Christology Today:The Significance of the Chalcedonian Definition Assessed

The influence of the Council of Chalcedon on Christology is hard to exaggerate. Most scholars in the West have maintained a more or less appreciative view of the Council, while Nonwestern churches have tended to disclaim it. In this blog,I may sound critical of the Pro-Chalcedonian point of view, while I express my disagreement with the Non-Chalcedonian standpoint on a few significant points. Chalcedon sets the boundaries more than it defines the centre. Chalcedon has been depreciated for its dry, negative, compromising, and insubstantial language and aim.

The Council of Chalcedon, convened on 22 October 451 C.E., is widely considered as the most important of the first four ecumenical councils of Church. The divisive question over the nature and personhood of Jesus Christ was decided here. At the heart of the debate was the view of the Monophysites, who argued that Jesus had a single, divine nature. This idea was set aside in favor of the Nestorian belief that Jesus Christ was a single person, but of two distinct and separate natures – one human and one divine. This position has remained the touchstone confession of Christian orthodoxy for fifteen centuries. Today voices of scholarship, both Biblical and theological call for an overhaul of the formula, and for a downward revision in the status of the Council.

The reasoning I adopt to make an assessment of the significance and relevance of the Chalcedon for today is to interpret modern Christology through a grid, the grid of Divine Transcendence and Divine Immanence. This would be my working tool as I compare and contrast various Christologies of the modern era. I start with Christology at the beginning of the Enlightenment to Christology of the Twentieth century. Christology, has swayed between these two eras. While at times, the Immanence of Christ has been emphasized at the expense of His Transcendence, the opposite has been the case, at other times. Whenever such a balance was lacking, Christological problems have emerged.

Saint Augustine represented the proper balance between Transcendence and Immanence. This view was refined during the Middle Ages, and reformulated by the Reformers. The Enlightenment period, with its emphasis on human reason, seems to have brought an end to this balance. The accent on human reason led to the victory of Immanence. This triumph of Immanence over Transcendence extended into the twentieth century.

I highlight, four men of this area, Immanuel Kant, G.W.F Hegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Albrecht Ritschl. Kant proposed, the practical or moral realm is the sphere of religion. Though he attempted to balance Transcendence with Immanence, Kant’s Christology is essentially anthropocentric with an emphasis on Christ’ Immanence. He understood Christ as the abstract, personification of an ideal whose historicity was merely accidental. The Christology of Karl Barth resembled Kant’s as I would discuss later in this blog, as not conditional upon history.

The radical skepticism of Hegels day caused him to attempt to shield Christology by moving the content of Christology beyond history. In doing this, however, he inadvertently helped move Christianity in the direction of pantheism.

Schleiermacher placed “feeling” as the foundation of Christology and could also be described as pantheistic, in that his Christology correlates God and the world, even making them inseparable. Schleiermacher’s language of God-consciousness can be seen as a substitute for the Chalcedonian language of two natures.

Ritschl, whose views are associated with classical liberal Protestantism, took a highly subjective approach to religion and furthered the trend toward immanence.

The rise of the Neo-Orthodox Theology in the early 1920s brought about a revolt against immanence. The neo-orthodox movement, headed by Karl Barth and others such as Emil Brunner, Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, sought to recover some of the doctrines of Reformation Christology. Barth, particularly, attempted to recover the doctrine of the transcendence of God but in reacting so excessively, Christology again moved from one extreme to the other. However, for Barth, both the person [transcendence] and the work [immanence] of Christ were fundamental. He saw Christ, the word of God, as not conditional upon history, the son who travels to a far country only to be killed, the servant who becomes Lord. Bultmann, maintained that Christ could be encountered only through Biblical kerygma and that the today’s testimony of Christ needs demythologization. The neo-orthodox resistance toward immanence lasted from the 1920’s to the 1960’s.

The shift toward transcendence was not held by all, Paul Tillich, for instance,

sought to reformulate and deepen the immanent theology of the older liberalism. In doing so, Tillich, some would think, tended to distort Christology so that it became barely recognizable.

Jurgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg

Moltmann emphasized a hope based on the cross and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In his earlier writings, Moltmann stressed transcendence, while his later writings emphasized Christ’s immanence. By linking God’s inter-Trinitarian being so closely with historical events, Moltmann, one would consider called the deity of Christ into question. Pannenberg linked salvation with creation, thereby developing an understanding of the relation of the world to its transcendent/immanent Source. He tried to provide a balanced alternative to the emphasis on transcendence found in German Christology and immanence found in American Christology.

The trend toward immanence in the 1960s was also evident in the rise of liberation theologies—Black theology, Latin American Liberation Theology, and Feminist Theology. These three theologies were a response to the emphasis on transcendence in much of contemporary Christology. Rather than waiting for the Transcendent One, whose coming was still in the future, liberation theologians speak of the Immanent One—and His power to liberate in the present circumstances of life. Liberation theologies moved the pendulum too far in the opposite direction to Christ’ Immanence”

The theologies of transcendence and immanence also occupied the attention of Roman Catholicism— Karl Rahner and Hans Kung. Rahner seems to stress transcendence while Kung maintains a better balance between Immanence and Transcendence.

The rise of “Narrative Theology” during the 1970s, attempted to utilize the concept of “story” as the central motif for theological reflection. The new emphasis on narrative opened the way to a new means of conceptualizing Transcendence while also well giving place to Immanence, for its Transcendence or Immanence is in the way story is employed.

Despite the pressures of modernism, Evangelicals still held to the traditional transcendence – immanence balance. Two evangelical theologians of note in this area are Carl F.H. Henry and Bernard Ramm. Both men, especially Ramm, was willing to dialogue with theologians outside evangelicalism while still holding to traditional views of Transcendence and Immanence.

The twentieth-century did not bring a closure to the Transcendence-Immanence issue. The efforts of the last few decades have only increased the tension. The contribution of this century to Christology is that Christology has recovered the some of its original balance.

According to, V.C. Samuel, in his “A Brief Historical Survey of the Council of Chalcedon,” pulished by Indian Journal of Theology in 1961, Chalcedon, has caused the emergence three Christological traditions in the Indian Church

First, the Sankarite-Advaitisa Christology. They develop a Christology that is both Chalcedonian and Indian at the same time. They are Thomistic and emphasis Christ’s enhypostasic manhood.

The second group are those who maintain a form of evolutionary Christology. Perhaps influenced by Western Liberal Theology, this group base their interpretation on neither the Transcendence of the Trinity nor on the Immanence of Incarnation, they stress the new creation of the human race in Christ and maintain that Christ is permanently Man. Their approach is commonly referred to as Bhakti Marga.

Third, there are those who are involved in discovering a viable link between Hinduism and Christianity. They believe Christ to be the manifestation of the Supreme Being and as the one in whom man as he ought to be has been revealed. Christ is the Cit (the Logos) of Advaitistic Satcitanada, he is the Antaryamin (the immanent God) of Bhakti Marga, and the Isvara, the divine reality that connects Brahman with the world of Advaitism. All three traditions attempt to understand the Incarnate Son philosophically

My Critique

Chalcedon did not claim to know how the Hypostatic Union occurred; only that the empirical, historical Jesus was a God-man, and that it was written in Scripture, it did not seem to deal with the boundaries within which this perfect union must be seen in order to avoid compromising the evidence. Some believe Chalcedon endorsed a formula, which is inconsistent with Scripture. Whereas the New Testament picture of Christ is largely functional, Chalcedon thought of it in ontological, transcendent terms. Oscar Cullmann insisted that such a transition is not found in the New Testament and argued that it was a post-Biblical development. In recent times, R.V. Sellers and Aloys Grillmeier have defended Chalcedons’ definition of the faith. Since I have reservations about their conclusions, I indicate my point of view. Both these scholars defend the council based on the assumption that Rome and Constantinople, supported by the Antiochene side and Flavian, made everyone believe that Eutyches was a confirmed heretic, Chalcedon never tried to establish that fact. Consequently, almost any account of Eutychen teaching, perpetuated in history since the time, has yet to be proved against him. Today, in the 20th century when scientific accuracy in evaluation, is asked for everything, including Biblical data I have no right to assumptions. Sellers and Grillmeier assumption remains to be proved. A Chalcedonian would prefer, R.H. Fuller as he traces the shift to the New Testament itself, that it was Jesus who made the fundamental change from a functional to an ontological Christology, not his disciples or the early Church. Gerald E. Bray in his “Can we Dispence with Chalcedon?” published in Themelios 3.2 in 1978, shows that Martin Hengel puts it back to the very earliest period of Christianity. Hengel’s view drives a wedge between the teaching of Jesus and the thought of the early church, an idea that is foreign to Chalcedon. Hengel tries to make the wedge as thin as possible, by maintaining that the theological reflection of the pre-Pauline church was both necessary and inevitable. Still some distance from the Chalcedonian position.

By its reluctance to pronounce any of Jesus’ sayings as indisputably genuine, Modern reductive, ‘Christologies from below’, have produced an intellectual climate in which the Chalcedonian definition has no logical place. That what counts is what Jesus did, not who he was, that Christology in the New Testament is the record of the Divine plan of salvation (Heilsgeschichte) of which Jesus was the divinely appointed agent and therefore, was only functional.

Another objection to Chalcedon concerns its out-of-date Hellenism. According to Edwin Walhout, in his “Chalcedon: Still Valid,” available in Christian Scholar’s Review 13.1 in 1984. In the Bible, sin is not a part of human nature but a corruption of it; its present universality is the result of inheritance by common descent, but it is not inherent in man’s nature. It is true that solidarity with the human race requires descent from Adam, but Jesus had this through his mother as Bray puts it in his “Can We Dispence With Chalcedon?”.

According to this argument, the definition was fine in its day, but now with new philosophies and new cultures we need a new statement of faith – a question of translation, with the need to find dynamic equivalents for ideas which are no longer current. Are we assuming that modern equivalents can be found for terms like ‘person’, ‘nature’ and ‘substance’. The early Christians did not just slide into

Platonism – on the contrary, they were acutely aware of the dangers of doing just that and fought to keep as close to the Bible as possible in their terminology and expressions. Words like ousia, physis and hypostasis though used in Greek

philosophy, but not in the same way. Similarly, other terms just had to be invented, like homoousios, or prosopon. Christian dogmatic concepts may have been expressed in words taken from the surrounding culture, but they do not depend on it. Probably the strongest objection to the definition is the charge that it is fundamentally Docetic – it is impossible to be fully a man and yet God at the same time. Chalcedon tried to give equal weight to both, but in fact erred on the side of the divine nature. The Chalcedonian Christ is accused of being less than fully human because he is sinless, and he lacks a human personality. In fact, it is precisely because of this defective ontology of man that a functional Christology was necessary. To define humanity empirically is not the Biblical view of man at all. As Gerald Bray states, interestingly, during the Enlightenment period, objections to the Chalcedonian formula arose mainly from inside the church. Two primary charges that were leveled against Chalcedonian Christology were, first, that the Hellenistic language of the formula is contradictory in relation to Trinitarian orthodoxy. Second, that it is unfair and dismissive of other world religions. When, F. Schleiermacher questioned the internal contradictions of the formula, and Ernst Troeltsch during the fin de siecle and the period just preceding World War I, pointed out that Chalcedon failed to take serious account of other religions, it provided a base for the further development theological liberalism that attempted to shape orthodox Christology, to build a Christology, to accept, the Enlightenment goal.

Submitting that, the story propagated by the Western and the Byzantine traditions needs a re-examination, and perhaps even a modification. The Chalcedonian controversy to me cements the point that the account that an event reported by an admirer is invariably different from the description of the same event held by a critic.

I encourage all who read this to reply, and I will gladly discuss this further.

 

Wesley Jacob