What is Christology and Why it Matters
The natures of God
At the outset, I told you this was going to be an eclectic blog. The last three posts are about as eclectic as you can get: a science fiction recipe, a recipe for lasagna, and now some musings on Catholic theology. Welcome to my online world.
The Why
Longtime readers of my old TypePad blog1 may recall that before COVID I was taking a series of online courses about Catholic Theology from the University of Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute for Church Life. I enjoyed those courses, but the technology they used back then was fairly primitive. It was mostly text-based. So I eventually pursued my interests in religious studies on my own.
Recently, however, my wife Helen expressed an interest in taking some courses on Catholic doctrine. So we checked ut the Notre Dame “STEP” courses. The technology seemed (and proved to be) much improved, using Zoom and much better interactive course websites. So for our first course we decided to start with something basic.
We chose “Foundations of Catholic Belief.” You couldn’t get much more basic than that. We’re in week 3 and it has been a very rewarding course. I strongly recommend it for online Catholic education.
This Week’s Assignments
We have an initial scriptural passage on which to meditate, a selection of readings from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and three 20-minute video lectures (transcripts available). We then have two written assignments and an online Zoom discussion.2
This week, our topic is Christology.
This Week’s Discussion Response
The discussion prompt for this week asked us to consider several questions:
Why was it worth the time and effort t[the Church spent] to develop such precise language about who Jesus is? How does this language enable a person to understand who Jesus Christ is, that he is not just a good person, or a good teacher?
When I kneel down and pray, who am I talking to? Christology gives me the answer. I am not talking to the ghost of a very holy man nor to a divine spirit who only seemed human, but to a real person who is simultaneously fully God and fully human.
That means my prayers aren’t going to an abstract cosmic force. Instead, they’re going to someone who has actually experienced hunger, grief, loneliness, temptation, and physical suffering. God knows what my life feels like from the inside.
In last Sunday’s Gospel (John 11:1-45), we are told that when Jesus saw Mary and Martha weeping about Lazarus’ death, “he became perturbed and deeply troubled.” So much so that he also wept.
In his sermon from last week, Bishop Robert Barron said that Jesus wept because he lost his friend Lazarus and because of his sympathy for those who were also grieving. But Barron says that Jesus was also weeping out of empathy for everyone who suffers when God acts in ways we don’t understand. The creator of the universe so identifies with our frustrations and sorrows and loss that he weeps with us.
Jesus can weep because he is fully human and so understands in his bones why we sorrow even though, like Martha and Mary, we believe in him and in the resurrection to come.
As such, when we go through pain—loss, illness, failure, loneliness—Christology tells us that God has already been there. Not as an observer watching from outside, but as someone who literally sweated blood in Gethsemane, felt abandoned on the Cross, and wept at a friend's tomb. Our suffering isn't foreign to God. He carried it himself. But that's only true if Christ is genuinely one Person who is genuinely human.
of course, the story doesn’t end with Jesus weeping. Jesus goes beyond mere sorrow. He raises Lazarus from the dead. No mere human could do that. Only God possess the power of life and death to that extent.
So this week’s STEP lesson was really well timed, because we can’t understand the story of Lazarus without understanding Christology.
This Week’s Assignment
We were asked to respond to this statement:
When Nestorius said that Jesus’ human and divine natures acted separately (that the divine nature did divine things and the human nature did human things), how was this answered by the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon? Why was it important for the councils to correct this error and clarify understanding of the Incarnation?
The Council of Ephesus (431 AD) was called to evaluate the teachings of Nestorius, who was the Bishop of Constantinople. Nestorius, the Archbishop of Constantinople, taught that Jesus had both a divine nature and a human nature. So phrased, his teachings were orthodox. The trouble arose, however, because he described these two natures in a way that made it sound like Jesus was really two separate beings loosely stuck together, a divine Word of God sort of partnered with a human man named Jesus. He called this a union of dignity and authority rather than a deep, real, personal unity.
Nestorius also refused to call Mary the “Mother of God” (Theotokos), preferring “Mother of Christ” instead. His reasoning was that a human woman—Mary—couldn’t have given birth to God himself, only to the human Jesus.
The Church said no at Ephesus. Nestorius’ understanding gives us two Christs, not one. And if you have two Christs, you’ve lost the real meaning of the Incarnation; i.e., that God himself truly became human. Nestorius’ teaching was declared to be inconsistent with the Nicene Creed and, accordingly, condemned.
In one of his lectures this week, Professor Joshua McManaway explained that persistent disputes arose over how to interpret what the Council of Ephesus had wrought:
In light of this widespread confusion, the Council of Chalcedon clearly and dogmatically stated that Jesus Christ is one person, the person of the Word of God who has existed for all eternity, and who, because of the Incarnation, has two natures, both divine and human. He is therefore both fully God and fully man and the integrity of each nature is not cancelled out by the Incarnation. It is not as though the divinity of Jesus was diminished by His being human, nor was the reality of His human experience diminished by being divine. The two natures belong in their fullness to the person of the Word after the Incarnation.
The Council of Chalcedon (451 AD) was key because getting Christology wrong has huge consequences. If Christ isn’t truly one person—fully God and fully human at the same time—then his death and resurrection don’t have the salvific import orthodox Christianity claims. You’d essentially have a very holy man doing impressive things with divine backing, rather than God himself taking on flesh to rescue humanity from the inside.
A Side Note on the Trilemma
Thinking about Christology and Trinitarian doctrine always calls to my mind C.S.Lewis’ famous trilemma: “Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.” You thus cannot say “Christ was a human who was a great moral teacher,” for if he is not divine, he was either a liar or insane, neither of which are characteristics of great moral thinkers.
Conversely, if Christ also were not fully human, he could not have suffered and died for our sins. It is precisely because Jesus was human that his death atoned the sins of all humanity. “For if the blood of goats and bulls and the sprinkling of a heifer’s ashes can sanctify those who are defiled so that their flesh is cleansed, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from dead works to worship the living God?” Hebrews 9:13-14.
Which loops us back to Christ’s divinity. After all, if Christ were not divine, Christianity would be saying that suffering of a human provided atonement for sin. Why then would not our own suffering do so?
Am I annoyed that TypePad died and my old blog disappeared?
Yes.
Did I at least export the contents of the old blog?
Yes.
Am I going to import the old blog into a new site?
No.
Am I mining the old blog for this site?
Yes.
Our written assignment responses are limited to 250 words. Personally, I find that limit very frustrating. I pride myself on the clarity of my writing, but I admit to lacking conciseness. Which is part of the reason I’ve always blogged about the courses. Nobody limits my word count here.