Two natures in Christ

Speaker 1 0:00

Yes, you see, I think that this is becoming a problem not only for Western Christology. People who've been trained in Western theology have basically Mopsuestian Christology when it comes to the two natures in Christ. If not out-and-out Nestorian, then they are veiled Mopsuestians, historian, then they are veiled mopsuestians. And what this means is that they don't fully appreciate the teachings of Saint Cyril of Alexandria on the person of Christ. And it's Saint Cyril of Alexandria who gives us the foundations of our Christology Orthodox Christology, of our Christology Orthodox Christology. It's Saint Cyril of Alexandria who tells us in his second letter to Nestorius, he wrote that Scripture does not say that the Logos united the prosopon, a human prosopon, to himself, but that he became flesh, but that he became flesh. So what Saint Cyril is saying and Saint John Damascene follows this line of thinking is that there are not two subjects in Christ, there is but one. The other day, on the Feast of the Ascension, one of our priests was giving a sermon and he said that God became a human being. And that's the problem, right there, of course he's thinking Anthropos. Anthropos can be translated quite correctly as a human being, philologically, but Anthropos may also be translated as man. Not a man, but man, human and that is the sense in which Saint Cyril of Alexandria uses the term understands that the Logos became flesh. He did not unite the prosopon of a man to himself, but that he became flesh. So you have the logos, who is a divine being the god, the son and word of god, the second hypothesis of the Holy Trinity, who unites our human flesh, meaning our human body, and our reasonable and spiritual soul, human soul, to Himself. So we are dealing with a divine being, not a human being. We are dealing with a divine being, not a human being. We are dealing with a divine being who becomes human as well. In that sense, so when we see the logos in the flesh, when we touch the logos in the flesh, it is indeed the logos whom we are seeing and it is the logos whom we are touching and everything, all the saving work of christ is accomplished, as the services of the church teach us.

Speaker 1 3:17

Katasarka according to the flesh. He was born according to the flesh. He suffered according to the flesh. He was born according to the flesh. He suffered according to the flesh. He died on the cross according to the flesh and he rose again according to the flesh. This is the point. So, from there when you go down the road.

Christ perfectly equal in His divine status with God the Father

Speaker 1 3:45

As I've said before many times, when you approach the mystery of the God-man first as man, you almost inevitably fall into error and you begin to think in terms, familiar terms, that Christ could have sinned, that Christ learned his Tanakh from the rabbis of Nazareth, that Christ grew in wisdom, that he was ignorant of certain things, forgetting all the while that christ is god. Christ is the god, equal in every respect in his divine status with god the father. And, as saint john damascene says, the logos allowed his human nature to exist in a human way. He voluntarily assumed the blameless passions, so he grew hungry, thirsty, tired, so on and so forth. As he willed, he prayed. Mean he's God right? Who is he praying to? He's praying to God, the Father as the Logos, in his human capacity, as an example to us. I mean, what is prayer? It's communion with God. Is he not in communion with God? Of course he's in communion with God. So all these mysteries are misunderstood. Gethsemane is misunderstood.

Divine and human wills in Christ

Speaker 1 5:27

The two wills in Christ are misunderstood. The Western theologians and those Orthodox who follow the Mopsuestian line of thinking. They think that the Lord was in conflict with himself in the Garden of Gethsemane, that he struggled. He struggled to accept the will of the Father, but the will of the Father is his very own will. There is one will in the Holy Trinity, one common, single will. So when he says, not my will but thy will be done, it means not my human will but thy divine will, which is also my will. And that's why people, they don't take it seriously.

The human flesh of Christ both deified and deifying

Speaker 1 6:18

When St John Damascene says the human will of Christ always willed what the divine will willed it to. Will Because it is the will of the Logos. It is his human will, yes, but it's not the human will of some second subject. In Christ, christ is not the man in whom the Logos dwelt. Christ is the, the man in whom the Logos dwelt. Christ is the Logos willing, now in a human way, now in a divine way, and his two wills were always in perfect harmony with each other. His human flesh was deified, that is to say it realized the divine purpose in the creation of the first Adam, from the moment that he was conceived in his mother's womb, from the moment of inception, he was deified. So we're speaking of deified human nature, but this deified human nature is the human nature of none other than the Logos. So it is not simply deified, it is deifying. It has become the source of our deification, the source of our theosis.

A nature has a will and an energy

True freedom

Speaker 1 7:51

Now, what I've just said, in a matter of minutes, I'm sorry to say, is very difficult to find, even in our seminaries. You have two natures, perfect natures, and a nature has a will and an energy. It has a life. How do we know the will? We know the will from what one does. That's the action activity, the energy does. That's the action activity, the energy. They think that the fact that they act in unison, in perfect harmony with each other, suggests a lack of freedom. It's exactly the opposite, because freedom does not lie in our ability to choose to do something other than the will of God. Freedom is the will of God. Freedom is living on the plane of the life, of the Holy Trinity, and God is, by definition, supremely free. So when we are united with God and when we are in harmony, living in harmony with his will, then we are truly free.

Speaker 1 9:25

The West does not have a distinction between nature and person. The west does use those terms, but it's not a correct distinction and it's not sufficient to help them theologically. What is of nature and what is of person. We mentioned the will and the energy just a moment ago, and what I implied, at least, was that if there are two natures in Christ, in the one hypostasis of Jesus Christ, then there must also be two wills and two energies.

Essence and energies

Speaker 1 10:06

St John Damascene also defines energy as life, which is why I mentioned that earlier. He said energy means life, and if you don't have an energy, that means something doesn't have life. If it doesn't have life, it doesn't exist. This is a point that St Gregory Palamas took up. When his adversaries, his theological opponents, denied that the uncreated essence has an uncreated energy, he says well, in that case you're atheists, you don't believe in any God. If an essence has no life, then what are we talking about? Something that doesn't actually exist? And so what is of essence? And essence and nature, as we've said, after the fourth century, become synonymous. What is of essence and what is of nature? And then what is of hypostasis? And after the work of the Cappadocian fathers, hypostasis and prosopon are synonymous. They don't know.

The saving work of Christ

Speaker 1 11:23

So when they speak of the will of God and following the will of God and so on and so forth, and, more fundamentally, the saving work of Christ, there's no understanding that our nature was redeemed in Christ, but then it is down to each one of us to follow his way voluntarily. Our nature has indeed been saved, but in Christ, which means that each one of us images of Christ, created, images of the uncreated image has the responsibility to follow christ or not. I mean well, that would be again, that would be introducing choice. So the only correct response is to follow the way of Christ voluntarily. That's not an obliteration of one's personhood, of one's will. It is an affirmation of one's personhood and one's will because in the place we were created by him and for him.

The Fall

Speaker 1 12:52

The idea that we belong to ourselves is in fact incorrect. We belong to God, but again we mistake this fact as being a lack of liberty, signifying some lack of freedom, when freedom can only be found in perfect union with the one who is supremely free. When did we lose our freedom? We lost our freedom when we separated ourselves from god and we became slaves to death and corruption. We were not created to die, and this is another mystery. Death is natural.

Adopted children of God

Speaker 1 13:39

After the fall saint athanasius talks about this, all the great fathers that Christ assumed a mortal and passable body so he could die. And he did die, according to the, the flesh on the cross. But were it not for a violent death, he would have continued to live. He was the good man and, as we said, his human nature was deified from the very moment of his conception, so he would not have grown old and die as we do. After his resurrection and ascension, he put off both mortality and passability, that he is susceptible to change, to suffering, to pain. So he raised our human nature up to the right hand of God the Father. Well, he was always seated at the right hand of God the Father in his divine hypostasis he's always seated at the right hand of God the Father, meaning he's equal in his divinity with God the Father. But now he has done so after his saving work in and according to the flesh. So he has raised our human nature up to equality with God the Father. This is what is meant by the adoption of sons, the adoption of children, the fact that we are joint heirs with Christ, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, adopted children by grace. What he is by nature, we become by grace. So that's new, that's the new element.

Subordinationist tendency in Western theology

Speaker 1 15:53

And this is another stumbling block for the West. The West has struggled to accept the threeness of God, which is described in terms of Hypothesis. But then it has to contend also with the human nature of Christ in the very life of the Holy Trinity, united with the second hypostasis of the Holy Trinity forever. What does that do to their philosophical notion of the simplicity of God, to have to deal with the human element in the life of the Holy Trinity as well? And then the Orthodox come along with St Gregory Palamas and say oh, by the way, there is also another distinction, the essence, energy's distinction. Well, well, that's just too much from a western standpoint, you see, which is fixated and obsessed with the simplicity of god and how to preserve that. But at the heart of it is the fact that western theology has a subordinationist tendency and therefore you don't have an orthodox understanding of the incarnation In the Western context.

Speaker 1 17:16

At the end of the day, christ is, it might be a whisker, depends on who you're speaking with, which denomination or which confession you're dealing with. Christ is somewhat even, as I say, by a whisker, nevertheless not quite as divine as God the Father. So I say this because we're not aware of the ramifications, the consequences of saying, against the teachings of saint cyril of alexandria, that christ became a human being. Christ did not become a human being, he became flesh. And yes, he is true and perfect God and true and perfect man, but in that sense, in the sense that our human nature was grafted onto his divine hypostasis, he is God, the Word, he is the God who is everywhere present and fills all things.

The person-hypostasis in the Holy Trinity

Speaker 1 18:37

But in the Paschal Proclamation read by the Archdeacon at the Vatican on the night of Pascha I don't know how they attribute it to Ambrose of Milan I doubt very much that Ambrose of Milan would say something like oh, happy fall. What a wonderful thing it was that Adam fell, because thanks to the fall, we have the incarnation. And the incarnation and the incarnation is understood how, in the Western context, god was absent. After the fall, he left us, we became a mass of damned sin, and God could not abide with this until his son came to shed his blood and propitiate God, the Father. And so, at the moment of the incarnation, god re-enters creation, which he had abandoned, and then afterwards he leaves again, leaving us with the other comforter. Well then, you have representatives, right, because of vicarii instead of, and I shall be with you until the end of the age, you don't have the distinction between nature and person, and you don't have the distinction between essence and energy. If you have a real union with God, in the Western context, inevitably the human element would be swallowed up by the divine.

Speaker 1 20:32

There's no hypostatic integrity, a hypostasis. Person is understood only as an essential relation, and that's precisely what St Augustine works out in his day trinitate, that the proprium, the special individuality of the holy spirit is that he proceeds from two, from two sources as from one. So it's a. What defines the person for him is relation, but all you have is one essence, to use the Western language, one substance, three substances. The one substance is the three substances, the three substances. The one substance is the three substances. The three substances are the one substance. The only thing that distinguishes them is the fact that the first is from no one, the second is from one and the third must therefore be from two in order to preserve his distinctiveness.

Speaker 1 21:53

And so the work of the Cappadocian fathers is entirely missed. That hypostasis is predicated upon the hypostatic mode of existence of each of the divine. Hypostases, not relation, but it is the unbegottenness of the hypostasis of God the Father, the begottenness of the generation, of the hypostasis of the Son and the procession of the hypostasis of the Holy Spirit which constitutes their uniqueness, their distinctiveness. That is entirely missed. The work of the Cappadocians and of the Second Ecumenical Council is not taken into consideration. Well, I say it's missed. It seems to be deliberately ignored.

Speaker 1 23:08

This is Western theology. Created effects and created symbols are the means by which God communicates with us, and so references to the light, the lighting of the candle, the candle signifying the light which came into the world, and so on and so on. And in the midst of all that, saying in a couple of places my memory serves me well, at least twice that the fall of Adam was a good thing because it led to this incarnation of the Son of God, as we said, for the reasons that we said, because otherwise God would have remained at a distance from the world, away from the world. This is God entering the world again, is God entering the world again. And it's this curious view of God's absence and then his presence which, on the devotional level and the liturgical level, leads to the adoration of the Holy Eucharist, the practice of placing the consecrated wafer in the monstrance, setting it up and then worshipping it, taking it out of the context of the divine Eucharist saying ah, god is here, this is the real presence of God, let's capture it and worship it. And then you have to convince yourself by means of mental gymnastics that you're worshiping God. You're bowing before a wafer and you're worshiping God Because that wafer is consecrated, it is the body of Christ, and so that's a moment where we actually have God with us.

Speaker 1 25:18

As I say, it's an anomaly, but it leads to that kind of thinking and that that kind of practice, which is full of devotion and the desire to experience God. But it's the product of a scholastic theology mingled with this almost sentimental devotion. So that's why the saint Sophrony. Well, thank God, on the surface we have many things in common. We're grateful for that. But when you begin to scratch the surface and look a little deeper, one discovers that we have two fundamentally different worlds.

Latent subordinationism and Nestorianism in the West

Speaker 1 26:15

Yes, I call it subordinationist tendency. The Ostrogoths were Christianized by Ulfila, who was himself a Eunomian, and I think that these barbaric tribes which swept across the Western portions of the Christian Roman Empire, they learned a subordinationist Christology, they absorbed subordinationist Christology and there were attempts, which we know about, where there was a kind of resistance to going too far in that. But the other side of the subordinationist Christology or Logos theology is an historian, because what they both have in common is that they deny the reality of the incarnation, in the sense that God himself could never have deigned to become incarnate. This must have been the product of an inferior deity. The damascene will help you there.

Speaker 1 27:34

The damascene is too easily dismissed for various reasons, but the damascene is in fact a faithful recapitulation, creative recapitulation, of his predecessors. Gregory palamas depends on the damosine a lot and it's not correct what a lot of people say about the damosine as scholastic and also that his christology was influenced by Leontius of Byzantium. It's true it was influenced by Leontius of Byzantium, but Leontius of Byzantium, with his term enhypostasis, is correct. Our channel and share with your friends. Click on the join button below our video and become a friend or reader of the Mount Tabor Academy. Support our drive to introduce the theology and spiritual life of the Orthodox Church to the wider community.