Dr. Nathan Busenitz · The Master's Seminary · 65 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Nathan Busenitz, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
This is the course's consolidation hour: everything from Nicaea to the fall of Rome gathered into one review, with a handful of figures introduced here for the first time, the Robber Synod, the pneumatomachians, Cassian, Hilary, and the two Cyrils. If you have watched the lectures out of order, this is the one that ties the age together.
Five sees led the Roman church: Rome and Constantinople in the first rank, west and east; Antioch and Alexandria in the second, perpetual rivals whose quarrels Rome repeatedly umpired; and Jerusalem, honored for its apostolic symbolism more than its influence. Antioch stood for the literal, grammatical school of interpretation and guarded Christ's humanity; Alexandria, heir of Philo's allegory through Clement and Origen, guarded his deity; and out of that difference in emphasis, sharpened by politics, came the collision at Ephesus. Constantinople, Constantine's city, would later be called Byzantium and is Istanbul today.
Nicaea 325: the deity of Christ against Arius, and by extension the Trinity. Constantinople 381: Nicaea reaffirmed, the Spirit's deity confessed, Apollinarianism condemned. Ephesus 431: Nestorius condemned and Theotokos affirmed. Chalcedon 451: two natures in one person, the four adverbs, Leo's Tome, called two years after the Robber Synod it overturned. Constantinople II, 553, under Justinian: Chalcedon upheld against the monophysites, the three chapters condemned, Leontius of Byzantium its interpreter. Constantinople III, 680: two wills. Nicaea II, 787: icons, images, statues, paintings, permitted for worship, the council where evangelicals part company.
In 449 Dioscorus, Cyril of Alexandria's successor, with the emperor Theodosius II's backing, convened what would have been a second council of Ephesus and strong-armed it into endorsing Eutyches's one nature doctrine. Leo of Rome refused the result, and two years later Chalcedon overturned it, which is why history remembers the gathering not as a council but as the Robber Synod. Theodosius II himself died after being thrown from his horse, and with him fell the synod's imperial protection.
Diocletian, the last great persecutor, to 305, whose terror created the traditors. Constantine: Milvian Bridge over Maxentius in 312, the Edict of Milan in 313, sole ruler by 324 over Licinius, Nicaea convened in 325, the capital moved to his own city. Julian the Apostate, the two year pagan reaction. Theodosius the Great: Nicene Christianity made official in 380, Constantinople convened in 381, dead in 395 as the last sole emperor. His grandson Theodosius II: Ephesus and the Robber Synod. Justinian: Constantinople II. And far beyond them, Charlemagne, crowned in 800, whose Holy Roman Empire, historians quip, was none of the three, yet lasted a thousand years, with a genuine renaissance of learning under his house.
Arianism: the Son a created being, there was when he was not; answered at Nicaea. Apollinarianism: deity in a human shell without a human soul; answered at Constantinople. Nestorianism: the natures walled into two persons; answered at Ephesus and Chalcedon. Eutychianism, monophysitism: the natures blended into a hybrid; answered at Chalcedon. Pelagianism: humanity born good and able to earn heaven; answered by Augustine and condemned by synods. Sabellian modalism: one God in successive masks, exposed by Christ's baptism in Matthew 3, where Father, Son, and Spirit act at once, and by the simple question of whom Jesus prayed to. Donatism: the refusal to restore the lapsed, hardened into schism. And Islam, by the lecture's three mark test, a pseudo-Christian cult: Muhammad, born 570, dead 632, and a hundred years to Spain and India.
New in this review: the pneumatomachians, literally fighters against the Spirit, who applied Arianism's logic to the third person and denied the Holy Spirit's full deity and personhood. Their chief opponents were the Cappadocian fathers, which explains the Cappadocians' distinctive emphasis and the expanded confession of the Spirit at Constantinople in 381.
Between Augustine and Pelagius stands the view that fallen people, helped by a prevenient grace, can still initiate the cry to God for salvation, a synergism against Augustine's monergism, in which God alone initiates because, as Romans 3 says, no one seeks after God. Busenitz passes on the historians' quip that the view might better be called semi-Augustinianism, and the important pastoral distinction: Pelagianism was condemned as heresy, semi-Pelagianism never was; its modern heirs in evangelical Arminianism are regarded as true brothers holding a deficient soteriology, not as heretics.
Alexander of Alexandria, who answered Arius from John 1; Athanasius, his deacon and successor, forty five years contra mundum; the Cappadocians, Basil, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus, who once held Constantinople's see though he preferred his books; the two Eusebiuses, Caesarea the historian and compromise-proposer, Nicomedia the Arian partisan; Ambrose the orator of Milan, credited with the Athanasian Creed and used of God in Augustine's conversion; Jerome and the Vulgate; Chrysostom the golden mouthed expositor, trained under Diodore of Tarsus, a founder of Antioch's school; Augustine, the West's greatest theologian, with the Confessions, On the Trinity, and the City of God; Leo, whose Tome reached Chalcedon by delegation; and Cyril of Alexandria, in the lecture's blunt summary a man of good theology and questionable ethics.
John Cassian, the monastic father whose rules fed the later Benedictine order and an early champion of semi-Pelagianism. Hilary of Poitiers, whose Matthew commentary says a couple of dozen times that faith saves, a patristic witness to faith alone. Cyril of Jerusalem, moderate in the Arian storms but orthodox in the end, famous for selling church goods to feed the poor. Anthony the Hermit, whose biography by Athanasius launched the monastic ideal. Monica, Augustine's praying mother; Helena, Constantine's mother and builder in the Holy Land. And from earlier in the course: Quadratus the first apologist, Tatian of the Diatessaron, and the two Clements, Rome, the apostolic letter writer who preached justification by faith, and Alexandria, the christianizing Platonist.
A short ladder worth memorizing: 305, Diocletian's persecution ends. 313, the Edict of Milan. 318, the Egyptian synod condemns Arius, and, by tradition, the number of bishops at Nicaea, a figure some historians suspect was rounded to echo Abraham's 318 men in Genesis. 324, Constantine sole emperor. 325, Nicaea. 381, Constantinople. 395, Theodosius dies and the empire splits. 431, Ephesus. 451, Chalcedon. 476, the western empire falls, and the Middle Ages begin.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all fourteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. Which two sees stood in the first rank, and which two feuding sees stood just below them?
2. What role did Jerusalem play among the leading sees?
3. What was the Robber Synod of 449?
4. Match the council to its issue: Constantinople III in 680 decided what?
5. Which sequence of Constantine's rise is correct?
6. Who were the pneumatomachians?
7. How does Matthew 3 expose modalism?
8. What distinguishes the condemnation of Pelagianism from that of semi-Pelagianism?
9. What is prevenient grace in the semi-Pelagian scheme?
10. Which father is which: the two Eusebiuses?
11. What is the lecture's blunt summary of Cyril of Alexandria?
12. For what two things is John Cassian remembered?
13. Why is Hilary of Poitiers significant in this course's argument?
14. Which date ladder is correct?
All fourteen correct. Lecture 17 is complete.
Of everything consolidated here, which single doctrine do you most want your own church to be able to articulate from Scripture, and what would it take to teach it?
Cyril won at Ephesus with good theology and questionable ethics. Can a right conclusion be wrongly won, and what does that distinction demand of us in our own disagreements?
The review moves from creeds to dates to names. Which way of remembering, story, list, or ladder, actually helps you retain truth, and how could you build that habit into your Bible reading?
The verdict of Romans 3 that underlies the whole Augustinian position, paraphrased: there is none righteous, and there is none who seeks for God; salvation begins with him.
The lecture's own commendations: Bryan Litfin's Getting to Know the Church Fathers for the figures reviewed here, and Stephen Nichols's For Us and for Our Salvation for the councils.