The Beauty of the Catholic Faith, Part IV

This is the fourth in an eight-part series that reflects on fundamental Christian beliefs as expressed in the Creed. There are four main topics, each divided into two sections: (1) Reflecting on the Mystery of God; (2) Gazing on the Face of Christ; (3) Being Church in a Secular Society;  (4) Living in Hope: What Catholics Believe about Death and Eternal Life.

Gazing on the Face of Christ  (II)

In the previous installment in this series, we explored the portraits of Jesus that were painted by the four evangelists. These Gospel portraits, along with the affirmations made about Jesus in the other New Testament writings, continue to be the source and norm of thinking for the Church as it reflects on the person and saving work of Christ in different contexts through the ages. Frequently conflicts about Christology have resulted from divergent ways of interpreting the biblical witness to Christ.

The period of the second through the fifth centuries was one of great expansion for Christianity as well as some harsh persecution. As Christianity moved out into the wider Graeco-Roman world, pastors and theologians had to articulate the message about Christ in ways that would be intelligible to people immersed in this culture. They were compelled to explain and defend the universal claims that were made about the whole Christ-event. Why do Christians profess that Jesus Christ is the savior of all humanity? Controversies arose concerning the most appropriate language to use to speak of the person of Christ and his relation to God (the Father). In the midst of this development, the Church began to feel the need for more precise formulations in its doctrine about Christ.

At first glance, these doctrinal developments can seem picayune and even arcane. Why worry so much about such precision in terminology when one is speaking about the mystery of Christ? Underneath these debates, however, was an abiding concern about salvation. It was the experience of salvation from God in Christ that impelled Christians to reflect on the mystery of his person. What does it mean to say that we find salvation in Christ? Who must Jesus really be if we proclaim him to be the savior of humanity and the definitive revealer of God? These concerns, then, were not just matters of theological or philosophical abstraction. They were self-involving because they were connected with the experience of God’s healing, life-giving grace.

There were three major Christological issues that emerged during the early centuries of the Church. The first involved the divinity of Christ. While it seems clear that Christians proclaimed Christ as divine from the beginning, questions arose about the status of Jesus’ divinity. Is Jesus divine in the way that the Father is divine? A second set of issues centered on the true humanity of Jesus. Curiously, there has been a recurring tendency in the history of theology to deny or abbreviate the humanity of Jesus. Was Jesus really like us in his humanity in every way but sin? Was his humanity complete? Third, there were debates about how to speak of the unity, or oneness of Christ. How can we speak of humanity and divinity in one being, in one person?

Early on, two ways of thinking about Jesus that were popular in some circles came to be understood as deficient. Adoptionism conceived of Jesus as a man (a human being) who at some point in his life was adopted as Son by the Father. Some thinkers identified the moment of “adoption” as Jesus’ baptism, while others placed it at the resurrection. The Church concluded that this perspective jeopardized the conviction that in Jesus God has brought salvation to the human family. Adoptionism did not allow for a genuine incarnation. Docetism (from the Greek verb dokeo meaning to “seem, appear”) was a line of thought that denied the true humanity of Jesus. According to this way of thinking, Jesus only appeared to be human and he only appeared to suffer. Christians struggled with holding together the dual affirmations of Jesus’ divinity and his real suffering, since suffering was not supposed to touch the divine. The docetist way of reconciling this difficulty was to claim that Jesus was indeed truly divine but that he only appeared to be human and that he did not really suffer. This position was inconsistent with the Christian conviction that in Christ God saved us from “our side” – from inside of human experience. It also jeopardized belief in the incarnation, since it failed to affirm that in Christ God became human.

One early Christian theologian who strongly affirmed the genuine humanity and divinity of Jesus was Irenaeus of Lyons, who wrote at the end of the second century. His theology made a significant impact upon later developments in Christology. Irenaeus wrote a lengthy work that was directed against Gnosticism, a complex set of speculations that, among other things, tended to deny Christ’s true humanity.  About the person and saving work of Christ Irenaeus wrote, “Therefore as I have said, he caused humanity to cleave to God – he united humanity to God. For if a human person had not conquered humanity’s foe, that foe would not have been conquered justly. Conversely, unless it was God who conferred salvation, we should not possess it securely, and unless humanity had been closely united to God, it could not have become a sharer in incorruptibility.” (Against Heresies, III, 18, 7). In this passage, Irenaeus highlights the Christian conviction that authentic salvation must come from “God’s side” and from “our side.”

The major theological controversy of the fourth century focused on the divinity of Christ. Arius of Alexandria and his followers taught that the Son of God was divine only in a diminished, subordinate sense. The Council of Nicea, and the creed that it authorized, countered this claim by teaching that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is “one in being” with the Father. The Son is truly God, coequal and coeternal with the Father. If the deepest meaning of salvation is sharing in the very life of God, Christ must have been truly divine for him to be able to offer us that gift.

In the fifth century, controversies about the unity and the humanity of Christ led to heated debates.  Against the teaching of a bishop named Nestorius, the Council of Ephesus (431) affirmed that Christ is one Person, one concrete subsistent being. Thus, Christians rightly call Mary the “Mother of God,” since the child to whom she gave birth was the Son of God incarnate.  After Ephesus, a well-known monk named Eutyches publicized teaching about Christ that seemed to deny a true human nature. This controversy eventually led to the Council of Chalcedon (451), which produced the most important Christological confession. Inspired by a famous letter of Pope Leo the Great, this council authored a statement about Christ that seeks to hold in balance Christian affirmation of true humanity and true divinity united in one person. The Christological formula of Chalcedon articulates “the confession of one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ: the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly human, of a rational soul and a body, consubstantial with (one on being with) the Father as regards his divinity, and the same consubstantial with us as regards his humanity; like us in all respects except for sin…”

The doctrine of Chalcedon does not offer us a complete Christology. It tells us very little about the story of Jesus – his life, death and resurrection.  And its terminology needs to be interpreted and explained for us today because we do not always use terms in the same way that thinkers of the fifth century employed them. But this teaching provides a framework within which Christians can relate the story of Jesus and the meaning of his person and saving work. In a sense, this Christological formula can be likened to the “foul lines” in a baseball park. These lines mark the boundaries within which “the game” is played. Through the ages theologians have developed many different ways of speaking about the person and saving work of Jesus. The Church does not espouse a single Christology. There is a legitimate pluralism of ways of talking about Jesus and what he means to us. The Church does say, though, that in our thinking about Christ we must affirm his genuine humanity, his genuine divinity, and the unity of his person.

We might read the excerpt from the teaching of Chalcedon cited above and wonder aloud, “What in the world does that have to do with me, and with my life as a believer?” In fact, it has a great deal to do with us and our lives of faith, even if that is difficult to perceive at first glance. The most eloquent explanation of the relevance of the Church’s Christological doctrine that I have ever read was authored by the late Raymond Brown, one of the foremost biblical scholars of the twentieth century. Brown reported that, after a lecture he gave, a student came up and asked him why any of this really mattered. Brown’s written reflection on that student’s question shows that what we affirm about Christ ultimately relates to what we believe about the love of God:

I think that the issue of the full identity of Jesus, which is related to the insights of Nicea and Chalcedon, is ultimately a question of the love of God for human beings. If Jesus is not ‘true God of true God,’ then we do not know God in human terms. … Only if Jesus is truly of God do we know what God is like, for in Jesus we see God translated into terms that we can understand. A God who sent a marvelous creature as our Savior could be described as loving, but that love would have cost God nothing in a personal way. Only if Jesus is truly of God do we know that God’s love was so real that it reached the point of person self-giving. … Again unless we understand that Jesus was truly human with no exception but sin, we cannot comprehend the depths of God’s love. If Jesus’ knowledge was limited … then one understands that God loved us to the point of self-subjection to our most agonizing infirmities. A Jesus who walked through the world with unlimited knowledge, knowing exactly what the morrow would bring, knowing with certainty that after his death  his Father would raise him up, would be a Jesus who could arouse our admiration, but a Jesus still far from us. He would be a Jesus far from a humankind that can only hope in the future and believe in God’s goodness, far from a humankind that must face the supreme uncertainty of death with faith but without knowledge of what is beyond. On the other hand a Jesus for whom the detailed future had elements of mystery, dread, and hope as it has for us and yet, at the same time a Jesus who would say, ‘Not my will but yours’ – this would be a Jesus who could effectively teach us how to live, for this Jesus would have gone through life’s real trials. Then his saying, ‘No one can have greater love than this, to lay down his life for those he loves,’ would be truly persuasive, for we would know that he laid down his life with all the agony with which we lay ours down. We would know that for him the loss of life was, as it if for us, the loss of a great possession, a possession that is outranked only by love.  (Introduction to New Testament Christology, 150-1).   

I believe that Brown is exactly right in his reflections on the meaning and significance of the Church’s doctrine about Christ. This teaching ultimately speaks to us about the saving love of God poured out in Christ.  As Irenaeus pointed out, it reminds us that we cannot save ourselves. We needed (and continue to need) the presence and power of God to rescue us from the powers of evil and sin that oppress us and to grant us a share in the life of God. This teaching also affirms something that is truly remarkable: God chose to effect salvation not by sweeping in from above with the “heavenly powers” but from within the very depths of our human experience – by becoming one like us. As Brown beautifully puts it, “God loved us to the point of self-subjection to our most agonizing infirmities.” We celebrate this reality of the incarnation every Christmas.  And it should never cease to astound us.

In Christ we discover the way in which the power of God is present and effective in the world and in our lives. It is a power that was displayed in the One who humbled himself, even to death on a cross. It is a power that was mysteriously present and active even in the midst of suffering. It is a power that effects forgiveness and reconciliation. It is a power that heals and gives new life to those who have had the life drained out of them. It is a power that does not overwhelm or dominate but which lifts up and ennobles. In the incarnation we discover that God’s power is the power of faithful, steadfast love that went to the greatest lengths in order to save us and offer us new life.

Robin Ryan, CP