The
upcoming Sunday is Whitsunday which is the Christian Pentecost that looks back
on the day the Holy Ghost came down upon the Apostles as they were waiting in
the Upper Room following the Ascension.
It is the successor in the Christian Kalendar to Shavuot or the Festival
of Weeks, the Jewish Pentecost, which is often thought of as looking back to
the giving of the Law. While it is not
explicitly stated that this is the reason for the Festival in the Old Testament
the timing is right. Shavuot falls fifty
days after the Jewish Passover, hence it's having been called Pentecost in the
Greek-speaking ancient world.
Whitsunday falls fifty days after the Christian Passover, Easter,
commemorating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Forty days after the Resurrection came the Ascension and then ten days
after the Ascension, fifty after the Resurrection, the Holy Ghost came upon the
Apostles.
Whitsunday
is one of the days appointed in the Book
of Common Prayer for the Athanasian Creed to be recited instead of the
Apostles’ Creed in Morning Prayer or Matins as is the Sunday after Whitsunday
known as Trinity Sunday. This rubric,
along with the one that says that Morning and Evening Prayer should be
available in every parish on a daily basis, are ones the Church ought to take
more seriously. It would be a great
corrective to the doctrinal decay of the present day.
The
Athanasian Creed, or more properly, since it is not in the form of a Credo, an
“I believe” confession of faith but is rather in the form of a Quincunque Vult declaration of what must
be believed by “whosoever will be saved”, the Athanasian Symbol is the longest
of the three ancient Symbols. Whereas
the Apostles’ and Nicene-Creeds follow a Trinitarian structure – three sections,
the first about the Father, the second and largest about the Son, and the third
about the Holy Ghost and His earthly ministry through the Church – the
Athanasian Symbol has two parts. The
first and longest is a thorough statement of the doctrine of the Trinity so as
to exclude any possibility of confusing the Persons or dividing the
substance. The second part is a
statement of the doctrine of Jesus Christ.
While the Christological section of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed,
the Creed which under ordinary circumstances is supposed to be used in a
service of Holy Communion, adequately protects against Arianism, the main
heresy against which the Church contended in the fourth century in which this
Creed was developed, the Athanasian Symbol is a welcome supplement for it
incorporates the safeguards of the doctrine of the Hypostatic (Personal) Union
of Jesus Christ against Nestorianism and Monophysitism, the heresies against
which the Church contended in the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon in the
fifth century. The Christological
portion of the Athanasian Symbol begins like this:
For the right Faith is that we believe and confess: that our Lord Jesus
Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man;
God, of the Substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds: and
Man, of the Substance of his Mother, born in the world;
Perfect God, and Perfect Man: of a reasonable soul and human flesh
subsisting;
Equal to the Father, as touching his Godhead: and inferior to the
Father, as touching his Manhood.
Who although he be God and Man: yet he is not two, but one Christ;
One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh: but by taking of the
Manhood into God;
One altogether, not by confusion of Substance: but by unity of Person.
For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man: so God and Man is one
Christ.
The statement that He is “Perfect Man: of a reasonable soul
and human flesh subsisting” guards against the heresy of Apollinaris of
Laodicea, the fourth century heretic who in his zeal to oppose Arianism taught
that Jesus was less than fully human, that in Him the divine Logos took the
place of a human νοῦς or mind. Hence the
reference to “a reasonable soul” as well as “human flesh.” Jesus’ eternal divine nature did not take
the place of anything missing in His human nature, He was perfect in both of
His natures. Therefore He had a human
“reasonable soul”, that is a soul with a mind that reasons, that knows things
by learning through experience and drawing deductive conclusions like any other
human being, as well as His omniscient divine nature in which He knows
everything because as God to be omniscient is not something different, added
on, or accidental to His just being. His
human nature was complete, differing from ours only in that it was enhypostatic
and sinless. Enhypostatic means that
His human nature did not belong to or comprise a self other than His divine
Self, if this were otherwise, the Nestorians would have been right and He would
have been two persons sharing the same body, instead of One Person, which would
be something closer to the idea of possession than of Incarnation. A self is not a component of human nature
without which it would not be complete and completely human like a body or a
human soul. Of course a nature cannot
exist without a self, but the self is the owner of the nature, that to which
the nature belongs, and in the case of Jesus’ Christ’s complete human nature,
the self to which it belonged was always the Self of the eternal Son of
God. Nor does His sinlessness indicate
that He lacked something necessary to make Him human, quite the contrary. Sin, although we talk about it as if it were
a thing, something that has positive existence in us, something that was added
to our nature at the Fall, because human language is such that if we didn’t talk
about it this way it would be difficult to talk about it at all, is not
actually a thing, with positive existence, added to our nature, but rather a
deficiency, the hole where something we lost in the Fall used to be, something
that exists in us only in a negative sense, as an absence or shadow. Specifically it is the absence of the quality
of rightness, of being right or just, in our thoughts, words, and actions,
singular and habitual. When we say that
Jesus was sinless, we are saying that He lacked a lack, that the absence that
is there in all of us of the rightness that ought to be there was itself absent
in Him, meaning that the rightness that ought to be there in us was present in
Him, and that therefore His lacking sin really means that He was completely
human in a way that we in our fallen estate are not.
In the twentieth century, Gordon H. Clark and Cornelius Van
Til, two of the conservative Presbyterian theologians who followed J. Gresham
Machen in opposing the apostasy of the Presbyterian Church of America and
Princeton Theological Seminary when these bodies abandoned the nineteenth
century Presbyterian orthodoxy of Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield, had a
famous controversy over the relationship between divine and human knowledge. Van Til took the position that God’s
knowledge was qualitatively different from man’s knowledge, Clark took the
position that it was merely quantitatively different. To explain further, suppose a truth, let us
say that all dogs are animals. Clark
maintained that this truth as known by both God and man, is the same known
truth to God as it is to man, except that God knows it more thoroughly, knows all of its details, knows every type of dog for example, everything implicit in it,
and everything consequential to it. The
truth, however, is the same truth for man as it is for God, and the knowledge
of it is the same knowledge. The
difference between man’s knowledge and God’s knowledge, to Clark, is that man’s
knowledge is limited, that he knows certain finite truths and can add to his
knowledge, truth by truth, but this can never approach God’s knowledge, because
God knows all truths, and so His knowledge is infinite, which the finite can
never approach because infinity is indivisible and so no amount of finites can
ever add up to an infinite. Van Til maintained
that God’s knowledge differs from man’s in more than this, that it is
qualitatively different in that each truth is different to God than it is to
man, with God’s knowledge of it being the true knowledge, of which man’s knowledge is only an approximate
resemblance. While each man’s most
zealous adherents, such as Greg Bahnsen for Van Til and John W. Robbins for
Gordon Clark, maintained the controversy long after its originators had passed,
others less partisan have come to suspect that the two men were talking past
each other. Clark’s position is grounded
in the idea that truth is truth and that it is the same for everybody, an idea
that seems to have been jettisoned today, but without which the basic laws of
logic – the law of identity, the law of non-contradiction and the law of the
excluded middle - fall. Van Til’s
position is grounded in the idea that God is incomprehensible by man and that
in speaking truth of Him, neither univocal (the bark of the Doberman, the bark
of the Rottweiler) nor equivocal (the bark of the Doberman, the bark of the
tree) language can convey truth but only analogical which is neither univocal
or equivocal but shares aspects of both enough so that something meaningful and
understandable can be conveyed through it about the infinite Being that is
beyond the comprehension of human minds.
Clark and Van Til, being strict Calvinists, would have abhorred the
thought, but both would have benefited from a thorough grounding in Thomistic
theology and philosophy for both of their starting points were stressed and
harmonized in the thinking of the Angelic Doctor. Furthermore, they would have benefited from
looking at the Patristic consensus on the difference between divine and human
knowledge as formulated in the struggles of the orthodox Fathers against
heresies such as Apollinarianism.
Divine knowledge is indeed different from human knowledge in more ways
than the mere quantitative but the difference is between the omniscience of the
simple, uncreated, Being Whose essence and every attribute are the same as His
very existence and the finite knowledge of composite, created, beings who must
attain and accumulate what they know, truth by truth, fact by fact, over time.
Other errors that have plagued Christianity in recent
centuries could have been avoided by more attention to the Athanasian Symbol
and the words “One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh: but by taking
of the Manhood into God.” Take, for
example, kenoticism. This error takes
its name from the Greek word rendered “made himself of no reputation” in
Philippians 2:7 in the Authorized Bible.
The English Standard Version, which is the apostate liberal Revised
Standard Version as modified for Crossway Publishers by a committee that
included enough evangelical celebrities like J. I. Packer and Wayne Grudem as
to persuade the gullible into thinking a liberal translation had thereby been
turned into a conservative and faithful one, renders it “emptied himself” in
the American edition as do the ASV, NASV, and NRSV. The New Living Translation renders it “he
gave up his divine privileges.” The NIV
has “made himself nothing” as does the UK edition of the ESV. Now, “empty” is not a wrong translation of κενόω
when it comes to word-to-word translation, it is the basic, literal, meaning of
the word. Contextually, however, in
Phil. 2:7, the meaning is that of the Authorized Bible. It is not that the Son of God underwent an
ontological emptying in which He divested Himself of His deity, part of His
deity, or even His “divine privileges.”
Think of the words of Jesus to Nicodemus in John 3:13 “And no man hath
ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the
Son of man which is in heaven.” He
declared there that He was in heaven even as He was on earth speaking to
Nicodemus having come down from heaven.
Clearly there was no ontological divesting of His deity or any of His
divine attributes, which in orthodox theology are not accidental in God, but
all belong to and indeed are equivalent to His very essence. St.
Paul in Philippians 2 was not talking about an ontological change in the Son of
God but His humility in taking to Himself another nature, a far less exalted
nature, a created nature, and undergoing all the experiences appropriate to
that nature and indeed everything that human nature experiences as a result of
its debasement through the Fall into sin even though the human nature He took
unto Himself was not so debased. Kenoticism
is the interpretation of Phil. 2:7 as meaning that Jesus underwent an
ontological emptying of at least part of His divinity in order to become truly
man. It is usually thought of as
beginning with Erlangen School neo-Lutheran theologian Gottfried Thomasius
around the middle of the nineteenth century.
Another major proponent of it was Charles Gore, Bishop of Oxford, a
liberal (in the sense of embracing the so-called higher criticism, rejecting Biblical infallibility, and trying to make the Christian faith conform to
so-called scientific theories built upon the unsound foundation of
anti-Christian naturalistic presuppositions) Anglo-Catholic (“liberal Anglo-Catholic”
ought to be as absurd an expression as “liberal fundamentalist” since
pre-Oxford Movement high churchmen were the most reactionary – as always I mean
that as a positive compliment – wing of the Church, and the Oxford Movement
began as a reaction against liberalism).
The sound orthodox doctrine, however, is that of the Athanasian
Symbol. The Incarnation was “not by
conversion of the God head into flesh”, which is what an ontological kenosis
would amount to, but “by taking of the Manhood into God.” The divine nature, the Godhead, is simple
and immutable. It does not change. Being infinite and simple, it is indivisible
with no composite parts. No attributes
can be separated from it as accidental, each are the very essence of the
Godhead. The Son of God, the Second of
the Three Persons Who each possess the whole of the one Godhead in the Trinity,
took to His Self another nature, a complete human nature, so that from the
moment of the Incarnation – His conception – He has subsisted in two modes simultaneously,
as fully God and fully Man.
That Jesus Christ is “One altogether, not by confusion of Substance:
but by unity of Person” is a necessary corrective of two opposing errors in the
main branches of continental Protestantism.
In the early days of the sixteenth century Reformation, Dr. Martin
Luther accused the Swiss branch of the Reformation of Nestorianism. This was because Ulrich Zwingli of Zurich who
was the leading Swiss Reformer for most of the period in which Dr. Luther led
the Reformation in Germany in defence of his memorialist view of the Lord’s
Supper argued against the Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament on the
grounds that Jesus’ body, and His human nature in general, has a local presence
which is currently in Heaven, preventing it from being on the altars of all the
parishes in Christendom. Dr. Luther was
a strong defender of the Real Presence, the strongest among the Protestant
Reformers, and this issue was what prevented the success of the Marburg
Colloquy of 1529 which sought unity between the German and Swiss branches of
the Reformation and at which both Luther and Zwingli were present. Zwingli died two years after the failed
Colloquy and five years after that French Reformer, John Calvin, published the
first edition of his Institutes of the
Christian Religion and was persuaded by William Farel to move to Geneva and
lead the Reformation there. Calvin,
while he rejected Zwinglian memorialism, held to a spiritual view of the Real
Presence rather than the more literal view of the Lutherans who concluded that
the difference between his view and Zwingli’s was more nominal than
substantial. That Calvin in rejecting
the Lutheran view borrowed Zwingli’s argument based on the local presence of the
body of Christ lent its support to this conclusion. Thus, Calvinism became as suspect in Lutheran
eyes as Zwinglianism of, if not outright Nestorianism, a Nestorian tendency.
That this Nestorian tendency actually exists in the
tradition of Reformed thought is undeniable today although it was not remotely
as evident in the sixteenth century. In
our day, a leading “orthodox” Reformed theologian, the late R. C. Sproul,
accused the hymn writer Charles Wesley of bordering on Patripassionism (the heresy
against which Tertullian wrote his Against
Praxeas, it would later be renamed after Sabellius, and is essentially the modalist
view of the Trinity, that the Three Persons are not Three Persons but three
names or offices of the same Person) for the line in his beloved hymn And Can It Be that says “that Thou my
God shouldst die for me.” Sproul’s
accusation against Wesley, however, did not reveal actual Patripassionism on
the part of the hymn writer, who by no means confused the Persons of the
Trinity, but rather Nestorianism on the part of the one making the accusation. It was the human nature of Jesus that died,
Sproul argued, not His divine nature. This
is a fundamentally Nestorian argument. Natures
do not die. Persons die. Jesus, the Person Who is the eternal Son of
God, the Second Person of the Trinity, died.
That means that when He died, God died.
He was able to die because in the Incarnation He took to Himself a
second nature, human nature, which was mortal, that is to say, capable of
death, as His divine nature, which is immortal, incapable of death, is
not. The death the Son of God
experienced, therefore, was a human death, but it was the human death of a
Person Who is fully God, which is why Wesley’s line is legitimate. Since the human nature and divine nature of
Jesus both belong to the same Person in which they are eternally united it is
legitimate to predicate of that Person whatever is true of either nature even
when speaking about Him in terms of the other nature. This is called the communicatio idiomatum, the communication of properties or
attributes, a Scriptural example of which can be seen in the verse quoted
earlier from Jesus’ discussion with Nicodemus.
Note that He calls Himself “the Son of man” when stating that He is,
that is in the present at the time when He was speaking to Nicodemus, in
heaven. Sproul’s Nestorianism was
particularly troublesome in that it expressed itself as taking exception to
something that is arguably the entire point of the Christian message – that in
the Incarnation, and in the suffering and death the Son of God was able to
experience because of the Incarnation, God entered into the plight of humanity
and redeemed and sanctified it by His sharing in it, that God imposed no
suffering upon mankind as a natural or juridical consequence of sin that He had
not determined to go through Himself to redeem us. It has been more common among the Reformed
of the last century or so, to revive Nestorianism in its original form, the
rejection of the honorific of “Mother of God” for the Virgin Mary. Nestorius rejected this honorific, or rather
its Greek original Θεοτόκος (literally, God-bearer, but because τόκος refers to bearing in the specific sense
of bearing children rather than the more general sense, it means Mother of God)
and based his rejection on the fact that Jesus received His human nature from
Mary rather than His divine. The problem
with his reasoning, a problem so serious that it was condemned as heresy in the
Council of Ephesus, is that the Person to Whom the Blessed Virgin gave birth
was One Person Who is both God and Man, and while He did not receive His deity
from her, she is still the Mother of the Person Who as the Son of God is God,
and therefore the Mother of God. The
Nestorian tendency in the Reformed tradition did not manifest itself in this
form until recently because Zwingli, Bullinger, Calvin et al. in the sixteenth
century all had a higher, more Catholic, Mariology than their twentieth and
twenty-first century successors. Note
that while the revival of the Nestorian rejection of this honorific has not
been limited to the Reformed among Protestants of the last couple of centuries,
the Reformed are the only ones among this renaissance of Nestorianism who claim
to care about the Patristic orthodoxy of the early Ecumenical Councils.
Dr. Luther, therefore, was correct in perceiving a Nestorian
tendency in the Reformed tradition.
Unfortunately, in responding to it he opened the door to a different
sort of error. In the fifth century,
after Nestorianism was condemned at the Council of Ephesus, an opposite heresy
called monophysitism developed among those who were most vehement in their
rejection of Nestorianism.
Monophysitism, as the name suggests, is the idea that after the
Incarnation, Jesus Christ was not just One Person, but had only one
nature. Those who adopted this position
pointed to a line in the writings of St. Cyril of Alexandria, who had led the
orthodox side at Ephesus, which they interpreted as saying that the Incarnate
Christ had only one nature but this was a case of a term not having yet
attained its settled meaning in theology.
Before the Council of Chalcedon issued its definition, clarifying the doctrine
of the Hypostatic Union of the two natures in the one Person of Jesus Christ,
the word φύσις was not the settled
word for “nature” but was used with other meanings, sometimes interchangeably
with ὑπόστασις which was the
settled (1) theological word for person in Greek. (2) This seems to be how St. Cyril was using the
term. The monophysites, particularly
the Eutychians who followed Eutychius of Constantinople, however, taught that
in the Incarnation Jesus’ human nature was sort of absorbed into His divine
nature This is what was condemned as
heresy at Chalcedon. Dr. Luther did not
revive the error of Eutychius. He did,
however, in response to Zwingli and Calvin, draw some unfortunate conclusions
from the communicatio idiomatum.
Dr. Luther’s position is often misunderstood. When he responded to the claim that Jesus’
body cannot be literally present in the Sacrament because it’s local presence
is in Heaven by saying that since in Jesus the divine and human are inseparably
united Jesus’ human nature is present everywhere His divine nature is, this was
not his explanation of how Jesus is present in the Sacrament but his rebuttal of
the argument that Zwingli and Calvin built upon the local presence of the body
of Christ. In other words, by
maintaining that through its union with His deity Jesus’ human nature was in a
sense omnipresent he was responding to the claim made based on the local
presence of Jesus’ body in Heaven by saying that the local presence is not the
only presence that Jesus’ human nature has, as is assumed by the Zwinglian and
Calvinist position, rather than saying that it is through this particular other
presence that Jesus is present in the Sacrament. Many of Dr. Luther’s critics on this point do
not get beyond their objections to his claim for a sort of omnipresence for
Jesus’ human nature to see that what he meant by Jesus’ Sacramental Presence
was a third kind of presence that was neither the local presence of Jesus’ body
nor this omnipresence that he claimed was shared from Jesus’ deity to His
humanity. It is this claim of a shared
omnipresence that concerns us here, however.
In the orthodox doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum the attributes of Jesus’ divine nature and
those of His human nature are shared, not with the other nature directly, but
with the Person Who is Subject and Owner of both natures. Had Dr. Luther limited his talk of Jesus’
divine attributes being shared with his human attributes to His omnipresence
his position, depending upon how he further explained it, would not necessarily
contradict the orthodox viewpoint.
Indeed, it is logically necessary that if the divine and human natures
have since the establishment of the Hypostatic Union in the Incarnation been
inseparably united that wherever Jesus is both of His natures in some sense are which translates into
Jesus’ human nature being in some sense
omnipresent. The question, however, is
what is that some sense? Obviously that
sense is not that the local presence of His human body and soul have been
extended infinitely. While omnipresence
as an attribute of the Godhead is not a local presence but a presence that
transcends the limits of locality it would be wrong to say that this
omnipresence now belongs to Jesus’ human nature qua His human nature. That
would require that either the omnipresence of His Godhead has passed from His
divine nature to His human nature or that it has been duplicated in His human
nature. Divine attributes can neither be
duplicated nor alienated from the divine essence. The sense in which Jesus’ human nature can
legitimately be said to be omnipresent is that because it is inseparably united
with His divine nature it is present everywhere the divine nature is present in the divine nature. Thus, the Lutherans are right in maintaining that
what they call the Extra Calvinisticum,
the idea that Jesus as God is present in places where He as Man is not present,
is wrong, but they themselves are wrong in thinking that because everywhere
Jesus is present He is present, since the Incarnation, as both God and Man,
that His omnipresence has passed from the omnipresent nature to the locally
present nature so that the locally present nature is now omnipresent in se, rather than that through the
inseparable union of the two natures in the Person of Jesus Christ, both are
present wherever that Person is present, in the nature that is omnipresent. Unfortunately, the Lutheran misunderstanding of
the communicatio idiomatum goes
beyond this, for the Lutherans also claim that omnipotence and omniscience have
become part of Jesus’ human nature as well as His divine nature. That Jesus’ human nature must in some sense
be omnipresent is a logical requirement of the Hypostatic Union because the doctrine
forbids the separation of the two natures and if Jesus were somewhere present
without His human nature there His divine nature would be separate from His
human nature. No such logical
requirement can be deduced with regards to His omnipotence and omniscience.
Again, the Athanasian Symbol declares that Jesus is “One
altogether, not by confusion of Substance: but by unity of Person” and it is
important to consider these words in the light of the preceding words “One, not
by conversion of the Godhead into flesh: but by taking of the Manhood into God.” Sometimes the One Person of Jesus Christ is
spoken of as if He were the product of the Incarnation as if His Person was
what you get when you add His deity to His humanity. This, however, would make Him a created and
composite person. His Person, His Self,
His Ego is eternal. He has always
existed with the Father Who eternally begat Him and with the Holy Ghost Who
eternally proceeds through Him from the Father. In the Incarnation, without changing Who He
eternally is, the Son of God, the Divine Logos, or What He is, Very God of Very
God, of one substance with the Father, He united to His eternal Person a
perfect, created, human nature so that the same eternal Person Who eternally
existed as God, now and forevermore exists also as Man.
Given the number of basic Christological errors prevalent
today we would do well to follow the liturgical use of the Athanasian Symbol as
prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer.
(1) I
have used the word “settled” here where most writers would probably use the
word “technical” because I do not like to speak of “technical terms” in
theology, the word “technical” having connotations closely associated with Modern
ways of thinking and doing things that I am very much opposed to importing into
theology.
(2) Before
ὑπόστασις was settled on as the Greek
equivalent of the Latin persona
and these terms became settled as the Greek and Latin designations of what it
is that makes the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost three, it had itself been used as
a synonym for οὐσία, the Greek word for “being” or “essence” – in God, although
in no created being, essence is identical to being or existence – which is the
word that designates what it is that makes the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost
one. The original synonymy of ὑπόστασις and οὐσία can still be seen in
the term used in Latin theological writings as the equivalent of οὐσία. This is the word substantia, from which our English word substance that in older
theological English was always used for these terms is derived. If you break this word down into its
component parts sub (under) and stantia (from stans, a participle form of sto,
stare, meaning “to stand”) these
correspond to the component parts of ὑπόστασις. The point of bringing this up is to
illustrate that it is important to pay attention, when the important terms of
theology are used in the early centuries, to when they are used. When they are used in conciliar definitions, at
least the definitions of those councils received by the larger Church as truly
ecumenical, as φύσις was at Chalcedon, they can be taken as from that
point having their settled meaning. This
meaning should not be automatically assumed for earlier uses. The term ὁμοούσιον was used in the
Nicene Creed in the fourth century to indicate that the Son shared the same
essence, substance, being with the Father.
Those who objected to the term at and immediately following the First
Council of Nicaea were not all Arians who objected to the idea that it was
being used to express. Their concern was
that a generation or so prior it had been used with a very different meaning, a
Sabellian one, by, for example, Paul of Samosata. While politics had as much or more to do with
the time it took for the Nicene consensus against Arianism to be finalized in
the Church it was only through this finalization that ὁμοούσιον attained its settled
meaning and the danger of it being taken in a Sabellian sense passed.
