In the last issue of this article, I tried to present the position of Ephesus (431) about the Person of Christ. As you know, the Church struggled for centuries to find the right and appropriate way to express the Incarnation of God in the person of Jesus, the Christ. The Church struggled to express how God could be simultaneously equally and totally both God and man. This is the mystery that the Church struggled with. The Eastern Church came up with ways to express how Jesus simultaneously was both God and man. The asymmetry of Eastern theology reflects an idea which Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria stressed so strongly: only God can save, while humanity can only cooperate with the saving acts and will of God. However, in the patristic concept of man, theocentricity is a natural character of humanity; thus     asymmetry does not prevent the fact that Christ was fully and actively man.

I would ask you who are reading this: What is our opinion and description of Jesus, the Christ? How do you explain the fact that Jesus was, and is, both God and man?

It is critical, I believe, that we understand that Jesus was wholly and fully both God and man so that we might have Jesus as an example of how to live. This means, of course, that Jesus, as God, did not control Jesus, as man. He went through the learning process as all humans do. He endured all the things of His life as humans do. Because of this, Jesus can be a model for us to imitate. He had no particular advantage in handling and accepting the struggles of life because He was also God. This is hard for most people to understand, comprehend and accept. In the history of the Church we see that the followers of   Jesus struggled with this. We have to remember that all the major heresies were formulated by bishops and priests, not laymen.

In the Church Fathers, who were mainly members of the Eastern Church, the human nature of Christ is not personalized into a separate human hypostasis. This means that the concept or idea of hypostasis is not an expression of natural existence, either in God or in man, but it designates personal existence. This, I know, may seem extremely confusing. This is due to the fact that the union of the two natures in Jesus is a mystery and this is why it took the Church so long to come up with a definition of who Jesus is. Post-Chalcedonian Christology postulates that Christ was fully man and also that He was a human individual, but it rejects the Nestorian view that He was a human hypostasis, or person. In Christ, the union of the two natures is hypostatic: they “concur into one person and one hypostasis” while, at the same time, are completely distinct. That which is to come will, hopefully, make this a little clearer