Category Archives: Christology

Three False Teachings about Jesus

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Article by Adriel Sanchez (Original source here)

Because the incarnation is so marvelously mysterious, there were groups in the early church that sought to explain its message in ways that undermined it. Here are three false teachings about Jesus that the early church had to reject:

1. Jesus only appeared to be human (Docetism).

Early in the church, there were those who argued that the incarnate God only appeared to be human. After all, how could God possibly take human flesh to himself? The idea seemed absurd to them because they couldn’t fathom God being hungry, tired, or in pain.

Therefore, they denied that Jesus had any human experiences. This teaching was known as Docetism. It undermines Christianity, because if Jesus didn’t really embrace our suffering in the incarnation, then he didn’t bear our sin and cannot relate to our pain.

2. Jesus was subordinate to his Father in power and glory (Arianism).

Unlike the Docetists, another group believed Jesus was truly a man, but not equal with God the Father in power and glory. This group attacked Jesus’s divine status. After all, how could God himself have such immediate contact with mankind? In order to deal with this perceived problem, this group attempted to strip Jesus of his eternal nature, and they were known as Arians. Arianism undermines the Bible’s teaching on God being one in essence and three in persons, because only God himself could rescue people from their sin.

3. Jesus’ humanity and divinity existed separately from each other (Nestorianism).

A third group tried to explain the mystery of the incarnation by splitting apart the divinity and humanity of Jesus. After all, how could divinity and humanity exist so perfectly in one Person? This group separated the divine actions of Jesus (such as healing) from his human experiences (suffering) and taught that there were two subjects in the incarnation instead of one divine Person. This teaching is known as Nestorianism. It undermines the believer’s hope in Christ, because if the divine Second Person of the Trinity didn’t truly unite humanity to himself, there’s no hope that we can be made “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet.1:4).

These three explanations of the incarnation were rejected by the Christian church. In the final analysis, none of them went far enough in their description of how marvelous the Incarnation was.

The eternal Son of God took to himself true humanity and bore our pain in that humanity to redeem us. The early church father Gregory of Nazianzus explained the importance of rightly understanding the incarnation with the famous dictum taken from his letter “To Cledonius the Priest Against Apollinaris”:

“For that which he [Jesus] has not assumed he has not healed; but that which is united to his Godhead is also saved.” He continued, “If only half Adam fell, then that which Christ assumes and saves may be half also; but if the whole of his nature fell, it must be united to the whole nature of Him that was begotten, and so be saved as a whole. (Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, Vol 2, #7, p. 648, at www.ccel.org )

Thankfully, God shared in the whole of our fallen humanity so that through his death he might make us partakers of the life found only in him.

The Deity of Christ in the Early Church

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Article: Did the Early Church Believe in the Deity of Christ? by Nathan Busenitz (original source here)

Ask your average Muslim, Unitarian, Jehovah’s Witness, or just about any non-Christian skeptic who has read (or watched) The Da Vinci Code, and they’ll try to convince you the answer is no. From such sources we are told that the deity of Christ was a doctrine invented centuries after Jesus’ death — a result of pagan influences on the church in the fourth century when the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as its official religion.

Emperor Constantine, in particular, is blamed for being the guy who promoted Jesus to the level of deity, a feat of cosmic proportions that he managed to pull off at the Council of Nicaea in 325. As Dan Brown put it (through the lips of one of his literary characters): “Jesus’ establishment as ‘the Son of God’ was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea. . . . By officially endorsing Jesus as the Son of God, Constantine turned Jesus into a deity who existed beyond the scope of the human world, an entity whose power was unchallengeable” (The Da Vinci Code, 253).

So how can believers answer such allegations?

The best response, obviously, is to demonstrate from Scripture that Jesus is God. We can be confident that the early church affirmed Christ’s deity (and that we should do the same) because the New Testament clearly teaches that truth. The biblical case can be made from many places. Without going into detail in this post, here is a small sampling of texts that teach the deity of Christ: Isaiah 9:6; Matt. 1:23; John 1:1, 14, 18; 20:28; Acts 20:28; Rom. 9:5; 1 Cor. 1:24; 2 Cor. 4:4; Php. 2:6; Col. 1:15–16; 2:9; Titus 2:13; Heb. 1:3, 8; 2 Pet. 1:1; 1 John 5:20.

But what about church history outside of the New Testament? Did the early church fathers affirm the deity of Jesus Christ? Or was it only after the fourth century (and the Council of Nicaea) that Christian leaders began to articulate their belief in God the Son?

Though it’s not an exhaustive list, here are 25 quotations from a number of ante-Nicene church fathers demonstrating their belief in the deity of Jesus Christ (with portions underlined for emphasis). These early Christian theologians all lived before the time of Constantine and the Council of Nicaea. As such, they provide incontrovertible proof (from post-New Testament history) that Constantine was not the first person in church history to affirm this doctrine. Rather, the early church embraced the truth that Jesus is God from the time of the apostles on.

1. Ignatius of Antioch (c. 50–117): For our God, Jesus the Christ, was conceived by Mary according to God’s plan, both from the seed of David and of the Holy Spirit. (Ignatius, Letter to the Ephesians, 18.2. Translation from Michael Holmes, Apostolic Fathers, 197)

2. Ignatius (again): Consequently all magic and every kind of spell were dissolved, the ignorance so characteristic of wickedness vanished, and the ancient kingdom was abolished when God appeared in human form to bring the newness of eternal life. (Ibid., 19.3. Holmes, AF, 199)

3. Ignatius (again): For our God Jesus Christ is more visible now that he is in the Father. (Ignatius, Letter to the Romans, 3.3. Holmes, AF, 229)

4. Ignatius (again): I glorify Jesus Christ, the God who made you so wise, for I observed that you are established in an unshakable faith, having been nailed, as it were, to the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. (Ignatius, Letter to the Smyrnaeans, 1.1. Holmes, AF, 249) Continue reading →

The Great Heresies: Nestorius and Eutyches

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Article by Gervase Charmley at this link.

We have made these studies of the so-called Great Heresies because they represent significant false steps in the history of Christian teaching; in each of them a true teaching is distorted, and so becomes false. Each precipitated a crisis that forced the Church to look deeper into the Scriptures and consider the fullness of God’s revelation there.

Our previous study, that of Apollinarius, marks a move from the question of the deity of Christ to that of the relationship between the Divine and human in Christ. Opposing the ruinous heresy of Arianism, Apollinarius took a crude approach, teaching that the Divine replaced a part of the human nature, a position that was rightly condemned on the ground that it made the Incarnate Christ less than human. The next great theological controversy would be driven at least as much by politics as theology, and ended in the great Council of Chalcedon. The two men who gave their names to the heresies condemned there were Nestorius and Eutyches, and they came from Antioch and Alexandria respectively.

HISTORY

After the Council of Constantinople in 381, theologians in the Eastern Church continued to debate the questions that had been raised by the Arian controversy, and consider how best to keep from falling into error on the question of the person of Christ.

Broadly speaking there were two main approaches, characterizing schools of thought based in Alexandria and Syrian Antioch respectively. The Alexandrians laid great stress on the unity of Christ’s person, while the Antiochenes stressed the two natures and the true humanity of Christ. The different emphases were not too much of a problem so long as they were only emphases, but there was always a danger of losing proportion; the Alexandrian emphasis could too easily result in a view of Christ that down-played his humanity, while the Antiochene approach might lead to a view of Christ that divided the two natures rather than just distinguishing them. Not only that, but there was a risk that the two schools might mistake a difference in emphasis for outright heresy.

This is what actually happened in the Nestorian controversy; Nestorius has perhaps the unique distinction of being the only one of the ‘great heretics’ who almost certainly did not teach the heresy that his name has become attached to. Complicating this were political issues; the church, freed from persecution and favoured by the Caesars, had developed its own complex political system of parishes, dioceses, bishops, archbishops, and patriarchs. The Patriarchs were archbishops of five particularly significant cities. These were Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Rome, and Constantinople. Jerusalem was always small and rather insignificant, while Rome, away in Europe, was distant and had its own concerns. Continue reading →