While I am quite aware that at times this article may be quite challenging because of how the Fathers of the Church thought and wrote, I have several hopes in sharing this information and how the Church has struggled through the centuries to come to an understanding of what she believes about our relationship with God. The dogmas of our faith were only formulated after much debate and a whole lot of thought. There was real concern that what the Church asked people to believe was as true as we humans can understand.

My first hope is that my readers will develop a much greater appreciation for our religion. My second hope is that my readers will develop a deeper understanding of the things that we believe, especially our beliefs about Jesus Christ, God Incarnate. Indeed the very thought that God could become a human being without either diminishing His Godhead or being not truly human as you and I are, is a complex idea. I’ve been presenting the ideas that the Fathers considered in coming to the belief that Jesus is truly God and truly man.

It is extremely important that we believe that Jesus is truly human. If He wasn’t truly human, then He could never have been a model for us on how to live. While the Council of Chalcedon insisted that Christ was indeed one in His personal identity, it did not clearly specify that the term hypostasis, used to designate this identity, also designated the hypostasis of the pre-existing Logos (i.e., Word of God). The anti-Chalcedonian opposition in the east so built its entire argument around this point that Byzantine Christology of the age of Justinian committed itself very strongly to excluding that interpretation of Chalcedon which would have considered the hypostasis mentioned in the definition as simply the union of the old Antiochian School (i.e., the synthetic reality resulting from the union of the two natures). It affirmed, on the contrary, following Cyril of Alexandria, that Jesus Christ’s unique hypostasis is the pre-existing hypostasis of the Logos; that is, that the term is used in Christology with exactly the same meaning as in the Trinitarian theology of the Cappadocian Fathers: one of the three eternal hypostases of the Trinity took flesh while remaining essentially the same in its divinity. The hypostasis of Christ, therefore, pre-existed in its divinity, but it acquired humanity by the Virgin Mary.

This fundamental position has two important implications: (a) there is no absolute symmetry between divinity and humanity in Christ because the unique hypostasis is only divine and because the human will follows the divine. It is precisely a symmetrical Christology which was rejected as Nestorian in Ephesus (431).

As you can tell, it is not easy to conceive how God could become man.