Incarnation and humiliation of Jesus
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Conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary
Earlier forms of the creed seem to have read: “Born of the Holy Spirit and of the Virgin Mary.” The primary affirmation of this article is that the Son of God, the Word, had become human or, as John’s Gospel put it, “flesh” (John 1:14). Preexistence and Incarnation presuppose each other in the Christian view of Jesus Christ. Hence, the New Testament assumed his preexistence when it talked about his becoming human, and, when it spoke of him as preexistent, it was ascribing that preexistence to him whom it was describing in the flesh. It may be that the reference to Mary in the creed was intended to stress primarily her function as the guarantee of Christ’s true humanity, but the creed also intended to teach the supernatural origin of that humanity. Although it is true that neither Paul nor John makes reference to it, the teaching about the virginal conception of Jesus, apparently based upon verse 14 of the seventh chapter of the Book of Isaiah, was sufficiently widespread in the 1st century to warrant inclusion in both Matthew and Luke as well as in creeds that date back to the 1st century. As it stands, the creedal statement is a paraphrase of verse 35 of the first chapter of Luke. In the New Testament the Holy Spirit was also involved in the baptism and the Resurrection of Jesus.
Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried
To a reader of the Gospels, the most-striking feature of the creed is probably its omission of that which occupied a major part of the Gospels, the story of Jesus’ life and teachings. In this respect there is a direct parallel between the creed and the Epistles of the New Testament, especially those of Paul. Judging by the amount of space they devoted to the Passion story, even the writers of the Gospels were apparently more interested in those few days of Jesus’ life than they were in anything else he had said or done. The reason for that was the faith underlying both the New Testament and the creed, that the events of Jesus’ Passion, death, and Resurrection were the events by which God had accomplished the salvation of human beings. The Gospels found their climax in those events, and the other material in them led up to those events. The Epistles applied those events to concrete situations in the early church.
From the way Paul could speak of the Cross (Philemon 2:6–11) and of “the night when he [Jesus] was betrayed” (1 Corinthians 11:23), it seems that before the Gospels came into existence the church commemorated the happenings associated with what came to be called Holy Week. Some of the earliest Christian art was a portrayal of those happenings, another indication of their importance in the cultic and devotional life of early Christianity. How did the Cross effect the salvation of human beings? The answers of the New Testament and the early church to this question involved a variety of metaphors: Christ offered himself as a sacrifice to God; his life was a ransom for many; his death made humankind alive; his suffering was an example to people when they must suffer; he was the Second Adam, creating a new humanity; his death shows people how much God loves them; and others. Every major Atonement theory of Christian theological history discussed below was anticipated by one or another of these metaphors. The New Testament employed them all to symbolize something that could be described only symbolically, that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them” (2 Corinthians 5:19).
He descended into hell
The phrase about the descent into hell was probably the last to be added to the creed. Its principal source in the New Testament was the description in the third chapter of the First Letter of Peter (verses 18–20) of Christ’s preaching to the spirits in prison. Originally, the descent into hell may have been identified with the death of Christ, when he entered the abode of the dead in the underworld. But in the time before it entered the creed, the descent was frequently taken to mean that Christ had gone to rescue the souls of the Old Testament faithful from the underworld, from what Western Catholic theology eventually called the limbo patrum. Among some of the Church Fathers the descent into hell had come to mean Christ’s declaration of his triumph over the powers of hell. Despite its subsequent growth in importance, however, the doctrine of the descent into hell apparently did not form an integral part of the apostolic preaching about Christ.
Glorification
The third day he rose again from the dead
The writers of the New Testament nowhere made the Resurrection of Christ a matter for argument but everywhere asserted it and assumed it. With it began that state in the history of Jesus Christ that was still continuing, his elevation to glory. They used it as a basis for three kinds of affirmations. The Resurrection of Christ was the way God bore witness to his son, “designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead” (Romans 1:4); this theme was also prominent in the Acts of the Apostles. The Resurrection was the basis for the Christian hope for life after death (1 Thessalonians 4:14), and Paul wrote that without it that hope was said to be baseless (1 Corinthians 15:12–20). The Resurrection of Christ was also the ground for admonitions to manifest a “newness of life” (Romans 6:4) and to “seek the things that are above” (Colossians 3:1). The writers of the New Testament themselves expressed no doubt that the Resurrection had really happened. But Paul’s discussion in 1 Corinthians shows that among those who heard the Christian message there was such doubt as well as efforts to rationalize the Resurrection. The differences among the Gospels, and between the Gospels and Paul, suggest that from the outset a variety of traditions existed regarding the details of the Resurrection. But such differences only serve to emphasize how universal the faith in the Resurrection was amid this variety of traditions.
He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father almighty
As indicated earlier, the narrative of the Ascension is peculiar to Luke-Acts, but other parts of the New Testament may refer to it. Such a reference may be made in the fourth chapter of the Letter to the Ephesians (verses 8–10). However, many interpreters hold that, for Paul, Resurrection was identical with Ascension. That, they maintain, is why he could speak of the appearance of the risen Christ to him in continuity with the appearances to others (1 Corinthians 15:5–8) despite the fact that, in the chronology of the creed, the Ascension intervened between them. Session at the right hand of the Father was apparently a Christian interpretation of the first verse of Psalm 110. It implied the elevation—or, as the doctrine of preexistence became clearer, the restoration—of Christ to a position of honor with God. Taken together, the Ascension and the session were a way of speaking about the presence of Christ with the Father during the interim between the Resurrection and the Second Advent. From the Ephesians passage it is evident that this way of speaking was by no means inconsistent with another Christian tenet, the belief that Christ was still present in and with his church. It was, in fact, the only way to state that tenet in harmony with the doctrine of the Resurrection.
From thence he shall come to judge the living and the dead
The creed concludes its Christological section with the doctrine of the Second Advent: the First Advent was a coming into the flesh, the Second Advent a coming in glory. Much controversy among modern scholars has been occasioned by the role of this doctrine in the early church. Those who maintain that Jesus erroneously expected the early end of the world have often interpreted Paul as the first of those who began the adjustment to a delay in the end, with John’s Gospel as a more-advanced stage of that adjustment. Those who hold that the imminence of the end was a continuing aspect of human history as Jesus saw it also maintain that this phrase of the creed was a statement of that imminence, without any timetable necessarily implied. From the New Testament it seems that both the hope of the Second Coming and a faith in the continuing presence of Christ belonged to the outlook of the apostolic church, and that seems to be what the creed meant. The phrase “the living and the dead” is a summary of passages on the Second Coming from several of Paul’s letters, particularly 1 Corinthians (15:51–52) and 1 Thessalonians (4:15–17).
In order to complete the confession of the creed regarding the glorification of Christ, the Nicene Creed added the phrase “of His kingdom there shall be no end.” That was a declaration that Christ’s return as judge would usher in the full exercise of his reign over the world. Such was the expectation of the apostolic church, based upon what it knew and believed about Jesus Christ.
The dogma of Christ in the ancient councils of Jesus
The main lines of orthodox Christian teaching about the person of Christ were set by the New Testament and the ancient creeds. But what was present there in a germinal form became a clear statement of Christian doctrine when it was formulated as dogma. In one way or another, the first four ecumenical councils were all concerned with the formulation of the dogma regarding the person of Christ—his relation to the Father and the relation of the divine and the human in Christ.
Such a formulation became necessary because teachings arose within the Christian community that seemed to threaten what the church believed and confessed about Christ. Both the dogma and the heretical teachings against which the dogma was directed are therefore part of the history of Jesus Christ.
The Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople
Early heresies
From the outset, Christianity has had to contend with those who misinterpreted the person and mission of Jesus. Both the New Testament and the early confessions of the church referred and replied to such misinterpretations. As the Christian movement gained adherents from the non-Jewish world, it had to explain Christ in the face of new challenges.
The misinterpretations touched both the question of his humanity and the matter of his deity. A concern to safeguard the true humanity of Jesus led some early Christians to teach that Jesus of Nazareth, an ordinary man, was adopted as the Son of God in the moment of his baptism or after his Resurrection; that heresy was called adoptionism. Gnostics and others wanted to protect him against involvement in the world of matter, which they regarded as essentially evil, and therefore taught that he had only an apparent, not-real body; they were called docetists. Most of the struggle over the person of Christ, however, dealt with the question of his relation to the Father. Some early views were so intent upon asserting his identity with the Father that the distinction of his person was lost, and he became merely a manifestation of the one God. Because of that idea of Christ as a “mode” of divine self-manifestation, proponents of that view were dubbed “modalists”; from an early supporter of the view it was called Sabellianism. Other interpretations of the person of Christ in relation to God went to the opposite extreme. They insisted so strenuously upon the distinctness of his person from that of the Father that they subordinated him to the Father. Many early exponents of the doctrine of the Logos were also subordinationists, so that the Logos idea itself became suspect in some quarters. What was needed was a framework of concepts with which to articulate the doctrine of Christ’s oneness with the Father and yet distinctness from the Father and thus to answer the question put forth by Adolf von Harnack:
Is the Divinity which has appeared on earth and reunited men with god identical with that supreme Divinity which governs heaven and earth, or is it a demigod?
Nicaea
That question forced itself upon the church through the teachings of Arius. He maintained that the Logos was the first of the creatures, called into being by God as the agent or instrument through which he was to make all things. Christ was thus less than God but more than a human being; he was divine, but he was not God. To meet the challenge of Arianism, which threatened to split the church, the newly converted emperor Constantine convoked the Council of Nicaea in 325, the first ecumenical council of the Christian church. The private opinions of the attending bishops were anything but unanimous, but the opinion that carried the day was that espoused by the young presbyter Athanasius, who later became bishop of Alexandria. The Council of Nicaea determined that Christ was “begotten, not made,” that he was therefore not creature but creator. It also asserted that he was “of the same substance as the Father” (homoousios to patri). In this way it made clear its basic opposition to subordinationism, even though there could be, and were, quarrels about details. It was not equally clear how the position of Nicaea and of Athanasius differed from modalism. Athanasius asserted that it was not the Father or the Holy Spirit but only the Son who became incarnate as Jesus Christ. But in order to assert that, he needed a more-adequate terminology concerning the persons in the Holy Trinity. So the settlement at Nicaea regarding the person of Christ made necessary a fuller clarification of the doctrine of the Trinity, and that clarification in turn made possible a fuller statement of the doctrine of the person of Christ.
Constantinople
Nicaea did not put an end to the controversies but only gave the parties a new rallying point. Doctrinal debate was complicated by the rivalry among bishops and theologians as well as by the intrusion of imperial politics that had begun at Nicaea. Out of the post-Nicene controversies came that fuller statement of the doctrine of the Trinity which was needed to protect the Nicene formula against the charge of failing to distinguish adequately between the Father and the Son. Ratified at the Council of Constantinople in 381 but since lost, that statement apparently made official the terminology developed by the supporters of Nicene orthodoxy in the middle of the 4th century: one divine substance, three divine persons (mia ousia, treis hypostaseis). The three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—were distinct from one another but were equal in their eternity and power. Now it was possible to teach, as Nicaea had, that Christ was “of the same substance as the Father” without arousing the suspicion of modalism. Although the doctrine seemed to make problematical the unity of God, it did provide an answer to the first of the two issues confronted by the church in its doctrine of the person of Christ—the issue of Christ’s relation to the Father. It then became necessary to clarify the second issue—the relation of the divine and the human within Christ.
The Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon
By excluding several extreme positions from the circle of orthodoxy, the formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity in the 4th century determined the course of subsequent discussion about the person of Christ. It also provided the terminology for that discussion, since 5th-century theologians were able to describe the relation between the divine and the human Christ by analogy to the relation between the Father and the Son in the Trinity. The term that was found to express that relation in Christ was physis, “nature.” There were three divine persons in one divine essence; such was the outcome of the controversies in the 4th century. But there were also two natures, one of them divine and the other human, in the one person Jesus Christ. Over the relation between those two natures the theologians of the 5th century carried on their controversy.
The abstract questions with which they sometimes dealt in that controversy, some of them almost unintelligible to a modern mind, must not be permitted to obscure the fact that a basic issue of the Christian faith was at stake: How can Jesus Christ be said to partake of both identity with God and fellowship with humanity?
The parties
During the half century after the Council of Constantinople, several major points of emphasis developed in the doctrine of the person of Christ. Characteristically, these are usually defined by the episcopal see that espoused them. There was a way of talking about Christ that was characteristic of the see at Alexandria. It stressed the divine character of all that Jesus Christ had been and done, but its enemies accused it of absorbing the humanity of Christ in his divinity. The mode of thought and language employed at Antioch, on the other hand, emphasized the true humanity of Christ, but its opponents maintained that in so doing it had split Christ into two persons, each of whom maintained his individual selfhood while they acted in concert with each other. Western theology was not as abstract as either of those alternatives. Its central emphasis was a practical concern for human salvation and for as irenic a settlement of the conflict as was possible without sacrificing that concern. Even more than in the 4th century, considerations of imperial politics were always involved in conciliar actions, together with the fear in countries like Egypt that Constantinople might come to dominate them. Thus, a decision regarding the relation between the divine and the human in Christ could be simultaneously a decision regarding the political situation. Nevertheless, the settlements at which the councils of the 5th century arrived may be and are regarded as normative in the church long after their political setting has disappeared.
The conflict between Alexandria and Antioch came to a head when Nestorius, taking exception to the use of the title “Mother of God” or, more literally, “God-Bearer” (Theotokos) for the Virgin Mary, insisted that she was only “Christ-Bearer.” In that insistence, the Antiochian emphasis upon the distinction between the two natures in Christ made itself heard throughout the church. The Alexandrian theologians responded by charging that Nestorius was dividing the person of Christ, which they represented as so completely united that, in the famous phrase of Cyril, there was “one nature of the Logos which became incarnate.” By that he meant that there was only one nature, the divine, before the Incarnation but that after the Incarnation there were two natures indissolubly joined in one person; Christ’s human nature had never had an independent existence. There were times when Cyril appeared to be saying that there was “one nature of the incarnate Logos” even after the Incarnation, but his most-precise formulations avoided that language.
The Council of Ephesus in 431 was one in a series of gatherings called to settle this conflict, some by one party and some by the other. The actual settlement was not accomplished, however, until the Council of Chalcedon was convened in 451.
The settlement at Chalcedon
The basis of the settlement at Chalcedon was the Western understanding of the two natures in Christ, as formulated in the Tome of Pope Leo I of Rome. Chalcedon declared:
We all unanimously teach…one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, perfect in deity and perfect in humanity…in two natures, without being mixed, transmuted, divided, or separated. The distinction between the natures is by no means done away with through the union, but rather the identity of each nature is preserved and concurs into one person and being.
In that formula the valid emphases of both Alexandria and Antioch came to expression; both the unity of the person and the distinctness of the natures were affirmed. Therefore, the decision of the Council of Chalcedon has been the basic statement of the doctrine of the person of Christ for most of the church ever since. The Western church went on to give further attention to the doctrine of the work of Christ. In the Eastern church the Alexandrians and the Antiochians continued the controversies that had preceded Chalcedon, but they clashed now over the question of how to interpret Chalcedon. The controversy was an effort to clarify the interpretation of Chalcedon, with the result that the extremes of the Alexandrian position were condemned just as the Nestorian extreme of the Antiochian had been. The Alexandrian position was known in the Western church as the heresy of monophysitism, or the teaching that Jesus had only a divine nature, until the 20th century.
Emerging from all that theological discussion was an interpretation of the person of Christ that affirmed both his oneness with God and his oneness with humanity while still maintaining the oneness of his person. Interestingly, the liturgies of the church had maintained that interpretation at a time when the theologians of the church were still struggling for clarity, and the final solution was a scientifically precise restatement of what had been present germinally in the liturgical piety of the church. In the formula of Chalcedon that solution finally found the framework of concepts and of vocabulary that it needed to become intellectually consistent. In one sense, therefore, what Chalcedon formulated was what Christians had been believing from the beginning, but, in another sense, it represented a development from the earlier stages of Christian thought.
