Christology 101

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is the Dividing Line.

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The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll free across the

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United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is

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James White. We will in fact be taking phone calls a little bit later on in the program, not the normal kind of phone calls.

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Since this is a lecture and a class on the subject of Christology, it is always good to have a question and answer period.

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And so toward the end of our time together, I will open up the phone lines and you will be able to call in and basically your task will be to convince the call screener that your question is widely representational enough via the description he provides to me for us to utilize it toward the end of the program.

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Obviously, what that means is I would want it to be something that would be useful to the wider audience, not something like, well, do you know what kind of footwear they were wearing at the

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Council of Chalcedon or something along those lines. We want something a little bit more broad based.

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A number of weeks ago, I mentioned my desire to do this lecture, this class, mainly because it strikes me as very odd that when it comes to evangelical

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Christians today, we have a tremendous amount of interest in side issues and yet a tremendous amount of ignorance concerning primary issues.

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Ironically, this is being proven by others right now in regards to the invitation to a confessed modalist,

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TD Jakes, to participate in the elephant room, whatever in the world that is.

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It sounds to me like just a place where you sit around and pretend that you can redo

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Christianity and that you're not standing on the shoulders of giants. By the way, as far as calling in,

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I wouldn't be calling in right now. I would be calling in after the break that we take. We will be taking a break at about 20 minutes past 2 o 'clock, so about an hour and 20 minutes from now.

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We'll take about a 10 -minute break so that you can stretch, and I can too. And that's pretty normative for about a two -and -a -half -hour, three -hour class in the seminary setting.

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So we will be doing that, and that's probably when we'll open up the phone lines if you would like to put in your question at that particular point in time.

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As I was saying, it would seem to me that in light of the biblical command to grow in the grace and knowledge of our

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Lord Jesus Christ, issues such as the Trinity, the deity of Christ, and Christology, the study of the person of Christ, and in particular, the controversies that occupied the attention of the early church from the period of time of the

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Council of Nicaea until the middle of the 5th century and the

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Council of Chalcedon in 451 A .D., that those would be subjects that you would think would be discussed fairly regularly within the context of the church.

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And yet the reality is, if we were to put forward a basic quiz on the meaning of such terms as Apollinarianism, Nestorianism, Eutychianism, Hypostatic Union, you would get looks from people that says, what,

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I didn't go to seminary, as if all that stuff is only for people who go to seminary.

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Well, let me tell you something. People go to seminary, thankfully, in any decent seminary, still have to study those things. Whether they remember it when they graduate or not or find any relevance to it any longer is completely another issue.

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But what we believe about Christ, I would think, has been made very clear in our discussions on this program over the years, is central to our apologetic, our outreach to the rest of the world.

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One of the major criticisms that we leveled last year against Ergen Kanner came from listening to a theological faceplant that he performed in a dialogue with a oneness pastor at Liberty University when he was asked about the sonship of Christ.

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And you would think that being a former Muslim, this would be a slam dunk. It was a slam dunk for the oneness side.

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And this illustrates, I think, really a blind spot.

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And so I announced that it would be a good idea. Obviously, we're sort of, to be honest with you, if we really, really, really want to do this right, we would do early church history as a whole.

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We would trace the development and the controversies and the personalities and everything else.

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There's just so many things I'm going to have to stop and say, well, you know, there's a background to this that we really haven't gotten to, and it's going to be a little bit of a challenge to be able to pull this off, but we're going to do the best that we can do.

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Now, I did assign what might be called homework, primarily so that there would be at least some common ground upon which we could build.

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Obviously, I went for sources that would be free and online. It did not make any sense to say, well, you know, we're going to be carrying this book, buy this book, read this, et cetera, et cetera, which is what you would probably do in the context of a more formal online class.

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I did want to start off by mentioning some of the books that I would recommend to you if you wish to, and hopefully you will wish, to go beyond what we do over the next two and a half or three hours, depending on how long this goes.

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One book that I would suggest to you is by Henry Chadwick. It's entitled

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The Early Church. It's the Pelican History of the Church, Volume 1, The Early Church, the Story of Emerging Christianity from the

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Apostolic Age, the Foundation of the Church of Rome. This is a Pelican book.

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This one, I noticed last night as I was looking at it, my, we do not make good books anymore.

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This was one of my seminary texts, and it is yellowed, and it's bad.

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We don't, we're not good at making books anymore. Then there is another book that you might want to obtain from the

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Sources of Early Christian Thought series, edited by William G. Rush, The Christological Controversy, Richard A.

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Norris, Jr., the volume translator and editor, which provides you with a lot of, well, all it is are original sources, so you can go back and read what was actually being said by the individuals that were involved at that particular point in time.

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Similar to that is a source book that hopefully many of you have already obtained.

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If you haven't, I would highly recommend it for your library called Documents of the Christian Church, selected and edited by Henry Bettinson.

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I believe the third edition is out. I have the second here, and I believe I have a hardback copy of the third in my library.

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That's an excellent resource to have. Then two books by J.

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Andy Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines. I tried to get the edition

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I had from the seminary. It is currently in four different pieces, all of which fell out of my hands.

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Now I have a hardback edition of that, thankfully, that is put out by Prince Press now,

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Early Christian Doctrines by J. Andy Kelly. And then Early Christian Creeds by J.

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Andy Kelly. Both will give you a tremendous amount of in -depth information on original sources, background information, things like that.

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And obviously I highly recommend that you obtain for your library the

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History of the Christian Church by Schaff. We will be especially drawing quotations from Volume 3,

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Nicene and Post -Nicene Christianity, AD 311 through 600, which is the third volume of eight that you would be able to obtain.

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Very frequently you can get the paper version for a pretty decent price, because I think –

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I'm not sure if that's at ccel .org. It might be. If it is, then there's another way to do it.

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You can grab hold of it that way. But these are resources that hopefully you would want to obtain. They are frequently cited resources, especially even by those who are enemies of the faith.

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And so since that is the case, it is a good idea to have these resources available to you.

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Now when we talk about Christology, there are many ways to approach this subject. Generally in a church history class, what you would do is you would just simply either discuss this within the context, discussing some of the major figures, such as Cyril of Alexandria, one of the central figures in the great

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Christological controversies. Or you might be looking at names of individuals who have been identified as heretics down through the course of the history of the church, such as Apollinarius or Nestorius or something like that.

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There are just so many ways in which you can do this. And one of the great challenges of any discussion of church history is how do you approach it given the fact that there are so many different streams that interconnect.

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There's so many different developments going on at the same time. I am very concerned that very often what

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I see being written today about history, whether it be recent or ancient history, can take a very simplistic approach to this always complicated subject.

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And when we're talking about Christology, we're talking about a theological issue, not just a historical issue.

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And so do you start with an in -depth discussion of scriptural passages and texts and then look at the history?

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Or do you look at the history and then go to the scriptural text? Very often, these issues will be discussed in two different classes in seminary.

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You will have the systematic theology discussion in the systematic theology class. And then you'll have the historical discussion in the church history class.

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And unfortunately, very often, you are left with the very strong impression that there is a, well, to use the language of Luke chapter 16, a wide gulf fixed between the two, whereas none can cross from one to the other.

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In other words, you rarely see the intimate connection that actually exists in the historical development of Christian theology.

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And as a result, in seminary especially, unfortunately, and I've listened to, one of the things

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I've done over the years, I not only loved the church history class I took under Dr.

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Nate Feldmuth at Fuller Seminary, I loved it so much, I audited it after I graduated just to take it again.

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And yet, I saw people. And then after that, what

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I've done is, you can go on iTunes. You can go get, I don't know how many different church history lecture series are available for free on iTunes now, from Reformed Theological Seminary and Westminster and Concordia and all these,

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Covenant Seminary. They all have their church history stuff available online for free.

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But my concern has been, as I've listened and as I've even participated in these classes and had the opportunity of teaching church history, it's the first thing

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I ever taught. Shortly after I graduated from Fuller, I was asked to teach church history at Grand Canyon University.

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And what I have observed many times is people being left with impressions and questions that end up leading to a diminishment of their confidence in the gospel of Jesus Christ because in the context of those classes, questions are not addressed head on.

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Or if they are, they're from very different perspectives within the same school, leaving you with great difficulties.

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We will be dealing with some uncomfortable things. I will read to you, for example, some of the reports of what was going on at some of these councils.

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And we can talk about the Robber Council, Council of Ephesus, and then the

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Council of Chalcedon, and the emotions that were running high and the behavior of people, and people literally being beaten to death for opposing the other side.

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And the result is, for a lot of evangelicals who have not spent a lot of time in church history, you look at that and you go, how can anything relevant or true come out of such a mess?

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I mean, it really does look like it was just a real mess. How can we look back?

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How can anyone call these ecumenical, worldwide councils when there was so much politics involved in this one?

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And this particular person really detested that one. And it's so easy to recognize the difference between East and West because in the

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East you constantly have the various patriarchal seas, that is the centers of apostolic authority, which are numerous in the

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East, such as Jerusalem and Alexandria and Constantinople, Antioch. They are constantly jockeying for position and authority and power over against the monolithic

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West that only has one apostolic sea, and that's Rome. Even that historical reality ends up being represented in the ecclesiology, the church structure that has developed since that time.

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You see the papacy in the West and you see the collegiality and the relationship of the patriarchal seas in the

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East. These are all background issues and we struggle when we see

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Cyril of Alexandria may have been right about a number of things, but he just wasn't an overly attractive guy.

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I mean, he just strikes you as, you just find dissonance in going, yeah, well,

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I got to agree with him, but man, I certainly don't have to like him. These are some of the things that come up when we start talking about the history of the church.

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And if you do not, you might say, well, then you shouldn't talk about these things. That might make people uncomfortable. Well, you know what?

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I'd rather have you uncomfortable now than to have someone like a Bart Ehrman or someone else come along and present challenges to your faith within that context and not give you the whole story or give you a balanced understanding of these issues as well.

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And so there's a lot to look at here. There's a lot of material to look at here.

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We're just going to jump in and see how far we can get and how fully we can attempt to explain these things.

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My desire is to bring everybody along. If you are deeply read in church history, this will just be a review for you.

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If you're not, hopefully you'll learn some things. I don't want to leave anybody so completely in the dust that you're just tuning out and going on to do something else.

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But hopefully at the end, you will have some understanding of the historical facts from the

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Council of Nicaea onward. You'll have an idea of the Council of Constantinople in 381, the

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Council of Ephesus, the Robbers' Council, the Council of Chalcedon. We're going to work through the

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Athanasian Creed and the Chalcedonian Creed because people always cite portions and they go, how can anyone ever believe this?

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Remember, we just did that last week, listening to Dr. Lawrence Brown, just quoting some parts and saying, no one really understands that.

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Well, actually, he's wrong about that. But we will work through those as well.

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But let's do so in the context of at least some historical material.

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Most people know about the Council of Nicaea, which took place in AD 325, 12 years after the peace of the church in 313, when the

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Roman Empire officially stopped persecuting the Christian church. And Constantine claimed to convert to Christianity, and he discovered the division that was taking place within Christianity over this issue of the teachings of Arius.

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And we know that, at least according to tradition, 318 bishops met at Nicaea.

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And at that council, you had different opinions expressed.

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We know that Arius and his few open supporters, anyways, promoted the concept that the son was heteroousios, was of a different kind, a different substance than the father.

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The saying was, there was a time when the son was not, which was attributed to Arius. On the other side, you had

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Alexander of Alexandria and his deacon, Athanasius, who was not a bishop at the time.

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He did not become a bishop until 328, as I recall, who presented what would later be called, and you need to realize we're looking backwards, and so what would later be called the orthodox position, that the son is homoousios, of the same substance as the father.

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As is so often the case, you also always have people who try to strike a middle ground.

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And, you know, sometimes that's just absolutely necessary, you know, in this fallen world. But then again, on issues of absolute principle and definition, compromise can be death.

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And so there were those who decided to take a middle position and say that Jesus is homoousios, of a like substance with the father, similar, but not identical.

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Now, there are all sorts of reasons for this. We need to recognize that, again, there was, history is not an easily grasped graphed, laid out, nice, clean, you know, progression of things.

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For example, I would imagine that mechanical or electrical engineers would make lousy historians, because they want things to be logical and to flow, and it doesn't work that way.

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There were so many complicating factors. I mean, just human beings are enough to complicate anything.

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But you had an issue here between East and West. That always has to be kept in mind. The Greek speaking

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East and the Latin speaking West, just simply on a language barrier. Through all of these controversies, one of the major problems was that the people in the

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East were always thinking those Latin speaking guys were sneaking something over on them because he had to translate what they were saying.

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And the feelings went the other direction. And sometimes you didn't even have to have anyone suspecting the other side of dishonesty.

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It was just matters of language. And you see, even before the Aryan controversy and even before the discussion of the deity of Christ, the first heresy that had been dealt with primarily in the

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East had been the concept of Sibelianism or modalism. The very issue, amazingly enough, that the folks in the elephant room want to bring back up again, and that is the concept of a confounding of the persons to where, as we've been listening to Roger Perkins, for example, oneness is a form of Sibelianism or modalism.

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It's a certain form of modalism, dynamic monarchism and so on and so forth. There's lots of variant viewpoints in there.

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But the point is the East had primarily dealt with that and they were very afraid of the term homoousius.

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They thought that if you say the son is of the same substance, the father, you are going to be playing into the hands of the modalists.

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And so they were somewhat concerned about that. And it took a great deal of explanation to be able to say that's not what we are saying.

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We are not confounding the persons. We're not saying the father is the son, so on and so forth.

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So even once Nicaea gets done, what you need to realize is that while we look back at Nicaea and we see the first great ecumenical council and we see men who were only 12 years removed from the great persecutions, there were men at Nicaea missing limbs and eyes from the great persecutions against Christians.

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And so the idea that they would have compromised on important issues just because Constantine walks in and he looks all fancy in his robes and stuff, this doesn't make any sense.

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They had stood against the Roman Empire before. They're going to stand for what they believe now as well. But we look back at Nicaea and we granted great reverence because of that.

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However, we must realize that the time, very briefly after Nicaea, the

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Arians came to ascendancy in power. Now, they did so primarily through political maneuvering, but really for the next 40 years,

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Arianism ruled the day. It was during this time that the phrase

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Athanasius Contramundum came into use, Athanasius against the world, because he was kicked out of his church five different times for refusing to go with the flow and to go with the fact that eventually councils were called,

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Ariminum, Sardica, that represented more bishops than Nicaea did.

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And they overturned Nicaea and they had an Arianized creed that did not fully affirm the full deity of Jesus Christ.

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But Athanasius said, no, he would not go along. And even when on a political level, the

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Arians had pretty much gained full control, then they turned on each other. And their alliances began to fall apart.

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And those who had held steadfast, specifically Athanasius, were able to reestablish themselves in their seas,

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Athanasius in Alexandria, and bring about eventually the

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Council of Constantinople in 381. And that led to the final downfall of Arianism itself.

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And that is called the Second Ecumenical Council. But you must realize our concept of Ecumenical Councils is anachronistic.

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Nobody had that idea at that time. And that is why you can have

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Augustine, for example, arguing with Maximin the Arian long after Nicaea and saying,

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I cannot quote the authority of Nicaea against you. You cannot quote the authority of Ariminum against me.

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Let us go to the Holy Scriptures. There were dueling councils. And it is easy for us to look back now and go, oh, well,

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Nicaea was right all along. But the only people who knew that back then were the people who stood firmly on the basis of the

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Scriptures, like Athanasius. But look what it got him. So we need to keep this in mind.

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It is so easy to just put together little charts and timelines and say, ah, here is Nicaea and ah, here is...

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And oh, there are some controversies. Yeah, what was it like to live during that time? Were there entire councils meeting and saying, no,

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Jesus is not fully God? And how do you decide at that point? So background issue.

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Well, 26 minutes in, I was going to take about five minutes on that. Obviously, once you have the fundamental victory of the

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Arian perspective at the Council of Constantinople in 381, the period of Arian ascendancy is ended and Arianism will always be seen until modern times as a fundamental degradation of Christianity, as a fundamental abandonment of what defines

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Christianity. And I would say, and I would defend this and debate this at any point, anyone who does not affirm with passion the full deity of Jesus, the

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Messiah, confess that he was born in time, born of a virgin, that he was truly the

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God -man has never been and has never been and does not have the right to claim the name

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Christian. And I believe most of the writers in the early church at this period of time would agree with that.

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But once that's established, what's the next logical question that must be asked?

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What's the next logical question? If Jesus is truly God, then the next thing that has to be addressed is, well, if that's true, then how was he truly man?

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Now, I think it's very important that we understand on a theological level that there is in Christian theology two unique situations, two absolutely unique, how do

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I put what term I'm looking for? There are two things that are absolutely unique in Christian theology, and that is

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God's triune nature. There is nothing we can complain it to, complain it to, compare it to.

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Thank you very much. There's nothing, I shouldn't have things popping up on my screen while I'm trying to speak. There's nothing we can compare it to.

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Any analogy of the Trinity will eventually break down.

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I don't care which one it is, any analogy will break down because we're talking about something that's absolutely unique.

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One being eternally shared by three divine persons, the

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Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. We do not confound the persons, we do not confuse the persons, we're not modalists, we're not tritheists, all of these things.

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There's nothing we can compare that to. That's the first unique thing. The second unique thing would be then what?

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Well, if the second person, the Trinity, has entered into his own creation, then that one will be absolutely unique.

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And so when we talk about both the Trinity and Christology, specifically the nature of the person of Jesus Christ, we are dealing with absolutely unique things.

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Hence, we cannot say, well, it's like this, or it's like that, because as soon as we say it is like that, then we are denying its uniqueness.

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We might be able to come up with certain examples for certain elements of it, but then when you go beyond just that limited application, it leads you to error.

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And so one of the things that has bothered people about the definitions that have been developed from the biblical data is that generally what we're saying is what

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God isn't like, rather than giving a positive statement of what he is like. But that's forced upon us by the uniqueness of the

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Trinity and the uniqueness of Christ as the incarnate one, because we have nothing to compare it to and say, well, it's like this, or have you ever seen that?

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It's like that. As soon as you do that, you are running into danger. And we will see, especially as we get into what a lot of people consider to be just the nitpicking.

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You're picking at nits here. This is just too in -depth. When you start talking about the relationship of the divine, the human, and the two natures in one person, and exactly what it was

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Apollinarius said, and exactly what it was Eutychius said, and exactly what it was Nestorius said, and exactly where they went wrong, and all the rest of it, it's just nitpicking.

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The reality is what we're doing is we're first of all saying the subject's important enough to pick at nits if we need to.

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And secondly, what we're saying is there is a divine revelation that is clear enough to give us the outlines of the borders outside of which we dare not go.

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And most of the Christological errors are doorways that lead us out of the realm of divine revelation into a negation of divine revelation.

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That's the problem. So interestingly enough, it would seem that most of the key figures whose names are now associated historically with error were actually trying to avoid going into error at another point.

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If you've ever played, and I haven't done this for many, many years, but if you've ever played tug of war, you know that you get two sides on that rope and you get your biggest guy possible at the back, he's your anchor, and what you're trying to do is you're trying to pull those people on the other side across a line or into a puddle of mud or something fun like that if you're at summer camp or whatever else it might be.

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And you know, when you start pulling on that thing, you're not balanced to that point.

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In fact, one of the sneaky ways to try to win is you get real quiet and you go, okay, on three, one, two, three, you let go.

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Now, you don't let it go all the way, but what you're trying to do is trying to knock the other people down because why? Because they're imbalanced.

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They're pulling as hard as they can, and as soon as the pressure lets off, they're on the ground. Now, you grab what's left and you start running the other direction as fast as you can, hoping that you're going to win that way, just to yank the rope right out from underneath them.

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Well, why in the world am I talking about tug of war? Because what we see illustrated in these situations is the result of theological tug of war.

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Sometimes for less than, unfortunately, good reasons, specifically, as we'll see,

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Cyril of Alexandria and Nestorius, there is interpersonal conflict.

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Cyril doesn't like Nestorius. Nestorius doesn't like Cyril. Cyril is a much less likable person than even

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Nestorius is at that point, and they will go to any lengths to expose the other, to attack the other.

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Yes, believe it or not, even in ancient church history, you have misrepresentation of people's views, and he's teaching this.

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Well, he actually wasn't teaching that, but hey, you know, if you can get the crowd all upset, then now he's got to defend himself, and it's not like you can jump on Twitter and say, no,

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I didn't ever say that. You can't jump on TV or put out a press release. Once you've got the crowd going, it might be simply impossible for the other guy to even make a meaningful correction, because even if you write something, it's got to be copied.

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It's got to be sent out. People might be willing to read it, and if the guy lives 600 miles away, it's going to take forever for the letter to get there.

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It's a different situation. And so, unfortunately, this tug of war would start, and neither side ends up being overly balanced.

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And the danger is that many of the people we now call heretics, they may have been pulling against something that itself was a heresy.

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They may have been very, very concerned, but when you're pulling only one direction, you can end up becoming imbalanced the other direction.

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And that is frequently exactly what took place. Now, online, there's a link.

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I provide these links, and I hope you still have them. This is to reform .org slash document slash index dot html.

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You can click on the Athanasian Creed. And so, before we go into looking at some of the

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Christological controversies, specifically that sprouted up after the Council of Nicaea, let's take a look at the

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Athanasian Creed. And I want to work through it.

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It's called the Athanasian Creed, but everyone realizes Athanasius didn't write it. It actually shows more of the later 4th century, early 5th century context than Athanasius would have known.

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However, it will still be very useful to us because it is very frequently cited as an example of something that simply cannot be understood.

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In fact, we had someone, I think someone said that they traced it to India, come into our chat channel yesterday and say, you know, as soon as the

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Doctrine of the Trinity came up, ah, you people are just zombies. You just quote whatever you've been taught, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

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A lot of people think that that's true. Well, let's take a look at it. Click on over to the Athanasian Creed, and let's take a look at it.

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Water is a wonderful thing. All right. You will note that it begins with exclusionary language.

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It makes it very unpopular today. Whoever will be saved before all things, it is necessary that he hold the Catholic faith, which faith except everyone do keep whole and undefiled.

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Without doubt, he shall perish everlastingly. Obviously, it's the Creed's intention to define what that faith is, and notice it doesn't say anything about the

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Roman Catholic faith. Here is the Catholic faith that we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in unity, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.

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Let's stop right there. Monotheism, we worship one God, but we worship a triune

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God. We worship a God who is Trinity in unity.

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One God in Trinity, Trinity in unity. Both must be held together.

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We dare not fall off the center point and become imbalanced on either side.

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And very frequently, that's exactly what happens as we were just discussing. We do not confound the persons, which means we do not identify them with one another.

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We don't make the father the son or the son the spirit or the spirit the father. But we don't divide the substance either.

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We do not say that the father is one third of God and the son is one third of God and the spirit is one third of God.

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God's being cannot be divided up. We affirm the simplicity of the being of God.

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Simplicity simply means it's not complex. It's not made up of parts. There's not the father part and the son part and the spirit part.

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God's being cannot be divided up into parts, thirds, sixths, or even ninths on certain channels that will not be mentioned at this particular point in time.

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For there is one person of the father, another of the son, and another of the

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Holy Spirit. What is that? That is a explanation more fully of the first phrase of line three, neither confounding the persons.

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But the Godhead of the father, of the son, and of the

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Holy Spirit is all one, the glory equal, the majesty co -eternal. So the father, the son, and the

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Holy Spirit participate in the divine being, share the divine being fully.

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Their glory is equal. They don't do the same things. We can differentiate between them.

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Obviously, from God's perspective, it's important for us to be able to make that distinction. So we have not only the ability to distinguish the persons as they function in what's called the economic trinity, but we also have the ability to distinguish the persons in their internal relationships with one another, as we will see here in a moment.

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Such as the father is, such is the son, and such is the Holy Spirit. Why? Because they partake of the one divine being that is indivisible, and there is not like a greater participation and a lesser participation.

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The father incomprehensible, the son incomprehensible, and the spirit incomprehensible.

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Incomprehensible doesn't mean that we cannot understand the doctrine of the trinity. It does not mean that we're just going, oh, it's a mystery.

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I just embrace anything that's just completely foolish. That's not what we're saying. What we are saying is that we as creatures cannot even wrap our minds around the statement,

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God has eternally been God. If that's one of the most basic elements of God's revelation, then how can we be anything but grossly arrogant to think that if that basic revelation is beyond us, then the relationship with the divine persons and their participation in the

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Godhead is not going to partake of something that is mysterious in the proper sense, mysterious in the sense of absolutely unique and therefore beyond creaturely categories of comparison, which we had already discussed.

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The father eternal, the son eternal, and the Holy Spirit eternal. That is, of course, once again, this is not just something, some modes that God has decided to adopt at a particular point in time after creation or for purposes in creation or whatever else it might be.

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So likewise, okay, there we are.

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We are now at number 10, and yet they are not three eternals, but one eternal.

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They are not three eternals as if you can separate them from one another as to their eternal nature because they are eternal via their participation in one being that is

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God, their divine nature, the divine being. As also, there are not three uncreated nor three incomprehensibles, but one uncreated and one incomprehensible.

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Now, if we've said that the Father is incomprehensible and the Son is incomprehensible and the Spirit is incomprehensible, how can that not be three incomprehensibles?

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Because what gives that incomprehensibility is the participation in the divine nature.

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I think it was Calvin, and I should have grabbed this. Actually, there's my copy right there.

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I might be able to get to it, but that's a little bit too much multitasking all at once. Maybe during the break,

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I'll remember to do it. I don't know. But there is a great quote in book one.

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I might be able to pull it up. Or you know what? There's plenty of folks in the channel. Maybe there's a

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Calvin expert out there. There's a great quote in book one, where he quotes, and I forget who it was he was quoting.

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It might have been Tatian. I'm not sure. But he said, in essence, and I am paraphrasing here, obviously.

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Whenever we contemplate the three, we are brought back to the one.

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And when we contemplate the one, we cannot help but see the three.

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The very nature of the divine revelation of the Trinity always draws us to that balance point and does not allow us to go one way or the other without ignoring certain elements of the biblical revelation.

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And so it's somewhere, as I recall, in the first book of the

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Institutes. Number 12. So likewise, the Father is Almighty, the

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Son Almighty, and the Holy Spirit Almighty, and yet they are not three Almighties, but one Almighty.

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So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet they are not three gods, but one

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God. Now, this is the kind of language that the enemies of the faith like to try to focus upon and ignore what has already been said, ignore the self -defining elements of this creedal statement so that it sounds like it's just engaging in double speak, but it's not.

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When we say the Father is God, we are not saying the Father is all of God in the sense of exhausting the personal aspect of God.

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We are saying that the Father is, as to his nature, deity.

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I think that's it. I think Brian 111 pulled it up, and he was, yeah, it was Gregory Natsianzen.

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I think that's it. If it's not, it's close enough. Let me read it. No sooner do I conceive of the one than I am illumined by the splendor of the three.

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No sooner do I distinguish them than I am carried back to the one. When I think of any one of the three,

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I think of him as the whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking of escapes me.

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I cannot grasp the greatness of that one so as to attribute a greater greatness to the rest.

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When I contemplate the three together, I see but one torch and cannot divide or measure out the undivided light.

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That's a quote from Gregory Natsianzen, and I'm assuming that that is found in book one.

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I'd be interested in knowing where in book one that is quoted, but that is the essence of the quotation that I was referring to there.

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Okay. Thank you. That's always, it does make it a little bit more like a class, because if I was in a class and I was saying that, you know, the last time

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I taught for Golden Gate up in Mill Valley, there's the back row guys, and they sit in the back row because that's the closest to the power outlets.

47:49

So they're all the geeks with their Macs and their Dells and stuff like that back there, and they would be pulling these quotes up, and if I said,

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I don't remember what the quote is, but blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, two or three minutes later, somebody would say, is it this one here?

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And you go, yep, there it is right there. So it's a little bit sort of like having a class, except the only people in the class are names on a screen.

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Yeah, Gregory Natsianzen, one of the three Cappadocian fathers. Gregory, Gregory, which reminds me, well, let's not even go there, and Basil.

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They weren't related, but anyways, they are very, very important in those post -Nicene

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Christological controversies and the establishment of an orthodox understanding of Christology. All right, back to number 14.

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When we say the father is God, we're not saying that the term father is merely, that the word is is an equal sign, so that all of God is the father and all the father is

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God, same thing with son or same thing with Holy Spirit. That's why when we say, and yet they are not three gods, but one

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God. So you got it, huh? I sort of like this because the rookie used his

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Kindle, and what's even nicer is I noticed that there is Greek displaying on the screen right now.

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Yes, there it is. Unfortunately, this isn't telling me what the particular, oh, let me back up here.

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Okay, it's section 17. I'm assuming this is book one.

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It is book one, and as soon as I can find what chapter it is, then we will all know exactly where to look in the

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Institutes of the Christian Religion, which a lot of people have or have access to, might have it sitting in their library.

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If you have not read it, shame on you, because as I have said many, many times, the

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Institutes of the Christian Religion is one of the few books that I know of where, now it doesn't work on a Kindle, but in the printed edition, the ink still smudges.

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And what I mean by that is that Calvin had a capacity that I do not even pretend to possess to be able to write in such a way as to remain relevant for generations and literally hundreds of years to come in the future.

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And that, to me, is an utterly amazing thing. This isn't telling me which chapter this is, unfortunately.

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This occupies from section 21 to the end, but then it says sections. So sorry about that.

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Maybe you can track that down, but I'll let you have your Kindle back there. And I notice that you keep it on a much smaller font size than I do these days.

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You will have to change that someday. All right. Anyway, 15.

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And yet they are not three gods, but one God. So likewise, the Father is Lord, the Son, Lord, and the Holy Spirit, Lord.

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Yet they're not three lords, but one Lord. Same reasoning as in reference to God.

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For like as we are compelled by the Christian verity, Christian truth, to acknowledge every person by himself to be

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God and Lord because of his full participation in the divine nature. So we are forbidden by the

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Catholic religion to say there are three gods or three lords. The Father is made of none.

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Now here's where, now beginning with section 20, beginning with section 20, now we go to the internal relationships that distinguish the

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Father, the Son, the Spirit from one another. Not the external, not the economic trinity, but internally.

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What do I mean? The Father is made of none, neither created nor begotten.

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The Son is of, eck, the Father alone, not made nor created, but begotten.

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The Holy Spirit is of the Father and of the Son, neither made nor created nor begotten, but proceeding.

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Now, this is taking a lot longer than I expected.

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And I should have known because there's just so much background stuff here. But we'll do the best we can do, go as far as we can.

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And if we have to pick up at another point, we'll pick up at another point.

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I'm not going to just go rushing through stuff just for the sake of time. Here you have the internal characteristics that differentiate the persons.

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The Father begets, that's an active thing, it's also an eternal thing and hence is not in time, it's relationship.

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And the Father and the Son together proceed, that is, the

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Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, major conflict with the East, which denies that secondary element of that, that the

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Spirit proceeds from the Son. The Son is begotten and with the

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Father is the source of the procession of the Spirit. So one of the ways they're distinguished is the

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Father is involved in two distinct actions relationally, begetting and procession.

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The Son is involved in one action and passively the recipient of one action.

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And the Spirit passively receives two actions. These are relationship terms.

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They are not to be taken as diminishment. The Creed has already said absolutely equal with one another in glory, majesty, power, et cetera, et cetera.

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But they are differentiated from one another. And if they were not differentiated, then we could only distinguish between them by their actions and not by their relationship with one another.

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That is what is being discussed in those sections.

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So there is one Father, not three Fathers, because the Father does specific things that the other two persons do not do in the exact same way in their relationship with one another.

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One Son, not three Sons. One Holy Spirit, not three Holy Spirits. And in this

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Trinity, none is afore nor after another. None is greater or less than others.

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So the Creed is even laid out in such a way as to before make this assertion, then discuss the relationship of the persons, and then reassert this afterwards, sort of bookending, so there can be no subtle, what's called ontological subordinationism, subordinating the persons on an ontological level, saying one is lesser after something along those lines, one another.

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But the whole three persons are co -eternal and co -equal. So in all things, as afore said, the unity in Trinity, and the

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Trinity in unity, is to be worshipped. He therefore that will be saved must thus think of the

55:52

Trinity. Then you have the discussion of the Son. I'm just going to go ahead a little bit faster this because we want to get to the

55:58

Chalcedonian symbol. And I think what I'll have to do is I will have to use the

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Chalcedonian symbol sort of as the means by which I introduce each of the various errors,

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Polynarianism, Eutychianism, et cetera, as it comes up in that particular statement.

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That might be the best way to do it. And we'll just see how that goes.

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Let me see here. 28.

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Furthermore, it is necessary to everlasting salvation that he also believe rightly the incarnation of our

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Lord Jesus Christ. For the right faith is that we believe and confess our

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Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and man. God of the substance of the

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Father, that's Nicene, homoousius, begotten before the worlds that is outside of time relationship to the

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Father, made of the substance of his mother, born in the world.

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So he does not merely appear in a physical body, but he is made of the substance of his mother.

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There is a intimate, true connection to humanity in the virgin birth.

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29. A son is given, a child is born.

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He is truly born. He didn't just beam out of Mary's womb as the Gnostics had it.

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And as unfortunately, Rome today has gotten stuck with it by its odd and strange

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Gnostic tinged Marian dogmas. He was born.

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He was truly a man. And he has taken true humanity, made of the substance of his mother.

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That is in time. The incarnation takes place in time. It is not an eternal union in the sense of having always been that way.

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It took place in time, made of the substance of his mother, born in the world. 30. Perfect God and perfect man of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting.

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Well, there is the issue. Because as we get into the Chalcedonian symbol, you will see that that's where the issue is.

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Yes. There we go. But I couldn't tell which one it was. So for those who are looking for it, we knew it was book one.

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We knew it was section 17. We didn't know what chapter it was. It's 13. Book one, chapter 13, section 17,

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Eclectus has pulled that up for us. We will simply have to trust him that he got that right.

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So there you go. Excellent citation of Gregory Natsianzis if you want to read that.

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And I'm sure a decent edition of the Institutes would give you the exact reference to Natsianzis as well.

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Anyway, perfect God and perfect man of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting.

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All of the controversies, whether it was in essence saying, well, he wasn't fully man, the

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Logos took over for the spiritual aspect of the man so that he was just sort of a, well, to be honest with you, a human zombie indwelt by God.

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That's basically what Apollinarianism is. Or no, there is such a union and mixing that you sort of end up with a demigod where the two natures are no longer distinguishable.

01:00:12

And you now have sort of a third kind of thing, sort of a demigod, a mixture of God and man.

01:00:19

That's sort of like Eutychianism. No, neither is it that he was two persons to where there isn't any meaningful connection, what's called the hypostatic union between the divine human.

01:00:34

That's what history would call Nestorianism. Nestorius probably didn't believe that, but it's what history calls.

01:00:42

Nestorianism, thanks to a lot of misrepresentation and politics and stuff like that.

01:00:49

None of those things. Perfect God and perfect man of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting, equal to the father is touching his

01:00:57

Godhead and inferior to the father is touching his manhood. And why is that important to recognize?

01:01:04

Well, what did Jesus say? The father is greater than I am. But why did Jesus say the father is greater than I am?

01:01:09

Whenever you hear anybody quote John 14, 28, they don't quote the rest of the verse. They obviously don't know what it's about. Because Jesus said, if you'd love me, you'd rejoice.

01:01:16

I'm returning back to the father for the father is greater than I am. That means the father is in a greater position than the son is.

01:01:22

He's going back to the position of exaltation and the very worship of the angels that he had had before. But Jesus does humble himself.

01:01:34

He makes himself of no reputation and hence is inferior to the father as touching his manhood.

01:01:41

Who, although he is God and man, yet he is not to, that's against Nestorius, but one

01:01:48

Christ. One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, Eutychianism, but by taking of the manhood into God.

01:01:59

One altogether, not by the confusion of substance, but by the unity of person.

01:02:08

For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so God and man is one in Christ. Who suffered for our salvation, descended into hell, rose again the third day from the dead.

01:02:17

We can have a whole discussion of the descent of the hell part another time. He ascended to heaven, he sits in the right hand of God, the father almighty, father,

01:02:24

God almighty. From thence he shall come to judge living the dead, at whose coming all men shall rise again with their bodies, to give account of their works.

01:02:30

Of course, we have here is the rest of the Nicene Creed that is given to us at that time.

01:02:37

So, there is the Athanasian Creed, and over against all those people who quote parts of it, ignore its history, ignore its background,

01:02:55

I don't believe that anyone who was paying attention, and especially anybody who took the time to do some of the background reading, had any problem following what

01:03:04

I just said. Yeah, I introduced some important terms, gave a little more background information, but that is not incomprehensible.

01:03:14

That is not double speak. That does not require you to check your brain at the door.

01:03:22

It does require you to do some thinking, and to allow words to have meaning, and to not mix those words up.

01:03:31

You got to think clearly, but there is nothing that is incomprehensible at that point.

01:03:41

Now, before I look at the Council of Chalcedon, let me just get a show of hands in the chat channel.

01:03:49

Anybody in the chat channel? Completely lost. If there is something at this point that I've said that, you know, sometimes you can misspeak while speaking.

01:04:01

I've never confused where I was born while speaking, but you can say things, and if I've said something, you know, maybe mixed one word for another word that has left you confused, now is a good time to ask that question, point that out.

01:04:16

I will have to trust that the channel will be able to do that for me, and ask that question.

01:04:21

But what I'd like to do before we hit the Chalcedonian symbol, and I have two different translations.

01:04:27

I have the one that I link to, but I also have my church history notes that I used to teach church history.

01:04:34

The last time was somewhere in the early 90s. And I have a different, a slightly different translation, has some of the actual

01:04:45

Greek. Demos wants to know, what is Hadith 2425? Well, for asking a question like that in the middle of class,

01:04:55

I hereby condemn Demos to buying a Hadith 2425 t -shirt, and he must show me a picture of him wearing it.

01:05:05

That is his punishment for doing that. All right. Okay.

01:05:14

Now, let's do a little definition here. Okay, let's, this is hard to do, but let's do a little definition.

01:05:23

Let me read you a couple statements. I wanted to read you something out of JND Kelly, first of all. And this is, this is what bothers people, you know, what

01:05:33

I just did. Most folks on channel probably like that because, hey, we're walking through this, you know, we're together and all that.

01:05:41

What people don't like is this element of it. This is under the Christological Settlement, Chapter 12 of JND Kelly's Early Christian Doctrines, page 310 of my particular edition here from Prince Press, if that means anything.

01:06:00

It says, The reader should be warned, however, that at no phase in the evolution of the

01:06:06

Church's theology have the fundamental issues been so mixed up with the clash of politics and personalities.

01:06:16

For this reason, if he desires to appreciate the doctrinal evolution, he should equip himself with at least an outline account of the historical situation.

01:06:27

Why does he say that? Well, the powder keg that really ignites the controversy that leads to the

01:06:41

Council of Chalcedon in 451, and we basically have not proceeded past Chalcedon.

01:06:49

Our Christology today is, well, let's face it, if we're really honest with ourselves, the vast majority of evangelicals live and die without ever approaching

01:07:01

Chalcedon's Christology. Am I being unfair there?

01:07:08

I mean, honestly, let me ask again, the only audience that I have other than the rookie.

01:07:18

Is it an unfair statement for me to say that the vast majority of evangelicals live their lives, maybe grow up in the

01:07:28

Church, I'm talking about true believers, and they go through their experience and are never ever challenged to even step up to the level of Chalcedonian Christology in understanding what those issues are, let alone feel any need to ask more questions and to go beyond that.

01:07:58

I just, in my experience, in my traveling around and speaking in churches and talking with people, it's just not my experience that we even, you know, when we say, well, we haven't really gone beyond Chalcedon, there might be a reason for that if we don't even get back up to that level.

01:08:19

And there is something to be said about the fact it's easy for us to sit back in our modern easy chairs with our iPhones and the new iPhone today, all that stuff, there's going to be a new iPhone every six months, just get used to it.

01:08:30

I mean, hello. But it's easy for us to sit back and look at these guys and go, oh, that was just terrible they did that.

01:08:39

Someone got beat to death at a council. That's just terrible. Well, it is terrible. But at the same time, it seems to indicate they were a whole lot more passionate about this than we are.

01:08:54

A whole lot more passionate about these things than we are. And do we really have any real basis for criticizing them?

01:09:03

Just because we tend to just get bored really easily. I mean, let's face it.

01:09:11

If we end up going for two and a half hours today, that's like asking,

01:09:18

I mean, how many people are listening live right now or will listen even once we post this file and we'll actually work through all this stuff and actually did the homework.

01:09:31

If I was promising you some kind of health wealth thing here, we would crash our servers with people listening.

01:09:44

But I'm just going over where we got to almost 1600 years ago.

01:09:54

And yet rarely do we get back to that level ever again. Sorry, that little sermon does frequently sneak into even my teaching

01:10:04

Greek sometimes. I get a little passionate about these things. Okay, let's define some things here.

01:10:15

Let me begin here. And I like to give my sources.

01:10:25

So it's not just coming off the top of my head. Here is the discussion of the first person we want to define, and that is

01:10:33

Apollinarius. Apollinarius. Apollinarius was the

01:10:39

Bishop of Laodicea in Syria, a church we know of. And this is from Schaff's discussion, volume three, beginning page 709, if you have that material.

01:10:53

And here's how Schaff lays out how

01:10:58

Apollinarius got into trouble. Now, by the way, here's a guy, again, a staunch supporter of Nicene Orthodoxy.

01:11:09

But you see, now we're post -Nicene. And now the question is, how do we apply the fundamental conclusions of the

01:11:20

Nicene Council? Jesus is fully God, okay? Then what's his relationship to humanity? And Schaff says, but in his zeal for the true deity of Christ, and his fear of a double personality, he fell into the error of denying his integral humanity.

01:11:38

Adopting the psychological trichotomy he attributed to Christ, a human body and a human or animal soul, but not a human spirit or reason.

01:11:48

Putting the divine logos in the place of the human spirit. In opposition to the idea of a mere connection of the logos of the man

01:11:57

Jesus, he wished to secure an organic unity of the two, and so a true incarnation.

01:12:03

But he sought this at the expense of the most important constituent of man.

01:12:09

He reaches only a theos sarcopharos, sarcopharos, that is, a

01:12:17

God with a bearing a human body. As Nestorianism, only an anthropos theopharos.

01:12:30

That was Nestorius' phraseology, where he wanted to view, basically,

01:12:40

Mary as one who gave us the gift of God, but did not actually bear

01:12:45

God. We'll look at that one in just a moment. And instead of the proper theanthropos, which means

01:12:53

God -man, he appealed the fact that the scripture says the word was made flesh, not spirit.

01:13:00

God was manifest into flesh, etc. To which Gregory Nazianzen justly replied that in these passages, the term sarx, flesh, was used by Synecdoche for the whole human nature.

01:13:12

In this way, Apollinaris established so close a connection of logos that all the divine attributes were transferred to the human nature, and all the human attributes to the divine, and the two were mixed in one nature in Christ.

01:13:24

Hence, he could speak of a crucifixion of the logos and a worship of his flesh. He made

01:13:29

Christ a middle being between God and man, in whom, as it were, one part divine and two parts human were fused in the unity of a new nature.

01:13:40

Now, there's a lot of connection, a lot of similarity between this and Eutychius. As far as one major issue, and that is the reality or the fullness of the human nature of Christ.

01:13:58

One, I guess you could argue, and please realize, this is the later definitions of what

01:14:06

Apollinarianism is, Nestorianism. There's always arguments, well, did Apollinarius really mean that?

01:14:12

Did Nestorius really mean that? For example, a book was discovered not that many years ago by Nestorius written in a later time, more mature time in his life, that has thrown a lot of light on whether he really was or was not a heretic.

01:14:25

That's not really our discussion right now. That's interesting. You can certainly delve into those things.

01:14:32

But the question has to do with the positions of Nestorianism, Eutychianism, Apollinarianism.

01:14:41

And the primary problem with both Eutychianism, proposed by Eutychius, and Apollinarianism, goes to the reality of the human nature.

01:14:57

And whether you either have constituent elements of the human nature removed, or in some way transformed into something superhuman, superhuman, but not fully divine.

01:15:13

Sort of a third kind of being. In other words, can we affirm, and this is the

01:15:20

Orthodox middle way, can we affirm that in Jesus the

01:15:27

Messiah, you have true God and true man intimately united, united, it's called the hypostatic union, hypostasis, the face, the person.

01:15:44

There is a personal, it's a union, which is not an admixture. I struggled through chemistry in college, and I do mean struggled.

01:15:59

Too much math, and I had a professor who was way too brilliant. In other words, he knew chemistry, and just could not figure out how everybody else didn't know it just as easy as he did.

01:16:11

That was ugly. If you ever had a professor like that, it's a bad thing. You had one too, oh yeah. They'll look at you like, what?

01:16:17

I wrote the book. Just read the book again. Are you stupid? That type of thing. And in those classes, you would create mixtures.

01:16:29

Sometimes it's a little dangerous when you create those mixtures, because they could go boom. But sometimes the resultant concoction was fascinating, and dangerous, and smelly, and all sorts of fun colors, and it was sort of fun.

01:16:46

Generally a waste of time, but it was sort of fun. But it'd be like you take two colored liquids, and when you mix them together, it produces a third color.

01:16:56

That's sort of what you've got going on here. One error would be that you mix them together, and it creates a third color.

01:17:06

Now you've taken the human and the divine, and the interpenetration involves a mixture.

01:17:12

So now you have a third kind of being that's not truly God, and not truly man. But a mixture of the two.

01:17:20

That's not what we're saying. Or you have the idea of instead of mixing the two together, you take out one of the constituent elements of humanity, and replace that with the logos.

01:17:38

So that you don't really have the God man. You have a man who you sort of have the external shell of a man, a body without the inner reality that's taken over by God.

01:18:01

So you can't say he really has two natures. Then the big thing that began the whole explosion is

01:18:12

Nestorius. And Nestorius is an interesting, interesting fellow.

01:18:21

I'll tell you a little about him, and then we'll take about a 10 -minute break, allow you to stand up and stretch, do what you need to do, and get some coffee or whatever.

01:18:32

And not that I will do that, but I think I'll grab a Propel Zero or something like that and get myself going here.

01:18:43

Nestorius cannot be understood outside of his conflicts with Cyril, cannot be understood outside of the conflict between Antioch and Alexandria.

01:18:49

And we just don't have time to get into all of that. Let me just summarize it by saying that there was an

01:18:54

Antioch school of Christology and an Alexandrian school of Christology, and much of this goes to the conflict between the two.

01:19:04

And if you read some of the sources that I've recommended to you, you'll see it's very complex. But Nestorius heard a particular phrase coming into popular usage, and he objected to it.

01:19:25

He objected to the term Theotokos, Theotokos, God -bearer, the identification of Mary as the

01:19:40

God -bearer, or as it has come into modern use, the mother of God.

01:19:48

Now, most Protestants respond very strongly against Theotokos.

01:19:59

When we come back from the break, I'll explain both my agreement with Nestorius in his concerns about possible abuses, but also my disagreement in that Theotokos is not only an appropriate, but a proper theological term in the proper context.

01:20:21

But we're going to take a break, and we'll be back in about 10 minutes to continue our study of Christology here on The Dividing Line.

01:24:48

Save that Thou art, Thou my best thought,

01:24:55

By day or by night, Waking or sleeping,

01:25:02

Thy presence my light. Be Thou my wisdom,

01:25:22

And Thou my true word, I ever with Thee, And Thou with me,

01:25:32

Lord, Thou my great Father, And I Thy true

01:25:39

Son, Thou in me dwelling, And I with Thee, one and all.

01:26:15

Which is I, He not, Nor man's empty praise,

01:26:22

Thou mine inheritance, Now and always,

01:26:30

Thou and Thou only, First in my heart,

01:26:38

High King of heaven, My treasure Thou art.

01:27:09

King of heaven, my victory won,

01:27:19

May I reach heaven's joys, So bright and sun,

01:27:26

Heart of my own heart, Whatever may fall,

01:27:36

Still be my vision, O ruler of all.

01:28:16

A song of thanksgiving to God the creator,

01:28:22

Triumphant He raised, Who fashioned and made us,

01:28:28

Protected and stayed us, Who guided us unto

01:28:33

The end of our days. His banners are o 'er us,

01:28:40

His light goes before us, A pillar of fire shining forth

01:28:46

In the night, Till shadows have vanished, And darkness is banished,

01:28:55

As forward we travel, From light into light.

01:29:13

And all He imposes, The stars in their poses,

01:29:19

The sun in His orbit, Obediently shine,

01:29:24

The hills and the mountains, The rivers and mountains,

01:29:31

The deeps of the ocean, Proclaim Him divine.

01:29:37

We too should be voicing, Our love and rejoicing,

01:29:43

With glad adoration, A song let us raise,

01:29:48

Till all things now living, Unite in thanksgiving,

01:29:55

To God in the highest, Hosanna and praise.

01:30:25

We too should be voicing, Our love and rejoicing,

01:30:31

With glad adoration, A song let us raise,

01:30:36

Till all things now living, Unite in thanksgiving,

01:30:43

To God in the highest, Hosanna and praise.

01:30:49

Back to our study of Christology on the dividing line today.

01:31:30

I will open up the phone lines. Once again, if you have a question, it really needs to be on the subject, obviously, and you will have to convince our call screener that it is on the subject, and you will need to give him a sufficient summary that he can type it up for me, and then

01:31:49

I can make a decision as to whether it will be something that we will attempt to tackle. But right as we took our break, we had gotten into the subject of Nestorius, and I suppose it would be good to bring in an expert testimony here.

01:32:09

Let me turn to J. N. D. Kelly to sort of lay out the issues here.

01:32:16

He's normally considered to be pretty fair in his perspective. Nestorius became

01:32:24

Patriarch of Constantinople 10 April 428. So we're talking 103 years after Nicaea, and 40 some odd years after Constantinople.

01:32:41

He was an Antiochian in Christology, deeply influenced by the ideas of Theodore of Mopsusidae, and it was his maladroit, crudely expressed exposition of the implications of the

01:32:57

Antiochian position that set the spark to the controversy. Quite early in his reign, it would appear, he was called upon to pronounce on the suitability of Theotokos, God -bearing, as a title of the

01:33:10

Blessed Virgin, and ruled that it was of doubtful propriety unless Anthropotokos, man -bearing, was added to balance it.

01:33:21

In any case, he held Christotokos, Christ -bearing, as preferable as begging no questions.

01:33:31

The disputed title, we recall, was widely accepted in the Alexandrian school. It followed from the communicatio idiomatum and expressed the truth that since his person was constituted by the word, the incarnate was appropriately designated

01:33:44

God. Even Antiochian theologians like Theodore had admitted it with the same qualifications as Nestorius prescribed.

01:33:52

But in delivering himself on the subject, Nestorius used intemperate language, which was calculated to inflame people whose approach differed from his own.

01:34:02

God cannot have a mother, he argued, and no creature could have engendered the Godhead. Mary bore a man, the vehicle of divinity, but not

01:34:09

God. The Godhead cannot have been carried for nine months in a woman's womb, or have been wrapped in baby clothes, or have suffered, died, and been buried.

01:34:19

Behind the description of Mary as Theotokos, he professed to detect the

01:34:24

Arian tenet that the son was a creature, or the Apollinarian idea that the manhood was incomplete.

01:34:31

Well, immediately, Cyril of Alexandria, and Alexandria and Antioch were, well, let's just say there was a constant struggle between the two when it came to, well, mundane things and big things.

01:34:58

Basically, Antioch saw Alexandria as a rival, and Alexandria saw

01:35:04

Antioch as a rival, and hence there were conflicts. When disputes would be brought to one or the other, the other would frequently take the other side.

01:35:17

Now, obviously, that is not the best context for balanced and meaningful discussion of theological issues.

01:35:25

And so, Cyril's response to Nestorius was not a balanced response.

01:35:33

And, in fact, as Kelly put it, Cyril, who claimed to see in them a revival of the theory, rejected the fourth century of two sons linked by a purely moral union.

01:35:49

He began promoting this, and it says, on the basis of these judgments, the traditional picture of Nestorianism as the heresy, which split the god -man into two distinct persons, rapidly formed itself.

01:36:04

Nestorius himself indignantly repudiated this account of his teaching, and in recent times the whole question what, in fact, it amounted to has been opened up afresh.

01:36:14

The discovery early this century of the book of Heraclides, a prolix apologia which he wrote some 20 years after the main controversy in which he avowed himself satisfied with the

01:36:24

Christology of Leo, canonized to Chalcedon, has seemed to make a reassessment necessary.

01:36:30

In other words, we're not really sure exactly what Nestorius believed, but Nestorianism in historical terminology refers to the idea that by denying that Mary is the

01:36:51

Theotokos, that she truly bore the god -man, but only bore a man, the result is you have in Jesus two natures and two persons.

01:37:13

The union, not the admixture, but the vitally important real union in one person is denied.

01:37:24

Now whether Nestorius went there, it certainly sounded like it when he said, well, you know, God can't suffer and die and stuff like that.

01:37:32

Whether he, you know, backed off of that or whether that was spoken in haste, that's not really for us to decide at this particular point in time.

01:37:42

But Nestorianism tells us that Jesus is in essence two persons.

01:37:53

That's why when we listened to Matt Slick debating with Roger Perkins, Matt Slick kept arguing that the oneness position inevitably leads to the error of Nestorianism.

01:38:07

And certainly in oneness theology, if you have the divine side and the human side and there's intercommunication and the one's praying to the other and referring to the other in the third person and everything else, clearly that does fall into at least the category of Christological error that Nestorianism represented.

01:38:30

Now, unlike Eutychianism and Apollinarianism, there are Nestorians to this day. And they will have their own particular takes on Nestorius and what happened at Chalcedon and all the rest of that stuff, which again,

01:38:48

I'm not going to be getting into, don't have any real interest in getting into. But because that has continued on to this day, then you have even further developments after that time.

01:39:04

You have the monophysite controversy and all the rest of the stuff that's come with it. They call us duophysites and we call them monophysites.

01:39:11

And this division continues to this day with a fairly small group of number of people, but still represented by Assyrian churches of the east and things like that.

01:39:24

And they would continue to be called Nestorian or monophysite to this day. I'm sorry, looking at the questions that have been sent in.

01:39:47

Not really sure they're directly on Christology. One is wondering if the term son of God has an implicitly divine reference.

01:39:54

I think you're saying Ehrman as in Bart Ehrman claims that isn't necessarily the case.

01:40:00

Well, Bart Ehrman is not a theologian, has never been trained as a theologian and really should stay out of theological areas, even though he makes lots of theological claims.

01:40:10

But the point is, son of God used where?

01:40:18

In John 19? John 9? Mark 1? Depends. I mean, just as with the

01:40:25

Muslims, there are places, you know, sons by the tons. You can find sons of God that doesn't necessarily have a divine claim to it.

01:40:34

But when the unique son of God, the monogamistos, the unique character of that sonship is emphasized in John, yeah, that clearly does carry a divine reference.

01:40:47

And the other question is, does the Holy Spirit factor in when Jesus said, no one knows except the

01:40:53

Father in reference to his second coming? I guess the question would be, does the Spirit know?

01:40:58

And since the Spirit searches the deep things of God, I'm really not going to get into that right now.

01:41:04

That's not really relevant to where we are right now. But I think when

01:41:10

Jesus, when you look at the parallel passages, his emphasis is upon the fact that it is within the

01:41:18

Father's authority to establish that time. And I think when Jesus says, nor the

01:41:23

Son, I think what he's emphasizing there is the Son's voluntary submission, not only to the

01:41:29

Father, but to the role of being dependent upon the Spirit, and that the

01:41:36

Spirit is not going to be giving a revelation of that. So I would say the Spirit does know, and that's not meant to be a

01:41:44

Trinitarian discussion. The point is that it's within the Father's purview only. He's the one who said that.

01:41:50

And the Son, not knowing that, it's not a matter of necessarily veiling of deity.

01:41:56

It is the reliance of the Son upon the Spirit in supernatural matters, and that that was not something that the

01:42:05

Spirit was going to reveal to anyone, including the poor fellow over in California, who probably still thinks that we only have 17 days left till the end of the universe.

01:42:18

That didn't work out too well either. All right, we need to get to the Chalcedonian symbol here.

01:42:23

So that's the most we're going to do on those. The Chalcedonian symbol, we need to work through it and see what it is saying.

01:42:32

So I'm going to use one of my notes. You can use the one on the online. They say pretty much the same thing.

01:42:37

Here we go. Following the Holy Fathers, we unanimously teach one and the same

01:42:44

Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, complete... No, wait a minute. Wait a minute. I'm sorry.

01:42:51

Got to back up just one second before we do this. Where did

01:42:57

I put... Yeah, here it is. Chalcedon is 451.

01:43:08

This controversy had been brewing for quite some time.

01:43:16

And even when a council was called in Ephesus...

01:43:25

Well, let me just read you what Schaff says. I think it's important that we note the historical context before we look at the words.

01:43:33

All right. So I'm going to go to Schaff, volume three, page 738, if you wish to follow along.

01:43:45

The Synod met at Ephesus in August 449. This is called the Robber's Council and consisted of 135 bishops.

01:43:55

It occupies a notorious place in the... He uses, for some reason, it looks like a

01:44:02

French phrase, chronique scandalous of church history, the chronicles of scandals of church history.

01:44:10

Dioscorus presided with brutal violence, protected by monks and an armed soldiery, while Flavian and his friends hardly dared open their lips and Theodorette was entirely excluded.

01:44:26

When an explanation from Eusebius of Dorlaeum, who had been the accuser of Eutyches at the

01:44:32

Council of Constantinople, was presented, many voices exclaimed, let Eusebius be burnt, let him be burnt alive, as he has cut

01:44:40

Christ in two, so let him be cut in two. The council affirmed the orthodoxy and sanctity of Eutyches, who defended himself in person, adopted the twelve anathemas of Cyril, condemned diophysitism as a and deposed and excommunicated its advocates, including

01:44:59

Theodorette, Flavian, and Leo, who was the bishop of Rome. The three

01:45:04

Roman delegates dared not even read before the council the epistle addressed to it by Leo and departed secretly, that they might not be compelled to subscribe to its decisions.

01:45:17

Flavian was so grossly maltreated by furious monks that he died of his wounds a few days later, in banishment, having first appealed to a new council.

01:45:29

In his stead, the deacon Anatolius, a friend and agent of Dioscorus, was chosen patriarch of Constantinople.

01:45:36

He, however, afterwards went over to the orthodox party and effaced the infamy of his elevation by his exquisite

01:45:42

Greek hymns. Now, Neander noted justly, according to Schaff, in calling this council the council of robbers, he says, nothing could be more contradictory to the spirit of the gospel than the fanatical zeal of the dominant party in this council for dogmatical formulas, in which they fancied they had

01:46:09

Christ, who is spirit and life, although in temper and act, they denied him.

01:46:15

Dioscorus, for example, dismissed a charge of unchastity and other vices against the bishop with the remark, if you have an accusation against his orthodoxy, we will receive it, but we have not come together to pass judgment concerning unchastity.

01:46:28

Thus, fanatical zeal for doctrinal formulas outweighed all interests of morality as if, as theodoretic remarks,

01:46:34

Christ had merely prescribed a system of doctrine and had not also given rules of life.

01:46:40

But then, we move over to Chalcedon, and this is 451.

01:46:49

So, there is a two years later, this takes place.

01:46:57

And interestingly enough, it originally met, to restore the peace of the empire, the new monarch in May 451, in his own name and that of his western colleague, convoked a general council, not, however, to meet in Italy, but at Nicaea, partly that he might better control it, partly that he might add to its authority by the memories of the first ecumenical council.

01:47:18

So, initially, was to be convened at Nicaea, and that's where the bishops assembled,

01:47:26

September 451. But, I go on with my quote, on account of their turbulent conduct, were soon summoned to Chalcedon, opposite Constantinople, that the imperial court and senate might attend in person and repress, as far as possible, the violent outbreaks of religious fanaticism of the two parties.

01:47:46

So, even though they first met at Nicaea, they had to move to Chalcedon, in hopes of calming the place down.

01:47:57

The number of bishops at it far exceeded all of the councils of the ancient church, five or six hundred.

01:48:05

And as he says on 743, the proceedings were from the outset very tumultuous. And the theological fanaticism of the two parties broke out at times in full blaze, till the laymen present were compelled to remind the bishops of their clerical dignity.

01:48:20

When Theodorus Cyrus was introduced, the orientals greeted him with enthusiasm, while the Egyptians cried, cast out the

01:48:27

Jew, the enemy of God, the blasphemer of Christ. And others retorted with equal passion, cast out the murderer

01:48:34

Dioscorus, who is there that knows not his crimes. The feeling against Nestorius was so strong that Theodoric could only quiet the council by resolving in the eighth session to utter the anathema against his old friend, and against all who did not call

01:48:48

Mary mother of God, and who divide the one Christ into two sons. But the abhorrence of Eutyches and the council of robbers was still stronger and was favored by the court.

01:48:58

Under these influences, most of the Egyptians soon went over to the left and confessed their error, some excusing themselves by the violent measures brought to bear upon them at the robber synods.

01:49:07

So the point is, it was a pretty intense place to be.

01:49:14

And this again leads us to the recognition of the troubling nature of many of these encounters.

01:49:30

But at the same time, I sort of feel the same way reading sections of the book of Judges.

01:49:40

You know, is it really all that impossible to think that God can still accomplish his means, and still accomplish his ends, still protect his truth, that truth can even be said in the midst of stuff like this?

01:49:58

Well, David was a man after God's own heart, yet he killed Uriah. And Paul says the church at Corinth is truly one of Christ's churches, yet man, they had problems.

01:50:12

And I look around today, and man, what calls itself

01:50:19

Christianity is a mess, and yet God's still working and God's still accomplishing.

01:50:26

So I think it is important, we dare not have some type of pie in the sky, absurd, fluffy, light view of the quote -unquote ecumenical councils.

01:50:42

I mean, of all of them, at least Nicaea was inhabited by men who had been willing to die for their faith only a few years beforehand.

01:50:53

And while there were discussions, and there were parties, and Eusebius tried to come up with compromises and stuff like that, still, nothing there that can even begin to come close to what takes place at the robber synod, and at Chalcedon, and the yelling out, and the politics, and all the rest of that stuff.

01:51:20

So when people try to, you know, people look at me and they go, man, you sola scriptura guys, why are you even reading

01:51:29

Chalcedon? You can't have any interest in Chalcedon. Oh, yes, I can. I recognize that Christ is building his church.

01:51:37

I recognize that I stand on the shoulders of giants. I just don't invest in them an authority equal to, or functionally greater than, the scriptures themselves.

01:51:50

And I recognize a fundamental difference in nature of the authority of that which is theanustas over against that which is theanustas over against Chalcedon.

01:51:59

But that's another issue as well. Now, with that, let's take a look at the actual wording of the

01:52:11

Council of Chalcedon. Following the Holy Fathers, we unanimously teach one the same

01:52:18

Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, complete as to his Godhead, I see him, complete as to his manhood, truly

01:52:30

God and truly man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting, which we saw in the

01:52:37

Athanasian, consubstantial with the Father as to his Godhead, Nicaea, and consubstantial also with us as to his manhood.

01:52:50

Ah, there is the first really important statement, a really important statement beyond what has already been said at Nicaea and Constantinople and the

01:53:03

Athanasian Creed and things like that. Don't get me wrong there, but you could really take that out of context.

01:53:09

So you have an assertion of the homoousius nature of the

01:53:17

Son with the Father as to his full deity. Then you have the very important, and we need to understand it, and if you ever want to do some reading on this, like I said, the

01:53:29

Christological Controversy by Norris, you'll get the same thing, similar things in Bettinson's documents of the

01:53:34

Christian Church. The primary concern leading up to Chalcedon in men like the

01:53:43

Gregories and Basil and so on and so forth is if Jesus is not truly man, if we somehow compromise there, if we somehow allow the removal of a constituent element of mankind, if we allow an admixture so that he's sort of a superman, but he's not really man, the very act of redemption itself will be compromised.

01:54:13

For them, this was a gospel issue. This wasn't just some, you know, thing that theologians sit around over coffee and argue about.

01:54:24

This really went to how real is the Incarnation, how real is the cross, how real is the gospel, how real is redemption itself.

01:54:35

Just need to understand that's where they're coming from. So this, with the

01:54:40

Father, consubstantial the Father is to his Godhead and consubstantial also with us as to his manhood, like unto us in all things yet without sin, biblical terminology, as to his

01:54:54

Godhead, begotten of the Father before all worlds, eternal relationship reality, but as to his manhood in these last days, born for us men and for our salvation.

01:55:09

So again, the Incarnation takes place in time. It's not been an eternal thing.

01:55:16

The word became flesh, just following John's own differentiation of agenita and the imperfect form of imi in the prologue of John at that point.

01:55:29

In these last days, born for us men and for our salvation of the Virgin Mary, the

01:55:35

Theotokos. So there is the term, and I was going to explain when we came back from the break and dived into it too fast.

01:55:48

I fully understand Nestorius' concerns for the abuse of this term.

01:55:55

How could he have possibly known the abuse of Theotokos in Romanism today?

01:56:04

No one could have. No one could. I was listening to a fellow lecturing in Church History just this past week, and I was a little surprised because he actually made it appear to his class that doctrines such as the bodily assumption of Mary and the

01:56:27

Immaculate Conception were a part of the context that would have been present at Calcine.

01:56:33

They weren't. Even at that point, those dogmas certainly had not been defined and were not a part of the context at all.

01:56:43

So even though Mary had already been greatly exalted beyond her biblical position, even at this point in Church history, still wasn't anywhere near what

01:56:50

Rome has gotten to since then. And so I fully understand that the term becomes an error when it becomes a title of Mary in her person rather than a title of Mary in her function as the chosen instrument of God so that it is a description of who

01:57:21

Jesus is rather than a description of who

01:57:27

Mary is. You see, the only, the truth of Theotokos is that Jesus is truly

01:57:39

God and that he was truly born of Mary.

01:57:46

Anything beyond that is utter falsehood. Anything that exalts

01:57:51

Mary and makes her the object of prayer as a result of this is utter falsehood.

01:58:01

Now, does that mean that we should abhor the term? No, we must contextualize the term because you see, it's just as much of an error to say that one that was born of Mary was not truly

01:58:15

God. I mean, we have to follow the same balance that I see in Isaiah 9 and in the

01:58:21

New Testament. Child is born. Yell it.

01:58:28

Eulod. It is a real birth. A son is given.

01:58:36

And there was a vital, proper, balanced union. This isn't just a little boy who becomes indwelt by God.

01:58:47

There's something much more to the incarnation than that. So, as far as Theotokos accurately represents that, then it must be affirmed.

01:59:00

Once it's taken beyond that and applied to Mary in any other way, in any other concept, then it becomes a falsehood.

01:59:10

And I just don't think Nestorius could possibly have seen what it would be, the gross caricature that it has developed into today in Roman Catholicism.

01:59:23

It's just incredible. So, back to the words. Of the

01:59:29

Virgin Mary, and yeah, notice in the online version it said, the God -bearer,

01:59:36

Theotokos, Mother of God. One and the same Messiah, Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, known in or of two natures.

01:59:56

Duo fusasin. Two natures. Without confusion, without conversion, without severance, and without division.

02:00:14

So, without confusion, we can properly speak of the divine and the human in Christ.

02:00:28

And we can differentiate them because they're not confused. Without conversion, the deity isn't changed to something less than deity.

02:00:41

The humanity is not changed to something more than humanity. Both of these would be against Eutychies, against Eutychianism.

02:00:50

All right? Then, the last two, without severance and without division, against, let's do the properly historical thing here,

02:01:02

Nestorianism. Especially since more modern research has demonstrated that Nestorius, Nestorius felt that Chalcedon actually affirmed him.

02:01:17

He didn't have any problem with what it said. So, we'll stay against Nestorianism and the concept of severing or dividing the two natures into one person.

02:01:36

Okay? So, there's the vitally important section. Known in two natures, without confusion, without conversion, without severance, and without division.

02:01:49

The distinction of the natures being in no wise abolished by their union, but the peculiarity of each nature being maintained and both concurring in one person and hypostasis.

02:02:05

Mion, hypostasin. There is the hypostatic union. One person, one hypostasis.

02:02:15

We confess not a son divided and sundered into two persons, but one and the same son, and only begotten, and God the

02:02:26

Word, our Lord Jesus Christ, even as the prophets had before proclaimed concerning him, and he himself taught us, and the symbol of the fathers has handed down to us.

02:02:40

Now, the result of this was one of the most important, and again, we must be open and honest with history itself.

02:03:01

There have been men who have sat upon the chair in Rome who were not worthy of that office and who did not have a theological bone in their body, but there have been others who were important and influential theologians, and one of them was called

02:03:24

Leo the Great, and Leo had written what's called the Tome, which, as we mentioned briefly before, was not even read at the

02:03:33

Robert Council, but it was read at Chalcedon. Now, again, there's a huge backstory to all of this.

02:03:46

Most of the bishops at Chalcedon are from the East, and the

02:03:52

Roman representatives pretty much represent all the West. Once again, this goes back to the fundamental division between East and West, the

02:04:00

Greek and Latin speaking parts of the Church at this time, that would eventually lead to the rupture of those two perspectives, a growing strain, and then eventually a rupture in 1054.

02:04:13

So, you know, 600 years later, kablooey, but think about 600 years.

02:04:18

That's a long time. That's a long time, and Leo laid these things out, and it's a little surprising.

02:04:37

Sure, the Robert Council had something to do with it and how badly it had been handled, but it's a little surprising that Chalcedon comes down so clearly where it does.

02:04:48

Because Nestorius was like, hey, I mean, someone who's into really a

02:04:54

Logos Christology Alexandrian guy doesn't really like that statement very much.

02:05:03

And just as with Nicaea, as I've mentioned, while Chalcedon takes us certainly in the

02:05:11

West to really our current state in Christology, as I mentioned, there are churches that continue to exist in the

02:05:21

East that are monophysites. There is only one nature.

02:05:30

Now, whether they do that in a Eutychian or Apollinarian way, you know, whether any of them even think too much of that anymore,

02:05:41

I don't know, because I'll confess I've never had a conversation with a monophysite to any depth or any specificity, so I can't tell you.

02:05:52

But they're out there, and here in the United States as well.

02:06:00

So Chalcedon comes down with a statement that refutes the

02:06:09

Eutychians, refutes the Nestorians, and establishes a standard.

02:06:18

The question then is, why would we consider that to be binding upon us?

02:06:27

Well, why would we consider Nicaea? Now, keep something in mind, please.

02:06:34

It's an unfortunate reality that I will hear Protestants very frequently making comments and statements.

02:06:42

Oh yes, I follow all the first seven ecumenical councils. Really? What they normally mean by that is that the dogmatic statements like this, the symbol of Chalcedon or the

02:06:58

Creed of Nicaea, that they accept the fundamental assertions of those, does not mean they actually follow those councils, because that's not the only thing the councils did.

02:07:09

The councils always had canons and decrees that went along with it, and I can guarantee you they don't follow those at all.

02:07:16

But most of them have never even read them, so we can give them a pass on that.

02:07:26

But why do I affirm that Jesus Christ was one person with two natures?

02:07:38

Is it because of Chalcedon? Is it because of Nicaea? Well, I first recognize the influence of both of those upon my religious and spiritual heritage.

02:07:52

I would be foolish to think that I am a tabula rasa, that I am a clean slate, and I just sort of walked onto the scene and had the ability to, you know, just put all this stuff off to the side, and I just came to all my conclusions on my own.

02:08:11

That's dumb. And if you think that you've done that, then I would just say you don't know your own heart very well.

02:08:20

For many years I have had to think and consider and seek to be consistent in my views of authority in defending

02:08:33

Sola Scriptura and teaching church history, studying church history, reading early church fathers, being constantly driven into dealing with these issues by people resurrecting old heresies or whatever else it might be.

02:08:51

And yet, I continue to affirm very firmly what

02:09:00

Chalcedon said. I am convinced that the conclusion that they came to, despite all the politics and the emotions and the striving for supremacy by Alexandria versus Antioch versus Constantinople versus Rome versus blah blah blah blah, that in the midst of all of that, what

02:09:31

I just read to you is true because it represents what the scriptures teach, not in a simplistic way, but on a very deep level.

02:09:49

There are so many texts that when you read them in the light of that definition make perfect sense.

02:09:59

The one that strikes me the most heavily as being the most relevant is

02:10:06

Paul's statement of the Corinthians, where speaking of the crucifixion of Jesus, he speaks of the fact that if the rulers this age had known who

02:10:17

Jesus really was, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. They would not have crucified the

02:10:25

Lord of glory, which of course could be translated the glorious Lord. Now, I don't have any doubt of what

02:10:34

Paul meant by that, what glorious Lord would mean to Paul. The kurios for Paul, not only clearly

02:10:44

Jesus, but given his background, his Jewish background, the Greek Septuagint, a high term here, a term of deity, no question, and yet they crucified him?

02:11:01

How can you crucify the Lord of glory unless the

02:11:06

Lord of glory had truly become incarnate? Unless you have one person with two natures and the union is such that, well, it's not a mixture, it doesn't involve a change, it's not confusion.

02:11:23

All those terms that were laid out to guide us through that discussion are true, they're necessary, they need to be there or there's so much in divine revelation that becomes silent.

02:11:44

The authority of creedal statements flows from their ability to allow us to hear all of the divine word and the errors in Christology silence major portions of God's revelation in scripture.

02:12:10

That's what makes them authoritative. I hope you understand what

02:12:16

I'm saying by that because if you embrace the errors, think of one, let's back up to one that's really obvious for all of us.

02:12:28

If you think of the

02:12:33

Arian Christ, I'm not talking about the modern Arianism, I'm talking about the

02:12:40

Christ of Arius. If you think of a son who at some point in time was not and came into being, entire sections of biblical revelation no longer make sense, they're silenced.

02:13:01

The pre -existence passages, the deity passages, the creatorship passages, Colossians chapter one, they're muted, they're silenced because you have gone beyond the bounds, you have gone outside the realm of the parameters established by scriptural revelation itself.

02:13:27

And so I would submit that I can be perfectly consistent in embracing the

02:13:38

Chalcedonian symbol, the Athanasian creed, the Nicene creed, without in any way shape or form compromising my firm stance in defense of solo scriptura because to embrace those things is to simply say that God has spoken with sufficient clarity in his word to give us the guidelines we need to have.

02:14:07

Now, yes, most of these definitions are saying, well, it's not this, it's not confusion, it's not division.

02:14:26

Chalcedon does not tell us how the hypostatic union works. And I've met people who are so arrogant as creatures that they'd be willing to say,

02:14:39

I'm not going to believe it unless I know exactly how it works. Well, let me tell you something, once again, we're talking about something that's absolutely unique.

02:14:50

And just as the scriptures do not pander to our desire to know everything about what it was like to have a six -year -old who's

02:14:58

God incarnate, you know, that's what the Gnostic Gospels got into and came up with the wild and wacky ideas that, well, a six -year -old who's

02:15:10

God incarnate would strike his play friends dead when they broke the rules of the game. The scriptures, oh, you didn't know that?

02:15:17

Oh, yeah. The Gnostic Gospels, oh, yeah. And Jesus would keep knocking his, you know, once if his play, the people he's playing with break the rules of the game, he'd just strike them dead.

02:15:29

So much so that the parents of the village came to Joseph and asked him to leave because they were losing all their kids.

02:15:36

And, yeah, I just think people should read the

02:15:41

Gnostic Gospels and the Gnostic Gospels will be buried back into the ground from which they have been dug out over the past 60 years.

02:15:49

Yeah, my arm is withered. Yeah, that happened too. Anyway, there is this desire on the part of individuals and groups to dig into things that God has not revealed to us.

02:16:08

And I love how the scriptures just give us a few little glimpses but do not even begin to even try to answer the questions that we in our impudence, and I do think it is impudence, demand answers to.

02:16:23

In the same way, don't you think eternity itself will be long enough for us to ponder the beauty of the hypostatic union?

02:16:34

Because in case you have imbibed a bad heresy, Jesus is still the

02:16:40

God -man. He didn't just unzip a man suit and leave it off someplace at the resurrection, okay?

02:16:49

He's still the God -man. And that's important in regards to our union with him, his role as intercessor, all that stuff, very, very important.

02:17:03

So I think maybe that might be one of the things that we are observing, pondering, praising, worshiping in eternity to come.

02:17:13

I don't know. But yes, these symbols do primarily give negative definitions.

02:17:23

It's not this rather than trying to, in human language, express what it is in a positive sense.

02:17:32

But that's because they are attempting to protect the sanctity of divine revelation.

02:17:39

The scriptures tell us these things. If we violate this, if we deny this, then we are in essence denying divine revelation itself.

02:17:53

So what have we learned? Let's recap and hopefully wrap things up.

02:18:03

We started with the Council of Nicaea. We could have started much earlier. We could have talked about origin and his implicit subordinationism.

02:18:10

We could have talked about all sorts of things. But we started with Nicaea.

02:18:16

We talked about the assertion of the full deity of Christ. And then once that has happened, the immediate question comes up, what's the relationship?

02:18:26

Now that we affirm that Jesus is truly consubstantial with the Father, what then does it mean that he became flesh?

02:18:35

What is the relationship between the divine and human and Christ? And that led to differing answers.

02:18:43

And most of the time, those who ended up giving answers that became condemned did so because they were out of balance, seeking to protect something true, but losing their balance in the process.

02:19:03

Nestorianism, we'll leave Nestorius out here for the moment. Nestorianism, concerned about losing the reality of the humanity in Christ.

02:19:19

Eutychianism, Apollinarianism, have different concerns, but there is an imbalance.

02:19:31

And yes, even in the midst of, well, politics and egos and armed monks, which is a frightening idea.

02:19:47

They'll be pretty easy to carry concealed if you're a monk. I mean, you could, you can carry a lot.

02:19:52

Yeah, you can carry a lot in there. But of course, they had to basically carry swords and clubs, which is a little bit harder to conceal.

02:19:59

But even in the midst of all that, we can acknowledge that those things took place.

02:20:05

I think one of the reasons that liberals in universities snipe off so many of our young people is we don't talk about these things.

02:20:18

We don't train them. And they go out there, and now in the context of unbelief, in the context of people attacking their faith, they have all this stuff about, well, don't you realize what you believe about the

02:20:29

Trinity was hammered out by these kinds of folks? And then you, man, you can collect all sorts of real wild stories and things like that.

02:20:36

And because we don't talk about this stuff, they're like, wow, mom, dad, you don't know. And they do come back and they say to mom and dad, did you know about this?

02:20:43

Mom, dad go, no. And that's why we need to talk about these things.

02:20:49

That's why we need to understand. So hopefully the next time someone says to you, why do you believe in the hypostatic union?

02:21:02

You will not start sweating profusely. Your eyelids will not start flopping up and down.

02:21:09

You will not start shaking, but you will know what the hypostatic union is. And you'll be able to say something along the lines of, well, because the

02:21:20

Bible tells us that Jesus is truly deity, and yet he truly became man. The word became flesh.

02:21:27

And the resultant person could be described as the Lord of glory who was crucified.

02:21:33

And so the best explanation of the biblical evidence, the consistent explanation, the harmonious explanation of the biblical evidence is that Jesus is one person with two natures.

02:21:52

And that those natures are not confounded. They are not mixed.

02:21:58

They're not changed. They're not confused. They're not split apart, split asunder, but they are united uniquely in that one person.

02:22:10

And because of that unique reality, he is able to be a perfect savior because he's the

02:22:19

God man, perfect high priest without sin. It's all related.

02:22:27

It's all one divine truth. And I'm awful glad we still have the right to sit here and to talk about these things.

02:22:35

And you have the right to sit there and listen. And I really hope, be blessed, edified, somewhat educated.

02:22:47

We've been on the air now with a break for two hours and 12 minutes.

02:22:53

We'll take the 10 minutes off. But hopefully we have covered enough ground to give you a good foundation to understand what the issues are and to understand the interrelated nature of Christian truth.

02:23:11

And so thank you very much for listening today. Lord willing, we'll be back

02:23:17

Thursday at our regular time or maybe half an hour early. I don't know.

02:23:22

We're going to get back to the Perkins debate and the Abdullah Kunda debate because that'll be about the last time we get to do it.

02:23:28

We'll probably do a program on Monday of next week because Tuesday next week is a very, very, very long day for me.

02:23:41

Actually, it's the Monday following that. That's a very, very long day. It's a 36 hour day.

02:23:46

Yeah. So actually Tuesday is going to be, actually next Wednesday is just going to disappear for me because I leap forward 17 hours.

02:23:55

So it'll only be a seven hour day, but it's the 24th when I come back that I'll have like a 36 hour day or some absurdity like that.

02:24:03

It's weird. It's I, I get home about half an hour after I leave from Sydney. It's great.

02:24:09

So anyways, Oh, is this, this going here? Oh yeah. We're done. Aren't we? Hey, we'll see you on Thursday.

02:24:15

God bless. The dividing line has been brought to you by Alpha and Omega ministries.

02:24:52

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02:24:58

Box 37106, Phoenix, Arizona, 85069. You can also find us on the worldwide web at AOMIN .org.

02:25:05

That's A -O -M -I -N .org where you'll find a complete listing of James White's books, tapes, debates, and tracks.