Many issues are involved in accurately understanding the key Christian truth,
the Incarnation. Our key is majestic opening to the prologue to Saint John's
Gospel, "In the beginning was the Word". These words echo the first sentence of Genesis "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." But John writes not of the creation of the universe but of its salvation through a unique event, the Incarnation, the moment when God became man in Jesus Christ. Unlike the other three Gospels, the Synoptics, that introduce the Incarnation with a human genealogy of Jesus of Nazareth, John chooses to give us a kind of divine genealogy, the "story of God", if you like. He has a specific purpose in mind.
"In the beginning was the Word" immediately calls for some explanation of this mysterious "Word", or logos in Greek. This language opens the mystery of God being in relationship with God: "and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." John goes on to describe this Word who is always with God in the divine act of creation: "He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made." But the key idea was set out in that first sentence, "In the beginning was the Word". John was affirming and underlining one of the essentials of the Incarnation, the eternal pre-existence of the Divine Son.
This simply means that the Word, the Son or second Person of the Holy Trinity always is. He has no beginning or end. He is God from all eternity, One and equal with the Father and the Holy Spirit. As Catholics we may take this for granted, because it is the Church's own understanding of John's language. However, once we explore heresies that have denied or redefined the Incarnation, we find that Christianity in the Twenty-first century faces errors about the Incarnation just as it did in the era of Saint John, the late First Century.
At that time some people had problems with John's statement of the Incarnation in his prologue: "and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us." They were disgusted by these words, disgusted at the suggestion that God took mere human flesh in Christ and that Jesus really suffered and died on the cross. Saint Ignatius of Antioch (who died in about 110) confronted heretics motivated by a negative view of matter and the human body, combined with an exalted understanding of the spirit and the "otherness" of God. How could God condescend to take our corrupt flesh? How could God enter the process of conception, birth, growth, experiencing pain and suffering in our human condition?
Under pagan Greek influences, gnostic heretics simply denied that God assumed a real human nature and a body that could suffer. Jesus. only seemed human. This is known as Docetism. But other, more plausible and more rational, heresies moved in the opposite direction. They struck not at the humanity of Christ but at his divinity, especially by reinterpreting Saint John's affirmation of the eternal pre-existence and divinity of the Son of God who took flesh.
Arianism and Orthodoxy
The most subtle denial of divinity of Christ appeared in the Fourth Century, when the priest Arius (who died in 336) taught that the Word is divine but that this divine Son had a beginning. Reinterpreting John's prologue, Arius said that the Son was not "co-eternal" with the Father. Arius was a skilled populariser. He took his ideas to the public in pop songs and poetry. To get across the essential point of his teaching, he coined a rhyme in Greek which he taught to his followers, "Ain hoti poti ouk ain", meaning "There was a time when he was not", that is, there was a time when the Divine Son did not exist in eternity. Saint John's words were "nuanced" by Arius to mean that the Word who became flesh had a "beginning" at some point in pre-history, before the creation of the universe, but a beginning after the Father, hence the Word is not infinite, not as divine as the Father.
Arius reduced the Son to a being created by the Father, a demi-god or an emanation from God, an intermediary between God and the cosmos, but not fully God. Pagan Greek mythology was familiar with gods and demi-gods. Therefore, the Arian denial of the divinity of Christ fitted neatly into the thought of the age. Some who sympathized with Arius sensed that he had gone too far so there are several variations of his heresy, called semi-Arianism, attempts to maintain the divinity of Jesus Christ but in a slightly reduced form.
Apart from the crude implication that there is a process of time in eternity, that is, of "before" and "after" when God the Father generates or creates a lesser Son, we can see other implications in this heresy. We can soon figure out what is destroyed by such an error, not only the divinity of Jesus Christ but the Holy and Undivided Trinity, the Triune God.
Saint Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 295-373) was the greatest and most persistent foe of Arius and his followers. He perceived how the Arians had redefined and destroyed the Holy Trinity as follows: God the Father had a semi-divine son. He sent this son to earth, who in turn sent out a semi-divine spirit. There are thus three distinct beings but of these only the Father is the true God. The other two are semi-divine beings subordinate to the Father, so this model of the Trinity is described as "subordinationism".
Because the Father is the sole source and focus of divinity Arius took up a feature of earlier heresies, "monarchianism", from the Greek words "monos" and "arche", meaning "one source". Our word "monarchy" is derived from this, because it describes a single governing source of authority and power. Monarchianism denied the divinity of Christ by making the Father the One God and single source of all other beings.
Eastern Christians still favour a special source role for the Father in the Trinity, hence their problem with the Spirit proceeding from both the Father and the Son. But they certainly reject Arius' reduced Trinity. They prefer a vertical model of the Trinity rather than the triangular model familiar to us in the West. Nonetheless the same faith in the divine Unity and perfect Trinity is common to East and West today.
Key Words in Christology
The Catholic response to Arius was focussed around a technical term we find embodied in the Nicene Creed, "homoousios". In the current English translation this is rendered "of one being with the Father". The divine Son is of one Being or one essence with his divine Father. "Homoousios" affirms the eternal equality and unity of the Father and the Son.
The semi-Arian compromise was another word, "homoiousios", meaning "of like being" or "of similar being" to the Father, a shift of meaning, hinting at a lesser status for the divine Son. The struggle over two Greek words reached its critical moments at the Council of Nicea (325) and the First Council of Constantinople (381) . At these Councils, the creed we say or sing at Sunday Mass was solemnly defined including the essential word "homoousios" that effectively wipes out Arianism. Nevertheless, the battle with Arianism raged across much of the Fourth Century. Imperial politics led to the fierce persecution of orthodox theologians and clergy and instances of cowardice or compromise among various Church leaders.
These disputes defining the creed remind us of how God the Word enters our words, how human language becomes the vehicle for divine Revelation. Language is the usual the way we know God revealing himself in the deeds and words of Christ Jesus. This is why I believe that divine Revelation comes to us normally through human language, that is, through propositions. As the Second Vatican Council taught, there are two sources of the one Word of God, Scripture and tradition, sources of the teachings of the Church, her dogmas and doctrines. This is why technical words were so important when used by the Church to express, refine and protect orthodox doctrine. Homoousios in the Nicene Creed is the supreme example of such a word. Without that word, orthodox christology would have been very difficult to express, proclaim or maintain.
Another element in the battle with Arianism was the affirmation of the equal divine Personhood of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Each is a divine "prosopon", Person. This word means "person" in a technical philosophical sense, that is, a complete living being, and should not be understood in a modern psychological way, e.g "she's a nice person". The Arians rejected describing the Father, Son and Holy Spirit with the word "prosopon".
Therefore, Saint Athanasius and the Cappaddocian Fathers, Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa, also strongly defended the Person of the Holy Spirit as co-equal and one with the Father and the Son, that is the Trinity, one God in being or "ousia". The semi-Arians such as Macedonius of Constantinople had taught that the Holy Spirit is an emanation of the Son, thus the Spirit is an even lesser "divine" entity if divine at all. At the First Council of Constantinople (381) the Nicene Creed was completed with the addition of the "And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life who proceeds from the Father, who the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets."
Another heresy emerged in the Fifth Century, Nestorianism, named after the Patriarch Nestorius of Constantinople. He said that Jesus was a human person and a divine person joined together, so that the divine Logos dwells in the man, Jesus of Nazareth and his Mother cannot be called Mother of God but only Mother of Christ. Nestorianism was condemned at the Council of Ephesus (431) which also affirmed Mary's title of "God bearer" - Mother of God. Nestorianism seems to have emerged from the adoptionist tradition.
Nestorianism provoked a reaction, the opposite extreme that said there was one Person and nature in Jesus, a divine Person and nature. This is called Monophysitism from "monos" (one) and "phusis" (nature). In its variations it not only reduces the humanity of Christ but absorbs it, changes it, or mixes it up with the divine nature.
Arians, Nestorians and Monophysites were all confronted by another word for personhood that describes Jesus Christ as one Person and one "hypostasis", with two natures, human and divine, that continue unimpaired, untransformed and unmixed with each other. This "hypostatic union" was defined at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, strongly influenced by the teachings of Pope Leo the Great and Saint Cyril of Alexandria. But the expression "hypostatic union" dates from the Fifth Council of Constantinople 553.
"Descending" and "Ascending" Christology
Arianism, Nestorianism and even variants of adoptionism still reappear in our times. The Jehovah's Witnesses of today seem to be crudely Arian, to say the least. But today we face some other rejections of a pre-existent Word who took flesh in Mary's womb. Modern denials of the divinity of Christ usually take a different form to Arianism. The reasons for this are interesting.
In the Fourth Century Arianism emerged in the era of a "descending christology", meaning that the Incarnation was thought of in terms of a divine being becoming man. God descends to earth, takes our flesh and enters our condition.
This is beautifully expressed in Saint Paul's hymn of the Incarnation in Philippians 2: 5-11, which emphasises the self-emptying" of God or what is called a "kenotic" understanding of the Incarnation. This way of thinking begins with God the Son who "humbles himself" to become man and whose sacred humanity is raise up and glorified in a bodily resurrection. However, in our times the approach moves in a different direction, as an "ascending christology", that starts on earth with Jesus of Nazareth.
You may want to turn the process of the Incarnation around, especially if you are not imbued with Plato's way of thinking, which begins with God. You may prefer to start with what you can see here on earth. But ignoring or rejecting Saint John's principle "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" soon leads to errors in this approach. You begin to see Jesus of Nazareth as a human person who somehow became divine.
This way of thinking was probably also developing when Saint John wrote his prologue. It certainly appeared in the following century and is generally known as "adoptionism", meaning that Jesus Christ was a special human person who was raised up into some kind of divinity. Jesus became God's Son. There had to be a time when this happened and, unlike Arius it would not be some cosmic moment before the creation of the universe, but here in this world in some event recorded in the Gospels.
The adoptionists of the Second and Third century usually chose the Baptism of Jesus in the Jordan as the moment when this remarkable human being was adopted by God the Father. They could cite the Gospel accounts with voice from heaven saying, "This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased." (Matthew 3:17). But seeing that as the adoption of Jesus by the Father negates John's insistence on the pre-existence of the divine Word, as well as the clear message in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, that God the Son took flesh through conception in Mary's virginal womb without a human father.
All heresies are a distortion or exaggeration of a truth. Adoptionism at least tells the truth about us. We are the adopted sons and daughters of God, through sanctifying and justifying grace in baptism. But once you start to talk about Jesus in these terms you level him off. He becomes simply the leading human being adopted by God, superior in some ways, but basically only different to us in degree.
Contemporary Errors
Current liberal Christian christology often reflects a kind of adoptionism, especially when the Resurrection is described as the moment when Jesus became "Christ", and when we are told that he did not know who he was up to that stage. Modern theological expressions such as "Jesus who became Christ" hint at adoptionism. If one examines books, articles and television productions that currently promote extreme forms of liberal biblical criticism, they imply some kind of adoptionism within an "ascending christology". This problem emerges when Jesus is described as a "human person" filled with God or revealing God.
There is ample scope for scholarly analysis of Scripture, but the Church insists that this be carried out in the light of tradition, in faith and respecting the Magisterium of the Popes and Councils. On the other hand, liberal biblical criticism reinterprets the New Testament documents in the light of Nineteenth Century materialistic "scientism". This ideology, revived in our times, rejects any possibility of the supernatural, the miraculous or the spiritual. Then the Infancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke, with their emphasis on the virgin conception of Jesus, must be set aside as "myths". The Gospels must be "demythologized" and Saint John's words "In the beginning was the Word" are dismissed as the theories of a neo-platonic theologian.
A minimal historical description of Jesus is constructed by some liberal critics. Because they reject the supernatural, they strip away all miracles from the Gospels and slice off any of his teaching that implied his divine identity, such as claims the be one with God or predictions of the future. Jesus was just a good rabbi or a political radical or a popular country exorcist who fell foul of the Romans and powerful elements in his own religion. He was crucified and then his followers had "faith experiences" that changed their view of his failure, so they created stories about his rising from the dead, which appeared in heavily edited Gospels many years after his death.
Once you reach that point one wonders why it is necessary to add any "divine" element to this tragic figure lifted from obscurity and failure by myth makers. One wonders why any faith at all should be put in this figure or the organization that rapidly emerged among his followers. These men and women seemed foolish enough to die for what some of them must have known were myths if not downright lies. But now I am entering the field that some liberal critics veto, apologetics. Yet basic rational questions need to be answered in the field of christology.
Behind Saint John's Affirmation
"And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us." Why did Saint John write these words about the Incarnation at the beginning of his Gospel? Was he writing fanciful theology or was there real history behind his work? If we turn from his Gospel to his First Letter he gives us the answer, and it may even be a reply to critics already picking away at the prologue of the Gospel. If he wrote the letter before the Gospel, as some scholars argue, he was certainly refuting heretics of a docetic cast of mind, who could not accept God assuming our frail human flesh. He defended the historical basis of the Word taking flesh as he emphasised the human reality of the divine Word who took flesh. He gives us a new shorter prologue in his First Letter and his use of "we" and "our" seems to be an authoritative way of speaking on behalf of all the apostles:
"That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life - the life was made manifest and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us - that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you may have fellowship with us; and our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. And we are writing this that our joy may be complete." (1 John 1: 1-4)
John presents a supernatual event as historical and tangible. The Incarnation is not an event "up in the clouds" but happening here on earth amidst the dust and squarking chickens of Nazareth and Bethlehem. To express the supernatural dimension, he used a neo-platonic Greek philosophy of the logos, the creative Word or Wisdom of God. With Saint Paul, he is among the first in a long line of Christian theologians who took up the philosophy of the time and used it well to convey the reality and message of Jesus Christ. Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas are outstanding examples of this. Our Holy Father, Pope John Paul II stands firmly in this living tradition, where faith and reason come together in dynamic harmony.
Scholars still debate the exact influences on John. He may well have been influenced by Jewish platonic philosophy from Alexandria, the school of Philo. In this tradition there was emphasis on the divine presence working in and through all creation, the "logos spermatikos", a celestial seed giving purpose, order and fulfilment to every atom of creation, ourselves included. This was a further development the holy Wisdom theology that we find in some of the last writings of the Old Testament and it represents a convergence between Hebrew and Greek thought. But John goes far beyond Wisdom literature which presented Wisdom as a female emanation or spirit coming from God because he bluntly says that "the Word was God". No Jew could say that unless he had become a Christian.
But why was this man a Christian? As always we are led back to the bodily Resurrection of jesus, back the decisive event that converted men and women to Christ, directly or through the teaching of brave witnesses. In that event Jesus of Nazareth was revealed as "the Lord". Because of that event the four Gospels were written as "good news". Because of the memories preserved in the living tradition of the followers and family of Jesus, his earthly beginnings were included in two of those Gospels, Matthew and Luke. Yet, in John's Gospel, we find something different, a startling philosophical and theological affirmation of the cosmic origin of the historical Jesus that will be decisive in all later attempts to water down or compromise either his divinity or his humanity.
The pre-existence of the divine Word is the key to the Incarnation hence to the Trinity, for it is only through Jesus Christ that we know the Trinity. As Saint John put it: "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life - the life was made manifest and we saw it, and testify to it…" What was John's task is ours today, to be witnesses to the Word made flesh and the abundant life he offers us.
USEFUL REFERENCES
SCRIPTURE
John 1:1-14; 1 John 1: 1-4; 4:2. Matthew 1 and 2; Luke 1 and 2.
St. Paul: Galatians 4: 4-7, Philippians 2: 5-11.
Hebrews 1.
TRADITION AND MAGISTERIUM
The Apostles Creed the Nicene Creed: teachings of Councils of Nicea, Constantinople, Ephesus, Chalcedon etc.
CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, 456-483 and 484-511
TECHNICAL TERMS
Incarnation - God taking our flesh in Jesus conceived in Mary's womb.
Christology - theology about who Jesus is and what he does.
Adoptionism - heresy, the special human Jesus was adopted and became divine (and other variations); from Gnosticism, pagan mystical "new age".
Arianism - heresy of Arius, that the Son (Word) is not eternal, a demi-god.
Homoousios - "of one being", the divine Son and divine Father: orthodox doctrine.
Homoiousios - "of like being" - quasi-divine son and divine Father: semi-Arian heresy.
Prosopon - Person in the Trinity - the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who are one Ousia - pure Being, One God, the Trinity: orthodox doctrine.
Nestorianism - heresy: two persons joined - divine Logos dwells in Jesus of Nazareth, the opposite to Monophysitism - another heresy: one divine person and nature, the Word, absorbs the humanity of Jesus or the humanity mingled with divinity.
Hypostatic Union - in Christ Jesus, two unconfused natures (nature - phusis) divine and human in one Person (prosopon and hypostasis), the Second Person of the Trinity. Official Catholic teaching from the Council of Chalcedon, 451AD.
"In the beginning was the Word" immediately calls for some explanation of this mysterious "Word", or logos in Greek. This language opens the mystery of God being in relationship with God: "and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." John goes on to describe this Word who is always with God in the divine act of creation: "He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made." But the key idea was set out in that first sentence, "In the beginning was the Word". John was affirming and underlining one of the essentials of the Incarnation, the eternal pre-existence of the Divine Son.
This simply means that the Word, the Son or second Person of the Holy Trinity always is. He has no beginning or end. He is God from all eternity, One and equal with the Father and the Holy Spirit. As Catholics we may take this for granted, because it is the Church's own understanding of John's language. However, once we explore heresies that have denied or redefined the Incarnation, we find that Christianity in the Twenty-first century faces errors about the Incarnation just as it did in the era of Saint John, the late First Century.
At that time some people had problems with John's statement of the Incarnation in his prologue: "and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us." They were disgusted by these words, disgusted at the suggestion that God took mere human flesh in Christ and that Jesus really suffered and died on the cross. Saint Ignatius of Antioch (who died in about 110) confronted heretics motivated by a negative view of matter and the human body, combined with an exalted understanding of the spirit and the "otherness" of God. How could God condescend to take our corrupt flesh? How could God enter the process of conception, birth, growth, experiencing pain and suffering in our human condition?
Under pagan Greek influences, gnostic heretics simply denied that God assumed a real human nature and a body that could suffer. Jesus. only seemed human. This is known as Docetism. But other, more plausible and more rational, heresies moved in the opposite direction. They struck not at the humanity of Christ but at his divinity, especially by reinterpreting Saint John's affirmation of the eternal pre-existence and divinity of the Son of God who took flesh.
Arianism and Orthodoxy
The most subtle denial of divinity of Christ appeared in the Fourth Century, when the priest Arius (who died in 336) taught that the Word is divine but that this divine Son had a beginning. Reinterpreting John's prologue, Arius said that the Son was not "co-eternal" with the Father. Arius was a skilled populariser. He took his ideas to the public in pop songs and poetry. To get across the essential point of his teaching, he coined a rhyme in Greek which he taught to his followers, "Ain hoti poti ouk ain", meaning "There was a time when he was not", that is, there was a time when the Divine Son did not exist in eternity. Saint John's words were "nuanced" by Arius to mean that the Word who became flesh had a "beginning" at some point in pre-history, before the creation of the universe, but a beginning after the Father, hence the Word is not infinite, not as divine as the Father.
Arius reduced the Son to a being created by the Father, a demi-god or an emanation from God, an intermediary between God and the cosmos, but not fully God. Pagan Greek mythology was familiar with gods and demi-gods. Therefore, the Arian denial of the divinity of Christ fitted neatly into the thought of the age. Some who sympathized with Arius sensed that he had gone too far so there are several variations of his heresy, called semi-Arianism, attempts to maintain the divinity of Jesus Christ but in a slightly reduced form.
Apart from the crude implication that there is a process of time in eternity, that is, of "before" and "after" when God the Father generates or creates a lesser Son, we can see other implications in this heresy. We can soon figure out what is destroyed by such an error, not only the divinity of Jesus Christ but the Holy and Undivided Trinity, the Triune God.
Saint Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 295-373) was the greatest and most persistent foe of Arius and his followers. He perceived how the Arians had redefined and destroyed the Holy Trinity as follows: God the Father had a semi-divine son. He sent this son to earth, who in turn sent out a semi-divine spirit. There are thus three distinct beings but of these only the Father is the true God. The other two are semi-divine beings subordinate to the Father, so this model of the Trinity is described as "subordinationism".
Because the Father is the sole source and focus of divinity Arius took up a feature of earlier heresies, "monarchianism", from the Greek words "monos" and "arche", meaning "one source". Our word "monarchy" is derived from this, because it describes a single governing source of authority and power. Monarchianism denied the divinity of Christ by making the Father the One God and single source of all other beings.
Eastern Christians still favour a special source role for the Father in the Trinity, hence their problem with the Spirit proceeding from both the Father and the Son. But they certainly reject Arius' reduced Trinity. They prefer a vertical model of the Trinity rather than the triangular model familiar to us in the West. Nonetheless the same faith in the divine Unity and perfect Trinity is common to East and West today.
Key Words in Christology
The Catholic response to Arius was focussed around a technical term we find embodied in the Nicene Creed, "homoousios". In the current English translation this is rendered "of one being with the Father". The divine Son is of one Being or one essence with his divine Father. "Homoousios" affirms the eternal equality and unity of the Father and the Son.
The semi-Arian compromise was another word, "homoiousios", meaning "of like being" or "of similar being" to the Father, a shift of meaning, hinting at a lesser status for the divine Son. The struggle over two Greek words reached its critical moments at the Council of Nicea (325) and the First Council of Constantinople (381) . At these Councils, the creed we say or sing at Sunday Mass was solemnly defined including the essential word "homoousios" that effectively wipes out Arianism. Nevertheless, the battle with Arianism raged across much of the Fourth Century. Imperial politics led to the fierce persecution of orthodox theologians and clergy and instances of cowardice or compromise among various Church leaders.
These disputes defining the creed remind us of how God the Word enters our words, how human language becomes the vehicle for divine Revelation. Language is the usual the way we know God revealing himself in the deeds and words of Christ Jesus. This is why I believe that divine Revelation comes to us normally through human language, that is, through propositions. As the Second Vatican Council taught, there are two sources of the one Word of God, Scripture and tradition, sources of the teachings of the Church, her dogmas and doctrines. This is why technical words were so important when used by the Church to express, refine and protect orthodox doctrine. Homoousios in the Nicene Creed is the supreme example of such a word. Without that word, orthodox christology would have been very difficult to express, proclaim or maintain.
Another element in the battle with Arianism was the affirmation of the equal divine Personhood of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Each is a divine "prosopon", Person. This word means "person" in a technical philosophical sense, that is, a complete living being, and should not be understood in a modern psychological way, e.g "she's a nice person". The Arians rejected describing the Father, Son and Holy Spirit with the word "prosopon".
Therefore, Saint Athanasius and the Cappaddocian Fathers, Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa, also strongly defended the Person of the Holy Spirit as co-equal and one with the Father and the Son, that is the Trinity, one God in being or "ousia". The semi-Arians such as Macedonius of Constantinople had taught that the Holy Spirit is an emanation of the Son, thus the Spirit is an even lesser "divine" entity if divine at all. At the First Council of Constantinople (381) the Nicene Creed was completed with the addition of the "And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life who proceeds from the Father, who the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets."
Another heresy emerged in the Fifth Century, Nestorianism, named after the Patriarch Nestorius of Constantinople. He said that Jesus was a human person and a divine person joined together, so that the divine Logos dwells in the man, Jesus of Nazareth and his Mother cannot be called Mother of God but only Mother of Christ. Nestorianism was condemned at the Council of Ephesus (431) which also affirmed Mary's title of "God bearer" - Mother of God. Nestorianism seems to have emerged from the adoptionist tradition.
Nestorianism provoked a reaction, the opposite extreme that said there was one Person and nature in Jesus, a divine Person and nature. This is called Monophysitism from "monos" (one) and "phusis" (nature). In its variations it not only reduces the humanity of Christ but absorbs it, changes it, or mixes it up with the divine nature.
Arians, Nestorians and Monophysites were all confronted by another word for personhood that describes Jesus Christ as one Person and one "hypostasis", with two natures, human and divine, that continue unimpaired, untransformed and unmixed with each other. This "hypostatic union" was defined at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, strongly influenced by the teachings of Pope Leo the Great and Saint Cyril of Alexandria. But the expression "hypostatic union" dates from the Fifth Council of Constantinople 553.
"Descending" and "Ascending" Christology
Arianism, Nestorianism and even variants of adoptionism still reappear in our times. The Jehovah's Witnesses of today seem to be crudely Arian, to say the least. But today we face some other rejections of a pre-existent Word who took flesh in Mary's womb. Modern denials of the divinity of Christ usually take a different form to Arianism. The reasons for this are interesting.
In the Fourth Century Arianism emerged in the era of a "descending christology", meaning that the Incarnation was thought of in terms of a divine being becoming man. God descends to earth, takes our flesh and enters our condition.
This is beautifully expressed in Saint Paul's hymn of the Incarnation in Philippians 2: 5-11, which emphasises the self-emptying" of God or what is called a "kenotic" understanding of the Incarnation. This way of thinking begins with God the Son who "humbles himself" to become man and whose sacred humanity is raise up and glorified in a bodily resurrection. However, in our times the approach moves in a different direction, as an "ascending christology", that starts on earth with Jesus of Nazareth.
You may want to turn the process of the Incarnation around, especially if you are not imbued with Plato's way of thinking, which begins with God. You may prefer to start with what you can see here on earth. But ignoring or rejecting Saint John's principle "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" soon leads to errors in this approach. You begin to see Jesus of Nazareth as a human person who somehow became divine.
This way of thinking was probably also developing when Saint John wrote his prologue. It certainly appeared in the following century and is generally known as "adoptionism", meaning that Jesus Christ was a special human person who was raised up into some kind of divinity. Jesus became God's Son. There had to be a time when this happened and, unlike Arius it would not be some cosmic moment before the creation of the universe, but here in this world in some event recorded in the Gospels.
The adoptionists of the Second and Third century usually chose the Baptism of Jesus in the Jordan as the moment when this remarkable human being was adopted by God the Father. They could cite the Gospel accounts with voice from heaven saying, "This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased." (Matthew 3:17). But seeing that as the adoption of Jesus by the Father negates John's insistence on the pre-existence of the divine Word, as well as the clear message in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, that God the Son took flesh through conception in Mary's virginal womb without a human father.
All heresies are a distortion or exaggeration of a truth. Adoptionism at least tells the truth about us. We are the adopted sons and daughters of God, through sanctifying and justifying grace in baptism. But once you start to talk about Jesus in these terms you level him off. He becomes simply the leading human being adopted by God, superior in some ways, but basically only different to us in degree.
Contemporary Errors
Current liberal Christian christology often reflects a kind of adoptionism, especially when the Resurrection is described as the moment when Jesus became "Christ", and when we are told that he did not know who he was up to that stage. Modern theological expressions such as "Jesus who became Christ" hint at adoptionism. If one examines books, articles and television productions that currently promote extreme forms of liberal biblical criticism, they imply some kind of adoptionism within an "ascending christology". This problem emerges when Jesus is described as a "human person" filled with God or revealing God.
There is ample scope for scholarly analysis of Scripture, but the Church insists that this be carried out in the light of tradition, in faith and respecting the Magisterium of the Popes and Councils. On the other hand, liberal biblical criticism reinterprets the New Testament documents in the light of Nineteenth Century materialistic "scientism". This ideology, revived in our times, rejects any possibility of the supernatural, the miraculous or the spiritual. Then the Infancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke, with their emphasis on the virgin conception of Jesus, must be set aside as "myths". The Gospels must be "demythologized" and Saint John's words "In the beginning was the Word" are dismissed as the theories of a neo-platonic theologian.
A minimal historical description of Jesus is constructed by some liberal critics. Because they reject the supernatural, they strip away all miracles from the Gospels and slice off any of his teaching that implied his divine identity, such as claims the be one with God or predictions of the future. Jesus was just a good rabbi or a political radical or a popular country exorcist who fell foul of the Romans and powerful elements in his own religion. He was crucified and then his followers had "faith experiences" that changed their view of his failure, so they created stories about his rising from the dead, which appeared in heavily edited Gospels many years after his death.
Once you reach that point one wonders why it is necessary to add any "divine" element to this tragic figure lifted from obscurity and failure by myth makers. One wonders why any faith at all should be put in this figure or the organization that rapidly emerged among his followers. These men and women seemed foolish enough to die for what some of them must have known were myths if not downright lies. But now I am entering the field that some liberal critics veto, apologetics. Yet basic rational questions need to be answered in the field of christology.
Behind Saint John's Affirmation
"And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us." Why did Saint John write these words about the Incarnation at the beginning of his Gospel? Was he writing fanciful theology or was there real history behind his work? If we turn from his Gospel to his First Letter he gives us the answer, and it may even be a reply to critics already picking away at the prologue of the Gospel. If he wrote the letter before the Gospel, as some scholars argue, he was certainly refuting heretics of a docetic cast of mind, who could not accept God assuming our frail human flesh. He defended the historical basis of the Word taking flesh as he emphasised the human reality of the divine Word who took flesh. He gives us a new shorter prologue in his First Letter and his use of "we" and "our" seems to be an authoritative way of speaking on behalf of all the apostles:
"That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life - the life was made manifest and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us - that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you may have fellowship with us; and our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. And we are writing this that our joy may be complete." (1 John 1: 1-4)
John presents a supernatual event as historical and tangible. The Incarnation is not an event "up in the clouds" but happening here on earth amidst the dust and squarking chickens of Nazareth and Bethlehem. To express the supernatural dimension, he used a neo-platonic Greek philosophy of the logos, the creative Word or Wisdom of God. With Saint Paul, he is among the first in a long line of Christian theologians who took up the philosophy of the time and used it well to convey the reality and message of Jesus Christ. Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas are outstanding examples of this. Our Holy Father, Pope John Paul II stands firmly in this living tradition, where faith and reason come together in dynamic harmony.
Scholars still debate the exact influences on John. He may well have been influenced by Jewish platonic philosophy from Alexandria, the school of Philo. In this tradition there was emphasis on the divine presence working in and through all creation, the "logos spermatikos", a celestial seed giving purpose, order and fulfilment to every atom of creation, ourselves included. This was a further development the holy Wisdom theology that we find in some of the last writings of the Old Testament and it represents a convergence between Hebrew and Greek thought. But John goes far beyond Wisdom literature which presented Wisdom as a female emanation or spirit coming from God because he bluntly says that "the Word was God". No Jew could say that unless he had become a Christian.
But why was this man a Christian? As always we are led back to the bodily Resurrection of jesus, back the decisive event that converted men and women to Christ, directly or through the teaching of brave witnesses. In that event Jesus of Nazareth was revealed as "the Lord". Because of that event the four Gospels were written as "good news". Because of the memories preserved in the living tradition of the followers and family of Jesus, his earthly beginnings were included in two of those Gospels, Matthew and Luke. Yet, in John's Gospel, we find something different, a startling philosophical and theological affirmation of the cosmic origin of the historical Jesus that will be decisive in all later attempts to water down or compromise either his divinity or his humanity.
The pre-existence of the divine Word is the key to the Incarnation hence to the Trinity, for it is only through Jesus Christ that we know the Trinity. As Saint John put it: "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life - the life was made manifest and we saw it, and testify to it…" What was John's task is ours today, to be witnesses to the Word made flesh and the abundant life he offers us.
USEFUL REFERENCES
SCRIPTURE
John 1:1-14; 1 John 1: 1-4; 4:2. Matthew 1 and 2; Luke 1 and 2.
St. Paul: Galatians 4: 4-7, Philippians 2: 5-11.
Hebrews 1.
TRADITION AND MAGISTERIUM
The Apostles Creed the Nicene Creed: teachings of Councils of Nicea, Constantinople, Ephesus, Chalcedon etc.
CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, 456-483 and 484-511
TECHNICAL TERMS
Incarnation - God taking our flesh in Jesus conceived in Mary's womb.
Christology - theology about who Jesus is and what he does.
Adoptionism - heresy, the special human Jesus was adopted and became divine (and other variations); from Gnosticism, pagan mystical "new age".
Arianism - heresy of Arius, that the Son (Word) is not eternal, a demi-god.
Homoousios - "of one being", the divine Son and divine Father: orthodox doctrine.
Homoiousios - "of like being" - quasi-divine son and divine Father: semi-Arian heresy.
Prosopon - Person in the Trinity - the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who are one Ousia - pure Being, One God, the Trinity: orthodox doctrine.
Nestorianism - heresy: two persons joined - divine Logos dwells in Jesus of Nazareth, the opposite to Monophysitism - another heresy: one divine person and nature, the Word, absorbs the humanity of Jesus or the humanity mingled with divinity.
Hypostatic Union - in Christ Jesus, two unconfused natures (nature - phusis) divine and human in one Person (prosopon and hypostasis), the Second Person of the Trinity. Official Catholic teaching from the Council of Chalcedon, 451AD.
© Msgr. Peter Elliott 2001