Disputes on Christ: Nestorius and Cyril

in this lecture when we looking at the disputes on Christ or the subject of Christology in the fourth century and we can begin by looking at the recap of where we brought the story of the development of credo language up until this point what's happened so far is moving from the early church discussions of sub alien ism or modalism we notice that there was the rise of radical origin astrology in the person of Arius in particular with the notice how areas made the Sun a creature in how the somewhat tortured experience from Nicaea to kassadin ouple in terms of the politics of it muddy the waters but that the church in the end continued to affirm that Christ was God come down that it was God incarnate and in an effort to protect the doctrines of salvation in particular we said they found that the teachings of arias while coming from a perspective of anti modalism nevertheless on the opposite side of the spectrum equally brought into jeopardy the subject of how God could save us if Jesus is merely a creature who has become incarnate and we want to stress again that what the Creed has done here is limit language it's brought in the parameters of credo orthodoxy but we can say in general this is a pretty broad range a pretty wide berth frankly I mean if all we're saying about the Trinity in the Creed's in the development so far is that we're not going to simply deny that there are different persons in the Trinity interacting in Scripture like civilian is immed uhz and we're not going to call the son merely a creature like Arianism does well that's not exactly a straitjacket in terms of our theological vocabulary in fact when you get someone like Agustin who will see at a few lectures a Gustin wrote a massive tome on the doctrine of the Trinity and it's important to note he wrote that in the context of the Nicene concept to double faith and yet he still had plenty of reflection that he could apply to the subject of the Trinity and though not everyone likes what Agustin has to say the way he attempts to come up with some analogies to describe the Trinity the way he attempts to explore those issues it's telling that he still lives within the context of the Nicene constantinople creed and i also want to stress that while it's often alleged that the Creed's invent language or that they create these doctrines somewhat out of thin air it always needs to be stressed that the Bible is the backbone bible is the source of these teachings and one place you can really notice this is when you look at the Nicene concept and opal descriptions of the spirit is actually quite telling when you look at these lines that are attributed to our confessional credo belief in the spirit notice there's not one bit of language here about the spirit that refers to his being none of it there's no philosophy there's no words homoousios does not appear here now it stands a reason I think that if the Creed's are developing sort of programmatic language and if they really want to sort of out of thin air or create this idea the spirit is God in the same way that Jesus is God well a more simple move would have been to simply say that just as the Sun is homoousios so to the spirit is homoousios but look at the language it actually doesn't go there in fact every one of the points that's mentioned here about the spirit tells us that what they're actually doing is reflecting on the biblical teachings in the biblical verses that give us fodder for our understanding of the Spirit every sentence he spoke by the prophets with the father in the son he is worshiped and glorified there's language of worshiping and baptizing the name of the Spirit in the scriptures he's the Lord the giver of life etc in other words when you look at the Nicene Constantinople Creed which is where we've landed at the beginning of this lecture the framers of these creedal statements when they came to the doctrine of the holy spirit actually held back and relied merely on scriptural language and from just a systematics perspective that's really what you want you want them to say here is all we have in Scripture this is always see but what we see here about the Spirit is that he is worshiped he is sent he is not some lesser being some force and we don't have time to go into all this but I want you to understand that what's going on with Creed's is often what happens is teachers arise who try to develop language in that language might at times create controversy sometimes they're well-intentioned sometimes not and that that controversy will bring the church together in an effort to explain and clarify and to articulate the consensus that the early church fathers believe they already have and lastly at the end of our last lecture we looked at the teachings of apollon arias and we want to underscore the fact that what Apollinaris does is provide a link really between the doctrines of the Trinity that debates about the Trinity and the subsequent debates on Christology which is what we're starting with in this lecture now Christological debates don't have to happen it's not as if the Trinitarian formulas of Nicaea and constantinople create christological problems rather you need to notice that this is an impulse that happens frankly a lot in the history of the church's reflection on Scripture and in theological vocabulary you're going to see repeatedly if you look throughout church history of people who really emphasized kind of GM steroids into one doctrine because that's the debated doctrine that's the one that everyone's fighting over and they'll really stress one piece and too often that stressing of one piece or one doctrine can cause other doctrines to fall into jeopardy I often say to slogan form the answer to one extreme is rarely the opposite extreme because usually an extreme position in theological language is somebody that has sort of lopped off significant pieces of Scripture either through logic or through simply denying that that is what these scriptures teach but it's the contrarians in our midst that frankly too often can confuse just as much and we're going to see a great deal of this here Apollinaris comes along and he is so radically anti Aryan he is so radically committed to the idea that the son is fully God that what he does is he actually begins to limit the ways in which God became man and so we pointed out how Apollinaris believes essentially that the full humanity of Christ is relatively irrelevant for a full doctrine of the Christian idea of Christ coming to save he doesn't feel the staying in other words of the problem that we found in Romans 5 which is that Christ came as the second man the second Adam he simply wants to affirm that this is God in a human body and so that brings us to right now and there are two issues that flow out of this the first issue is that again in defending divinity for some the humanity of Christ becomes obscured outflanking on the one side could often leave you exposed on the other flag and secondly again that the issue here is not simply debating what kind of a body Christ had as if they believe that they can somehow come up with the metaphysical substance of what it is to be fully God and fully man it's also not the case a theta simply shrug their shoulders and say man let's just say he's a hundred percent of both you know fully God fully man somehow means 100% plus 100% means 100% he's all Jesus again this is sometimes the Sunday school way of describing it that the mystery of the Incarnation is some sort of math formula where two hundred percent somehow only equals one person one hundred percent but again if you focus on the issues of salvation what does Christ in the New Testament say that he came to do and what does Christ or the rest of the New Testament say that he was in order to do that because again just as with the Trinity if you look at the way in which the Scriptures invite us to ask or affirm certain positions or certain questions even if we then say these verses are hard there is maybe controversy or challenges in interpreting certain verses and there's maybe debates on this if we just begin with the reality that the Bible invites us to ask certain questions it won't seem that foreign then we transition and we see that the early church is actually asking these questions because here's the thing the New Testament does actually say that Christ came to do something he came to save and then in the scriptures there is a substantial amount of discussion on who Christ was as the Savior and what he had to be to save us when he died on that cross Romans five is one he's the second Adam he came as the second man to die in our place the book of Hebrews describes how he is like us in every way so there's radical commitment to the humanity of Christ he was born he had a human body he didn't float down from the sky and yet as we've seen as plenty of places in Scripture that invite us to see that Christ is God the I am statements the I and the father are one statements language and Paul and language elsewhere we could spend hours frankly going through certain passages and even if we're not going to execute the Greek can try to be scholarly in this we can at least admit the Bible is kind of raising this point for us it's only natural then as Christians that we want to explore what Christ came to do when he saved and what does the Bible tell us that he had to be in order to save us because here with the second issue what we're saying is if God became man to save and that's the phrase we want to kind of focus on the Bible indicates that God became man to save us if we begin with that as the second issue or the second principle that we come to when we look at this creedal period we'll be at a better Vantage whenever we see where people jump the rails and go in a different direction another way to say it is that God came down to be the substitution for us that's a simple statement but if you begin there you have to again say God came down to be man and of course this raises issues of did he have to be fully man they've already concluded with Nicaea and constantinople that he had to be fully god to save us angels don't save us and lesser created beings don't say God saves and so therefore the son is God somehow now we see a rise after the Council of Constantinople signaled already as we've said by the teachings of Apollinaris that there are some in their radical commitment to the idea that God is man somehow confuse or obscure in the equal affirmation that if he's not like us in every way then we are not saved to put it simply if Jesus simply looks fully human then that doesn't cover the blood guilt that we have as a result of breaking covenant but if he is like us in every way then according to the evolving understanding of covenant headship in the Old Testament then he could serve as our covenant representative and die on our behalf now that's later language that we're using to describe this but I think it helps us understand that the instincts here in the early church are not all that dissimilar to the ones that you and I might have if we were to sitting around with friends or family discussing what the Bible has to say about certain things now one last thing before we dive into the actual people and the ideas that are being discussed here it's often alleged and this is based on an older scholar who really developed these categories but it's often said that there are two schools of thought going on here that there's the Antioch Keane school and the Alexandrian school the Antioch in school of course is from the city of Antioch Alexandria from Alexandria and you get this with overly simplistic depiction of the Antioch in school in the Alexandrian school I mean just google it Antioch in versus Alexandria you'll find all kinds of resources that describe this sort of harsh distinction the problem is and historians have been boarding this out really shouting about this for a while patristic scholars there is no such thing as a distinction between the Antioch in school and the Alexandrian school so we're not going to cover it but I want you to be aware that where you see these interpretive conclusions based on this Antioch and Alexandria split that actually that does not exist now there are however two general trends that occur during this time and they carry on for quite some time actually all the way to the Council of Chalcedon and that is the two trends or that there is one loose group of people who believe that what Christ has come to do is not so much come and be or representative rather that he has come to infuse or provide this divine grace to our humanity there's lots of ways that they get at this conclusion one of the big ones we'll look at in just a minute with Theodore of masu estia but there's this general trend where the focus can be in general on the sort of discussion of the glorification of our natural human faculties you might say because Christ became incarnate and that what Christ demonstrates and provides is a way for that divine infusion to come in to us and to correct us and restore us but there's this one trend of folks who talk about Christ as this kind of graced humanity that brings about this grace in our own lives to live aesthetically and to live the perfect life the other trend not surprisingly or those who focus primarily on our sin on our inability to save ourselves how the entire mass of humanity has been lost not utterly we're not the worst possible people that we could be but when it comes to saving ourselves there is a fundamental brokenness that doesn't need to be empowered but needs to be covered and once covered it can then be restored in the process of the ongoing Christian life but it needs to be covered first and whenever you focus first on the need to cover an atone for sin then the issue of who Christ is as our Savior matters because and as we've already stressed the Scriptures really belabor this point he has to die in our place he is the propitiation he is the blood guilt offering he is the covering the mercy seat over our sins and so when you go down this other trend the conclusion only naturally is Christ has to be fully man okay so we've laid a lot of foundations here how does this play out in real time and space but one of the most important and one of the earliest people to come on the scene is a man by the name of Theodore of mops ooh estia in Theodore in a very general way exhibits this first trend that I just described now it's important to note Theodore is never accused of heresy in his lifetime however the people he will influence with his teaching will be accused of heresy well what Theodore stresses is that what Christ was was a graced human he was fully God but that that doesn't really touch his humanity it can't in a manner of speaking metaphysically Theodore will argue it can't touch his humanity so he affirms Nicaea in Constantinople the son is fully God but when he comes to what God came to do he stands tall this idea that the man Jesus was a graced human in a manner the first one to have this that in other words what Theodore wants to do is while affirming the law goes affirming the divinity of the son he wants to protect the divinity of the son from touching or coming in contact you might say and the cooties sends with the humanity of Christ well the importance of Theodore's ideas are not so much that they are his ideas because again he is not fully condemned during his lifetime but rather their importance is because of one of his greatest students mist aureus notorious was a student of Theodore's and like a lot of students sometimes they take the teachings of their master and they expand upon them and they develop them well mist aureus is one of the more important views on Christology from this period of time because again they're attempting to protect the logos they want the Sun to be profoundly divine in the sense that he really cannot touch the humanity in the full sense of the word again you might call this sort of a excessive homo you see anism or something like this historia simply does not want to believe that the omnipotent Sun if he is like the father in every way or that the infinite Sun the omnipresent Sun could in any way be considered localized or in the person of Jesus that it is impossible to describe the Sun as somehow becoming in fleshed and it's important because the language that he chooses to use much like the way arias is language in an effort to protect the father went to four was really excessive in terms of his division between God the Son and the man Jesus and that really is where the issue lies historian ism is a sort of separation of the divinity of Christ in order to protect the divinity of Christ at the expense of the humanity of Christ and one of the lines that notorious used in one of his sermons was that we quote confess God in a man now that's subtle but it's important because what he's saying here is not that the man Jesus is God that He is God come amongst us but rather that the Spirit is somehow alongside in with Jesus in a important way but not in an incarnated way God he says really didn't come down in the specific sense rather there was born this man Jesus and the son particular eyes his relationship with him or came alongside him in a spiritual sense but it was not God come down to take on flesh in many ways what he has is himself wrapped up in this concept of infinity the Sun is too infinite to expansive to omnipresent to ever really be localized in the person of Jesus it so when he says that we confess God in a man it becomes problematic because how do you distinguish the difference between Jesus frankly and the way that the New Testament describes that the spirit or that God is in us if there is no incarnation if the priority of our focus is not that God came to save and if all we've done is focus on this separation between the two which you end up with and this is where notorious goes is this idea that there is sort of two persons two wills two something's going on between the divine side of Jesus and the human side of Jesus mysterious goes on in another sermon to say that he divides the natures they are utterly divided but that it's okay he says because he unites the two in worship and the stress here is that he says that there are two Phocis two persons two something's going on here now don't get locked up in the idea that he is somehow inventing some philosophical language or that he has some platonic idea in its backdrop or something else that's driving him to this conclusion rather it's meditation on Scripture and he says because God is already everywhere the idea that God would come particularly into a person into a man Jesus is simply impossible there are two things we need to focus on here the first is why this affects the doctrines of salvation and the second is what is the fight that they have what is the issue what is the word that they fight over in the first case as we've already laid out the issues of salvation always involve biblically a strong commitment that God came down to save and that when he came down he became like us in every way except without sin now the priority of most of the church the consensus is to stress the divinity of Christ that Jesus was not simply just a man but that he was God come down the problem here at this point though is that the really excessive focus on the idea that the son is God and that he's like the father has not provoked enough conviction in people to stress but he to be like us in every way now that's not true of Athen Asia or of the Cappadocia --nz they have stressed both all along in a manner of speaking if they had simply read a seditious is on the incarnation more closely or at all then they would have actually seen that athenais shish and many of the orthodox theologians from Nicaea had already sort of protected the humanity of Christ but because Nicaea wasn't focused on the humanity of Christ which was assumed by everybody it had only focused on the divinity of the son those who come after end up stressing the divinity and denying some element of the humanity or they end up separating the two entirely which is what we have here in Nestorian so the issue of salvation here is simply that when you look at nestorianism very often theologians say what is done here is simply have no incarnation at all and effectively when you get down to it he simply denied that God has even come down God is everywhere so what does it mean to say that God comes down and again when we look at the issues of this in relationship to John one that the word became flesh that he dwelt among us that he was the light of men etc both are in play in that preamble to the Gospel of John so the story's has simply come to the conclusion that that is relatively illogical to say that God comes down and the theologians from this period of time as we get forward to the next council that we're going to talk about will end up saying that what notorious has done here is put in jeopardy again the essential narrative structure of the Gospels in the basic message of the faith which is that God came to save and he died in our place now what is the issue that they fight over well the issue that they fight over is a relatively strange word to most people and in Protestant and evangelical circles it's a word that some miss read as a medieval invention in relationship to Mary and that word is Theotokos they attack us means the god Bearer it's the belief that Mary in her womb was carrying God incarnate already in some English translations of this the phrases Mary the mother of God and again many Protestants and evangelicals when they hear that phrase assume some sort of medieval Catholic understanding of that phrase but it's right here in the fifth century the issue with calling Mary the mother of God is a bit of a mental game you might say and it makes sense only if you take into account the fact that they're dealing with historian ISM because you see if you believe that Jesus is God come down that means that whenever he comes into her womb we can say that there is already an incarnation now there are lots of other sort of views of Christ from the earlier part of the church which we call adoptionism which is a view that's not in play here but it helps us understand the problem adoptionism had said that when Jesus came he was just simply born of natural causes he was the son of Joseph in a manner of speaking an adoption is said that at Jesus baptism the Spirit came upon him and enlivened him and called him up to some greater purpose this man Jesus and that the Incarnation is really at that moment not at the inception of Jesus and Mary's womb while the church rejected that because again all the way back in the early church the separation of Jesus as God in Jesus as like us in every way was simply counter to the natural reading of Scripture miss Turin ISM isn't an adoption esteem Fateh in her womb can in any way be described as God in her womb God is everywhere again why would he be only in that womb and the stories and others had a response to this word they'll talk us and they would talk about the cristo tacos that we can only say that christ himself is in there not God now these debates might seem archaic in a bit sort of ill fashioned arianism and the debates over homo osseous might seem to make more sense the debates about the divinity of Jesus but maybe there's an instinct in some of you to say why in the world leave fighting about this well if you come to this believing that all they're fighting about is some philosophical conception of the humanity of Christ or how the to mingle per se then it's easy to mistake this debate but rather when you look at this issue as an issue of salvation of the essence of the gospel God came down to die on our behalf and he was like us in every way that he can see why some of the struggle here is more fervent than it might be if this issue were raised to sort of out of the blue in our modern world well the idea here is again mist aureus has separated the two I often tell students that a way to remember nestorianism and it's overplayed and historian today would probably not like this in full but what the historian position amounts to is a schizophrenic Jesus and later on mist organism will sort of intensify and become stronger on this separation of Jesus as Tuesday Jers with two people two persons but it's a sort of a schizophrenic thing you have a human nature a human will a human body and that you have God the Son come alongside that human and kind of guide it or direct it but again notice what notorious is concerned about the son is God and therefore let's separate him from any involvement or engagement or incarnation with the human Jesus well the two men who countered historias were cyril of alexandria in a pope a bishop of rome named Celestine both of these men stress the priority of the divine nature of Jesus as the primary focus whenever we talk about God come down in other words they stress God had to come to save the Scriptures teaches God came to save only God saves it can't simply be that God used a man but rather God Himself came and they really don't want to describe how God came rather they did simply want to say God came down and he took on flesh he became incarnated we don't get to see the inside of that we don't get to understand how that works but we're also not gonna sit back and say that there's a separation of divine and human nature's to such an extent that in the end we simply said that there is a man on that cross and that God is somehow everywhere well by this time in 428 historia s' had become Bishop of Constantinople the controversy had not yet arisen to the point where his consecration as bishop had really been called in a doubt but historia s-- following the teachings of theodore of masu estia had begun to intensifies language about the separation of jesus humanity from his divinity in cyril in particular is the main fighter on this issue cyril of alexandria and he had enlisted the help of Celestine well in the fall of 430 there was a small council a Senate in realm to which the stories had been called in order to answer for his views now remember back when I said that Constantinople and Rome are going to begin to have some tussles or some fights as to who's really in charge here well this is a bit of a crack in the armor mysterious refuses to come and the Senate of Rome condemns Nestorius and 430 well this led to controversy and strife between east and west and not surprisingly the emperor had to step in the Emperor this time is Theodosius and he decides the call a full ecumenical council yet again for the third time in order to settle and debate the teachings of mist aureus and so in June of 431 they're kicked off the Council of Ephesus or Ephesus one as it's known as the third ecumenical council now I'm going to say right now emphasis one is a massive monstrosity of leadership and fights in in fights it's not pretty it's a huge mess but this has been known to happen from time to time in church history is that a group of sinners get together and they do sinful things but I wanted us to focus first on the debates of the issues here so that you could at least appreciate the theology of it but now I want to give you the warts-and-all version well historia San Cyril arrived at the council first then while they're there they are waiting for John of Antioch John is the bishop from the city of Antioch he's gone down by the name as a moderate here at this council which really doesn't make much sense he's not really a moderate rather what John is is somebody who affirms essentially what Cyril says and what the western half of the church has come to say about nestorianism but John is a friend of miss Toria tsa's and therefore he doesn't want to see his friend betrayed well for whatever reason John of Antioch is late to the council well Cyril believes that John is stalling that he's playing some tactics here to kind of throw the council off whack so Cyril just simply convenes the council begins the council without the presence of John there as a result notorious actually refuses to attend the council or to answer for anything he grandstands a bit because he wants John of Antioch to be there Cyril is unswayed and so he continues on with a council and the discussions about the teachings of Nestorian present after a period of time john of enoch does arrive he's frustrated with Cyril even though as we'll say in a minute he does end up siding with Cyril on this point and so he and historia sexually convene an alternative council sort of a bizarre-o council could inverse council in which they're discussing the teachings in a story is in a positive light while Cyril and the other council are meeting discussing historian ism in a negative light then at some point the Roman delegates the delegates from the Bishop of Rome arrive and they join the council that Cyril has convened not surprisingly given the Pope's backing of the teachings of Cyril over against the stories why is it can imagine both sides come to different conclusions and Theodosius actually has to come in and decide which one is followed protocol and which one is to be believed and Theodosius sides with the majority opinion with the leadership of Cyril in the first council that got under way and therefore historias is condemned and he's exiled now this is important for two reasons first of all of course it was a huge mess so there's all kinds of fights and a spill out of this problem we're notorious is now not only accused of heresy but is now also accused of attempting to divide the council and start his own Council which obviously is a big no-no the other issue in terms of the history of the church is that because of the wrong that notorious believed that he experienced at the hands of Cyril and those at Ephesus one there was a split here such that there is even to this day a historian Church now they go by different names in the East but there is a Nestorian Church that is carried on not only a position in relationship to Christ in the Incarnation but also a real wound that they say was experienced by an historian where he was trumped up on charges that his theology was not allowed to be aired properly and they say at least today that the teachings described in a story is some of the excesses of the teachings of notorious were later inventions foisted onto notorious so when I described his stories his view as somewhat schizophrenic on the subject of Jesus humanity and divinity what modern historians would say that's not when the story has taught that that is an excessive caricature of his teachings and so it's an ongoing debate even to this day it's a ongoing not only theological struggle but ecclesiological struggle between east and west principally between the Catholic Church and the historian Church the other issue is that Ephesus one once it was finally decided its teachings were promulgated and the church came to embrace it fully even though the council itself was a mess the decisions of the council were embraced by the church and the council of ephesus actually affirmed boldly the Theotokos language the somewhat jargony word that mary is the god bearer that whatever we're going to say about jesus we have to say that he is God incarnate we can't explain it it's a mystery we're not trying to explain it but we want to end up saying that the baby in her womb was God come down that that is the epitome of the Christmas story that God came down to save well another reason why Ephesus 1 also carried more weight is that Cyril and John within a year or two after the council made nice the two of them got together and as we said John of Antioch actually affirmed the basic D logic positions of Cyril and others while the two get together and in an effort at Harmony come up with what's known as the formula of reunion and it's a document in which John affirms the essence of what Cyril is saying about God come down incarnate and Cyril affirms that john of antioch is on a side now john Ivania got a lot of flack for this he was seen as a betrayer of nist aureus again the wound with the Nestorian church is carried on in part also because of the betrayal of john but John's opinion from the beginning was actually on the side of Cyril well in the end Christology was not decided in one fell swoop rather what happens is notorious becomes condemned in these exiled it emphasis one becomes the third ecumenical council but as we'll see going forward not all of the issues have been resolved because in the zeal of some to attack nestorianism not surprisingly they went too far in the opposite direction and so flowing out of Ephesus one you have ongoing debates about Christology mostly related to the divinity of Christ and mostly related around the subject of salvation but Ephesus one is at the end of the Christological debates it's only the beginning

Channel: Ryan Reeves

Views: 110,871

Keywords: Nestorius (Deceased Person), Cyril Of Alexandria (Author), Jesus Christ (Deity), Religion (TV Genre), First Council Of Ephesus (Organization), Christianity (Religion), Christology (Literature Subject), Evangelicalism (Religion), Protestantism (Religion), The Bible (Religious Text), Theotokos

Id: 8o4j5xrlJLM

Length: 34min 5sec (2045 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 28 2015