Talking about the Council of Caledon or Calcedon, and the events and theological problems leading up to it.
But before we actually get to it, to sort of contextualize it, and then guess a little bit of refresher, even as contexts, it's important to remember that when we talk about Christian history, the debates that arise particularly early on are surrounding the fact that Christianity is a faith that
is centered on the person and the work of Jesus Christ.
The you know some people are getting answers to those questions wrong.
But nonetheless they are concerned with those questions, and so that makes it part of Christian history.
They may be heretics, but they're Christian heretics as opposed to, you know just some other religion altogether.
And since our faith is focused on Jesus Christ, all those controversies that come up are recognized by people at the time as being of vital importance to what our faith is.
You know, if we have the wrong answers to who Christ is, if we have the wrong answers to what He has done, then we have a major problem, and those were considered there were lots of issues that people disagreed about.
They might even fight about. But those weren't necessarily the issues that people would break fellowship over questions about who Christ is.
Were the kinds of questions that people broke faith over, and those are the kinds of questions that we're going to be looking at tonight.
We'll review a little bit, and then we'll see the the new questions that come up, and the and Soing either 125 or 70 years depending on where you wanna date the starting point before we get into it.
I'd like to open in prayer.
Father, we thank you for all the people that struggled through these questions when they had, they had so much at stake, and they recognized the importance and faithfully sought correct answers, father, we thank you even more for the intervention and the constant the constant care that you gave
to this, that the Holy Spirit was active in it, and that answers that we can have confidence in and language that we can use and know what it means, was able to arise even out of political and personal difficulties, and from people who we might not enjoy living next door to but you, you
work involved. You were engaged, and you guided that process.
Father, we thank you for that. We thank you for preserving the truth of your son, and who he is, so that we might understand it better now, as we look over these things, we just pray that that you would be with us tonight, that you would help us to see the nuances.
And to understand the importance of your son, and Christ's name.
We pray? Amen. Alright. So going all the way. Well, not all the way back, going back of the 2 options I mentioned, you know, 150 or 70 years going all the 150 years back from tonight's subject of Calcedon by the way, I don't know, I think I looked it up.
And there's an American and a British pronunciation difference.
And that's why some people say calcitan, and some people say Kelseedon and I don't know where in my educational history I picked up the pronunciation chelcedon.
But that's how I say it. If if you've heard Calcedon, we're talking about the same place.
But if we go a 150 years prior to that, back to no sorry 125 years back to the Council of Nicaea, in 3 25 at it was at Nicaea which we talked about several weeks ago that the statement was made that Christian faith held Jesus Christ to have
been fully, truly divine. In fact, so as not to confuse him, not to allow anybody to confuse him with some sort of lesser divine being, and say anything like that.
They said that he was God. In the same way that the Father was God.
They said he shared the same essence or the same substance.
That was language that had been problematic remained problematic.
But it was judged to be what worked best, and it was what they it was what they went with, and eventually what they fought for.
But as we also saw, that didn't settle the issue, people continued, we saw in the careers of Athanaceus and Basil the 2 Gregory's, and also in August, that people continued fighting over the subject that were still people, and for a long time continued to
be people who denied the full divinity of Christ, and said that he was some sort of lesser divinity.
But we're we're not concerned with those groups tonight.
They are those groups who are denying the divinity of Christ, while they continued to to exist, and, in fact, the when we talked about Augustine and we talked about the Vandals who came in through Spain and swept across North Africa, they were actually using the term Sloppily they were
Aryan Christians, who had a lower view of the divinity of Christ.
Then you know, then, the Christians of small-seat, Catholic or orthodox Christianity held and lower than we would hold.
But we're not concerned with those groups tonight tonight. We're dealing with people who at some point after Nicaea have come to accept, and but certainly by the time of Constantinople, have come to accept the divinity of Christ as an absolute non-negotiable point of the
faith.
So like, I say it continues after Nicaea to be fought over.
And also make arguments against people who might say, Well, yes, we do.
But who they would see as holding a Christology that was insufficient.
Right. It's like, I think, that my Christology is adequate, but Tom looks at me and says, No, your Christ is too low.
He's. There's some aspect of it that's too low.
And so Tom would be making arguments against me. Thanks for standing in for me, Tom.
Now, what's you get with that anytime you get?
And we've all seen this, and and so many contexts.
Political, is probably the one where we see at the most often when you get people who are involved in this kind of an argument.
Sometimes in order to make their point, or in order to make their point more clearly, or in order to make their point more decisively, you know not just to have a better argument, but to completely destroy the position of their opponent, they go too far, and that's the kind of thing that happens a lot, sometimes
like I say, they're just extremes. Marcellus, who's he's not on your list anywhere.
But he was a friend of Athanace and ally of Athanasius, and he was a strong defender of Nicene theology, but he took that emphasis on the unity of God.
The the equality of the sun with the Father he took that so far that he at least sounds like he may have been virtually a Unitarian Unitarian in the technical sense.
Not. You know, modern Unitarian Universalism. He had.
He was really serious about his theology, but he didn't have enough of a distinction between the father and son.
So sometimes you get that. But other times you're not dealing with people who are going to extremes they're just dealing with the follow up questions.
That sort of naturally arise, and when a new sort of follow-up question comes, and somebody takes a stab at it, they might not get it right every time.
Sometimes they get it wrong, somebody corrects them, and they say, Oh, yeah.
But sometimes they get it wrong, and somebody corrects them, and they say, No, this is my insight.
I'm sticking to it. I think this is right, and those are the kinds of things that we're going to be looking at tonight.
We're going to talk about 3 attempts, and you can see diagrams of them on the back, and I couldn't figure out how to get all the words where I wanted them.
So I'll let you fill in some statements as we go but we're gonna be looking at those 3 attempts to answer the obvious.
Follow-up question that comes out of nice CIA. That's obvious to me.
I could put you on the spot and ask you what it is. But I'm not.
Gonna do that. It's obvious to me, because I've studied this before.
And once you see it, it's like, Oh, yeah, of course you'd have to ask that next.
So Niceea says that Jesus Christ was God, the Son. Truly God.
Alright good! But what about Jesus Christ? The man? Because, other than other than a few really early heretics like the dosatists who basically had him as some sort of phantom who just looks like he's a man.
But he's not really a man other than them, and we're kind of leaving them out. Them.
And also that kind of a Christology where he's not really a man.
He's some sort of, you know. He looks like it.
That also persists, and Gnosticism persists for a long time, in Gnosticism.
But again, just like the people who deny the divinity of Christ, we're not talking about them tonight, so you can set them aside.
But so we can then say that he was a man. But the question that comes out of that is, wait a minute.
How can we say if we're gonna say that he's God, how can we also say that he's a man?
What, what does that mean? How can we talk about that? And like I said, the people we're talking about tonight do accept both the divinity of the sun and some sort of statement about the reality of the Incarnation.
They're gonna be disagreeing, or maybe falling short, or maybe going too far on what they think happens in the Incarnation.
So looking, and make sure I've got. Hmm! That is not the page I need.
Alright! Looking at your pictures on the back or the front I don't know which ones.
I guess it's the front since we're talking about it first.
Looking at the pictures there on the front. The first attempt that we're going to be talking about is called a pollinarianism.
It's named for Amanda Apolineris, and he is on the other sheet.
He's mentioned among the important figure, or on the back of your sheet.
Among the important figures, and he was just like Marcellus, although Apollinaris is of a later generation than Marcellus.
He is a strong defender of Nicaea. Early in his career he is very well responsive.
The Gregory's, or actually, I think it's Basil who corresponds with them.
We have some letters that we think, Basil, is corresponding with him about theological subjects.
There's disagreement about whether or not they're authentic, but certainly it's plausible.
At that stage that Basel would have been corresponding with him.
The letters are from before the Council of Constantinople, and it's at Constantinople in 381 that apologize is condemned.
So the reason it's condemned is because, as he's attempting to answer the question of how the divine and the human are related, he sort of stepped out of bounds of what's okay to say?
As a starting point. You could look at John 114, where we learned that the word became flesh.
I'm not gonna not gonna spend a lot of time on it, but that's sort of his scriptural starting point.
And I I guess the best way to say it is that Apollinaris treats that almost as a limiter, like the flesh is, as far as he was willing to go in saying what Christ takes on, and so the word the Logos the and log us you can almost think of as sort of the
rational capacity, and that's how John is talking about Christ in that passage in John, chapter one, right.
It is the word that became flesh. In John 1, 14, a pollinaris essentially, says, the Lagos functions as the the rational soul of Jesus Christ.
The Logos functions as that part of the person and the flesh.
The body is the human part. So he has. That's why I've got the divided circle there.
He's got a human body, but he's got a divine mind or a divine soul, which initially sounds okay and a polynerous thinks all the way to the end that it sounds okay.
But what people pointed out, and this even before, and I see before Constantinople, because that's where he's condemned.
First, if if Christ didn't have a human mind, if Christ didn't have a human soul, he's not fully human.
He's not truly human, and Gregory Nasianzas, his sort of catch phrase in response to this is what was not assumed was not healed, and so, by a pollinarysis, Christology, Grigory says you'd have him dying on the cross and
redeeming only the flesh, only the body not redeeming the mind.
And I don't know about the rest of you, but but my mind needs to be redeemed.
Gregory apparently felt the same way, and Apollinaris argued against this.
Apollinaris was not willing to to see both a divine mind and human mind in Christ.
He just needs just needs one mind. And and so he, he pursues that and ends up being condemned at Constantinople.
His followers continue on for a while. They don't.
The others that we're going to talk about tonight, continue and strength for a long time to the point that theology is not quite the same.
But you can find their denominational descendants even today, a Polinarianism didn't have a quite the same kind of history after a pollinaris.
I think a couple generations, probably, and then it it falls by the wayside and becomes less important.
But the basic idea keeps cropping back up. And certainly I think it's not an unnatural way to think about it.
If you ask a Christian who's never really given a lot of thought to it before, there's a good chance they're going to come up with something along those lines, and if you're familiar with William Lane Craig, who's an apologist, he holds to what he calls a
Neopolitic, I'm gonna try that again.
A Neo-apolinarian Christology we don't have time to get into all the details tonight of how his, Apulinarian Christology is different from fourth, fifth century.
A pollinarianism, but he thinks that it's different enough to be orthodox to be Biblical, but that it's better than what comes out of Kelseedon.
I don't know. He's a smarter guy than I am, so I'm not gonna try to to pick parce out all the details there, but just be aware that he holds to to that kind of theology and openly calls it that like it's not his enemies saying that
he's in a pollinarian. It's he himself saying.
Microsoftology is Neo, Apollinarian.
Alright before we go on to Nestori's and to the monophysite.
Does anybody wanna ask a question? I don't wanna lose anybody already at this stage, and for once for once in my life I'm doing kind of okay on time.
What? Oh, yeah, we're not done yet. No, we we can totally get into the weeds.
Alright. Well, since there weren't any questions there, we'll move on to Nestorianism, like, I say, a Pollinarianism is condemned at Constantinople in 3 81, and a story.
Sorry. I'm dry and and gunky tonight, Nestorius is a strong opponent of a pulinaryianism.
He doesn't.
To see this. You know this fractured, composite kind of Christ, and.
And essentially what he does is to see he wants to.
The completeness of Christ's humanity. So in that.
On, the.
Right. That's going to get to a full humanity.
But the way he okay that's not quite fair.
The way in historianism expresses it, is, is eventually judged, insufficient, and the reason is that he refers to the human and the divine as complete.
Distinct persons. There's a human person, and there's a divine person, and those are both present in Jesus Christ.
Now the reason I say it wasn't quite.
To say notorious is because.
To the best that we can tell. Nestorius did not hold to the Nestorianism that was condemned.
He was personally condemned for it at the Council of Ephesus and 4, 31, but the whole time he's being condemned they're trotting out like this is what you can't say. This.
You can't believe this. This is what we're condemning you for.
And he's saying, that's not what I believe.
I believe something kind of like that, but not that. So he's saying that he doesn't distinguish them.
He doesn't separate them as much as what's being distributed.
Some of the other people sort of on this side of the debate.
Certainly do go that far, and they separate them to the point that it is not the the Divine Son of God who dies on the cross.
It is Jesus Christ, the human person dies on the cross, but the Son of God can't experience death.
And so it's not the Son of God who dies.
It's not the human person who performs miracles.
I I can't perform miracles. I would if I could.
It is the Son of God who performs miracles.
The man Jesus Christ doesn't perform miracles, and they totally separate these 2. They're not say, as we would more often say, you know he does this as God or He does this.
As man.
Or what might even be a better way it's just grammatically awkward is to keep adverbs in there and say he does this humanly.
He does this divinely, so that we're describing.
Instead of describing the person who does it, he doesn't do that, or they don't do that.
Nestorianism separates those 2 entirely.
The. It's interesting. One of the early ways that I'm getting into the politics of it now.
Both the politics and some theology, but one of the ways that Nestorianism and the story is personally get sent to trouble.
Maybe not theologically, but at least gets into trouble with the church is over a term. That's I don't think I put it on your list, but the term Theo talk us no, I didn't.
Is anybody familiar with the term theoto costs some. Okay.
I didn't know.
It is in the middle of that thing, and we'll get to the.
It's in the middle of the definition of Calcedon on the back of your seat.
But so the word is translated in English, usually the Mother of God.
So they are. Is God. Talk us!
It kind it sometimes in Scripture it's translated as interest, like, if you pay interest on a loan, or if you receive interest on investments, but it's interest in the sense of what is produced from the capital that's that's why it's used of interest.
It's also used of notions of childbirth or bearing.
So some people prefer the translation. The God Bearer, and it was applied to Mary because she was the one obviously who bore priced and the Alexandrians in particular liked to refer to her in that sense as the the Mother of God their Intention.
Was in Alexandria. I think the intention was not so much to describe.
Who married was but to emphasize who it was that she bore.
That was God. It was not just someone, it was not a normal kind of pregnancy, it was not a normal birth.
That was God. That was the intention of the term, and when it's used, when it is used orthodoxly, I'm not sure if that's a word.
But when it's used correctly, that's what's intended by it.
The problem that Nestorius was seeing was exactly what we and you know Low Church Protestantism might expect, which is that Mary is being pushed in in popular piety that Nestorius sees to the position of being almost a goddess.
It's promoting her to a level that he didn't want to.
He didn't want to see her promoted to, and he felt that he was seeing that around him he was by this point the Bishop of Constinople, and that was sort of the popular piety that he was trying to to keep down.
And so he was teaching against this idea of Mary as Theo. Talk us.
He actually proposed, years later, proposed first to talk us price-bearer or mother of Christ, as a substitute term, but Cyril of Alexandria, the Bishop of Alexandria at this time did not accept this, and like I said in my sheet in my you
know descriptions of important characters. He was a brilliant theologian, but he was sometimes an unscrupulous political manipulator.
You also have to remember. This is Cyril of Alexandria, and it's Nestorius who's the Bishop of Constantinople?
So there's gonna be a desire to knock down that guy in Constantinople a little bit.
Cut him down to size. Make sure Alexandria retains its position of you know.
Theological center of the universe, at least from Sarah's perspective.
So he takes this, and he describes, nestorious as far out of bounds as he can.
Now some of some of the Nestorians actually are pretty much as far I don't know if they are that far, because Cyril pushes them that far, or if that was actually how far they wanted to go in their distinction between the divine person, and the human person, but certainly
Cyril plays a role in pushing historianism over that far, and it's condemned at at a Council church council in Ephesus, in 431.
I am not gonna go into the day by day, hour by hour.
Political History of the Council of Ephesus. If people are really that interested in it, I can come back at some point and do a three-week series just on the politics of the Council of Ephesus, they were meeting in 2 different place.
It was a mess. It was a mess we'll just say that.
But one of the things that came out of it was the condemnation of nestorious, and the story is.
And then 20 years later, of course, no problems ever go away.
20 years later, and 4 51, and there were several councils, several meetings along the way intervening.
But there's another council at Calcedon that you know.
Finally defines these issues and draws hard lines.
Any questions on historianism before we move on to to the monophysite Uttician models.
Nestorianism in 4 31 at Ephesus, the only city that I'll mention tonight that we've probably all heard of.
By the way, nice Constantinople, I guess we've all heard of that Constantinople present day.
Istanbul visantium in between, and before.
That's the cap of the Eastern capital of the Roman Empire.
The capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. After they really fully split both Nicea and Kelseyedon are at the time they were considered small towns close by.
They're more like suburbs. And today I don't think they're even suburbs of of Istanbul, Kelseyedon, the Council of Calcedon, and 4 51 was supposed to be held at Nicaea, which like I say is now a
part of Istanbul, but because of the possibility of violence, it was decided to move it even closer to Constantinople at the time, I think Constantinople was limited to the European side of the Straits, and Kelseedon is pretty much as close as you can get to
the European side. On the Asian side of the streets there.
Oh, one other thing to say, and this sort of 4 shadows for shadow is what we'll be talking about next week.
A little bit, but when Nestorianism is condemned, and 4, 31, and so the churches that insist on maintaining fellowship, maintaining a story and Christology are separated from the main Church, the the Catholic or the Orthodox Church, they split off and they
actually continue to exist. Today they became the dominant form of Christianity in places like Iraq and Iran, and most of us here are old enough to remember Saddam Hussein and his government.
If you remember Tariq Aziz, who was, I think, his Secretary of State, or something like that.
He was from a church. That that had its history. It had split off at Ephesus or after Ephesus, and was a Nestorian church.
Then at some point historically, that church had a another split, and his part of it actually had restored full communion with Roman Catholicism.
Long time ago, but historically that was their trajectory, and there are still churches in that part of the world today, and and some immigrant communities in Europe and America.
I assume, who follow, who follow in that sort of that history.
I don't know how nice story in their theology is anymore.
That's one thing that you'll see that a lot of these controversies that we're talking about tonight.
The theological differences are so fine that over the course of 1,500 years a lot of those differences have sort of dissolved away.
Alright! So the last model that we'll talk about then tonight is the monophysite or Utician pathology, and that is a reaction against Nestorianism.
It sees accurately this division of Christ into 2 or not a division, but an ununited, incarnation, where you have a divine person and a human person who are essentially acting separately, acting individually, they see that as a problem, and they react very strongly, against that and
emphasize the unity of Christ, the oneness of Christ.
So what it does. Instead of saying that there are 2 persons, it says that the divine nature and the human nature are merged in such a way that after the Incarnation there's just one nature.
So you see, the the arrows in that last diagram are, I guess, supposed to be arrows through time. But before the endarnation there's a and I don't know exactly what was going on with the human nature before the incarnation. They're talking about this concept.
And so they're kind of fuzzy on that.
But prior to the Incarnation there's a divine nature and a human nature.
I think they're saying that in order to provide for a basis of conversation with Nestorianism, because the real point is that but after the Incarnation there is only one nature, there is a new nature of Christ it's a different kind of price's nature.
According to this model, would not be divine. In the same way that it was prior to the Incarnation.
Price's human nature would not be a human nature. In the same way that our natureures are human.
Nature's price is a different kind of a thing where he has his own. I guess.
Unique kind of nature. When orthodox Christianity speaks against this, it describes that in terms of confusion, not that the people were confused, but that they have confused the natures and the, and so when when we talk about 2 natures, in one person, which is language, that
comes out of the definition of Calcedon, when we say 2 natures in one person, we're opposing monophysites.
Utichians. Utiki's is the guy's name.
He was, you know, one of their big spokespeople.
But we're opposing their idea that there's only one nature in Christ when we say in one person, we're opposing the Nestorian idea that there are 2 persons active within Christ.
So at Calvin there was this attempt done to to address all this, and to pull this all together, and to an effective statement, almost all of the bishops who were there.
It's called an ecumenical council. It's supposed to be of the whole world, or at least the whole Roman world.
But really it was mostly an Eastern Council. Almost everybody there was from the eastern half of the Roman Empire.
There were 2 bishops. These are the exceptions. There were 2 bishops there from North Africa and Rome sent to Representatives.
They weren't bishops, but the Bishop of Rome sent.
I don't think they were. I don't know who they were, anyway, the Bishop of Rome sent 2 representatives.
They got called legates to represent him, and to read the theological statement about this question that he had composed his name was Leo.
You've heard of Leo the Great, or Leo the First.
He's on your seat, too. That's the Leo that we're talking.
That's the Bishop of Rome at this time.
Yeah.
I don't know. Tom is asking Neil this time is not gonna work.
Tom's asking how many total people were at the Council, and we decided that I would restate questions to give myself time to think about the answer, and I could stand here and talk all night, and I wouldn't know it was a large number, no no no no 500.
It was big.
Right? Right statistically. There was nobody from the West there.
Effectively. There was because Leo's representatives were very successful in reading the statement.
It's called the Tome of Leo. It's not nearly long enough that I would call it a tone but that's what it gets called.
That was read, and so before that was read statements by Nestorians, and, more importantly, cause.
Nestorianism had already been condemned. That was reaffirmed at Calcedon.
Statements from Utiki's and from other monophysites on the nature of Christ, were read, and it very quickly became clear that the bishops were not going to condone that they were.
There, there might have been a few that were sympathetic to it, but to those few it became clear enough that the vast majority were absolutely opposed to it, and their sympathy did not rise to the level of defense.
It was more along the lines of Come on. I can see how they could think that, but that strong of a support was not strong enough to prevent them from being condemned, and so then they start working on okay, what are we gonna say?
And the 2 sources that even though one of them was dead and the other one wasn't present, the 2 sources that pretty much held the day and provide most of the language for what gets decided at calciity were Cyril of Alexandria, who had died in I don't know I think it's.
On your seat. But he had died several years prior to to the council, and it was the language from this letter that Leo had written the tome of Leo that gave them the formula.
This didn't come from serious, but it Leo gave them sort of this formula for 2 natures in one person, and that's the language that goes into the definition of Calcin.
And if you've heard the term Hippostatic Union, that's what Hypostatic Union is referring to the Union, and 1 one person, one that's the Greek word that they're using, there, that that we're translating as human
as person sorry. The union of 2 natures in one.
Hoopostasis. So that's what a Hippostatic Union is, and I've given you on the at the bottom of that sheet.
I've given you the definition of Cal, or the relevant portion.
I guess from the definition of, and I'll.
Oh, you! You can read over it as you go, but I'll just highlight a couple of things you see in the second line, about middle of the line.
It says, this same one, that language, that same one, and some translations translated as the self, same.
This self saying comes up throughout this definition, what they're doing and doing that is to make sure that you can't separate them.
They're saying the same one who is homozyous with God.
Skip down a couple of lines from that where you say homo in italics, he says the same one who is of the same essence as the Father, according to his deity, and the same one is of the same essence.
He's homozyous with us. He's of the same nature as us with, according to his humanity.
So they're using that emphasis on the same one to say, you can't separate these 2 it's not just that we're talking about Jesus and we're talking about the sun.
No, they are the same, and every statement you make about one has to be made about the other as well.
And then when you come down well, we'll use.
They'll talk us as as a landmark, because it's an italics.
Skip down to the line to just below that where it says he is one in the same Christ, Son, Lord, and only begotten, who is made known in 2 natures united unconfusedly.
So there, you know I told you that the language of confusion was one, but he is united unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably part of that's because the the Nestorians in particular, were saying that after the crucifixion these 2 were
separated. He's he's no longer embodied in the flesh.
He's no longer that human, that person that's the one who died, and the bishops at Cal Seat, and are saying, No, no, no, it's indivisible.
The Union was indivisible. It goes on, it is true today.
Is still true today. Now you know, it was true. In 4 fifty-, and it's true.
In 2023, inseparably so. The distinction between the natures is not at all destroyed because of the Union, so they are preserving these 2 natures.
They're saying that they are still different natures that's not destructive because of the Union, but rather the property of each.
Nature is preserved, and concurs together into one person and Substance.
So this is, you know this is some of the language that's coming out of Kelseedon, and it's important to recognize.
And when you look through this.
On or without confusion. Some translations do it without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.
None of these are positive statements, right positive in the that.
I'm making an affirmative statement about priced.
I'm not saying this is how it is I'm saying.
This is how it's not. We can't say this.
So this is you know, it gets described as a negative theology, right?
It's not making a positive statement. It's saying, this is what you can't say.
These are the boundaries, right? It's like a basketball court, and you can't step out of bounds.
Now story is steps out of bounds. The monophysites step out of bounds Apollinaris stepped out of bounds.
Areas, stepped out of bounds. These are all things that you cannot say.
It at Calcedon. They didn't really try to say how it does work.
They left that as a mystery, and they were exploited about the fact that how it exactly happens is a mystery.
But these are the boundaries that you can't cross.
You can't go into this territory, you know, beyond here there'd be heresies.
Essentially it does a couple of other sort of housekeeping types of things, because when you've got 500 bishops gathered together from all over the Eastern Roman Empire, you might as well clear up a few things, but we can I can mention them easily enough next week as
we're rushing through at least 1,500 years of Church history.
So I will leave at that, and say that it preserves that mystery.
It just wants to set boundaries, and I think personally, that they're pretty good boundaries that we should respect.
I think in spite of Cyril's and Leo's, and all of the other ones, in spite of their personal failings, I think.
They mostly got it right. So questions before. Alright, I got to Bill.
We'll start with you. Cool.
What price there should not be.
He gave up his spirit.
I mean that something that is my spirit. Then errors.
What was? What was that at all?
So Bill's asking about at the cruise fiction, where Christ says that he's giving up His spirit, and he's asking if that phraseology gets used.
I don't know specifically if it gets used, but I know that they talk about.
You know I didn't look at their of the passage but I know that they do talk about.
You know all of these groups are talking about that and they have a little bit different ways of coming down on what happens.
And I would say that that, for example, the Apollinarians, who you know that's exactly where they draw the line is between his human body and the Divine spirit or soul or mind.
You know. However, you wanna phrase that cause those terms all get kind of fuzzy together.
That's exactly where they draw that line. And so then those 2 parts would have would have separated again the divine mind, the Divine Spirit would have departed from the human body.
The Calcedonian response to that would be that the spirit, the soul that departed from the body was both a divine soul and a human soul.
Christ continued after his death, after His resurrection, after His ascension continued, and continues to possess a human soul and a divine soul.
To find some soul. You know what exactly. That's a little fuzzy, but largely because I'm using sole where they would have probably used something closer to mine.
So, Tom, you are. Is that satisfy your answer?
It's a beginning. Okay? I mean, we could go through the I don't know what the Utikians would have done.
They would have had problems with that. But they would have been okay with having problems with that, because they didn't want to separate anything.
Some of the more extreme Nestorians actually say that.
Yeah, those 2 persons go their separate ways at the crucifixion, some of them same, and I don't know how they get away with this.
It's almost an adoptionist. Christology. Nestorianism is a some of them don't seem to have the divine person of the human person come together until he's born.
Not conception, but born because they're so opposed to talking about Mary as the bearer of God.
So they don't even want the to be divine yet.
I don't know how they deal with John the Baptist's opinion on that, but Tom!
Okay, manage for?
I do not. In fact, I think that that Calcedon would have said that the reason that I don't have a picture for them is because they didn't want to draw a picture because drawing pictures is what gets you in trouble. That's why.
They said, You know, essentially, yeah, actually, that's not true.
I do have a picture of what Cal Seaton would say.
They would have this, and they would draw next, through that, and next through that, and next through that.
No, they were very explicit that, you know we're not.
We don't know. It's a mystery how it does work, but they're united without confusion.
If it hasn't done obvious already to people on Zoom.
Tom was asking what would be an appropriate picture to this to portray Caledonian Christology.
There may be some out there that that do it more or less successfully, but I don't think that the people who are actually there would want it done I think they would be okay with drawing pictures of these 3 and saying, you know, these guys are wrong.
All 3 of these guys are wrong. That's what you can't say.
In fact, there's the closest I can get is that there's a diagram that floats out there in textbooks and on the Internet called, a I think it's called a Calcedonian box.
But it might be a Calcedonian square. And it's basically a square that that positions pollinarianism, Nestorianism.
And you took Anism and also Aryanism at the 4 sides.
And it's got, you know, some explanations of why you can't cross that boundary while you can't cross that boundary, you know.
Basically stay on the court. Don't go out of bounds.
Stay on the court inside these boundaries is where we can do some theological speculation. But if we get too specific with our theological speculation, probably gonna step out of bounds.
So sorry. I don't think there is one. I don't think there should be one.
Any any further questions?
Okay. I'll I'll just say that the monophysites, the Utichians.
They do also persist. After the Council of Kelsey done.
They are the non-caledonian Churches.
At least that's what Calcedonian Christians call them.
If you've heard of, not Eastern Orthodox, but Oriental Orthodox.
So Coptic Church. I think the church in Ethiopia and there are a few other few other places that they continue to exist but they're sort of gathered under the umbrella of the Oriental Orthodox Church.
Those are churches that we're separated after Calcedon because their Christology was.
To Monotheize or Utician again, some of them have managed to restore relations with Caledonian Christianity by talking through it a whole lot, and realizing that maybe you don't actually believe what people were condemned for, and maybe we
don't actually believe what you condemned us for.
And so people got back together. But with that we will. We will set the Council of Calcedon down, and hopefully that gives you a little bit better idea of the history of how we got to the point of insisting on the language of Christ having 2 natures united in one person.
Oh, yeah. Tom.
I'm just saying which I would say Tom's asking whether Nicia or Chalcedon had a larger impact on church history, and I know Tom's not asking that question as technically as a as I'm hearing it.
But I would say so for Church history. I hear sort of the the social historical aspect of what happened throughout church history, and for that I'm I think I would have to go with Kel Seedon.
It, and I'll get into some of the reasons more next week.
But it it defines some things about how the church is going to operate and I think, after Kelseedon, you have a much more formalized structural functioning church.
But I think for for theological impact, and for or just share precedent, I think Nicea eventually takes place in 3, 25 in 3 26.
It's not that important, but over the course of the next 100 years or so, I think it becomes both for precedent setting reasons that you know the Church can do something like an ecumenical Council and make these decisions that can then be imposed and also for drawing that line and saying you
know? We believe he, that the Son of God is co-equal, co-aternal with the Father.
I would have to give my CIA the the one on those grounds.
I I did alright. I'll close in prayer, and then turn it over for announcements, and and all of us to pray.
Father, we thank you for your many ways that you have blessed us.
We thank you for your sun. We thank you that he did.
Unite in Himself, divine and human, so that we could be saved.
That we thank you for preserving that truth that is essential part of your gospel throughout Church history.
Other. We confess that we're tempted to get to close to the lines, and that we sometimes don't.
Don't accept that. We have crossed over the lines, father, keep us humble even as we're curious, even as we try to to work out the details that interest so much interest us so much because they are.
About you. They are about your son, father, help us also to do that in humility, and recognize that our understanding is limited, and that ultimately it is a mystery that we thank you for or your son again, and.
The salvation that we have through Him in His name.
We pray, Amen.