In the last issue of this article, I shared with my readers that the Council of Chalcedon (451) clarified much of the language that several Fathers of the Church, especially Cyril, used to set forth the true faith about Jesus Christ. For the sake of increasing the understanding of my readers about Chalcedon, I’d like to actually quote a text from the Council, underlining the Cyrillian passages and italicizing the sentences inspired either by the Antiochenes of Pope Leo. It shows the “compromise” of thought. This is the resulting Chalcedonian text:

Following the holy Fathers, we all with one voice confess our Lord Jesus Christ one and the same Son, the same perfect in Godhead, the same perfect in humanity, truly God and truly man, the same consisting of a reasonable soul and a body, of one substance with the Father as touching the Godhead, the same of one substance with us as touching humanity, like us in all things apart from sin; begotten of the father before the ages as touching the Godhead, the same in the last days, for us and for our salvation, born from the Virgin Mary, the Theotokos, as touching humanity, one and the same Christ, Son, Lord Only-begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures without confusion, without change, without division without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way abolished because of the union, but rather the characteristic property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one person, or hypostasis, not as if Christ were parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God, Word, Lord, Jesus Christ; even as the prophets from the beginning spoke concerning him, and our Lord Jesus Christ instructed us, and the Creed of the Fathers [i.e., of Nicaea] was handed down to us.

So, as you can see, our true faith was forged by Fathers of the Church compromising on language which brought about our true and complete understanding, as far as one can really understand a miraculous mystery, of Who Jesus Is. The dogma of Jesus took the entire Church to formulate. It was not just one of the schools of theology, but all the existing schools of theology to formulate. All the schools agreed that what Arius and Nestorius, two of the most pronounced, taught about Jesus was untrue. The Fathers knew that somehow Jesus had to be truly God and truly Man for our faith to make any reasonable sense. And so they hammered out a statement which they felt safeguarded this idea: Jesus is God incarnate as a God-Man and that His divinity and humanity were joined through the Person of the Son and that His two natures were kept totally separate and complete. With this understanding of Who Jesus Is, it is possible that we can, therefore, voluntarily imitate Him, growing in His likeness, and therefore becoming more like God in whose image we have been created.