The Great Schisms of the Fifth Century

This is a digression from my series of posts from Paul Johnson’s “A History of Christianity,” but the material is related, and it provides some background information for what I’ll hope to be writing about with regard to the Crusades, and how that crusading spirit was funneled into the Inquisition.

Part 1: Augustine as Conduit to the Inquisition
Part 2: How Confession became a Divinely Instituted Sacrament
Part 3: The Origins of Payment for Penance
Part 4: Crusading and Other Indulgences

The councils of Nicea (325) and Constantinople (381) contended with Arianism and finalized, to a large extent, the doctrine of the Trinity. (There were other battles fought, to be sure, but at this point the doctrine of the Trinity included one God, three persons, and rejected the Arian notions that Christ was a created being and that “there was a time when he was not”.)

These councils affirmed the Scriptural teaching that Christ was the eternal Word of God, and supplied the phrase “homoousious,” “of one substance with the Father,” that is, that Christ was the eternal God made flesh. But once this was determined, there arose questions as to precisely how God and flesh related within the person of Christ. Even at the time of Constantinople, Christological ideas were being posited and rejected. For example, Constantinople also rejected the notion of Apollinarius that in Christ, “the Word of God dwelt in human flesh in lieu and place of the human rational and intellective soul.” (from here).

But other controversies developed. Here I’m following the account of Justo Gonzalez, “The Story of Christianity,” (253-4):

The next episode of the Christological controversies was precipitated by Nestorius, a representative of the Antiochene school who became patriarch of Constantinople in 428. There were always political intrigues surrounding that office, for the patriarchate of Constantinople had become a point of discord between the patriarchs of Antioch and Alexandria. The Council of Constantinople had declared that the bishop of Constantinople should have in the East a precedence similar to that which the bishop of Rome had in the West. This was a simple acknowledgement of political reality, for Constantinople had become the capital of the Eastern empire. But the bishops of the older churches in Antioch and Alexandria were not content with being relegated to a secondary position. They responded, among other things, by turning the bishopric of Constantinople into a prize to be captured for their own supporters. Since Antioch was more successful at this game than Alexandria, most of the patriarchs of Constantinople were Antiochenes, and therefore the patriarchs of Alexandria regarded them as their enemies. … For these reasons, Nestorius’ position was not secure, and the Alexandrines were looking to catch him at his first mistake.

This happened when Nestorius declared that Mary should not be called theotokos – that is, bearer of God – and suggested that she should be called Christotokos – bearer of Christ. It is difficult for Protestants to understand what was at stake here, for we have been taught to reject the notion that Mary is the “Mother of God, and at first glance, this seems to be what is at stake here. But in truth, the debate was not so much about Mary as about Jesus. The question [at this time] was not what honors were due to Mary, but how one was to speak of the birth of Jesus. When Nestorius declared that Mary was the bearer of Christ, but not of God, he was affirming that in speaking of the incarnate Lord one may and must distinguish between his humanity and his divinity, and that some of the things said of him are to be applied to the humanity, and others to the divinity. This was a typically Antiochene position, which sought to preserve the full humanity of Jesus by making a very clear distinction between [his humanity] and his divinity. Nestorius and the rest of the Antiochenes feared that if the two were too closely joined together, the divinity would overwhelm the humanity, and one would no longer be able to speak of a true man Jesus.

Actually, there is yet another concept wrapped up here. “Theotokos” more correctly means “God-bearer,” or as Gonzalez relates, “bearer of God.” But other theologians conflated “bearer of God” into “mother of God” (the Greek “Mater Theou”). In proposing the term “Christotokos,” Nestorius was intending to provide a caution and a mediating position against the very misunderstanding that, as we have seen, has led to all of the later emphasis on Mary throughout church history. So history has shown that Nestorius was correct with his caution.

On the other hand, it is clear that Nestorius’s theology was not as precise and helpful as it could have been. Samuel Hugh Moffett, writing in “A History of Christianity in Asia” (176-177) notes, “As early as [the Council of Ephesus, 431 A.D., Nestorius] struggled to find a way to express the essential unity of the person of the incarnate Christ without denying the essential reality of both the humanity and deity of the Savior without surrendering the all-important truth that there is an ultimate, basic distinction between deity and humanity.” As Nestorius later wrote:

The divine Logos was not one, and another the man in whom he came to be. Rather, one was the prosopon [“person”] of both in dignity and honour, worshipped by all creation, and in no way and no time divided by otherness of purpose and will.

Moffett continues, “This doctrine of the unity of the person (prosopon) of Christ in two natures may have rested on the use of a word too weak to support the theological weight it was required to bear, but it was in no sense heresy.” (177)

Nevertheless, for political reasons and other reasons, Nestorius had attracted an enemy in the “strong-minded, hot-tempered patriarch” of Alexandria, Cyril. (Moffett, 170). Cyril put his emphasis on the unity of the person of Christ. As Moffett explains, “But in order to preserve the oneness it was difficult not to weaken either his deity or his humanity, for ‘complete God’ and ‘complete man’ strongly implies duality of person. Cyril’s explanation of the two natures seemed to Antioch to weaken the humanity of Christ and to stress his deity as of higher significance. The Alexandrian school, strong on the doctrine of redemption, genuinely and naturally defended the deity in Christ’s nature, for only a divine Christ could save sinners. But in doing so, the Alexandrians ran the risk of losing some of the historic authenticity of Christ’s human nature.” (Moffett, 171)

This dispute led to the calling of another council, at Ephesus in 431 A.D.

For a variety of reasons, Cyril won the day, but only the day – not least because of his mischaracterization of Nestorius’s theology (he accused Nestorius of positing two persons in Christ), and the actions of his own bishops (50 in number, plus their entourages) who

acted as if it was a war they were conducting … [and they] went about in the city girt and armed with clubs… with yells of barbarians, snorting fiercely … raging with extravagant arrogance those whom they knew to be opposed to their doings, carrying bells about the city and lighting fires …. They blocked up the streets so that everyone was obliged to flee and hide, while they acted as masters of the situation, lying about, drunk and besotted and shouting obscenities…(Moffet, 174, citing Nestorius’s “accurate description of the proceedings.”)

The decision at Ephesus was “an embarrssement and blot on the history of the church” (174); its legality was “questionable, its conduct was disgraceful. And its theological verdict, if not overturned, was at least radically amended by the Council of Chalcedon (451).” (175) It led to a massive split in the church, “irreversibly … not only east and west but also north and south, and cracked it into so many pieces that it was never the same again.” (Moffett 169)

The controversies continued: in 451, Chalcedon instead used “Theotokos” language (and failed to pick up the “Mater Theou” language), and largely incorporated Nestorius’s “one-person, two-natures” theology into the definition that is held to be orthodox today.

The followers of Cyril of Alexandria, however, rejected Chalcedon, adhering more to a “one-nature” (Monophysite) theology. Monophysites continued to reside largely in Egypt and Syria.

Index of recent argumentation regarding the Real Presence as monophysitism

I'd be lying if I said I didn't expect to provoke a lot of anger and vexation over my recent post: Is transubstantiation a Monophysite doctrine? But it was so much fun to write! And it's been even more fun to watch:
1) how fired up certain interlocutors became
2) how bad their arguments generally were
3) how little they actually interacted with the fundamental point - that Jesus, as both God AND man, is not multilocational but is, rather, always in one place at one time
4) how it made bedfellows out of practitioners of otherwise fairly hostile systems, such as Scott Windsor, loyal son of Rome, and Edward Reiss, fairly conservative Lutheran.

This index post is to serve as a collective reference point to see all the conversation that has gone down over this point.
First came Steve Hays' Anti-Incarnational sacramentalism.
I'd had my post written for some time but was waiting for a good time to post it, and figured that I should go ahead and strike while the iron was hot. So then came my post, which has accumulated more than 120 comments.

Scott Windsor added Transubstantiation Question, and I interacted a lot there.
Later he posted Transubstantiation Question II, and I interacted some there as well. Read these if you want a lot of strawmen and a failure on Windsor's part to even understand what I was saying.

And then you can see Matthew Bellisario post barely-relevant quotations from Thomas Aquinas over at his post: For Those Confused About Transubstantiation..., in which combox I interacted some.
As one philosopher (apocryphally) said: if you speak nonsense in Latin, you can write many books; if you speak nonsense in Saxon, you are found out at once.

Perry Robinson aka Acolyte4236 interacted extensively with me in the combox of my post, starting here.

Edward Reiss jumped in with How Jesus' body--even before the resurrection, is not "Just like ours", then Calvin's framing of the question about the Incarnation--i.e. Jesus' body, is flawed, as if I appealed to Calvin or care particularly what he had to say about this issue if it's irrelevant. Find a great deal of interaction there between us.
Later, Jesus as a "Spiritual reality", since it really seems that the monophysitism proponents in this discussion have a hard time admitting that the spiritual is real. Strange for someone who confesses to be a Christian, but you know.
Later, If St. Peter can do it, Jesus' miracles don't tell us anything special about Jesus as a man..., in which he attempts to assert that Jesus' status as God-man makes Him more buoyant, more cooperative with the surface tension of water than my status as regular man makes me.

TurretinFan had One More Response to Edward Reiss.

Finally, Steve Hays had numerous helpful things to say in his posts:
The Styrofoam Jesus, in which he mocks the buoyancy argument.
A Lutheran's unresponsive response
Lutheran cartoons
The Heisenberg compensator
The Real Presence of the Big Mac, a specific response to some of the comments from Perry Robinson, Acolyte4236 in the combox of my post.
Why Lutherans deny the empty tomb, a reductio on the Lutheran view Edward Reiss has been defending (and by extension, the Roman view).

Overall, a very interesting and satisfying exchange. It's good to be Reformed. Sort of funny how I'll be teaching through Eric Svendsen's curriculum on the Lord's Table starting pretty soon in my Sunday School class.

Is transubstantiation a Monophysite doctrine?

CrimsonCatholic and Perry Robinson participated a few months ago in a fairly technical but somewhat interesting discussion at David Waltz's blog.
CrimsonCatholic made a very interesting statement:

The key feature of Chalcedonian theology is that Christ's nature is exactly the same as ours, so what happens to the human nature in Christ happens to everyone who is "in Christ Jesus" (to use St. Paul's term) by grace, including the sharing of the divine glory.

I'd like to ask a few questions, if we're going to take this consistently with the rest of our theology.
So Christ's nature is exactly the same as mine. My nature is human. Part of being human (as opposed to being divine) is to be limited to a particular physical location at any one time, is it not? My body cannot be in more than one place at any one time. That's obvious.

Now, Christ Himself, at the time of His Incarnation, took upon Himself a human nature and a physical body. At the time of His Resurrection, His body became glorified and immortal; He doesn't necessarily have blood anymore, but He retains flesh and physical tangibility, among other properties. He can perhaps walk through walls, or perhaps not; John 20 simply says, "when the doors were shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, 'Peace be with you.'" Maybe He created a key and let Himself in; maybe He knocked and they let Him in; maybe He passed through the door via "teleportation"; the text does not tell us. Obviously He can perform miracles such as walking on water and perhaps passing through walls, disappearing right in front of two disciples at dinnertime on the road to Emmaus, etc, but we never see Christ in more than one place at any one time.

CCC 1376 The Council of Trent summarizes the Catholic faith by declaring: "Because Christ our Redeemer said that it was truly his body that he was offering under the species of bread, it has always been the conviction of the Church of God, and this holy Council now declares again, that by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. This change the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation."

1377 The Eucharistic presence of Christ begins at the moment of the consecration and endures as long as the Eucharistic species subsist. Christ is present whole and entire in each of the species and whole and entire in each of their parts, in such a way that the breaking of the bread does not divide Christ.

1378 Worship of the Eucharist. In the liturgy of the Mass we express our faith in the real presence of Christ under the species of bread and wine by, among other ways, genuflecting or bowing deeply as a sign of adoration of the Lord. "The Catholic Church has always offered and still offers to the sacrament of the Eucharist the cult of adoration, not only during Mass, but also outside of it, reserving the consecrated hosts with the utmost care, exposing them to the solemn veneration of the faithful, and carrying them in procession."

1379 The tabernacle was first intended for the reservation of the Eucharist in a worthy place so that it could be brought to the sick and those absent outside of Mass. As faith in the real presence of Christ in his Eucharist deepened, the Church became conscious of the meaning of silent adoration of the Lord present under the Eucharistic species. It is for this reason that the tabernacle should be located in an especially worthy place in the church and should be constructed in such a way that it emphasizes and manifests the truth of the real presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament.

1412 The essential signs of the Eucharistic sacrament are wheat bread and grape wine, on which the blessing of the Holy Spirit is invoked and the priest pronounces the words of consecration spoken by Jesus during the Last Supper: "This is my body which will be given up for you. . . . This is the cup of my blood. . . ."

1413 By the consecration the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ is brought about. Under the consecrated species of bread and wine Christ himself, living and glorious, is present in a true, real, and substantial manner: his Body and his Blood, with his soul and his divinity (cf. Council of Trent: DS 1640; 1651).

On any given Sunday, or really most any day of the week, Mass is performed at thousands of churches across the globe. On any given Sunday morning, to be sure, the Eucharistic host is transubstantiated in multiple locations, at the same time. How well does this match with the conception of Christ's body's substance? It is supposed to be of human substance, yet here it displays a trait better assigned to divinity, that of omnipresence. Christ's human body, it turns out, is NOT "exactly the same as ours", as I don't think CrimsonCatholic has ever been at two or more places at once. I know I haven't, much as I'd like to be; I could get a lot more accomplished!

And the situation seems to be even worse than that. Take a look at this from the Catholic Encyclopedia:

On the contrary, He continues His Eucharistic Presence even in the consecrated Hosts and particles that remain on the or in the ciborium after the distribution of Holy Communion.

Thus the red candle/light that one often sees perpetually lit on the altar of a Roman church - one or more transubstantiated hosts are still there. The real and substantial body of Jesus Christ is enclosed there. In many hundreds or thousands of churches across the world, simultaneously.

So, taking the doctrine that CrimsonCatholic has expressed and applying it consistently across the board, we run into a serious snag in the doctrine of the Eucharist. It would seem that, if transubstantiation is true, then the RC position leads to a denial of the true human nature of Christ, because the substantial, real human body of Christ is simultaneously in thousands of different places, thus applying a divine trait to Christ's human nature. Not Chalcedonian at all, then; more like Monophysite.