As in the area of the doctrine of the Trinity, the general development of Christology has been characterized by a plurality of views and formulations. Solutions intermediate between the positions of Antioch and Alexandria were constantly proposed. Two particular solutions became so controversial as to be deemed heretical. During the 5th century the position subsequently referred to by the mainstream of Christianity as Nestorianism, associated with Nestorius and placing strong emphasis upon the human aspects of Jesus Christ at the expense of his divine aspects, arose from the Antiochene school. The position known as monophysitism, associated with the monk Eutyches (and, according to some detractors, with Cyril of Alexandria) and placing strong emphasis upon the divine nature of Christ at the apparent expense of his humanity, emerged from the Alexandrian school. After the reign of Constantine, the Roman emperor who effectively made Christianity the religion of the empire, the great ecumenical synods occupied themselves essentially with the task of creating uniform formulations binding upon the entire imperial church. The Council of Chalcedon (451) finally settled the dispute between Antioch and Alexandria by drawing from each, declaring:

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.

The Christological statement composed at Chalcedon did not resolve the dispute to everyone’s satisfaction, as certain eastern, “non-Chalcedonian,” churches felt that the council’s statement about the “identity of each nature” had strayed too close to the purported dyophysitism of Nestorius and therefore too far from what they perceived to have been the miaphysite Christology of Cyril.

Even the Christological formulas, however, do not claim to offer a rational conceptual clarification. Instead, they emphasize clearly three contentions in the mystery of the sonship of God. First, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is completely God, that in reality “the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” in him (Colossians 2:9). Second, Jesus Christ is completely human. Third, those two “natures” do not exist beside one another in an unconnected way but, rather, are joined in him in a personal unity. Once again, the Neoplatonic metaphysics of substance offered the categories so as to settle conceptually those various theological concerns. Thus, the idea of the unity of substance (homoousia) of the divine Logos with God the Father assured the complete divinity of Jesus Christ, and the mystery of the person of Jesus Christ could be grasped in a complex but decisive formula: two natures in one person. The concept of person, taken from Roman law, served to join the fully divine and fully human natures of Christ into an individual unity.

Christology, however, is not the product of abstract logical operations but instead originates in the liturgical and charismatic sphere wherein Christians engage in prayer, meditation, and asceticism. Not being derived primarily from abstract teaching, it rather changes within the liturgy in new forms and in countless hymns of worship—as in the words of the Easter liturgy:

The king of the heavens appeared on earth out of kindness to man and it was with men that he associated. For he took his flesh from a pure virgin and he came forth from her, in that he accepted it. One is the Son, two-fold in essence, but not in person. Therefore in announcing him as in truth perfect God and perfect man, we confess Christ our God.