The Horsts, Vardamans, and soon Gunsaluses still meet to read through books together. I am particularly interested in the current one, Jesus Wars, by Philip Jenkins. It is about the time around the Council of Chalcedon in 451.
You may know Jenkins from The Next Christendom, which we required in the original curriculum at Wesley Seminary for the Cultural Contexts of Ministry class. He also wrote a book called Lost History of Christianity.
All these books play on a common sense that, while we like to think of "Western," Protestant-Catholic orthodoxy as providential and inevitable by God's will, there have always been other forms of Christianity. In the year 1000, the center of Christianity might have more been in the area of Iraq than Rome.
Next Christendom pointed out that Christianity in the Global South is overtaking us. There will likely be moments in the future where our sense of orthodoxy feels threatened as a result. The Lost History reminded us of the once vibrant forms of Christian faith that faded over time with movements like the rise of Islam and the Mongols.
2. Jesus Wars looks at a crucial moment in the history of Christianity, one that most of us don't know too much about -- the Chalcedonian moment in 451. This is the council that said Jesus was one person with two natures -- fully human and fully God.
We like to think of Nicaea in 325 as the pivot. Some popular belief here is just wrong. Constantine did not make Christianity the official religion of the empire. He did not eliminate Roman religion. He did not set the canon or persecute the Gnostics.
For some Christians, Constantine is the boogie man who messed everything up. True, he did get the Roman state involved in Christianity, but it was far less intrusive at that time than it would become.
This is all more than 100 years before Jenkins book, but Nicene Christianity was not the clear winner after Nicaea. In the mid-300s, there may have been more Arians in the church than Trinitarians. Arius taught that Jesus was the firstborn of all creation -- meaning that God created Christ first as the most exalted being of the universe. He just wasn't "of one substance" with God for Arius.
3. Tonight we discussed the Introduction and first chapter, "The Heart of the Matter." It's a potentially sobering read for the "orthodox," those of us in the West who are in the Western-Catholic-Protestant tradition. However, fear not. There are options. :-)
Did God cause (or allow) the horse of Theodosius II to trip in 450? If he hadn't, the center of Christianity might be in the Middle East and Islam a marginal religion. Meanwhile, Europe might be Arian, Celtic, or some Game of Thrones like religion. (I'm throwing that in there, not Jenkins.)
In 449, there was a council that we don't talk about. It was in Ephesus. History calls it the "Gangster Synod." Monk militias forced the representatives there to sign a blank piece of paper and filled it out with "monophysite" doctrine. They actually beat the opposing patriarch of Constantinople (Flavian) so badly that he died a few days later.
The emperor Theodosius II was also Monophysite. If he hadn't died in a freak horse accident, Monophysitism would likely have become the official doctrine of the empire.
4. Who were the Monophysites? They believed that Christ only had one nature. Typically, they erred more on the side of Christ's divinity and minimized his humanity (For example, Apollinaris believed Jesus had a human body but a divine soul). As usual, there was more nuance than each side wanted to admit. In fact, there are some parables here of the way we stereotype "the other side" today. Are all liberals communists? No. Are all conservatives fascists? No.
Some Monophysites might be better characterized as "Miaphysites." They saw Christ's one nature as a mixture of human and divine, a fusion of the two. Meanwhile, historians and theologians still debate whether Nestorius was really a heretic. He is usually taken to have virtually seen Christ as being two people and going too far in dividing Christ's two natures.
Probably, Nestorius was. He did not seem to be comfortable calling Jesus God when he was an infant. He did not want to say that Mary was the mother of God, theotokos.
As an aside, a Facebook friend of mine, Gregory Blevins, who is Syrian Orthodox, has sometimes described my view of Jesus' knowledge while on earth as semi-Nestorian. But I have never claimed that Jesus had two minds. I have only suggested that Jesus' human mind on earth did not fully access his full divine capacities. Like the Antiochenes of the past, I lean this way because of my historical reading of the Gospels.
5. Perhaps the most striking claim of this first chapter is how violent these disagreements were. These were far from mere ideological debates. Jenkins himself likens it much more to the Gangs of New York. People were murdered and persecuted for being on the wrong side of this debate. The common person basically went along with whatever their ruler at that time demanded that they believe.
The Athanasian Creed, which actually dates to a century or more later, says that anyone who does not believe what it says can't go to heaven. It ends with a series of anathemas against those who disagree. I'm thankful that John Wesley removed the anathemas when he included this creed in his Articles of Religion.
Jenkins notes that these violent gang wars are a good argument for the separation of church and state. It is really in this phase that the Roman Empire got involved. Indeed, empresses played a major role. For example, Justinian's wife Theodora pushed the monophysite position.
Jenkins sees such tribal behavior as typical of these honor-shame cultures. It reminds me of some of the extremely hardened attitudes of Christians today who virtually excommunicate each other over matters of doctrine. What is sometimes called "Christian nationalism" is basically a contemporary form of these attitudes.
This brings me to a second observation. God is far more interested in the state of our hearts than our creedal confession. We are saved by faith, not by creedal affirmation. How many of these partisans were truly Christian at all? Were the real Christians the unnamed "little people" tossed about by those with power? How hard it is for the powerful to be true Christ-followers! Is it like a camel going through a needle's eye?
I suspect Arius will be in heaven. But there are probably many on all sides who won't be.
6. Jenkins believes that these bloody conflicts severely weakened the church around the Mediterranean. Along with Edward Gibbon, Jenkins sees this as a factor in the fall of the Roman Empire to the barbarians. Even more, he sees this as a reason why the church of the East fell to the Muslims. He also notes that the monophysites fared much better under the Muslims than they did under the empire, as did the Coptics in Egypt.
What might have happened if the monophysites had won? Perhaps, Jenkins muses, Christianity would have been strongest in Syria, Egypt, and the Middle East.
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