Truly God and truly man

Two kinds of things, one Lord

The last lesson saw the eternal Word become flesh. So who was the man who walked the roads of Galilee? The Gospels show us two kinds of things about him at once.

He did what only God does. When he told a paralysed man that his sins were forgiven, the scribes thought, "Who can forgive sins but God alone?" (Mark 2:7). They were right about that, and Jesus did not correct them. Instead he healed the man "so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins" (Mark 2:10). He received worship. After he walked on the water, those in the boat worshiped him and said, "Truly You are the Son of God!" (Matthew 14:33), and before the risen Jesus, Thomas said, "My Lord and my God!" (John 20:28). The apostles say the same.

For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity dwells in bodily form.

Colossians 2:9

Hebrews applies to the Son the words "Your throne, O God, endures forever and ever" (Hebrews 1:8), and Paul speaks of "our great God and Savior Jesus Christ" (Titus 2:13). For more, see Is Jesus God?

The same Jesus lived a fully human life. He "grew in wisdom and stature" (Luke 2:52). He was hungry after fasting (Matthew 4:2) and tired after walking (John 4:6). At Lazarus' tomb, John tells us simply, "Jesus wept" (John 11:35). On the cross he said, "I am thirsty" (John 19:28), and he truly died. He was tempted in every way as we are, "yet was without sin" (Hebrews 4:15); see Was Jesus really without sin?

These are not two people but one. In the storm on the lake, "Jesus was sleeping" (Matthew 8:24). Then the one who had been asleep stood up and rebuked the wind and the waves.

The men were amazed and asked, “What kind of man is this? Even the winds and the sea obey Him!”

Matthew 8:27

An ancient sermon handed down under Origen's name puts it this way: "He slept with His body, but was awake in His Deity" Pseudo-Origen. Alcuin sees the same at Lazarus' tomb: "He wept in His human nature for him whom He was able to raise again by His divine" Alcuin. The church speaks of one person in two natures.

Fences around a mystery

Attempts to make this mystery easier to grasp have usually done it by cutting away one side. In four great councils the early church weighed such explanations and set up fences around the Christ of Scripture. The councils did not explain the mystery away. They marked the edges of the path.

Each of these teachers was trying to protect something. Arius wanted to guard the oneness of God, but the church judged that a created Son could not bring us to God; the lesson on the Trinity takes this up. Apollinarius wanted to secure Christ's unity and sinlessness, so he taught that the divine Word took the place of a human mind; the church answered, as Gregory of Nazianzus did in the last lesson, that a mind not assumed is a mind not healed. Nestorius was reluctant to say that God was born or suffered, and so he refused to call Mary Theotokos, ‘God-bearer’; his way of speaking seemed to divide Christ into two subjects, though historians still discuss how far he himself meant that. The Council of Ephesus received Cyril of Alexandria's letter to Nestorius and kept the title, because the one Mary bore is the Son of God himself Cyril, Second Letter to Nestorius. At the other extreme, Eutyches taught that after the union there was only one nature, as though the humanity had been swallowed up in the divinity.

At Chalcedon in 451 the bishops received the letters of Cyril and the letter of Leo of Rome, which taught that in the one person each nature keeps its own character and acts in communion with the other The Tome of Leo. Then they set out their Definition. It confesses Christ "truly God and truly man", of one being with the Father in his divinity and of one being with us in his humanity, like us in all things except sin. The one Christ is acknowledged "in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation", the distinctness of each nature preserved and both coming together in one person Definition of Chalcedon. The first two phrases fence off mixture, the last two division. In the eighth century John of Damascus summed up the teaching of the Greek Fathers: because the two natures are united in one person without being confused, what belongs to each nature can be said of the one Christ John of Damascus, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. So Scripture can say that the Lord of glory was crucified (1 Corinthians 2:8).

The churches that did not receive Chalcedon

Not every church received Chalcedon's wording. The Oriental Orthodox churches (the Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopian and Syriac churches among them) did not accept the council. They confess Christ in the words of Cyril of Alexandria, ‘one incarnate nature of God the Word’, and so their tradition is called miaphysite, from the Greek for ‘one nature’. They feared that ‘in two natures’ opened the door to dividing Christ as Nestorius had seemed to. The one nature they confess is not a blend of divine and human, but the one incarnate Word, come together from two natures without mixture or change. So they too reject Eutyches, and they do not accept the label ‘monophysite’ often given them.

The Chalcedonian churches, Orthodox, Catholic and most Protestant, have kept ‘in two natures’ because they judged that ‘one nature’ could blur the distinction between the divine and the human. Yet both sides look to Cyril as their teacher. Cyril wrote that "the natures are different indeed which are brought into true union, but He Who is of both, Christ the Son, is One" Cyril. Many historians think that the same word, ‘nature’, was being used in different senses, and that imperial politics and regional loyalties deepened the split. Since the later twentieth century the Catholic Church and the Orthodox churches have each held dialogues with the Oriental Orthodox churches, and joint statements have found that, beneath different words, they hold in substance the same faith in Christ. Full communion has not yet been restored.

Both traditions confess that Christ is truly God and truly man, that his natures are not mixed and that he is not divided. This is not a cold formula. "There is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy 2:5). Because he is God, he is able to save us; because he is man, he can stand beside us. The one who slept in the storm is the one who calms it. For more on who he is, see Who is Jesus?

Practice