The Definition of Chalcedon

The road to 451

The Council of Nicaea in 325 settled that the Son is no creature but true God, "of one substance with the Father" Nicene Creed. That answer raised the next question. If the eternal Son became man, how are God and man related in him? Scripture holds both in a single sentence: "The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us" (John 1:14). For more than a century the church wrestled with explanations that cut away part of it (see also The incarnation).

Apollinarius, bishop of Laodicea, was a staunch defender of Nicaea. To secure Christ's unity and sinlessness, he taught that the Word took a human body but himself took the place of a human mind. Gregory of Nazianzus answered that what the Son has not assumed he has not healed Gregory of Nazianzus, Epistle 101: if the Son did not take a human mind, the mind, where sin goes deepest, is left unsaved. The Council of Constantinople in 381 condemned the Apollinarians.

Nestorius, who became bishop of Constantinople in 428, came from the school of Antioch, which stressed Christ's full humanity. Unwilling to say that God was born or suffered, he objected to calling Mary Theotokos, ‘God-bearer’, and proposed ‘Christ-bearer’ instead. Cyril of Alexandria saw in this a Christ divided into two sons, the Son of God and the son of Mary. Because the Word truly made the flesh his own, Cyril argued, the one Mary bore is the Son of God himself Cyril, Second Letter to Nestorius. The Council of Ephesus in 431 received Cyril's letter and deposed Nestorius. The meeting was bitter, opened before the bishops from Antioch arrived; peace came only in 433, when Cyril and John of Antioch agreed on a common confession. How far Nestorius himself divided Christ is still debated by historians.

The opposite danger came next. Eutyches, an elderly abbot in Constantinople and an opponent of Nestorius, said that Christ was of two natures before the union but of one nature after it, and he was reluctant to confess that Christ's body was of one substance with ours. A synod under Flavian, bishop of Constantinople, condemned him in 448, and he appealed to Rome and Alexandria. Leo, bishop of Rome, replied in 449 with a long letter to Flavian, known as his Tome. Taking up Paul's words about ‘the form of God’ and ‘the form of a servant’, Leo taught that in the one person each nature keeps its own character and does what is proper to it in communion with the other Leo the Great, Tome. That same year a second council at Ephesus, led by Dioscorus of Alexandria, refused to have Leo's letter read, restored Eutyches and deposed Flavian, who died soon afterwards. Leo called it a ‘robber council’.

After Theodosius II died in 450, the new emperor Marcian called a council, which met in October 451 at Chalcedon, across the Bosporus from Constantinople. Several hundred bishops came, nearly all from the East, with legates sent by Leo. The council heard the creeds of Nicaea and Constantinople, Cyril's letters and Leo's Tome; according to the minutes, the bishops cried out that this was the faith of the fathers, that Peter had spoken through Leo, and that Cyril had taught the same. Dioscorus was deposed. A first draft seems to have spoken of Christ ‘from two natures’, a phrase Dioscorus's party could have accepted; after the Roman legates objected, a committee revised it to ‘in two natures’. The finished Definition first sets out the two earlier creeds, then begins its own confession with "We, then, following the holy Fathers". The text on this page is that confession.

One and the same Son

The Definition's first and most important words are "one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ." The words ‘one and the same’ come three times in this short text, and the Greek repeats ‘the same’ more often still. The one who did the works of God and the one who bore the weakness of man are not two subjects but one. Paul speaks this way: from Israel "proceeds the human descent of Christ, who is God over all, forever worthy of praise!" (Romans 9:5).

He is "perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man." Nothing is missing on either side. "In Christ all the fullness of the Deity dwells in bodily form" (Colossians 2:9); and since the children have flesh and blood, "He too shared in their humanity" (Hebrews 2:14).

The words "of a reasonable soul and body" answer Apollinarius. Christ had a human mind and will, not only a human body. He "grew in wisdom and stature" (Luke 2:52), and in Gethsemane he said, "My soul is consumed with sorrow to the point of death" (Matthew 26:38). Leo wrote to the people of Constantinople: "We do not speak of Christ as man in such a sort as to allow that any thing was wanting to Him, which it is certain pertains to human nature, whether soul, or rational mind, or flesh" Leo.

He is "consubstantial with the Father according to the Godhead, and consubstantial with us according to the Manhood." Consubstantial renders homoousios, the word Nicaea had used for the Son's oneness with the Father; the council used it a second time for his oneness with us. He is as truly one with us as he is one with the Father. This was what Eutyches hesitated to say. When Elizabeth called the child "the fruit of your womb" (Luke 1:42), the eleventh-century commentator Theophylact found the answer to him: "From this place we derive the refutation of Eutyches, in that Christ is stated to be the fruit of the womb. For all fruit is of the same nature with the tree that bears it" Theophylact.

The phrase "in all things like unto us, without sin" takes up the words of Hebrews: we have a high priest "who was tempted in every way that we are, yet was without sin" (Hebrews 4:15). Sin is not part of the human nature God made but its ruin. So his sinlessness makes him not less human but human as God meant us to be.

Born of the Father, born of Mary

The Definition sets two births side by side: "begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead", and according to the manhood born of Mary. Micah foretold a ruler from Bethlehem "whose origins are of old, from the days of eternity" (Micah 5:2), and Paul says that God sent his Son, "born of a woman" (Galatians 4:4). Leo's Tome drew the line between them: the birth in time took nothing from the eternal birth and added nothing to it Tome of Leo. Between the two it sets "for us and for our salvation", a shorter form of the Nicene Creed's "for us men and for our salvation": the eternal Son was born of Mary in order to save us.

The title Theotokos, ‘God-bearer’, which Ephesus defended and this translation renders "the Mother of God", is first of all a confession about Christ, not about Mary. The child Mary bore was not a man later joined to God but God the Son himself, made flesh. Filled with the Spirit, Elizabeth greeted the Lord while he was still in the womb: "why am I so honored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?" (Luke 1:43). Cyril put it sharply: "she bare not a simple man as ye say, but rather the Word incarnate" Cyril.

Yet the Definition takes care to add "according to the Manhood". Mary is not the source of the Son's divinity, which is eternally from the Father; from her he received his flesh. Orthodox and Catholic Christians honour Mary by this title in their prayers and hymns, and the Lutheran Formula of Concord calls her truly the mother of God Formula of Concord 8. Reformed churches seldom use the title, wary of how it may be heard, but they confess what Ephesus used it to guard: the one born of Mary is true God.

Two natures, one person

Then comes the heart of the Definition: the one Christ is "to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably". Nature, phusis (φύσις), answers the question what he is: all that God is, and all that a human being is. Person answers the question who he is, and there the answer is single: the eternal Son, God the Word.

The four words are all negatives. The first two shut out Eutyches' direction: the natures are not blended into some third thing, and neither is turned into the other. The last two shut out the direction of Nestorius: Christ is not split into two sons. The council did not explain how God and man are one in him. It marked the edges of the mystery so that no one would lose the way, and left the centre to worship.

The next words say what this means: "the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence". Subsistence translates hupostasis (ὑπόστασις), which Hebrews uses for the very being of God when it calls the Son "the exact representation of His nature" (Hebrews 1:3). In the fourth century the Fathers sharpened the word to name each of the three persons of the Trinity, and Chalcedon confesses that in Christ there is one such hypostasis. That one person is not a new man made at the incarnation, but the eternal Son himself, who took our nature into his own person.

Paul's great hymn holds both natures in one sentence:

Who, existing in the form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in human likeness.

Philippians 2:6-7

Bede saw it in the feeding of the four thousand: "we should notice, in one and the same, our Redeemer, a distinct operation of Divinity and of Manhood" Bede. Pity for the hungry crowd is the feeling of a man; feeding thousands with seven loaves is the work of God; both are the acts of one Lord. And because the person is one, Scripture can say of him, named by one nature, what belongs to the other, as the Westminster Confession observes 8.7. The rulers "would not have crucified the Lord of glory" (1 Corinthians 2:8) had they understood, and Paul speaks of "the church of God, which He purchased with His own blood" (Acts 20:28). The divine nature did not die; the one who is God died in the human nature he had made his own.

The Definition ends by saying that all this is "as the prophets from the beginning [have declared] concerning him, and the Lord Jesus Christ himself has taught us, and the Creed of the holy Fathers has handed down to us." The council claimed no new doctrine; it pointed to the one Scripture had spoken of from the first. Isaiah had already named the child who is God:

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government will be upon His shoulders. And He will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Isaiah 9:6

The churches that did not receive Chalcedon

Not every church received the council. The Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt, the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Churches and the Malankara Orthodox Church of India receive the councils of Nicaea, Constantinople and Ephesus, but not Chalcedon. Together they are known today as the Oriental Orthodox churches. They confess Christ in Cyril's phrase, ‘one incarnate nature of God the Word’, and so their tradition is called miaphysite, from the Greek for ‘one nature’. The Ethiopian church carries the confession in its name: Tewahedo means ‘made one’.

The one nature they confess is not a blend of divine and human but the one incarnate Word, in whom Godhead and manhood are united without mixture, change or division. So they too condemn Eutyches, and they reject the name ‘Monophysite’ often given them. They did not refuse Chalcedon to make Christ less human. They feared that ‘in two natures’, and Leo's language of each nature acting, opened the door to the divided Christ of Nestorius, and they could not accept a council that had deposed Dioscorus, Cyril's successor. Many historians add that the same word, ‘nature’, was being used in different senses, and that imperial pressure and regional loyalties deepened the break. The Armenian church, at war with Persia in 451, was not represented at the council, and it rejected Chalcedon in the sixth century.

Dialogue began in the later twentieth century. In 1973 Pope Paul VI and Pope Shenouda III of the Coptic Church together confessed Christ perfect God and perfect man, his divinity and humanity united without mingling, change, division or separation. In 1989 and 1990 the joint commission of the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches agreed that both families confess Chalcedon's four negatives, and that those who speak of two natures do not deny their inseparable union, nor those who speak of one united nature the abiding reality of the divine and the human in Christ. In the 1990s the World Alliance of Reformed Churches also reached an agreed statement on Christology with the Oriental Orthodox. Questions remain, about the later councils and about teachers honoured as saints by one side and condemned by the other, and full communion has not been restored.

The Church of the East, which did not receive Ephesus and was long called ‘Nestorian’, made a Common Christological Declaration with the Catholic Church in 1994. These ancient churches of Africa and Asia are a reminder that the faith was never only Western; see Is Christianity a Western religion?

Chalcedon in the Reformed confessions

The Reformers did not set councils above Scripture. All councils since the apostles "may err, and many have erred; therefore they are not to be made the rule of faith or practice, but to be used as a help in both" Westminster Confession 31.4. Yet they received Chalcedon gladly as faithful to Scripture. The Second Helvetic Confession confesses whatever the councils of Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon defined from Scripture about the incarnation Second Helvetic Confession 11, and the Westminster Confession takes up the Definition almost word for word:

So that two whole, perfect, and distinct natures, the Godhead and the manhood, were inseparably joined together in one person, without conversion, composition, or confusion. Which person is very God and very man, yet one Christ, the only mediator between God and man.

Westminster Confession 8.2

The Shorter Catechism adds what Chalcedon implies: Christ "was, and continueth to be, God and man in two distinct natures, and one person, forever" Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q. 21. The incarnation is not undone; the Son still wears our nature in heaven. The Belgic Confession says each nature keeps "its own distinct properties": the human nature keeps the reality of a body even after the resurrection, "forasmuch as our salvation and resurrection also depend on the reality of his body" Belgic Confession, Article 19. Not even death separated the natures. The article before it confesses, against some sixteenth-century Anabaptists who denied that Christ took his flesh from Mary, that "Christ is become a partaker of the flesh and blood of the children" Article 18.

The Heidelberg Catechism confesses that the eternal Son of God, "who is and continues true and eternal God, took upon him the very nature of man, of the flesh and blood of the Virgin Mary" Heidelberg Catechism, Q. 35; "continues" is Chalcedon's "unchangeably" in a single word. And it finds comfort there: with his innocence and perfect holiness he covers, in the sight of God, the sin in which I was conceived Q. 36.

Questions 47 and 48 apply the same rule to the ascension. Christ promised, "surely I am with you always, even to the end of the age" (Matthew 28:20), yet he was taken up into heaven. "according to his human nature, he is now not upon earth; but according to his Godhead, majesty, grace, and Spirit, he is at no time absent from us" Q. 47. Are the natures then separated? "By no means": the Godhead, everywhere present, "is indeed beyond the bounds of the Manhood which it has assumed, but is yet none the less in the same also, and remains personally united to it" Q. 48. Calvin wrote that the Son came down from heaven without leaving heaven Calvin, Institutes 2.13, and long before him Athanasius taught that the Word was not confined in his body Athanasius, On the Incarnation.

Lutherans read the union differently. The Formula of Concord teaches that through the personal union Christ's human nature shares in the divine majesty, so that Christ can be present with his body where he has promised, above all in the Supper Formula of Concord 8. Both traditions appeal to Chalcedon: Lutherans press its "indivisibly, inseparably", the Reformed its "inconfusedly" and "the property of each nature being preserved". See The Supper: Christ's spiritual presence and The ascension and Christ’s reign.

In the end Chalcedon guards the gospel, as the Heidelberg Catechism shows. Our Mediator must be a true man "because the justice of God requires that the same human nature which has sinned should make satisfaction for sin" Q. 16, and true God "that by the power of his Godhead he might bear, in his manhood, the burden of God's wrath" Q. 17. A Saviour who was not God could not save us; a Saviour who was not truly one of us could not stand in our place. The Belgic Confession puts it in a line: he is "very God by his power to conquer death, and very man that he might die for us according to the infirmity of his flesh" Article 19.

For this reason He had to be made like His brothers in every way, so that He might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, in order to make atonement for the sins of the people. Because He Himself suffered when He was tempted, He is able to help those who are being tempted.

Hebrews 2:17-18

Matthew Henry writes that "it was needful that the Saviour of men should be one who has the fellow-feeling which no being but a fellow-creature could possibly have" Matthew Henry. So Chalcedon's four words are no dry formula. They keep in view the one at the Father's right hand: our brother in flesh and soul, who knows our weakness from the inside, and the Lord who is able to keep us to the end. "Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence" (Hebrews 4:16). See also Truly God and truly man.