Chalcedon: one person, two natures

The question after Nicaea

At Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381 the church confessed that the Son is God as the Father is God (Nicaea). That answer raised the next question. If the eternal Son became man, how are God and man one in the Jesus who walked in Galilee? John puts the mystery in a single sentence:

The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

John 1:14

Where you put the weight of that sentence shaped the road you took. Teachers of the school usually called Alexandrian stressed ‘the Word’: the one who acts in every line of the Gospels is the eternal Son of God. Teachers of the school of Antioch stressed ‘became flesh’: he grew, learned, was tempted and suffered as a complete human being. Both emphases are in Scripture; press either one alone, and the other fades.

The first test came from a firm friend of Nicaea. Apollinarius, bishop of Laodicea and an ally of Athanasius, wanted to keep Christ undivided and sinless. So he taught that the Word took a human body, but that in Christ the Word himself took the place of a human mind. A changeable human mind, prone to sin, seemed to him to have no place in the Saviour.

The Council of Constantinople in 381 condemned the Apollinarians, and Gregory of Nazianzus gave the reason in a letter of about 382: "that which He has not assumed He has not healed" Gregory of Nazianzus, First Letter to Cledonius. The mind is where sin goes deepest; if Christ did not take a human mind, ours is not saved. Hebrews says the same thing from the other side: "He had to be made like His brothers in every way" (Hebrews 2:17).

Ephesus: the quarrel over Theotokos

In 428 Nestorius, a celebrated preacher from Antioch, became bishop of Constantinople. When a dispute broke out over calling Mary Theotokos, ‘the one who gave birth to God’, he proposed instead ‘the one who gave birth to Christ’. God cannot be born or suffer, he reasoned; what Mary bore was the human nature in which the Word dwelt as in a temple. It was a favourite Antiochene picture, drawn from Jesus' own words about "the temple of His body" (John 2:21). Nestorius meant to protect two things: that God is God, and that Christ is fully human.

Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, believed that this split Christ into two sons, the Son of God and the son of Mary. In his Second Letter to Nestorius (430) he wrote that the Word truly made his own a body animated by a rational soul and so became man. It was not that an ordinary man was born first and the Word then came down upon him: the Word himself was born in the flesh and suffered in his own flesh. That is why Mary is rightly called Theotokos Cyril of Alexandria, Second Letter to Nestorius. Paul could say that the rulers of this age "would not have crucified the Lord of glory" (1 Corinthians 2:8).

The Council of Ephesus, called by the emperor Theodosius II in 431, approved Cyril's letter and deposed Nestorius. But it opened before John of Antioch and the Eastern bishops arrived, and they met separately and condemned Cyril in turn. Only in 433 did Cyril and John agree on a shared statement, and Nestorius died in exile. Whether he truly divided Christ into two persons, or was a clumsy theologian misunderstood, scholars still debate.

Theotokos is first a confession about Christ, not about Mary: the child she bore is the Son of God himself, made flesh. The Orthodox and Catholic churches honour Mary with the title; Lutherans use it too; Reformed churches rarely use the title but confess its meaning.

Chalcedon: four fences

Then trouble came from the opposite side. Eutyches, an elderly abbot in Constantinople and a fierce opponent of Nestorius, said that Christ was of two natures before the union but of one nature after it, and he hesitated to confess that Christ's body was of one substance with ours. In 448 a synod under Flavian, bishop of Constantinople, condemned him.

In 449 Leo, bishop of Rome, sent Flavian a long letter, known as the Tome of Leo. Christ, he taught, took the form of a servant without losing the form of God, and in the one person each nature keeps its own character and does what belongs to it in communion with the other Leo the Great, Letter to Flavian. His text was Paul's:

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. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to death — even death on a cross.

Philippians 2:6-8

That same year a second council at Ephesus, led by Dioscorus of Alexandria, refused to read Leo's letter, restored Eutyches and deposed Flavian, who died soon afterwards. Leo called it a ‘robber council’. When Theodosius II died in 450 and Marcian became emperor, a new council was summoned. In October 451 several hundred bishops, nearly all from the East, met at Chalcedon, across the water from Constantinople, with Leo's legates present.

The council read the creeds of Nicaea and Constantinople, Cyril's letters and Leo's Tome. The first draft of its statement seems to have said that Christ is ‘from two natures’, words Eutyches himself could accept. Leo's legates objected, the text was reworked, and it came to say ‘in two natures’: after the union the two natures remain. The Definition reads:

one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; 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, not parted or divided into two persons

The Definition of Chalcedon

‘Nature’ says what Christ is; ‘person’ says who he is. The four famous words are all negatives. ‘Without confusion’ and ‘without change’ fence off Eutyches' road; ‘without division’ and ‘without separation’ fence off the road Nestorius was thought to take. The council did not explain how God and man are one in Christ. It marked the edges of the mystery and left the centre to worship.

Its fence posts are Scripture. In Christ "all the fullness of the Deity dwells in bodily form" (Colossians 2:9), and our high priest "was tempted in every way that we are, yet was without sin" (Hebrews 4:15); the Definition's "in all things like unto us, without sin" The Definition of Chalcedon all but quotes Hebrews. Half a century earlier, John Chrysostom, Antioch's great preacher, had already struck the balance in commenting on "dwelt among us": "For that which inhabits is not the same, but different from the habitation: different, I say, in nature; though as to union and conjunction, God the Word and the flesh are one, without confusion or extinction of substance" Chrysostom.

The churches that said no, and what Chalcedon leaves us

Not every church received Chalcedon. The Coptic church of Egypt and the Syriac, Armenian and Ethiopian churches, now called the Oriental Orthodox, accept Nicaea, Constantinople and Ephesus but not Chalcedon. With Cyril, they confess ‘one incarnate nature of God the Word’. By one nature they do not mean a blend of divine and human; they mean the one incarnate Word, in whom Godhead and manhood are united without mixture or change. They too condemn Eutyches and reject the label ‘Monophysite’. They feared that ‘in two natures’ reopened Nestorius's road, and they could not accept a council that deposed Cyril's successor, Dioscorus.

Further east, the Church of the East in the Persian Empire did not receive even Ephesus, and kept the Christology of the Antiochene teachers. Others called it ‘Nestorian’, a name it considers unfair to its faith. Its missionaries carried the gospel along the Silk Road; in 781 a stone was set up in the Chinese capital, Chang'an, telling of their coming The Xi'an Stele.

Many historians think the divisions deepened because the parties used words like ‘nature’ in different senses, and because imperial politics and local loyalties were tangled up with theology. In dialogues that began in the twentieth century, several of these churches have found that they share much of the same faith in Christ, though full communion has not been restored.

The Reformers set no council above Scripture, yet they received Chalcedon gladly as faithful to it, and the Westminster Confession echoes its words closely Westminster Confession 8.2. What Chalcedon guards is the gospel. A Saviour who is not God cannot save us; a Saviour who is not truly one of us cannot stand in our place. Because he is God, he can hold us to the end; because he is man, he knows our weakness from the inside. The doctrine itself is taught in the doctrine course's lessons The incarnation and Truly God and truly man; see also Why did God become human? and Is Jesus God?.

Practice