At the Council of Nicaea in 325 A. D., the Church once and for all put the lid on Arianism and declared for the ages that the Son of God was of one substance with the Father and shared fully in the divine essence. The deity of the Logos was no longer at issue, and the worship of the Logos as God was no longer a point of contention. Having accomplished this theological feat, however, the Church found itself faced with a question that naturally followed. If the Word of God is fully divine, how then are we to think about the man Jesus whom the Scriptures reveal as the Word of God incarnate? The time had come for the Church to wrestle with this question and explore it in depth in order to achieve a clear definition of the person and nature of Jesus Christ, a definition that would establish the boundaries of Christian orthodoxy in language that could be understood by its largely Greek and Latin constituencies.

But, as history has shown, theology is a messy business. There is no such thing as a perfectly linear progression from point A to point B when hammering out Christian doctrine, and the road from the Council of Nicaea to the Council of Chalcedon, where the issue was finally settled in 451 A.D., was anything but a smooth super highway. It was more like a rarely traveled, unlit back road with many twists, turns, bumps, and pot holes.

The events leading up to this council comprised a drama complete with villains and heroes, winners and losers, and imperial and ecclesiastical intrigue that would have challenged the imagination of even the most accomplished script writer. But it is all part of Christian history, and it is to the task of recounting this history that this series is committed. In the end we will discover that despite the foibles and the folly of fallen men, God worked through them, bringing to consummation a process resulting in a doctrinal confession that has stood the test of time and by which the validity of all subsequent Christological speculation has been measured.

Just how is it that deity and humanity can meet in one being? This was the central theological question in the Church for the next hundred years after Nicaea. Whatever solution to the puzzle of the historical Jesus might be proposed, all who took part in the debate agreed that it must not compromise his divine nature. This was no small conundrum, and, in response to the challenge, two schools of thought arose with competing emphases, one at Alexandria in Egypt, and the other at Antioch in Syria.

The Alexandrian scholars began with the preincarnate Son, considering him the primary mover within the incarnation and stressing the union between the divine and the human natures. This became known as the “Word-flesh” position. Antiochene thinkers, on the other hand, started with the man Jesus, considering him to be the central concern of theological reflection and arguing the importance of maintaining the distinction between the two natures. This has historically come to be identified as the “Word-man” stance.

Of utmost importance to both camps was preserving the full integrity of the divine Logos, and each school saw its point of view as the one best protecting the fullness of the divine nature of the Word and best honoring the edict of Nicaea. In our next post, we will begin to take a closer look at the development, the champions, and the heretics of each of these schools of thought in order to better define the battle lines of the debate between them.

Blessings,

Arnie Gentile

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