(12 minutes)

The humanity of Christ is essential to our salvation. That may seem like a given. After all, how could we be redeemed and then represented by One who doesn’t share our nature? Besides, it’s “obvious” in our time that Jesus was human. Everyone, apart from the ignorant or intellectually dishonest, agrees that Jesus was a human who lived some 2000 years ago in the Roman province of Palestine. Most even agree that he was crucified under the Prefect Pontius Pilate. There are plenty who deny the divinity of Christ today, but few in our Western circles deny that He was human. So, why write a three-part series on the human nature of Christ? Well, the simple reason for this series is that many misunderstand the true humanity of our Savior or “mix” His humanity with His divinity. As believers, we must defend the humanity of Christ as much as His divinity because to lose one is to lose all of Christ. This is a hill to die on.

I will explain the human nature of Christ in three articles: First, in this article, I will overview and explain the heresies that led to the Chalcedonian Creed’s statements on the human nature of Christ. I truly believe to understand orthodox Christology we must first see the heresies that forced creedal statements. In the second article, I will show how the Reformed Creeds and Confessions are in line with Scripture and tradition (I hope to show how we are more “Catholic” than Roman Catholicism!) And finally, I will close the series with a look at one of the most powerful passages we have in relation to the humanity of Christ, Hebrews 2:5-18. In that final article, I will explain the modern need to defend and know the humanity of Christ. With all that said, let’s look at some heresy (that sounded better in my head…)

The Road to Chalcedon

To understand where we are, we must first see where we’ve been. Rome argued against the Reformation by calling it a “new church,” however, when we look back to the church Fathers and the creeds formulated in the early church, we see how the Reformation truly brought us back to the roots of the faith.

In the first four centuries of the church, we see numerous attacks against the Christian faith, none as ferocious as the attacks against the person and works of Christ. And, sadly, many of these attacks came from within. During the first 400 years, Christology was negatively affected by two popular philosophical methods. First, the highly syncretistic methods of middle Platonism encouraged folks to pull doctrines from various religions and mix them with philosophical oddities. We see this most clearly with the Gnostic system. In Gnosticism, it was argued that flesh was inherently evil, while the spirit is good. In this dualistic system, Christ couldn’t have been truly human because “flesh is inherently evil.” 

The second philosophical method that arose after middle Platonism went out of style, Neoplatonism, kept some aspects of devaluing human flesh, albeit to a much less extreme. It still contributed to denying parts of the humanity of Christ. With this in mind, I want to point out four early heresies that denied the essential human nature of Christ and how Chalcedon ultimately dealt with them.

Docetism - Jesus Only “Seemed” to be Human

Out of Gnosticism came one of the earliest heresies against the humanity of Christ: “Docetism” (From the Greek dokeo which = to seem). This Gnostic heretical powerhouse taught that Jesus only seemed human, but was in reality only a “spirit.” Therefore, in this system, he didn’t actually die on the cross but was either “hanging” there in the appearance of a person, or it was someone else who was mischievously transformed to look like Christ (as later claimed by the Quran). Here is how it is explained in the Gnostic text, the Apocalypse of Peter,

"He whom you saw on the tree, glad and laughing, this is the living Jesus. But this one into whose hands and feet they drive the nails is his fleshly part, which is the substitute being put to shame, the one who came into being in his likeness.”

Docetism is among the first heresies we see in the early church. John wrote against it explicitly in 2 John 1:7, saying, “For many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. Such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist.”

We see a creed-like statement against Docetism in Ignatius’ letter to the Smyrnaeans (written around AD 107/108 according to Eusebius),

“... with respect to our Lord Jesus Christ, that He was the Son of God, ‘the first-born of every creature,’ God the Word, the only-begotten Son, and was of the seed of David according to the flesh, by the Virgin Mary; was baptized by John, that all righteousness might be fulfilled by Him; that He lived a life of holiness without sin, and was truly, under Pontius Pilate and Herod the tetrarch, nailed [to the cross] for us in His flesh... He suffered truly, even as also He truly raised up Himself, not, as certain unbelievers maintain, that He only seemed to suffer, as they themselves only seem to be [Christians]. And as they believe, so shall it happen unto them, when they shall be divested of their bodies, and be mere evil spirits” (Ignatius of Antioch To the Smyrnaeans, i-ii, emphasis mine).

Docetism was finally condemned without reservation in325 at Nicaea (although, it had lost a good bit of steam before this official statement).

Apollinarianism - The “Mindless” Messiah

Arianism (the idea that the Son was a created being) rocked the church and was the main heretical threat in the 4th-century. Apollinaris the Younger was the bishop of Laodicea around the year 361. He was opposed to Arianism and was an ally to the Nicene statement regarding the consubstantial nature of the Son. However, in his defense of the divinity of Christ, he cast aside His humanity. He argued from a Neoplatonic understanding of the trichotomy of human nature. This system, championed by Plotinus, stated that people are a composite of three parts: Body, soul (the Intellect/mind), and spirit (God-consciousness). This understanding of human nature caused all sorts of trouble.

Using this tripartite division of human nature, Apollinaris argued that Christ didn’t have a truly human soul (intellect) but the divine mind took the place of the human mind of Christ. Since the soul, according to Apollinaris, is the seat of the human intellect, will, and emotions, he and his followers denied that Christ had a total human nature, and the “mind of Christ” was not human, but divine. Gregory of Nazianzus wasn’t a fan of this. He wrote,

“The unassumed is the unhealed, but what is united with God is also being saved. Had half of Adam fallen, what was assumed and is being saved would have been half too; but if the whole fell he is united to the whole of what was born and is being saved wholly. They are not, then, to begrudge us our entire salvation or to fit out a Savior with only bones and sinews and the picture of a human being. … If he has a soul, but if he has no mental consciousness, can he be human? Man is not an animal without mind! The form, “the tabernacle,” must have been human, but the soul might be a horse’s soul or a cow’s or some other unintelligent beast’s. That, at any rate, will be what is being saved!” (Ep. 101.5)

In short, if Christ doesn’t have a human mind we are not represented by a truly human Savior. This theory was condemned as heresy at Constantinople in 381. The positive affirmation of Christ’s humanity in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed is as follows: “. . .Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered and was buried; and the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures.”

Eutychianism and Nestorianism: Two Heretical Opposites

With Arianism soundly rejected and the divinity of the Son affirmed and canonized by the orthodox church, people wrestled with how Christ’s human nature relates to His Divine nature. In Constantinople, two men developed systems that opposed each other and denied the humanity of Christ on opposite counts. The first was the monk Eutyches. He taught that the humanity of Christ was “swallowed” up or overshadowed by the Divine. The theological conclusion to this system is that Christ was not the “God-man” but rather He was a totally “other” nature that wasn’t truly human, or divine, but some type of composite mixture.[1]

On the other side of the spectrum was the Archbishop of Constantinople, Nestorius (He was in this role for three years, 428 to 431). He taught that the human nature of Christ and the divine nature of Christ were not united in essence but rather that he had two distinct natures. Or, in the words of Louis Berkhoff, “Instead of blending the two natures into a single self-consciousness [as Eutyches did] Nestorianism places them alongside each other with nothing more than a moral and sympathetic union between them.” A key part of the Nestorian’s heresy is that he refused to call Mary “The Mother of God” but instead used the term “mother of Christ.” I will go into why we can call Mary the mother of God in the next article, but know that he was so dividing the human and divine nature that he didn’t consider them connected in any ontological way.[2]

So, on one end, we have a mixture of the Divine and human natures, and on the other we have a cleaver hacking away at the God-man. However, leaning to one side or the other results in falling into the ditch of denying Christ’s humanity.

After a rather nasty Ecclesiastical battle (which could be an article in itself), Nestorius was condemned and deposed at the 3rd Ecumenical Council at Ephesus in 431. Eutychianism was officially condemned at Chalcedon in 451. 

The Chalcedonian Creed and the Hypostatic Union

In closing, I want to let the Chalcedonian Creed speak for itself. Many godly and wise leaders formulated this statement and all I have to add is how thankful I am to be positioned in history at the time I am. I will spend more time in the following articles discussing modern application of the doctrine of the humanity of Christ. But first, let’s look at the past. 

“We, then, following the holy Fathers, all with one consent, teach men to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man, of a reasonable soul and body; consubstantial with us according to the manhood; in all things like unto us, without sin; begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead, and in these latter days, for us and for our salvation, born of the virgin Mary, the mother of God, according to the manhood; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ, as the prophets from the beginning have declared concerning him, and the Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us, and the Creed of the holy Fathers has handed down to us.”

[1] For a short, helpful overview of Eutychianism follow this Link: https://www.ligonier.org/learn/devotionals/eutychian-heresy/

[2] See also this overview of Nestorianism https://www.ligonier.org/learn/devotionals/nestorian-heresy/