Early history
- Related Topics:
- Christianity
- theology
- miaphysitism
The four Gospels portray Jesus as having had a sense of mission much like the prophets in the Hebrew Bible, and they declare that Jesus saw himself as the decisive revelation of God to his people. That revelation consisted of his teachings, both about himself and about his role. Throughout the more than 2,000 years of Christian history, there has been what might be called a dual emphasis with regard to Jesus: he has been seen both as teacher and as saviour, and accordingly either his teaching or his person has stood in the foreground of theological reflection.
The earliest Christological reflection focused on the titles given to Jesus in the apostolic writings. Those titles, some of which were used more widely than others, derived in one way or another from the Hebrew Scriptures. Son of Man, Son of God, and Messiah were three terms prominently employed in the Gospel narratives. Jesus was also described as judge and as high priest (as in the Epistle to the Hebrews). John the Baptist referred to him as the Lamb of God on the occasion of Jesus’ baptism, but that title hardly appears subsequently in the apostolic writings. It was used in the liturgy, however, and the iconography of the lamb, generally depicted with a cross, became one of the foremost Christian symbols. Another title used in the New Testament, but only sparingly afterward, was Servant of God.
Despite its clear prominence in the Gospels, the term Son of Man enjoyed less-extensive usage. In Jewish Scripture (e.g., the books of Ezekiel, Daniel, and Enoch), it has various meanings, but the Gospels most likely appropriated passages that referred to a heavenly figure who will come to judge the world. The term does not appear in the writings of the apostle Paul, and the Letter of Barnabas (12:10) expressly prefers Son of God, presumably because Son of Man was thought to emphasize the “human” Jesus and thus to diminish him.
In antiquity the words god and son were rather ambiguous, as illustrated by the veneration of the Roman emperors, who were addressed as “my Lord and my God”; Jesus is addressed in the same way in the confession of the apostle Thomas (John 20:28): “Thomas answered him, ‘My Lord and my God!’ ” Moreover, the Christian understanding of Jesus as God and as the Son of God was consonant with the trend in late antiquity toward monotheism, particularly since the earliest Christian reflection did not ponder the precise relationship of the “son” to the “father.” The phrase only Son, which appears in The Gospel According to John (3:16) and proved so important in subsequent discussion, rarely occurs in apostolic literature. The appellation Son of God seemed consistent with the notion of the eternal preexistence of all that is good. In its broadest sense, the notion of the Son of God denoted a special relationship to the Father: Jesus is “the” Son of God, related to “his” Father in a special way.
The assertion of Jesus’ distinctive status as Son raised questions, from the very earliest days of Christianity, about the beginning of this status, about Jesus’ relationship to the Father, and about the relationship between the divine and the human in Jesus himself. The Gospel According to John maintains that the status of Son is unique to Jesus. That affirmation marked the beginning of the orthodox Christian assertion that fully equated the Son of God with God, the Son. The other Gospels also commented on the attributes of the Son when they spoke about the Son’s omnipotence and his effective role in the creation.
The title Christ, from the Greek word meaning “anointed” or “messiah,” was one of several appellations for Jesus, but it increasingly took on a special and important meaning. The combination of the proper name Jesus with the appellation “the Christ”—Jesus, the Christ—became before long the name Jesus Christ, with both words conjointly denoting a single name, virtually akin to a family name. Accordingly, Jesus Christ became the standard appellation for Jesus, somewhat contrary to the earlier usage of Christ Jesus, meaning “the Messiah Jesus.” Clearly, the use of the term Messiah or Christ for Jesus by the early Christian community must be seen in the context of contemporary Jewish notions of the messiah. Christian scholarship traditionally argued that the Jewish expectation of the messiah at the time of Jesus focused on a political figure who would bring redemption to Israel through political might. Scholarship since the mid-20th century, however, has challenged that view, insisting that the picture was far more complex.
The most widely used title for Jesus was Lord (Greek: Kyrios), undoubtedly because for non-Jews it was more comprehensible than Christ; the former term also implied adoration. As indicated by the preceding discussion, in the apostolic age the titles and appellations given to Jesus were often used in a guarded and tentative way, as in the Second Letter of Clement (written c. 125–140 by an unknown author) and in the writings of St. Ignatius of Antioch (died c. 110).
Until the middle of the 2nd century, such terms emphasized two themes: that of Jesus as a preexistent figure who becomes human and then returns to God and that of Jesus as a creature elected and “adopted” by God. The first theme makes use of concepts drawn from Classical antiquity, whereas the second relies on concepts characteristic of ancient Jewish thought. The second theme subsequently became the basis of “adoptionist Christology” (see adoptionism), which viewed Jesus’ baptism as a crucial event in his adoption by God.
Christologies of the ancient world
The earliest controversies
Strictly speaking, Christology should be distinguished from Trinitarian theology, though the two subjects are closely related. Trinitarian theology is concerned with “intradivine” distinctions: it explores the relationship between Jesus and God—between the divine nature of the Son and that of the Father (and the Holy Spirit). Christology, on the other hand, focuses on the relationship between the human nature of Jesus and his divine nature. Trinitarian theology is a prerequisite of Christological discourse, a fact reflected in debates between Christian theologians beginning in the 3rd century. The Arian controversy, for example, was not about Christology but about a Trinitarian issue: whether Jesus was divine (see Arianism). The basic contours of the controversy provided the context for the Christological debate that began once the church had concluded that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit formed a single Godhead and that the Son was fully divine. The remaining issue concerned how the divine nature of Jesus was related to his humanity.
The richness of metaphor in the apostolic writings helped shape the early Christian understanding of Jesus. That extensive vocabulary was first given a coherent framework in the 2nd century, when Ignatius of Antioch rejected adoptionism to argue that Jesus was the conqueror of death, in whom both the divine and the human were present. According to Ignatius, Jesus was spirit and flesh, created and uncreated, suffering and nonsuffering. As spirit, Jesus was one and equal with the Father; as flesh, he was subordinate and altogether obedient to the Father. Ignatius did not reflect on how those contrasting characteristics could be harmonized, nor did he seem bothered by the fact that his views amounted to a series of paradoxes.
The combination of the divine and the human in Jesus posed a formidable problem for 2nd-century theologians, especially the Gnostics, who adopted a cosmological dualism and held that the material world was the creation of the Devil. The Gnostic thinkers Marcion (see Marcionite), Valentinus, and Basilides, for whom such a connection was unthinkable, proposed a Christology based on Docetism, which maintained that Jesus’ assumption of the flesh was only apparent. Others taught that Jesus was wholly human, that he was wholly divine, or that the divine entered him at his baptism only to leave him at his Crucifixion. In response to the soteriological question Why did Christ come down?, St. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon, argued that, in order to be the redeemer of humankind, Jesus, who was divine, also had to be human. But, because he was begotten by the Father, he was inferior to him. The Roman theologian Tertullian (died c. 225) suggested that the two substances, the divine and the human, were mixed but not fused in Jesus. That enabled him to assert that “the Son of God died” and to speak of “the crucified God.” Sabellianism, named after Sabellius (flourished c. 220), possibly a Roman presbyter, sought to preserve a strict monotheism by holding that Jesus was a form of the one God, a temporary mode of God’s revelation. Also known as “modalism” or “monarchianism,” that doctrine maintained that there were three such modes: the Father as creator and lawgiver, the Son as redeemer, and the Spirit as giver of life.
Theological discourse in Alexandria, represented in the 2nd century by St. Clement of Alexandria, centred on the concept of the logos, which was understood as the source of all rationality, knowledge, and morality. According to logos theology, logos appeared as philosophy among the Greeks and as the Law among the Jews and reached its final form in Jesus. The problem lay in the difficulty of understanding Jesus as truly human. That was an issue for Origen (c. 185–c. 254), a theologian from Alexandria who sought to differentiate the logos from God and yet to locate it as close to God as possible. His solution was expressed in the phrase “the Son is eternally begotten of the Father.” Origen saw the Son as subordinate to the Father, though he did use the term homoousios (Greek: “of the same substance” or “of the same essence”), which proved to be crucial in subsequent Christological debate.
Many of the participants in the controversies surrounding the divinity and humanity of Jesus came from the eastern Mediterranean. They wrote in Greek and employed the concepts and vocabulary of Greek philosophy. Most Western theologians, meanwhile, were preoccupied with other issues, though St. Augustine discussed the nature of Jesus in his magisterial work On the Trinity.
The question in that bewildering diversity of positions and arguments—which, nonetheless, had at its core the effort to safeguard both the unity of Jesus with God and his separateness from God—is whether the debates led to a logical conclusion in the decisions rendered at the great ecumenical councils of the 4th and 5th centuries. Traditional historiography answered that question in the affirmative, maintaining that the apostolic faith was expressed in the resolution of the Trinitarian-Christological controversies through the canons of the Council of Nicaea (325), which provided the orthodox definition of the relationship of God the Father and God the Son, and the formula of Chalcedon (451), which established orthodox teaching on the nature of Christ. According to that view, mainstream Christianity battled deviations from the implicit and explicit apostolic faith. The alternative perspective, presently held widely by scholars, sees the historical development of Christology in terms of a rich multiplicity of viewpoints, each with its own persuasiveness and biblical grounding. That perspective notes the serendipity of the course of the historical discussion and the arbitrariness of its resolution at both Nicaea and Chalcedon. Moreover, though the formulations of Nicaea and Chalcedon subsequently served to determine the parameters of orthodoxy and heresy, they were never universally accepted by all branches of Christendom, either at the time or afterward. It is not possible, therefore, to speak of a universal acceptance of classic Christology; rather, classic Christology was normative only in the Western church.