Who is Jesus? This is the most important question that anyone can ask because discovering the truth declared about Jesus in the Spirit-inspired Scriptures brings life, joy and peace with God our Father. It is also the question that occupied the church in the earliest centuries of its history. This is not because faithful Christian people were unaware of Christ’s identity or what the significance of this was. Rather, this was because false teaching about the identity of Christ was spread by those who had badly misunderstood God’s Word.
In this article we will focus on one episode in church history as it came to a head at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553. However, it is necessary to see that the groundwork for this theological debate was laid by previous controversies.
The background
Athanasius fought against Arius’ idea that the Son of God was a created being. Along with other representatives of the church at the Council of Nicaea (325 AD) he condemned this heresy, defending the Bible’s teaching that the Son of God is eternal and has always been the Son of the Father. Basil of Caesarea fought against a similar idea relating to the Holy Spirit, and the Council of Constantinople (381 AD) subsequently taught that the Spirit is to be worshipped and glorified as God along with the Father and the Son.
Cyril battled against Nestorius’ idea that the divine and human natures of Christ were joined by a ‘conjunction’ in the incarnation and not that God the Son had truly become a human being. The Council of Ephesus (443 AD) was an extremely messy affair fraught with political tension but in the end Cyril’s theology won the day; that there is ‘one enfleshed nature of God the Word’.
This led to some difficulties as not everyone was happy with Cyril’s phrasing. Cyril was a prolific writer and extremely intelligent but he was not very concerned about terminology. He often used the words ‘nature’ and ‘person’ interchangeably which caused confusion. Did Cyril mean that the divine and human natures of Christ combined to become a new thing that wasn’t really God but also wasn’t really a man anymore?
A man called Eutyches claimed that this was what he meant and that the Scriptures taught it too. To settle these debates, the Council of Chalcedon met in 451 AD and produced the famous ‘Chalcedonian definition’ against Eutyches’ theology. This taught that Christ is one divine person who possesses two natures ‘unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably’.
Surely that statement sorted everything out? Unfortunately not.
The council’s decision
Some people, called monophysites by their opponents, were concerned that the Council of Chalcedon didn’t account for the fact that the two natures of Christ were united together in one person in the incarnation. They thought that the distinctness of Christ’s deity on the one hand, and his humanity on the other, was over-emphasised.
Emperor Justinian I called the Second Council of Constantinople to resolve this. As emperor, he had no authority to make decisions: he was there to get the leaders of the church to discuss the issues and come to a solution. The Archbishop of Constantinople presided and, although Pope Vigilius was in the city at the time, he declined to attend and told the council that it shouldn’t meet without him. They ignored him and went ahead anyway. As a result of his stubbornness, the council excommunicated Vigilius and he was imprisoned. He was released after he decided to acknowledge that the council had got things right. According to Vigilius this decision was made entirely separately from the council and completely of his own volition!
The council used new terminology to define how the divine and human natures of Christ interact with one another. They taught that the humanity of Christ was both anhypostatic and enhypostatic. Those are not words you hear every day! So what do they mean and why is this important?
These terms are really two sides of the same coin and are trying to express one truth both positively and negatively. To say that Christ’s humanity is anhypostatic means that there isn’t a separate human person that the eternal Son of God hijacks in order to become incarnate. Put negatively, there are not two persons, one divine and one human, experiencing different things at the same time. To say that Christ’s humanity is enhypostatic means that the human nature which the Son of God assumed in the incarnation is his own humanity. Put positively, it was truly God himself who became a man for us and for our salvation.
The important question at issue since Cyril’s time had been, ‘Who is the subject experiencing all of Jesus Christ’s actions?’ In other words, who is the person who became humanly tired, hungry and thirsty? Who is the person who was able to heal the sick, give sight to the blind and raise the dead? Who was it who suffered in his flesh and died the way all humans must, but who was also able to raise his flesh up again on his own authority?
The answer to all these questions is the Son of God in the flesh. Only God has the power to raise dead flesh to new life, to forgive sins and to bring salvation to sinful humanity. The Son of God did all this for us in and with his human nature. Only humans can be tired, hungry and can suffer; yet the Son of God experienced all this personally according to his human nature.
This is a mystery, the depths of which we will never fully be able to grasp. Thanks to the outcome of the Second Council of Constantinople, we have some language which helps us articulate these things more precisely.
Lessons for today
We should be wary of drawing too strict an analogy between our time and that of any historical event. We live in different circumstances and the live theological debates of our day are different from those of the sixth century. That being said, it is worth being aware of how politics can both help and hinder theological debate.
Justinian was unusually interested in theology for a man in his position. He cared passionately about theology and wanted to see the monophysites brought back into the fold of the church, not least because his wife had been very sympathetic towards them. His political influence was undoubtedly useful in persuading the representatives of the council to back his position, which was also that of the ancient church until his day.
However, his political influence also had its down side. There is a question over how much Justinian was merely persuading the council and how much he was threatening them into submission. Vigilius was also not too keen on Justinian’s theologising but this was largely because the Pope himself was an ambitious and proud man who didn’t like his authority being impinged upon.
The most important thing to take away from this historical episode is the answer to the question with which we began. Who is Jesus? He is the Son of God the Father full of grace and truth, through whom all things were made, who truly became flesh and made his dwelling among us.