This article has been, perhaps, the most difficult to write. The Fathers of the Church are not necessarily easy to understand since they frequently used philosophical terms to forge an understanding of what they believed about Jesus Christ. As I shared with you, during the first eight hundred years of the Church there were great struggles to come to an understanding of who Jesus is and what He taught. By the way I see the same thing happening today with our Ecumenical Patriarch Francis leading the Church. He is inviting bishops and people to think about and debate many different things. This approach has not happened in the Church for many years. It was something that happened in the Church throughout the whole first millennium. I can recall that in the early 1960s, when I was in the seminary, there was still honest and sincere debate and exchange of ideas. Then, during the last several decades, the Church again closed all debate. If the Fathers of the Church had not debated what they believed and how to express those beliefs, we would not have the faith that we do today. But I digress.

The name “Jesus Christ” cuts the history of mankind in two, but at the same time it has constituted and still constitutes the greatest scandal for human thought. It is God who has become man, and such a union remains incomprehensible to logic and inaccessible in any way whatever to “positive” knowledge (knowledge proved by data).

The Apostle Paul first noted that for the Greeks, at least, the concept of divine-humanity is really “foolishness.” The Greeks taught people correct reasoning and methodical knowledge, which cannot function without a definition of things. And things, whatever exists, are defined by their essence, that is, by a total of properties which make each thing that exists to be what it is. A flower is a flower since it has a stem and petals and sepals and stamens and a pistil; it cannot be a flower and, at the same time, have feet or wings, eyes to see or a voice to speak. And so even God, in order to be God, must be infinite, unlimited, omniscient, omnipotent, life itself and the principle of motion; He cannot be God and at the same time have a material and limited body, need oxygen to breath and food for nourishment, become tired, be sleepy, be grieved and suffer bodily.

The opposition of Greek thought to the concept of divine-humanity was expressed powerfully within the bosom of the Christian Church itself, thus causing great debate. Think about it? We humans cannot conceive of how an infinite being can, at the same time, be a finite being. Of course just because we cannot conceive of such a person doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible, especially since we also say that everything is possible with God!