” [phusis], even of His “hypostasis” [hupostasis] as man and His “hypostasis” as Only-begotten. Interpreting allegorically Psa. 72:1, he explains “the king” and “the king’s son” as referring respectively to “the nature [phusin] of the Word” and to “the man whom He assumed” and whom, because of His pre-eminence, He dominates. Both the natures retained their special characteristics. For example, “the Logos, remaining Logos in essence, undergoes none of the experiences of the body or the soul”; whereas His human nature has to put up with the customary human lot. The cries, “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful” (Matt. 26:38), and, “Now is my soul troubled” (John 12:27), refer to His human soul. Similarly, we can say that the Son of God died, but only if we make clear that it was “in respect of that nature which was in any case susceptible of death”.
2. On the other hand, the incarnate Lord is a unity, “a composite thing” [suntheton chrema], as Origen forcefully describes Him. The Gospel, he point out, speaks of one, not of two; and he defines the relationship of the two natures as an actual union [henosis] or commingling [anakrasis], resulting in the deification of the humanity, and not as a mere association [koinonia]. The Logos and the humanity are really one [hen], the reason being that He has united Himself substantially with Christ’s human soul in a union more intimate than He ever effected with souls of prophets or apostles by inspiration and grace.
Starting with traditional teaching, Origen was thus able to explain the rationale of the incarnation in terms of his own philosophy. In criticism of his Christology, two further points must be made.
1. First, while he clearly intends to represent the unity between the Logos and Christ’s human soul as a real one, his theory as given above hardly succeeds in doing so. However intimate the relationship established by the soul’s loving adhesion to the Word, it can in the end be no more than a special case, differing in degree but not in kind, of that union of affection and will which the saints can attain with Him. In fact, however, his deepest thought seems to have been that the unity of the God-man (he was the first to use this description of the Incarnate) was located in the Logos Himself. While satisfied that the Lord must have assumed a soul as well as a body if human nature was to be saved in its entirety, he regarded the soul as wholly subjected to the Logos. It was the nature of the Logos, as we saw above, which predominated (compare, proegoumene) in Christ; and his conception is of the Logos indwelling and directing the manhood. The human soul was, in his view, totally suffused with, and caught up in, the divine wisdom, goodness, truth and life. As Origen saw the matter, therefore, the Word had in effect taken over the role of the hegemonikon, or governing principle, in Christ.
2. The second point opens up larger issues. It must be recognized that the incarnation as such really stood outside the logic of Origen’s system. While assigning it a place, out of loyalty to God’s revealed word and the Church’s tradition, he did not regard the Son’s participation in human nature as either permanent or essential. It is the simple sort of Christians, he taught, who are attached to Christ’s manhood; the true gnostic, that is, the man of real spiritual advancement and insight, strains upwards to the Logos, the soul’s authentic life from which it originally fell away. The mediator between the only true God, that is, the ineffable Father, and man is not, in the last analysis, the God-man Jesus Christ, but the Word Who bridges the gulf between the unoriginate Godhead and creatures. So we are not surprised to learn that Jesus was able to alter His body as and when He willed, and that it was “more divine” than other bodies. Indeed, it shared in the Word’s divinity, and while absolutely real (Origen had no wish to be a Docetist) possessed a godlike, ethereal quality. With the resurrection, the deification of Christ’s human nature really began, His body becoming of a consistency midway between that of natural flesh and that of the soul freed from bodily ties; and the Christian can say that, “although the Savior was a man, He is now no longer one”. The exaltation of the Son of Man consists precisely in this, that He has ceased to be other than the Logos and has become identically one with Him.
Although Origen’s general framework of ideas exerted a powerful influence in the second half of the third century, there was a widespread reaction against its most distinctive thesis, that is, that Christ’s human soul was the point of union between the eternal Word and the humanity of Jesus. Apart from the hostility to Origen’s doctrine of the pre-existence of souls, there seems to have been the growing suspicion that the recognition of a real human mind in the God-man must logically entail the disruption of His unity. An illustration of this reaction can be seen in the views of the bishops who excommunicated Paul of Samosata at Antioch in A.D. 268, and particular by their spokesman, the priest Malchion. These views can be reconstructed from the surviving fragments of the acts of the synod. Being Origenists, the bishops naturally repudiated Paul of Samosata’s denial of the personality or concrete subsistence of the Word; in their eyes the Word had existed from all eternity as a hypostasis or ousia. But they equally took offense at Paul’s radical separation of the Word from the man Jesus and his interpretation of the relationship between them as merely one of inspiration. There is, they affirm, an absolute unity between the two, a unity which is not one of participation or grace, but of substance. They are, as it were, ontologically one, and “the substantial Word”, “the hypostasis of the Word”, is actually present in the make-up of Jesus Christ. Being Himself a substance [ousia], the Word has become “substantified” [ousiomene] in the humanity, and the God-man is a composite being [suntheton zoon]; the divinity and the flesh having been substantially [ousiodos] united, the former is a real element in the structure of the God-man.
There is no suggestion of Origen’s theory of the intimate adhesion of Christ’s human soul to the Logos. On the contrary, the explanation put forward by Malchion and the bishops implies that Christ’s humanity did not include a human soul at all, all the functions of one in His constitution being performed by the Word incarnate. This comes out very clearly in their statement that the Savior is a composite being in the same way as an ordinary man is composite; just as the oneness or unity of the latter results from the concourse [sunodos] of flesh and “something else” which inhabits the flesh (manifestly the higher soul or mind), so the unity of the Lord results from the coming together [ek tou sundedramekenai] of the divine Word and the flesh that He assumed from the Virgin. Evidently they were dichotomists, believing in the Platonic manner that a human being is a mind inhabiting a body. So they can say,
“We recognize only one difference, admittedly a very important one, between His constitution [autou ten sustasin] and ours, namely, that the divine Logos is in Him what the interior man [ho eso anthropos] is in us”. [15]
There can be no doubt that by “the interior man” the fathers meant the higher soul or mind, or that by the substituting the Word for it in the structure of the Incarnate, they intended to safeguard His unity against Paul of Samosata‘s separation of the Word from “the man”.
As further proof that the doctrine of Christ’s human soul was coming under heavy attack in the latter half of the third century can be found in the apology for Origen which Pamphilus and Eusebius prepared between A.D. 308 and 310. From this it appears that Origen was charged with holding adoptionist views similar to those of Paul of Samosata and Artemas, and also of preaching two Christs. Evidently these errors were taken by his critics to be the logical outcome of the thesis that the God-man possessed a human soul, for in defending Origen, Pamphilus and Eusebius make the point that this suggestion of his should not be the occasion of offense, seeing that, on the evidence of Scripture, Christ Himself more than once alluded to His soul. In his own theology, Eusebius was quite explicit that the Word indwelt the flesh of the Incarnate, “moving it like a soul”; it was His “corporeal instrument”. If he is prepared to make use of the Scriptural language referring to His human soul, he interprets it as signifying, not an actual human soul, but that which takes the place of one, that is, the eternal Word. So he explains that, when the demons launched their attack “against our Savior’s soul”, the mistake they made laid in supposing that the soul inhabiting His body was an ordinary human one. Again, he understands by Christ’s death the departure of the Word from His flesh, which for its part is consigned to the grave.
If ideas like these were being discussed in circles that were in other matters sympathetic to Origenism, it is not surprising that theologians less subservient to Origen’s spell were decided to dissociate themselves from his solution of the Christological problem. Methodius of Olympus (d.311 A.D.) is a good example; he is the only theologian falling into this category whose works have come down to us. Few biographical details are known about him, but he was probably bishop of Olympus, Lycia, and was martyred in Chalcis. His only complete work extant in Greek is Symposium, or Banquet of the Ten Virgins, modeled on Plato’s Symposium, in which Methodius extols the excellence of virginity (as Plato commended “Eros”), ending with a hymn to Christ as the church’s Bridegroom. Portions of two other works survive in Greek. Aglaopon, or On the Resurrection attacks Origen’s doctrine of the soul’s pre-existence and maintains the identity of the resurrection body with the earthly body. On Free Will attacks the dualism and determinism of Valentinian Gnosticism. Speaking of the incarnation, Methodius states that the Son of God “truly became man”, or even “assumed the man”; he describes the Incarnate as “a man filled with deity unmixed and perfect, and a God contained in a man”. Phrases like these have an Origenist ring, as does his designation of the Lord’s humanity as an “instrument” [organon]. We should notice that when he defines his meaning more precisely, he affirms that it was in virtue of His assumption of flesh that the heavenly Christ, not being man, became man. As a matter of fact, his major Christological passages imply that there were only two elements compounded in the God-man, that is, the Word and His flesh. The effect of the incarnation was that the body in a miraculous way became the receptacle of the Logos; and, identifying Christ’s immaculate flesh with the bride of the Song of Solomon, he represents the Word as abandoning the Father for sheer love of it, descending to earth and cleaving to it in closest union. When we bear in mind that Methodius is a dichotomist holding that human nature is composed of body and soul, and that on his view the soul is the immortal element in man and belongs to the order of intelligences of which the Word is the chief, the conclusion is inescapable that he was an exponent of what may be called the “Word-flesh” type of Christology, teaching that the Word took the place of the human mind or soul in the structure of the God-man.
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