Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 15, 2025
The "Athanasian" creed is in disrepute, and its statement of dogmatic Christology is involved in the discredit attaching to the damnatory clauses. The clergy are perhaps rather glad to leave the subject alone. They know it is a difficult subject, and they are afraid of burning their fingers. The laity rarely hear any reference to the two natures of Christ.
Without claiming finality for the findings of modern psychology, we can consider some results of the science as established. They are sufficiently well established, at any rate, to provide a starting-point for our investigation. In particular the brilliant observations and theories of M. Bergson throw, so it seems to the writer, a flood of light on Christology.
They destroy the relation instead of expressing it. The concepts both of co-existence and of identity have proved fruitless in the speculative problem, and in Christology have given rise to heresy. The third school of thought takes as its starting point neither God, nor the world, nor the two as co-existing, but the relation of the two.
If we are concerned with a half-forgotten heresy, it is because a study of that heresy serves both as a preventive against error and as an introduction to the truth. The doctor studies disease to ascertain the conditions of health; pathological cases are often his surest guide to the normal; just so the study of heresy is the best guide to orthodox Christology.
It was expressly because the man Jesus had been rescued from the grave because of his spirituality, that other men might hope, by becoming spiritual like him, to be rescued also. But though Paul's Christology remained in this primitive stage, it contained the germs of a more advanced theory.
The leaders of the opposition to the Apollinarists of the fifth century were their own Syrian countrymen whose headquarters was at Antioch. The Antiochians differed from the Apollinarians in the starting-point of their Christology and in the controlling motive of their thought.
Aphthartodocetism springs from a spurious spirituality, from a fastidiousness that has no place in true religion. It is symptomatic of Manicheanism, which associates matter with sin. Christians affirm sinlessness of Christ's humanity; they do not affirm immateriality of His body. The monophysites, in abandoning the true Christology, were predisposed to the infection of this heresy.
The impersonal Trinity, such as Plotinus taught, was thoroughly in keeping with their Christology. They lacked a clear conception of personality in the second Person of the Trinity. It was inevitable that they should overlook the same element in the incarnate Christ. The Neo-Platonic view of matter finds its counterpart in monophysite theory.
For this reason elements can be found in the Epistle to the Romans and in the Epistle to the Hebrews which are easily susceptible of an Adoptionist interpretation, and others equally indicative of Pre-existent Christology. This means that Christians at that moment had not formulated the problem.
The problem thus raised can never be settled, for the evidence is insufficient; but neither can it be dismissed, for it is implicit in the gospel itself. The whole importance of this series of problems in the history of early Christology is often strangely mistaken.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking