Sitting in our screened in porch I listen intently to Rev. Fr. Michael describe an ecclesiastical world that our fellowship of churches would consider steeped in unnecessary tradition. Every Tuesday afternoon Michael brings his children to my wife’s home piano studio. She’s become the go-to teacher for the Russian Orthodox Seminary in our rural county in Pennsylvania. St. Tikhon’s Monastery is the oldest Orthodox monastery in America. At first, it was a marvel to see pony-tailed men in long black robes with large crucifix at my dining room table. Much more surprising, though, is how many of these seminarians were formerly protestant and at least one whom I know graduated from an undergraduate school that many in our fellowship know. What would trigger protestants to jettison their own non-denominational traditions for even more complex traditions?
That is a topic for another time. But today, Michael tells me that when he first converted to Orthodoxy, he thought his new church’s liturgy was stuck in the fifth century. Every liturgy, he said, closed with a Theotokion! With a wry grin, and a stroke of his beard, he added, that’s a hymn to the Virgin Mary Theotokos, you know. Do we know? Thankfully, we don’t need to know everything. Yet, for some deconstructing evangelicals the unknown is an attraction and ad fontes (‘to the sources’) feels much more authentic. To join an Orthodox communion is appealing because it appears to be the most direct way to get to the teaching of the apostles. For others, the big box church they grew up in created a deep hunger for a more stable and settled tradition after the worship band sang that chorus too many times. The next fad to attract consumers can be draining especially if you don’t catch the next wave.
Yet, instead of joining a new tradition, protestants have the greatest opportunity to sift through the widest sweep of historical theology with appreciation, humility, and an open Bible. In the two-millennia arc of history the new is often rather old. Just as mid-century décor has returned, so will those bell-bottoms and the subtle ways people used to talk about the incarnation of the Son in the fifth century. The more deliberate engagement with classical theology intends to retrieve a living faith from the past for present faithfulness. Ressourcement is a French word, which is mostly parallel to the Reformation cry ad fontes, meaning ‘a return to the sources.’[1]
That is, a return to the ancient sources can assist us in our contemporary situation in which Gnosticism seems to have returned with a vengeance (more on this in a moment). The advent season is an appropriate time to reflect upon the incarnation through the eyes of the ancient church. We can be thankful for those who labored to understand how it could be that Mary was truly Theotokos, that is, mother of God and not simply the mother of Christ, that is, Christotokos. Theotokos, though, jars my evangelical mind until I consider what this epitaph for Mary embodies. This term is much larger than Mary’s role of bearing the Christ child. Our understanding of the word Christ itself is colored by the Christological settlement which occurred after years of debate over the Trinity (Nicaea 325 ad) and the Son of God incarnate (Ephesus 431 ad and Chalcedon 451 ad).
Just as revelation itself came progressively over time, so has our understanding of revelation. Gregory Nazianzen (329—390 ad), a Cappadocian Father, recognized the naturalness of doctrinal development, saying, “The Old Testament proclaimed the Father openly, and the Son more obscurely. The New manifested the Son, and suggested the Deity of the Spirit. Now the Spirit Himself dwells among us, and supplies us with a clearer demonstration of Himself.”[2] As new teaching arises it must also be evaluated according to revelation to be sound doctrine (Titus 1:9; 2:1; 2 Tim. 2:15) and if not rejected. This means that expeditious decisions must be made in accordance with the Analogia Scriptura. Reason must be employed to make these decisions. Periodically, though, critics claim that the doctrine of the Trinity has more in common with Plato than Paul.[3] This claim presupposes that the Hebrew concepts in Scripture are non-translatable to other cultures. Furthermore, this view suggests that Christians in previous generations were less capable of asserting the authority of the originals as they were using external tools of metaphysics to answer questions that the New Testament authors left unanswered.[4]
Leading up to the contentious Christological controversies in the fifth century was the slow evolution of trinitarian expression occurring under the pressure of Gnosticism. Gnosticism was a difficult heresy to root out in the early centuries because it emphasized a monotheism by focusing on ‘the One.’ Everything outside of the One was a lesser substance, even if it was a mirror or shadow of the Almighty. In this way all creation was shunned and escape from it preferred. To gain insight and rise above this world was redemption. How could any divinity exist outside of the monad? To convince the gainsayers that the Son was not a lesser substance our forefathers adopted philosophical tools to describe the Son as being of the same uncreated substance as the Father because of the infinite nature which they share. Homoousias (lit. same substance) became the right way to describe the relationship of the three rather than Homoiousia (lit. of like substance). This is one instance in which the addition of an iota matters. In the fourth century Arius began to teach that only the Father was self-existent and that Son was generated with like substance (homoiousia).
At first homoousias may have been used generically leading up to the Council of Nicaea, but Arius’s insistence that ‘there was a time when the Son was not’ required the church to remove the iota to preserve the full deity of the incarnate Son. Athanasius courageously strove to overcome Arius’s insistence that the Son of God was a created being. According to John N. D. Kelly, Athanasius had a deeper “conviction of redemption” than philosophy.[5] Athanasius could see the gospel consequence around the corner. Without being of the same substance as the Father, the Son would not be able to bring sinners into union with the Father. In other words the mediatorial work of Christ was at stake.[6] It would be Augustine, in the next century, who would update the language of substance to essence. But for now, the issue at stake related to how one described the incarnate Son. His full deity was required to procure our salvation. So, who was Jesus Christ? The designation one gave to Mary provided significant insight into view of the incarnate Son. The only perfect human being was Jesus of Nazareth but as the perfect human being is a result of what the Son of God had become. What became of the Son when conceived in the womb of Mary by the Holy Spirit?
While Nicaea anathematized Arius’s teaching, homoousians did not fully answer how deity and manhood were combined. The creed’s simple statement that the Son “was made flesh, becoming man” gently corrected the Gnosticism. Nevertheless, this simplicity allowed for slippery word-games that undermined the full humanity of Christ. Arians and those that followed him taught that in Christ the Word had united himself to a human body while lacking a rational human soul, Himself taking the place of one.[7] In other words, the Word entered a body just as He had entered the prophets for the purpose of inspiration. This approach was simply gnostic dualism.
Apollinaris (310-390), on the other hand, valiantly stood against this Arian dualism, but in his zeal overstated how the Son was united with humanity. From the moment of conception, Apollinaris taught, the Word displaced man’s rational soul creating a unity of nature between the Word and the body.[8] This deification of nature is much like the science-fictional time-traveler Dr. Who, who takes on a persona, which is simply a form or projection to others. Apollinaris’s teaching was silenced because of its non-redemptive quality. If the Son of God did not assume a fully human nature than what value was the redemption made for mankind? Gregory Nazianzen famously said, “For that which he has not assumed, he has not healed; but that which is united to his Godhead, is also saved.”[9] Just as a created Son of God could not be redemptive neither could an apparition that seemed to be man without being man.
The alternative to a collapsed nature with a projected human form was to join the two natures through a moral conjunction. Nestorius (386—450) was asked by his parishioners if it was appropriate to call Mary Theotokos. He ruled that it was a doubtful term unless man-bearing (anthrotokos) was to be added to it as a balance. His preference was to describe the Virgin Mary as Christotokos. Like a person who discovers, for themselves, the truthfulness of Calvin’s doctrines of grace, Nestorius became odious to others claiming that God cannot have a mother and that the Godhead cannot have been carried in a womb for nine months, nurtured on the breast and be carried let alone suffer and die.[10] This provocativeness drew Nestorius into conflict with Cyril of Alexandria (376—444).
While Cyril’s approach was not honorable with respect Nestorius,[11] he nevertheless recognized that the divine and human natures must have existed not simply as a collection of qualities but as a concrete subsistence. In his mind out of the two is one Christ, one Son without destroying the natures in union.[12] A “hypostatic union” of the Word and man was from conception in Mary’s womb without any change or confusion, is understood to be, and is, one Christ.[13] Cyril began to understand, like Athanasius, that the redemptive quality of Christ’s suffering was directly related to a capacity as a rational human soul like ours that might voluntarily offer himself.[14] Cyril influenced the patriarch in Rome to join a council in which found Nestorius guilty of heresy. Then the Emperor expelled Nestorius from Constantinople. Nestorius and his followers fled to Persia. Today, the Nestorian Church is very small but still has members in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and India.[15]
Cyril’s famous formula of hypostatic union and preference for Mary Theotokos became the bedrock of our creedal tradition at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 ad. Retrieval of this classic theology can assist us today to be faithful to Christ. What is old is new again. Gnosticism has returned with a vengeance. Detachment from the created order is a higher value today in modern gender theory. Thankfully our forefathers recognized the high value that God placed on human flesh by taking upon himself gender to redeem male and female. Remember the words of Gregory Nazianzen: “For that which he has not assumed, he has not healed; but that which is united to his Godhead, is also saved.”[16]
As I listen to my Russian Orthodox friend, I am reminded of the necessity to retrieve this classic theology to preserve the gospel for another generation. Michael continues, saying that, some Orthodox like to describe Mary’s womb as a temple, wider than the heavens. The uncontained God is in Mary’s womb. The incarnation is a paradox to explain the unexplainable grace of God towards mankind. The hypostatic union, the link between infinity and finitude, is our link through Mary’s womb to a greater union which exists with God and each other in the church. The sacredness and simplicity of Mary’s role as the Theotokos highlights God’s tender concern for our frail humanity to redeem, restore, and reconcile. If the Son of God took on flesh, then our embodiment matters to him, no matter what elite social planners have in store for our society. Male and female matter to him. Hope is found in the risen So of God. As created beings our gendered existence is not to be thrown out; rather, Jesus came, as the old Carol rings, to cast out sin and enter in. The Son of God came to dwell among us and through the Holy Spirit in us.
[1] Michael A. G. Haykin popularized this definition, which he adapted from Jean Daniélou and Henri de Lubac. https://www.reformation21.org/blogs/ressourcement-retrieving-our-p.php.
[2] Gregory Nazianzen, Orations, 31.26.
[3] For example, seventeenth century British anti-trinitarianism, nurtured by the writings of the Italian theologian Faustus Socinus (1539—1604), claimed that Reformation was incomplete until tradition, transubstantiation, and the Trinity was fully dismantled. Paul Helm, Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 27-29.; Adolf von Harnack (1851—1930) claimed that the Hellenization of Christianity occurred through first three centuries. Adolf von Harnack, What is Christianity? trans. by Thomas Saunders (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1901), 204-224.]
[4] “Too often modern theologians erect a disastrous partition between ‘biblical’ faith and theology’s chronic ‘Hellenism’, as if the Bible were never speculative or as if hellenized Judaism did not provide the New Testament with much of its idiom; Hellenism is part of the scriptural texture of revelation, and theology without its peculiar metaphysics is impossible.” David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 32.
[5] John N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 4th ed (London: Adam Charles Black, 1968), 243.
[6] “If He was Himself too from participation, and not from the Father His essential Godhead and Image, He would not deify, being deified Himself.” Athanasius, De Synodis, 51.
[7] Kelly, Christian Doctrines, 280-84.
[8] Kelly, Christian Doctrines, 290-94.
[9] James Stevenson and B. J. Kidd, eds., Creeds, Councils, and Controversies: Documents Illustrative of the History of the Church A.D. 337-461 (New York: Seabury Press, 1966), 90.
[10] [Footnote: Kelly, Christian Doctrine, 311.]
[11] [Footnote: Bruce Shelley, Church History in Plain Language (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), 112-113.]
[12] Cyril of Alexandria, The Letter of Cyril to John of Antioch.
[13] [Footnote: Kelly, Christian Doctrine, 320.]
[14] [Footnote: Cyril of Alexandria, Scholia on the incarnation of the Only-Begotten, 8.
[15] [Footnote: Shelly, Church History, 113.
[16] James Stevenson and B. J. Kidd, eds., Creeds, Councils, and Controversies: Documents Illustrative of the History of the Church A.D. 337-461 (New York: Seabury Press, 1966), 90.