2b. Development of the Doctrine – Later Controversies
Rev A W MacColl
Since the Councils of Chalcedon and Constantinople, the orthodox faith of the Church regarding the Person of Christ has been guarded. And we must acknowledge the special guidance and superintendence of the Holy Spirit in this critical area of the Church’s understanding of truth. Through the Middle Ages the Christology of the Church was not under threat, in theory at least, despite all the other threats medieval religion posed to the gospel.
The appearance of Socinianism in the sixteenth century, however, facilitated a dangerous attack on the biblical teaching on the Person and work of the Mediator. Socinians taught that Christ was a mere man, that He did not offer an atoning sacrifice on the cross, nor was one needed, since man is morally good by nature. We can thus identify Socinianism as a forerunner of modern liberal rationalism in theology. In more modern times, other poisonous trends have developed and, in some cases, certain of the ancient heresies have reappeared in a modified guise.
One example of this is the heresy of Paul of Samosata from the third century. He taught that the Logos (the Word) was an impersonal power of the Divine nature which progressively permeated the humanity of Jesus, thus gradually deifying the humanity. Views of this kind often involved the idea that Christ – rather than being the eternal Son, co-equal with the Father – merely became the Son of God by adoption.2 This grossly-aberrant type of Christology is strikingly similar to that of the highly-influential German theologian Albrecht Ritschl in the nineteenth century. Ritschl taught that “Christ is a mere man, but in view of the work He accomplished and the service He rendered, we rightly attribute to Him the predicate of Godhead”3.
Since the late eighteenth century, there has been a powerful movement to remove from religion its supernatural and transcendent elements. This originated in Germany and produced the destructive Biblical criticism which brought forth such bitter fruits of theological liberalism in Churches throughout Europe and America which were once orthodox and evangelical. Part of this drift has led to the over-emphasising of the humanity of Christ, evident since the mid-nineteenth century in the so-called “quest for the historical Jesus”. All too often this has led to a detracting from the divinity of Christ.
Some of the fruits of this are obvious in our day, such as the idea that the Divine nature can suffer, which is in a sense a mutation of the ancient error of Patripassianism. Also known as Sabellianism, this was the theory that there are no personal distinctions in the Godhead, just manifestations or modes of the one divine person. Thus the logical outcome of this heresy is that it was the Father who suffered on the cross, manifested in Jesus Christ. While few who profess to believe in the Trinity in modern times would go that far in error, nevertheless the idea that the Father suffered in giving up His Son to die at Calvary is all too common.
Among the more recent discussions in Christology, the so-called “kenotic” theory was perhaps most theologically influential in the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth century.4 The kenotic theory attempts to explain the humiliation of Christ by asserting that He relinquished or lost the attributes of divinity while He was on earth. The true, scriptural teaching, however, is that Christ veiled the outshining of His divine attributes during “the days of His flesh”; He put into abeyance the direct exercise of His divine powers and the display of His essential glory as the eternal Son of God. During that time He drew upon His Father’s promised help through faith in the Word of God
1Last month’s section of this paper dealt with early controversies in the development of this doctrine.
2Louis Berkhof, History of Christian Doctrine, Banner of Truth, 1969, p 78.
3Berkhof, History of Christian Doctrine, p 122.
4The theory takes its name from the Greek verb used in Philippians 2:7, translated by the clause “but made himself of no reputation”.
and in the power of the Holy Spirit – as seen in the wilderness, when He used the Scriptures to drive away the evil one and when, on another occasion, He called on the Father at the grave of Lazarus.
In all this, however, He did not lose His power or glory in the least degree. He had power, for example, to lay down His life, and to take it again. He gave intimations and glimpses of His divine glory at various points, as on the Mount of Transfiguration, although it must be always borne in mind that, even there, the display of His glory was not the full outshining of His undiminished divine majesty; rather it was an exhibition for the disciples of the glory of the God-man Mediator, as conditioned to be perceived by human eyes in this present world. In Philippians 2, Paul compares with the humility of Christ the humility that Christians ought to exhibit: “Who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, made Himself of no reputation and took upon Him the form of a servant”. The famous dictum, which can be traced back to Augustine, is very helpful in clarifying our thinking here: “He became what He was not, but He never ceased to be what He always was”.