Lecture 15: The Seven Councils and the Battle for the Incarnation

The lecture, section by section

1. The seven, and how to weigh them

   An ecumenical council gathered the church of both the empire's halves, the first three drawing leaders from beyond the empire as well, from the Assyrian church under Persia. The seven: Nicaea 325, Constantinople 381, Ephesus 431, Chalcedon 451, then a second and third Constantinople, and finally a second Nicaea in 787. The evangelical rule stands as before: Scripture judges councils, never the reverse. The first four the church can affirm gladly because they say what Scripture says; the fifth and sixth mostly restate the fourth; the seventh, the lecture will argue, leaves the rails entirely.

2. Why Christology came first

   The person and work of Christ are the center of the faith, so it is no surprise that Satan's earliest assaults landed there. Ebionites denied his deity; Docetists his humanity; Arius made him a creature exalted above men yet beneath God. The next four heresies would keep pulling at the same two threads, and the operative word in every orthodox answer is fully: fully God, fully man, because a mediator who is anything less saves no one.

3. Constantinople 381 and the letter in the envelope

   Theodosius's council finally buried Arianism and expanded the creed's confession of the Spirit, but it also condemned a new error. Apollinarius, an opponent of Arius, protected Christ's deity by amputating his humanity: the Son, he taught, took only a human body, a shell with no human soul, mind, or will, deity slipped into flesh like a letter into an envelope. Fully God and only partly man fails the same test Arianism failed from the other side; the council said so.

4. Ephesus 431: what Theotokos was for

   Early in the fifth century the question became how to speak of Mary in a way that guarded the incarnation. Three titles competed, each true as far as it goes: bearer of man, favored at Antioch; bearer of Christ, Nestorius's mediating proposal; and bearer of God, Theotokos, Alexandria's banner, which prevailed, in no small part through the rivalry politics of the two great schools. The point of Theotokos was never Mary's status: it was that the child born in Bethlehem was fully God at the moment of his birth, as he had been from eternity.

5. What Theotokos became

   Busenitz is equally clear about the aftermath. The title Mother of God appears nowhere in Scripture; it is a fifth century label, and as pagan devotion flowed into a christianized empire, the label became a ladder. Centuries later Rome would style Mary co-mediatrix, with the folk logic that the Father is stern and Jesus is busy but Mary has time, a system the lecture calls, in its technical term, completely messed up. A well intended defense of the incarnation became scaffolding for a devotion the incarnation never asked for.

6. Nestorius and the oil and water

   Nestorianism, named for him, affirmed both natures but was charged with splitting them into two persons, a Christ of two selves, oil and water sharing a jar without ever mixing. The historical footnote matters: most historians doubt Nestorius actually taught what he was condemned for; Nestorius, as the saying goes, was probably not a Nestorian. But the error that bears his name is real, and the church rightly refused a divided Christ.

7. Eutyches and the hybrid

   From Alexandria came the opposite mistake. Eutyches (not the young man who fell from the window in Acts) so blended the natures that they became a third thing, one nature, monophysitism, like powder and water becoming gelatin: a new substance that is no longer either ingredient. A hybrid Christ is neither fully God nor fully man, and so, again, no Savior at all.

8. Chalcedon 451: two natures, one person

   Leo of Rome's Tome offered the resolution, and the lecture flags the politics inside the theology: Rome playing umpire between Antioch and Alexandria was a stepping stone toward papal primacy. But the doctrine itself is the treasure: Christ is two natures in one person, the hypostatic union, the natures coexisting without confusion, without change (against Eutyches), without division, without separation (against Nestorius). Four adverbs as guardrails: Chalcedon did not explain the mystery, it fenced it, and said that inside the fence lies orthodoxy. After the Nicene Creed, the Chalcedonian definition is the most important confession the early church produced.

9. Two more councils, and into the white spaces

   Chalcedon settled the West, but the East fought on for two centuries. The second council of Constantinople, under Justinian, upheld Chalcedon against the monophysites, condemning along the way writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Cyrus, and Ibas of Edessa in the Three Chapters affair. The third Constantinople asked whether the one Christ has one will or two, and answered two, a divine and a human will in perfect harmony in one person. Busenitz's verdict: by now the debate has drifted from revelation into metaphysical speculation, and the wiser course is Chalcedon's own: believe what Scripture teaches, and where God has not spoken, let the secret things belong to the Lord.

10. The seventh council: time to jump off

    In 787 the second council of Nicaea approved icons, physical images of Christ, Mary, and the saints, as legitimate objects of veneration in worship. Here the lecture's train metaphor ends the ride: evangelicals who could travel with the first six councils, because they said what Scripture says, must jump before the seventh, because Scripture always trumps history. A later lecture will take up the whole iconoclast controversy.

11. The takeaway for a preacher

    Strip the names away and the freight is simple and weighty: Scripture teaches that Christ is fully God; Scripture teaches that in the incarnation he became fully man; and he is one person. A hundred percent plus a hundred percent does not make two hundred, because the union is a miracle, not arithmetic. Every heresy in this lecture began with a logician refusing a mystery; every council worth affirming ended by bowing to the text. Believe both truths, guard the fence, and preach the Christ who, as God, can reconcile, and as man, can die.

1. Every heresy here began by refusing a mystery Scripture asks us to hold. Which biblical mysteries do you find hardest to leave fenced rather than explained, and what helps you bow to the text?

2. Theotokos began as a defense of Christ and ended as a devotion to Mary. How does a church keep its guardrail words from becoming objects of devotion themselves?

3. Chalcedon's Christ can, as man, die, and, as God, reconcile. How would you explain to a new believer why both natures, whole and unmixed, are necessary for the gospel to work?