Jesus Wars 2 -- The War of Two Natures

Our small group continues to read Jesus Wars by Philip Jenkins. See my post on the introduction and first chapter here.
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1. After reading about the crazy battles that resulted in what we now call orthodoxy, there seem two possible conclusions: 1) God was behind the scenes making sure the right answers won out or 2) it's all a crap shoot and orthodox Christianity is a sham.

I have argued for #1 for the last 25 years. If we don't have some faith that God was directing the final outcomes, Christian orthodoxy falls apart. We like to think that the Bible is obvious on all these things, but history tells a different story.

Every party in the debates over the Trinity and the nature of Christ was arguing from Scripture. Arius argued from Scripture. Athanasius argued from Scripture. Paul of Samosata argued from Scripture. Cyril argued from Scripture. Apollinarius argued from Scripture. Nestorius argued from Scripture. 

The politics -- indeed the violence -- that forged what we now believe as Christians is depressing. I think I had some sense of holy men gathering to discern what God wanted the church to affirm. Not so. In fact, the winners were more often the least holy and the most politically crafty. It reminds me of something Victor Frankl said about the concentration camps of the Holocaust. The more virtuous you were, the less likely you were to survive. "The best of us did not return." [1]

The century between Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451) primarily argued over the two natures of Christ. I have always felt like the final conclusion made perfect sense -- one person, two natures, fully God, fully human. Yet the players in this debate seem far from holy intellectuals. They seem more like the Gangs of New York.

2. Jenkins reviews the lead up. 

The earliest centuries saw options -- arguing from the books we now call the New Testament, no less -- that were early considered wrong. These were not evil people with twisted mustaches. They were the losers, and history is told by the winners. Again, by faith, we believe that God picked the winners whether they were good people or not.

Some early losers:

• The Ebionites -- Jews who believed Jesus was the Messiah but not that he was divine. It is debated whether they represent a form of Jewish Christianity going back to the earliest church.
• Adoptionists -- This one lasted a while. They believed that Jesus became the Son of God at some point (for example, at his baptism). Mark does not give any explicit teaching on Jesus before his baptism.
• Perhaps Matthew and Luke could be used to argue that he was Son of God through the virgin birth, but they say nothing explicit about what he might have been before that. Some early Christians might not have believed in Jesus' pre-existence.
• Some Gnostics had a form of adoptionism. Cerinthus (time of John) thought Jesus was possessed by a divine force at his baptism.
• Paul of Samosata (bishop of Antioch in the 260s) believed the human Jesus was born of Mary and then that the Logos descended on him at his baptism.
• Some might have believed Jesus became Son of God at his resurrection.
• By contrast, Docetists (around at the time of 1 John) believed that Jesus only seemed to be human.
• Sabellius (around 220) believed that God was only one person who kept changing hats. The Father became Jesus became the Spirit. One person.

3. Then we have the 300s. Constantine makes Christianity legal, which means the door is now open for Christians to develop power and use it to stomp on others. I will say, reading this book has made me much more open to those who think Constantine inadvertantly opened the door to the wholesale corruption of Christianity. We seem to do better when people -- by which I mean non-Christians -- are trying to kill us.

Some losers:

• Arius -- "There was a point when the Son did not exist." Arius believed Jesus was pre-existent and that he was like God. It's hard for us to fathom how popular this version of faith was in the 300s -- more popular than the orthodox. And Arius may very well have been more godly than Athanasius. Christianity among the Germanic tribes in the 400s was more Arian than orthodox.
• Apollinarius -- To be frank, most popular Christians today might just as well be Apollinarians or Eutychians. They more or less saw Jesus as having one nature -- a divine one. Apollinarius thought Jesus had a human body and divine soul. Eutychus thought that Jesus' humanity was like a drop in the ocean compared to his divinity.
• If the Council of Ephesus in 449 had stood (the Robber Council), we would all believe that Jesus did not have a human nature -- or at least not enough of one to count.

4. In 380, the emperor Theodosius II picks a winner for Christianity in the Empire. He picks Nicene Christianity. Thus, we are all Nicenes.

The two centers of the conflict for the next 70 years or so are Antioch and Alexandria. Antioch is always defending the humanity of Jesus. Alexandria is always pushing a single nature that is divine. Antioch is the place of biblical scholarship. Alexandria is the place with a history of Platonism.

Alexandria seems to wield the power of sabotage and the power of the mob. Frankly, I kept thinking of MAGA Christians as I read about them. 

Constantinople had become the center of Roman power, so it was a key power with regard to its bishop. These bishops often were chosen from Antioch. Then Alexandria would use its power to trash them. Most of the time, they did this by finding something about the Antiochenes or patriarch of Constantinople that they could call heretical and stir up a mob over. Again, MAGA Christians.

Meanwhile, Rome was trying to consolidate its power but was really like an old man whose hearing aid isn't working. They don't speak Greek so they don't really know entirely what's going on. They're invited to the council but can't really hear very well.

All sorts of forgeries are being created in this era. And of course, on a popular level, people believe whatever they want to believe, which is what their tribe believes.

"People knew the slogans, but did they really understand them? Actually an excellent case can be made that such distinctions were beyond the reach not just of ordinary believers but of many church leaders" (62).

"Cities fell apart in violent conflicts over a single letter: was Christ of the same being with the Father or of like being, homoousios or homoisousios? Was he from two natures or in two?" (63).

5. Nestorius was another target of the Alexandrians. It's not at all clear that he was the heretic he is made out to be.

Christians "did not fully understand the theology they believed" (67). But they knew the groups they were against. "Once something was an ism," it was a target. Once a stereotype was established, it could be used to destroy someone. All you had to do is attach the label to them.

Sound familiar? This is quintissential MAGA Christianity. "Socialist" "Leftist liberal" "woke." No need to have any.thought whatsoever. Once the label is attached, they're toast.

"Whatever he actually preached, Nestorius became the central figure of Nestorianism" (67). "Theological debate became a game of guilt by association."

"Understanding a war of isms helps us trace the course of theological development thorugh these centuries... In each case, advocates were reacting as much to the stereotype of the enemy movement prevailing at the time rather than to any rational analysis of its teachings" (67-68).

[1] Man's Search for Meaning.

Jesus' Balance of Power

This is from the last chapter of my second Jesus book:
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The Nicene Creed, said in many churches today, was a perfected version of what the Council of Nicaea decided in 325, but it didn’t reach something like its current form until the next council at the city of Constantinople in AD381. That creed says that, “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.”

It was now agreed that Jesus was divine in the same way that God the Father was divine. And of course it was agreed that he was human too. A Christian leader in the 300s named Gregory of Nazianzus famously argued that “what has not been assumed cannot be healed.” What he meant is that if Jesus did not really take on humanity, he can’t heal us.

So after working out the basics of the Trinity, Christians for the next hundred plus years would debate how Jesus’ humanity and divinity fit together. Now that Christianity was legal, they didn’t have to spend as much time worrying about persecution. In fact, the Roman Emperor Theodosius I made Christianity the only legal religion in 380. The contents of the Bible were also coming together.  By the year 400, Christians pretty much agreed on which books belonged in the New Testament. This “peace and quiet” created a space for them to iron out some of these issues.

The end result was the common Christian belief that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine in such a way as that both were real features of who he was. The church steered a path between a number of competing ideas. For example, a bishop named Apollinarius offered the possibility that Jesus had a human body but a divine mind, as if the divine Logos had taken over a body. The result basically would suggest that Jesus didn’t have any human element in his thinking.

Still later, an archbishop named Nestorius suggested that Jesus’ almost had a split personality—a human one and a divine one. In response, a man named Eutyches argued Jesus only had one nature that was a mixture of human and divine. No doubt these were all well-intentioned attempts to figure things out, even though the politics of it all often got ugly.

The final decision, like the one about the Trinity, was very balanced. Jesus was fully human and fully divine. He was only one person (against Nestorius) but he had two natures (against Apollinarius and Eutyches). He was really tempted and experienced genuine humanity in its fullness. But he was also truly God walking on the earth.

Obviously by 451 Christians had come a long way from simple biblical statements like 2 Corinthians 13:14: “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” The Corinthians may have had a very simple sense of such a verse. Here are three different persons: One God, one Lord, one Spirit.

When we read it today, we believe all three are mysteriously the same, one God. So Jesus the Lord is both the fully human Jesus who walked the earth and the fully divine Jesus who came from heaven. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.