Generally speaking there have been two ways of describing the nature of Christ. One way follows the school of Alexandria and teaches that Christ is God living and acting humanly; the other follows the school of Antioch and holds that Christ is a man in whom God lives and acts, or a man fully indwelt by the Word of God.

The danger of the first is Apollinarianism, the peril of the second is Nestorianism. Some modern scholars have begun where Apollinarius began and stressed the reality of Christ’s divinity (e.g. Emil Brunner). Christ is the Eternal Word who comes to us from the other side. He is unique… and essentially different from us.

Other scholars [employ] kenotic theories (Philippians 2:7)… a self-limitation of the eternal Son… ‘the exchange of a spiritual mode of life in heaven for flesh and the earth… But during this incarnation Christ possesses a full and true divinity’ (J. Ernest Davey, ‘The Jesus of St. John’, p. 163). The Reformation saw in Christ’s humiliation a veiling or obscuring of his glory, but not a removal of his divinity. Modern advocates of the kenotic theory stress not the giving up of the divine attributes but their operation in a new mode of existence (e.g. P. T. Forsyth). ‘Christ possessed all the qualities of Godhead in potency rather than in full actuality… He gradually became aware of his divinity… the divine attributes were not abandoned or destroyed but became potent or latent’ (Vincent Taylor, ‘The Person of Christ in New Testament Teaching’, 1958).

But William Temple said that if the Creative Word was so self-emptied as to have no being except in the Infant Jesus, then we are asserting cosmic chaos, for it means that the world was let loose from his control. So Temple believed that God the Son, who is the Word of God, without ceasing his creative and sustaining work, added this to it, that he became flesh. D.M. Baillie objected that such theories meant a temporary theophany in which he who was God changed himself temporarily into a man.

Other scholars are more ‘Nestorian’, e.g. Norman Pittenger (The Word Incarnate 1959) who disagrees with the ‘neo-orthodox’ school which cut the links between Christ and human experience and appear to present our Lord as a unique projection from eternity into time. He describes Christ as the One in whom God actualized in a living human personality the potential God-man relationship which is the divinely intended truth about every man.

The Council of Chalcedon (451): ‘We confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, perfect in Godhead, perfect in Manhood, truly God and truly man…’ Chalcedon has been criticized for being mainly negative, denying more than it asserts. The categories ‘substance’, ‘essence’, ‘nature’, ‘hypostasis’ sound strange to modern ears. And, as Paul Tillich says, we do not mean by human nature what they meant. The formula seems too static. It appears more interested in substance and metaphysic than subjects and persona. But in its defence, Chalcedon is principle more than theory.

D. M. Baillie believes we should be guided by the Christian experience of grace in understanding Christ. ‘In the NT we see the man in whom God was incarnate surpassing all other men in refusing to claim anything for himself independently and ascribing all the goodness to God.’

Karl Barth says the Chalcedon formula is too static. Barth combines the doctrine of the two natures with the doctrine of the two states of humiliation and exaltation, each of which must be interpreted in the light of the other.

Oscar Cullmann in his ‘Christology of the New Testament’ analyses the titles given to Christ in the NT and shows that the Christology of the early church was founded on the words and deeds of Jesus. The experience of the early church, the presence of the Holy Spirit, and their own reflection led them to see cosmic implication in the historical work of the Master. It is seen as God himself in his revelation. The NT supplies us, not with abstract categories such as substance or nature concerning the being of God; its revelation is historical, therefore its Christology is Heilsgeschichte. Hence Christ must be explained, not in terms derived from Greek philosophy, but in Biblical terms such as ‘event’.

And then J A T Robinson: we do not talk about God except in terms of man. In Honest to God the divinity of Christ is less real than his humanity.

‘We are told that history repeats itself. Nineteenth century theology emphasized too much the immanence of God, and provoked the Barthian reaction. Then the wheel went full circle again.’

(Notes from an article by Dr. R. G. Crawford, in Expository Times, pp. 4-8, date unknown)

Shalom! Rowland Croucher