The church and its history » God the Son
Dogmatic teachings about the figure of Jesus Christ go back to the faith
experiences of the original church. The faithful of the early church
experienced and recognized the incarnate and resurrected Son of God in
the person of Jesus. The disciples’ testimony served as confirmation for
them that Jesus really is the exalted Lord and Son of God, who sits at
the right hand of the Father and will return in glory to consummate the
Kingdom.
The church and its history » God the Son » The Christological
controversies
As in the area of the doctrine of the Trinity, the general development
of Christology has been characterized by a plurality of views and
formulations. Solutions intermediate between the positions of Antioch
and Alexandria were constantly proposed. During the 5th century the
heresy of Nestorianism, with its strong emphasis upon the human aspects
of Jesus Christ, arose from the Antiochene school, and the heresy of
Monophysitism, with its one-sided stress upon the divine nature of
Christ, emerged from the Alexandrian school. After Constantine, the
first Christian Roman emperor, the great ecumenical synods occupied
themselves essentially with the task of creating uniform formulations
binding upon the entire imperial church. The Council of Chalcedon (451)
finally settled the dispute between Antioch and Alexandria by drawing
from each, declaring: “We all unanimously teach…one and the same Son,
our Lord Jesus Christ, perfect in deity and perfect in humanity…in two
natures, without being mixed, transmuted, divided, or separated. The
distinction between the natures is by no means done away with through
the union, but rather the identity of each nature is preserved and
concurs into one person and being.”
Even the Christological formulas, however, do not claim to offer a
rational, conceptual clarification; instead, they emphasize clearly
three contentions in the mystery of the sonship of God. These are:
first, that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is completely God, that in
reality “the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” in him (Colossians
2:9); second, that he is completely human; and third, that these two
“natures” do not exist beside one another in an unconnected way but,
rather, are joined in him in a personal unity. Once again, the
Neoplatonic metaphysics of substance offered the categories so as to
settle conceptually these various theological concerns. Thus, the idea
of the unity of essence (homoousia) of the divine Logos with God the
Father assured the complete divinity of Jesus Christ, and the mystery of
the person of Jesus Christ could be grasped in a complex but decisive
formula: two natures in one person. The concept of person, taken from
Roman law, served to join the fully divine and fully human natures of
Christ into an individual unity.
Christology, however, is not the product of abstract, logical
operations but instead originates in the liturgical and charismatic
sphere wherein Christians engage in prayer, meditation, and asceticism.
Not being derived primarily from abstract teaching, it rather changes
within the liturgy in new forms and in countless hymns of worship—as in
the words of the Easter liturgy:
The king of the heavens appeared on earth out of kindness to man and
it was with men that he associated. For he took his flesh from a pure
virgin and he came forth from her, in that he accepted it. One is the
Son, two-fold in essence, but not in person. Therefore in announcing him
as in truth perfect God and perfect man, we confess Christ our God.
The church and its history » God the Son » Messianic views
Faith in Jesus Christ is related in the closest way to faith in the
Kingdom of God, the coming of which he proclaimed and introduced.
Christian eschatological expectations, for their part, were joined with
the messianic promises, which underwent a decisive transformation and
differentiation in late Judaism, especially in the two centuries just
before the appearance of Jesus. Two basic types can be distinguished as
influencing the messianic self-understanding of Jesus as well as the
faith of his disciples.
The traditional Jewish view of the fulfillment of the history of
salvation was guided by the idea that at the end of history the messiah
will come from the house of David and establish the Kingdom of God—an
earthly kingdom in which the Anointed of the Lord will gather the tribes
of the chosen people and from Jerusalem will establish a world kingdom
of peace. Accordingly, the expectation of the Kingdom had an explicitly
inner-worldly character. The expectation of an earthly messiah as the
founder of a Jewish kingdom became the strongest impulse for political
revolutions, primarily against Hellenistic and Roman dominion. The
period preceding the appearance of Jesus was filled with uprisings in
which new messianic personalities appeared and claimed for themselves
and their struggles for liberation the miraculous powers of the Kingdom
of God. Especially in Galilee, guerrilla groups were formed in which
hope for a better future blazed all the more fiercely because the
present was so unpromising.
Jesus disappointed the political expectations of these popular
circles; he did not let himself be made a political messiah. Conversely,
it was his opponents who used the political misinterpretation of his
person to destroy him. Jesus was condemned and executed by the Roman
authorities as a Jewish rioter who rebelled against Roman sovereignty.
The inscription on the cross, “Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews,”
cited the motif of political insurrection of a Jewish messianic king
against the Roman government as the official reason for his condemnation
and execution.
Alongside worldly or political messianism there was a second form of
eschatological expectation. Its supporters were the pious groups in the
country, the Essenes and the Qumran community on the Dead Sea. Their
yearning was directed not toward an earthly messiah but toward a
heavenly one, who would bring not an earthly but a heavenly kingdom.
These pious ones wanted to know nothing of sword and struggle, uprising
and rebellion. They believed that the wondrous power of God alone would
create the new time. The birth of a new eon would be preceded by intense
trials and tribulations and a frightful judgment upon the godless, the
pagan peoples, and Satan with his demonic powers. The messiah would come
not as an earthly king from the house of David but as a heavenly figure,
as the Son of God, a heavenly being, who would descend into the world of
the Evil One and there gather his own to lead them back into the realm
of light. He would take up dominion of the world and, after overcoming
all earthly and supernatural demonic powers, lay the entire cosmos at
the feet of God.
A second new feature, anticipation of the Resurrection, was coupled
with this transcending of the old expectation. According to traditional
Jewish eschatological expectation, the beneficiaries of the divine
development of the world would be only the members of the last
generation of humanity who were fortunate enough to experience the
arrival of the messiah upon Earth; all earlier generations would be
consumed with the longing for fulfillment but would die without
experiencing it. Ancient Judaism knew no hope of resurrection. In
connection with the transcending of the expectation of the Kingdom of
God, however, even anticipations of resurrection voiced earlier by
Zoroastrianism were achieved: the Kingdom of God was to include within
itself in the state of resurrection all the faithful of every generation
of humanity. Even the faithful of the earlier generations would find in
resurrection the realization of their faith. In the new eon the
Messiah–Son of man would rule over the resurrected faithful of all times
and all peoples. A characteristic breaking free of the eschatological
expectation was thereby presented. It no longer referred exclusively to
the Jews alone; with its transcendence a universalistic feature entered
into it.
Jesus—in contrast to John the Baptist (a preacher of repentance who
pointed to the coming bringer of the Kingdom)—knew himself to be the one
who brought fulfillment of the Kingdom itself, because the wondrous
powers of the Kingdom of God were already at work in him. He proclaimed
the good news that the long promised Kingdom was already dawning, that
the consummation was here. This is what was new: the promised Kingdom,
supra-worldly, of the future, the coming new eon, already reached
redeemingly into the this-worldly from its beyond-ness, as a charismatic
reality that brought people together in a new community.
Jesus did not simply transfer to himself the promise of heavenly Son
of man, as it was articulated in the apocryphal First Book of Enoch.
Instead, he gave this expectation of the Son of man an entirely new
interpretation. Pious Jewish circles, such as the Enoch community and
other pietist groups, expected in the coming Son of man a figure of
light from on high, a heavenly conquering hero, with all the marks of
divine power and glory. Jesus, however, linked expectations of the Son
of man with the figure of the suffering servant of God (as in Isaiah,
chapter 53). He would return in glory as the consummator of the Kingdom.
The church and its history » God the Son » The doctrine of the Virgin
Mary and holy Wisdom
The dogma of the Virgin Mary as the “mother of God” and “bearer of God”
is connected in the closest way with the dogma of the incarnation of the
divine Logos. The theoretical formation of doctrine did not bring the
veneration of the mother of God along in its train; instead, the
doctrine only reflected the unusually great role that this veneration
already had taken on at an early date in the liturgy and in the church
piety of orthodox faithful.
The expansion of the veneration of the Virgin Mary as the bearer of
God (Theotokos) and the formation of the corresponding dogma comprise
one of the most astonishing occurrences in the history of the early
church. The New Testament offers only scanty points of departure for
this development. Although she has a prominent place in the narratives
of the Nativity and the Passion of Christ, Mary completely recedes
behind the figure of Jesus, who stands in the centre of all four
Gospels. From the Gospels themselves it can be recognized that Jesus’
development into the preacher of the Kingdom of God took place in sharp
opposition to his family, who were so little convinced of his mission
that they held him to be insane (Mark 3:21); in a later passage Jesus
refuses to recognize them (Mark 3:31). Accordingly, all the Gospels
stress the fact that Jesus separated himself from his family. Even The
Gospel According to John still preserved traces of Jesus’ tense
relationship with his mother. Mary appears twice without being called by
name the mother of Jesus; and Jesus himself regularly withholds from her
the designation of mother.
Nevertheless, with the conception of Jesus Christ as the Son of God,
a tendency developed early in the church to grant to the mother of the
Son of God a special place within the church. This development was
sketched quite hesitantly in the New Testament. Only the Gospels of
Matthew and Luke mention the virgin birth. On these scanty
presuppositions the later veneration of the mother of God was developed.
The view of the virgin birth entered into the creed of all Christianity
and became one of the strongest religious impulses in the development of
the dogma, liturgy, and ecclesiastical piety of the early church.
Veneration of the mother of God received its impetus when the
Christian Church became the imperial church. Despite the lack of detail
concerning Mary in the Gospels, cultic veneration of the divine virgin
and mother found within the Christian Church a new possibility of
expression in the worship of Mary as the virgin mother of God, in whom
was achieved the mysterious union of the divine Logos with human nature.
The spontaneous impulse of popular piety, which pushed in this
direction, moved far in advance of the practice and doctrine of the
church. In Egypt, Mary was, at an early point, already worshiped under
the title of Theotokos—an expression that Origen used in the 3rd
century. The Council of Ephesus (431) raised this designation to a
dogmatic standard. To the latter, the second Council of Constantinople
(553) added the title “eternal Virgin.” In the prayers and hymns of the
Orthodox Church the name of the mother of God is invoked as often as is
the name of Christ and the Holy Trinity.
The doctrine of the heavenly Wisdom (Sophia) represents an Eastern
Church particularity. In late Judaism, speculations about the heavenly
Wisdom—a figure beside God that presents itself to humanity as mediator
in the work of creation as well as mediator of the knowledge of
God—abounded. In Roman Catholic doctrine, Mary, the mother of God, was
identified with the figure of the divine Wisdom. To borrow a term used
in Christology to describe Jesus as being of the same substance
(hypostasis) as the Father, Mary was seen as possessing a divine
hypostasis.
This process of treating Mary and the heavenly Wisdom alike did not
take place in the realm of the Eastern Orthodox Church. For all its
veneration of the mother of God, the Eastern Orthodox Church never
forgot that the root of this veneration lay in the incarnation of the
divine Logos that took place through her. Accordingly, in the tradition
of Orthodox theology, a specific doctrine of the heavenly Wisdom,
Sophianism, is found alongside the doctrine of the mother of God. This
distinction between the mother of God and the heavenly Sophia in
20th-century Russian philosophy of religion (in the works of Vladimir
Solovyov, Pavel Florensky, W.N. Iljin, and Sergey Bulgakov) developed a
special Sophianism. Sophianism did, however, evoke the opposition of
Orthodox academic theology. The numerous great churches of Hagia Sophia,
foremost among them the cathedral by that name in Constantinople
(Istanbul), are consecrated to this figure of the heavenly Wisdom.
