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Nevertheless, the author carefully avoids the extremes of Docetism or ditheism.
Its docetism, the assertion of the unreality of Christ's human nature, lies on the surface. No amount of personal piety can neutralise it. It has had, and still has, a crippling effect on the faith of devout Christians. Even where it is not carried to the length of formal heresy, it spreads a haze of unreality over the gospel story, and dulls the edge of belief.
There was danger that Christologic speculation might break quite loose from historic tradition, and pass into the metaphysical extreme of Docetism. Had this come to pass, there might perhaps have been a fatal schism in the Church. Tradition still remained Ebionitish; dogma had become decidedly Gnostic; how were the two to be moulded into harmony with each other?
What is the relation to each other of these two ways of regarding salvation? The problem has scarcely been formulated by the students of the Fourth Gospel, much less adequately discussed. Obviously the tendency of Ephesian Christianity was to minimise the human characteristics of the historic Jesus, and to merge into Docetism.
The rigid monotheism of the Jews made it hard for them to conceive an intermediary between God and man; they were naturally disposed to embrace a humanistic explanation of Christ. Docetism was elaborated by Valentinus, Manes and other gnostics and adopted into their systems, while ebionitism provided the basis for the Christologies of Paul of Samosata, of the Photinians and Adoptionists.
Ebionitism, related to docetism as realism to idealism, possessed equal vitality and equal adaptability. It showed itself in various humanistic interpretations of Christ. Of these the most elaborate was Nestorianism, which exerted the most insistent and immediate negative influence on the early growth of monophysitism.
They constitute the extremes of Christological thought: between them runs the via media of orthodoxy. Each of the two sees but one aspect of the two-fold life of Christ. Docetism lays an exclusive emphasis on His real divinity, ebionitism on His real humanity. Each mistakes a half truth for a whole truth. The docetists denied that Jesus Christ had come in the flesh.
The monophysites professed great jealousy for the honour due to the Redeemer. But the ascription of such attributes to Jesus Christ detracts from His honour. If the nature that suffered on the Cross be not distinct from the nature that cannot suffer, then the Crucifixion was a sham. Monophysitism is docetism elaborated. It abandons the Christ of history. It rules out His prokopé.
This can be seen in the Fourth Gospel, and in the allied Johannine Epistles. The writer is fully aware of the danger, and protests against Docetism, but his own writings with very small changes would have been admirably adapted for Docetic purposes.
This doctrine was not part of the official monophysite creed; but, as pointed out in the previous chapter, monophysitism was a lineal descendant of docetism, and always showed traces of its lineage. The saying that, "Christ brought His body from heaven," was commonly attributed to Eutyches.
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