As my readers may have guessed, this article has been dealing with the mystery of Jesus, the Christ. It has highlighted the great struggle the Fathers of the Church went through in trying to find the right words to express how Jesus could be both totally God and Man without one nature controlling the other (The Second Person of God, the Word, not controlling the Man Jesus. The Fathers saw this as extremely important so that we can look to Jesus as a model of how we should live as children of God).
An often-recurring criticism of Byzantine Christology, as it was defined by the Fifth Council, is that it, in fact, had betrayed Chalcedon by assuring the posthumous triumph of the one-sided views of Alexandrian Christology. Assumed by the divine hypostasis of the Logos, the humanity of Christ, according to these critics, would have been deprived of an authentically human character. One author wrote: “In Alexandrian Christology, there will never be any place for a true psychology of Christ, for a real cult of the Savior’s humanity, even if the assumption by the Word of a human soul is expressively recognized.” Another author maintains: “The tendency of the East to see Christ more and more as God (a tendency which is so marked in its liturgy) betrays a certain exclusivism which will increase after the schism.” This “neo-Chalcedonism” of the Byzantines is thus opposed to true Chalcedonian Christology and branded as a crypto-Monophysitism; it consists essentially in an understanding of the hypostatic union which would so modify the human properties of Jesus that He would no longer be fully man.
From this we can see that this was not an easy debate. How do we make Jesus, the Man, real and yet believe that Jesus is the Word of God – equally God and Man.
It is undoubtedly true that Byzantine theology and spirituality are very conscious of the real uniqueness of the personality of Jesus and are reluctant to investigate His human “psychology”. A balanced judgment on this subject, however, can be attained only if one keeps in mind not only the doctrine of the hypostatic union but also the prevailing Eastern view of what “natural” man is. For, in Jesus, the new Adam, “natural” humanity has been restored. As we have seen, “natural” man was considered as participating in the glory of God. Such a man, undoubtedly, would no longer be fully subject to the laws of “fallen” psychology. These laws, however, were not simply denied in Jesus, but seen in the light of soteriology (i.e., the doctrine of salvation through Jesus Christ). This is how the concept of Theosis came into existence.
Hopefully my readers will, at this point, stop and think about this. It is a critical that we believe that Jesus was both fully God and Man. While His divine Person joined the two natures it did not dictate how His humanity lived and acted. This is critical because we are called to live the Way Jesus Lived. He has to be truly human.