Here is the mystery of deity incarnate. The wonder of it expands our minds and stretches our spirits: the Word who was face-to-face with God in the glory of eternity (John 17:5, 24) came to be face-to-face with us in this world, marked by temporality, changeability, and the shame of sin. Infinite and finite, eternal and temporal, Word made flesh.

“The Word became flesh” (John 1:14). It is, once again, the time of year when the majestic words of the prologue to John’s Gospel will be read in churches throughout the world.

The verses constitute the shortest, but perhaps profoundest, description of the incarnation in the New Testament. And the more you think about them, the profounder they seem to be. John underscores (1) Christ’s eternity (“In the beginning was the Word”) and (2) his deity (“and the Word was God”) in John 1:1. But he also places him “in the bosom/at the side of” God (John 1:18), indeed “towards” or perhaps more vividly “face-to-face with God” (Greek pros ton theon).

Here is the mystery of deity incarnate. The wonder of it expands our minds and stretches our spirits: the Word who was face-to-face with God in the glory of eternity (John 17:5, 24) came to be face-to-face with us in this world, marked by temporality, changeability, and the shame of sin. Infinite and finite, eternal and temporal, Word made flesh.

For the first four hundred years of the church’s history, her finest minds probed the significance of these words. How can we understand them? In what terms should we communicate them? Can we press on to the outer circumference of God’s revelation of his Son without falling over the edge into error and even heresy?

Life-and-Death Matter

It was against that background that the early Christian confessions were written, ranging from the New Testament’s “Jesus is Lord” through the Apostles’ Creed, to the Athanasian, Nicene, and Constantinopolitan Creeds of the first four centuries.

Sometimes the early Christian thinkers made mistakes; sometimes they realized their statements were inadequate to safeguard the church. And when you believe, as they did, that martyrdom can never destroy the church but false teaching always will, it is understandable that sometimes discussion and debate reached a fever pitch of emotion, and occasionally harsh actions and reactions followed. It was said that it was impossible to go to the public baths without overhearing debates about the divinity of Christ!

Christology was a life-and-death matter. Missteps could be dangerous. That was true then; it remains true today. After all, isn’t it all-important to you to carefully describe the One you love best?

Four Great Errors

Despite several major efforts to help believers rightly understand and describe what really happened in the incarnation, disagreements, missteps, and divisions continued into the fifth century. To resolve them, in 451 the Emperor Marcian convened a council of some five hundred bishops at Chalcedon (now a district of Istanbul in Turkey). The confession they produced is usually known as the Definition of Chalcedon.

The Chalcedonian theologians were conscious of deviations from biblical orthodoxy that had plagued the church for over a hundred years, and especially of two that had exacerbated recent controversy. Their statement especially took into account errors that were and are associated with the names of four individuals:

• Arius, who died in 336. Arianism is the view that the Lord Jesus Christ is not fully God.
• Apollinaris, who died in 390. Apollinarianism is the view that Christ did not really have a human mind, but instead the eternal Logos took its place.
• Nestorius, who died in 451. Nestorianism is the view that after the incarnation there were two persons, the divine and the human, united together by a common will (although today it is questioned whether Nestorius himself really held this view).
• Eutyches, who died in 456. Eutychianism is the view that after the incarnation Christ had only one nature.

Is there really any value in knowing about these people and their theology? You will see that there is if you can spot what they all have in common — something that, if true, would disqualify Christ from being our Savior.

Chalcedonian Definition

So, the Chalcedonian Definition sought to exclude:

• Arianism, because if Christ is less than God, he cannot reconcile us to God.
• Apollinarianism, because if Christ is not truly human, he is not really one with us and therefore cannot act for us as our Mediator.
• Nestorianism, because if there are two persons in Christ and not one, then it is only the human person Jesus who offers himself as a sacrifice to God on the cross. For a divine person cannot die in his divine nature. And even if a human person could act as a redeeming substitute, his single death could never atone for the sins of many. One eye atones only for one eye, one tooth for one tooth, one person for one person. It requires an infinite person to make adequate substitution for the salvation of a multitude that no one can number.
• Eutychianism, because if the two natures of Christ are mixed together into one, then our Lord is no longer truly one of us and cannot therefore function as our substitute.

In each and all of these views, Christ would be disqualified from being our Savior! This background explains why the bishops meeting at Chalcedon wrote the following exalted sentences as their creed:

We, then, following the holy Fathers, all with one consent, teach people to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man, of a reasonable soul and body; consubstantial with the Father according to the Godhead, and consubstantial with us according to the manhood; in all things like unto us, without sin; begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead, and in these latter days, for us and for our salvation, born of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, according to the manhood; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ; as the prophets from the beginning declared concerning him, and the Lord Jesus Christ himself has taught us, and the Creed of the holy Fathers has handed down to us.

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