Position · 451

Chalcedonian Christology

The teaching that Christ is one person in two natures, divine and human, united without confusion, change, division or separation.

History

Roots

Once the Council of Nicaea (325) had settled that the Son is fully God against Arianism, a second question followed: how is the eternal Son also the man Jesus? The New Testament says both things of one subject. The Word “became flesh” (John 1:14), and the one who was “in the form of God” took “the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:5–8). Fourth-century answers kept falling to one side. Apollinaris of Laodicea taught that the divine Word took the place of a human mind in Jesus. He was condemned at the Council of Constantinople (381), on the principle Gregory of Nazianzus stated: “what has not been assumed has not been healed.”

Two schools then pulled in opposite directions. Antioch stressed the full humanity of Jesus and spoke of the Word dwelling in the man as in a temple. Alexandria, following Athanasius, stressed that the Word himself is the one subject of everything Jesus did and suffered.

Causes

The collision came in 428, when Nestorius, the new bishop of Constantinople, objected to calling Mary Theotokos (“God-bearer”) and preferred Christotokos. Cyril of Alexandria answered that if Mary did not bear God, the one born of her is a man joined to God rather than God made man. His Second Letter to Nestorius argued that the Word “united to himself hypostatically” a flesh with a rational soul. The Council of Ephesus (431) deposed Nestorius and received Cyril’s letter (texts). A compromise followed in 433: the Formula of Reunion, accepted by Cyril and John of Antioch, spoke of “a union of two natures” and is printed with the Ephesus documents at the same link.

The settlement did not hold. Eutyches, an elderly archimandrite in Constantinople, confessed that Christ was “of two natures before the union, but after the union one nature.” Bishop Flavian condemned him in 448. Pope Leo I backed Flavian with his letter known as the Tome (449, New Advent). Dioscorus, Cyril’s successor at Alexandria, then held a council at Ephesus in 449 that restored Eutyches, refused to have Leo’s Tome read, and deposed Flavian, who died soon after. Leo called it a latrocinium, a “robber synod.” When Emperor Theodosius II died in 450, his successor Marcian called a new council.

The council

About 500 bishops, nearly all Eastern, met at Chalcedon across the Bosporus from Constantinople in October 451. They deposed Dioscorus, acclaimed Leo’s Tome (“Peter has spoken through Leo”), and under imperial pressure produced a definition they had at first said was unnecessary (acts and Tome, New Advent). The key sentence confesses “one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only-begotten, acknowledged in two natures which undergo no confusion, no change, no division, no separation,” with “the property of both natures” preserved and “coming together into a single person and a single subsistent being” (definition, Papal Encyclicals translation; Greek and Latin with Schaff’s notes, CCEL). The council also passed canon 28, giving Constantinople rank next to Rome. Leo confirmed the doctrine but rejected that canon.

Influence

Chalcedon split the Eastern church. Much of Egypt and Syria saw the definition as a betrayal of Cyril and a revival of Nestorius. These churches became the Oriental Orthodox family (Coptic Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo), which holds to Miaphysitism. Emperors spent two centuries trying to heal the breach. Zeno’s Henotikon (482) tried to set Chalcedon aside and produced a 35-year break with Rome, the Acacian Schism. Justinian’s Second Council of Constantinople (553, texts) read Chalcedon through Cyril and condemned the “Three Chapters,” writings by Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret and Ibas, that Cyril’s followers found Nestorian. Heraclius’s compromise of one “energy” and then one will in Christ (the Ekthesis, 638) was rejected by Maximus the Confessor. The Third Council of Constantinople (680–681) taught “two natural volitions or wills in him and two natural principles of action,” with the human will “following, and not resisting” the divine (texts).

In the West the definition was received without serious challenge and carried by Thomas Aquinas into scholastic theology (Summa Theologiae III, qq. 2–19). The Reformers kept it. Martin Luther, John Calvin and the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles (art. 2) all confess the two natures in one person. Chalcedon now marks a large part of what most churches mean by Christian orthodoxy.

Key ideas and contributors

One subject. Everything Jesus does and suffers is done and suffered by one person, the eternal Son. This is Cyril’s central claim, and Chalcedon keeps it with the repeated phrase “one and the same.” It is why Mary can be called Theotokos and why one can say, as the councils did, that “one of the Trinity suffered in the flesh.”

Two complete natures. That one person is fully divine and fully human, “consubstantial with the Father as regards his divinity, and the same consubstantial with us as regards his humanity” (definition). The humanity includes a rational soul, against Apollinaris. Leo’s Tome supplied the Western contribution: “each form does in communion with the other that activity which it possesses as its own, the Word working that which is the Word’s and the body accomplishing the things that are the body’s” (Letter 28, New Advent).

The four negatives. The adverbs (asynchytōs, atreptōs, adiairetōs, achōristōs) mark limits rather than explain the union. “Without confusion” and “without change” rule out Eutyches. “Without division” and “without separation” rule out a split into two subjects. Defenders have long described the definition as a fence around a mystery. Karl Rahner’s 1954 essay “Chalkedon – Ende oder Anfang?” (“Chalcedon: End or Beginning?”) made the point for modern Catholic theology; it appeared in Grillmeier and Bacht’s Das Konzil von Chalkedon, vol. 3, and was reprinted as “Probleme der Christologie von heute” in his Schriften zur Theologie, vol. 1 (Ullrich, Analecta Cracoviensia, secondary).

Hypostasis and nature. Chalcedon used hypostasis (subsistence) for the one “who” and physis (nature) for the two “whats.” Later Byzantine writers, especially Leontius of Byzantium and John of Damascus, added that Christ’s human nature has no separate personhood of its own: it exists “in” the person of the Word (enhypostasia). That is why a human nature can be complete without being a second person.

The exchange of properties. Because there is one subject, what belongs to either nature can be said of the person (communicatio idiomatum): the Son of God died, and the man Jesus is Lord of glory. Protestant theology developed this most fully, and it became a dividing line (below).

Salvation is the reason. For the Fathers, the definition protects the logic of salvation. Only God can save; only what is human is saved. If either nature is lost or the two are split, the Atonement and the Eastern hope of Theosis both lose their footing.

Key controversies

“In two natures” or “from two natures.” The decisive objection came from Cyril’s own heirs. Cyril had written of “one nature (physis) of God the Word incarnate,” and for him physis could mean a concrete individual. Read that way, “two natures” sounded like two individuals, which was Nestorius. Severus of Antioch became the main Miaphysite theologian of the sixth century and argued that Christ is “from two natures,” one incarnate nature after the union. Dioscorus’s deposition, carried out on disciplinary grounds rather than for heresy, deepened the sense in Egypt that the council was political. Chalcedonians answered that “one nature” after the union could only mean the mixture Eutyches taught. Both sides condemned Eutyches, which suggests the dispute was at least partly about vocabulary.

The Nestorian charge from the other side. The Church of the East rejected Ephesus and honored Theodore of Mopsuestia and, later, Nestorius. It spoke of two natures and two qnome in one parsopa (person). It saw Chalcedon as an improvement on Ephesus but still too Cyrilline, and the Chalcedonian churches condemned its teachers at Constantinople II. See Church of the East Christology.

Leo and Rome. Some critics, then and now, read Chalcedon as Rome’s council imposed on the East: the Tome was acclaimed, the papal legates presided, and Leo’s approval sealed it. Others note that the bishops checked the Tome against Cyril before accepting it, and that canon 28 was passed over the legates’ protest. The council thus feeds both sides of the later debate over Papal Primacy and Conciliarity.

Lutheran and Reformed. The Reformation reopened Chalcedon’s balance in an argument about the Sacraments. Luther taught that Christ’s human nature shares in the divine attributes, including presence everywhere, so his body can be present in the Lord’s Supper (Sacramental Union). Huldrych Zwingli and then Calvin held that a human body is always in one place, so Christ is now bodily in heaven. Calvin added that the Son, while united to the flesh, was never confined to it: “The Son of God descended miraculously from heaven, yet without abandoning heaven” (Institutes 2.13.4, CCEL). Lutherans named this the extra Calvinisticum and accused the Reformed of dividing the natures, close to Nestorius. The Reformed accused Lutherans of mixing them, close to Eutyches. The Lutheran position was fixed in the Formula of Concord (1577), Solid Declaration art. VIII (Book of Concord). The dispute over the Supper is covered under Spiritual Presence and Sacramental Union.

Modern criticism. Friedrich Schleiermacher (The Christian Faith, 1821–22) argued that “nature” is the wrong category for God and that the formula is an unstable mix of philosophical terms. Adolf von Harnack treated Chalcedon as the high point of the Hellenizing of the gospel. Nineteenth-century kenotic theologians (Gottfried Thomasius in Germany, Charles Gore in England) read Philippians 2:7 as the Son laying aside divine attributes such as omniscience, to make room for a genuinely limited human life. Critics say this breaks the “without change.” John Hick’s edited volume The Myth of God Incarnate (1977) went further and called the two-natures doctrine incoherent. Defenders, including analytic philosophers such as Thomas Morris (The Logic of God Incarnate, 1986), have answered that the doctrine is consistent once divine and human properties are carefully distinguished.

Ecumenical reconciliation. Since the 1960s, Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian churches have concluded that much of the old quarrel was about words. Pope Paul VI and the Coptic pope Shenouda III signed a common Christological statement in 1973 (Vatican). John Paul II and Mar Dinkha IV of the Assyrian Church of the East signed one in 1994, confessing Christ’s divinity and humanity “united in one person, without confusion or change, without division or separation” (Vatican). The Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox joint commission agreed statements at Anba Bishoy (1989) and Chambésy (1990) (second statement, Syriac Patriarchate). These have not yet been received by all the Orthodox churches. Monks on Mount Athos and others objected that they treat councils as negotiable.

What remains unresolved

Almost no one now defends either error Chalcedon condemned, and the churches that rejected it agree with most of what it meant. The open questions are smaller and harder. Did the council settle a real disagreement or a misunderstanding? Can the Orthodox lift the condemnations of Dioscorus and Severus without weakening the authority of the councils? Modern theology adds a further question: whether “nature” and “person,” as the Greek Fathers used them, still say what the church means when it confesses that Jesus is God.