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Updated: June 15, 2025
Yet the perverse situation into which the long and fierce controversy had drifted cannot be better illustrated than by one undisputed fact. Athanasius, who assured for Christianity its character as a religion of the living communion of God with man, is yet the theologian in whose Christology almost every possible trace of the recollection of the historic Jesus has disappeared.
The psychology which justifies orthodox Christology is that which proclaims the interpenetration of psychic states, and which distinguishes between the surface states of a relaxed consciousness, and the deep-seated states which are ever present, but of which we are conscious only at moments of tension.
E. W. Brooks, "Select Letters of Severus of Antioch," vol. ii. pp. 88, 89. Christology divorced from empirical psychology is a barren science. Abstract discussions about person, nature and union of natures soon degenerate into logomachies. If personality is a psychic entity, and nature another distinct psychic entity, then the question at issue between diphysite and monophysite is worth debating.
Whoever he was, whoever he is, whatever our Christology, one fact stands out. It was his love of men and women and his faith in God that took him there. Was he justified? was he right? or was it a delusion? First of all, let us go back to a historic event. The resurrection is, to a historian, not very clear in its details. But is it the detail or the central fact that matters?
In each of the three cases we find that a school of philosophy corresponds to the school of theology, and that the philosopher's dominant idea about the cosmos decided the theologian's interpretation of Christ. This connection between philosophy and Christology is of early date. From the nature of both disciplines it had to be. Even in apostolic days the meaning of the incarnation was realised.
It is very hard not to discuss this question as though Adoptionism and Pre-existent Christology were consciously competing systems from the beginning. That is of course not true: none of these writers was consciously discussing the question.
That is not the same thing as the Logos Christology or doctrine of salvation as propounded by Origen, but I think that he would have understood it had he lived now. It is not the same thing as the teaching of the Kingdom of God preached by Jesus, yet I do not think that he would have condemned it, for great men understand the thoughts of lesser ones though they themselves fail to be understood.
The dominant ideas, however, of the system, the conception of God and the world and the relation between them, were taken over by the catholic theologians, and incorporated into their Christology. We need not here inquire whether Aristotle's influence was direct or indirect. No doubt many of the theologians who constructed Christian doctrine had read his works.
He admired the Moravian Church because she was free; and in one of his later writings he declared that if that Church could only be reformed according to the spirit of the age, she would be one of the grandest Churches in the world. "In fundamentals," he said, "the Brethren are right; it is only their Christology and theology that are bad, and these are only externals.
The systematic Christology of the fifth century was, therefore, a completion of the work begun in the first. The essence of the Christological problem is the question as to the union of natures in Christ. Are there two natures divine and human in Him? Is each distinct from the other and from the person? Is the distinction conceptual or actual? The incarnation is a union. Is it a real union?
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