Position · 431

Church of the East Christology

The teaching that Christ is one person (parsopa) in two natures (kyane), divine and human, each keeping its own concrete reality (qnoma) and properties, so that the Word dwells fully in the man Jesus without the two being mixed.

History

Roots

The Christology of the Church of the East grew from the school of Antioch, which read the Gospels with close attention to Jesus as a real man who grew, learned, was tempted and died. Diodore of Tarsus and his pupil Theodore of Mopsuestia (d. 428) worked this into a theology of two natures. The eternal Word took a complete human being as his “temple” (John 2:19–21) and dwelt in him by “good pleasure”, a union that was real and unbreakable but kept the two natures distinct. Theodore wanted to protect two things: God cannot suffer or change, and Christ’s human obedience must be a genuine human act if it is to save anyone. His catechetical lectures on the Creed survive in Syriac and were published by Alphonse Mingana (Theodore of Mopsuestia on the Nicene Creed, 1932, Archive.org).

Christians in the Persian Empire had their own history before any of this. The synod of Seleucia-Ctesiphon in 410 adopted the creed of the Council of Nicaea, and the synod of 424 declared the catholicos independent of the bishops of the Roman Empire. The acts of these synods are collected in the Synodicon Orientale (ed. J.-B. Chabot, 1902, Archive.org). Their theology came largely through the Syriac school of Edessa, which translated Theodore’s works and taught from them.

Causes

The break came through a quarrel in Constantinople. In 428 Nestorius, a monk trained in the Antiochene tradition, became archbishop there and objected to calling Mary Theotokos (“God-bearer”), preferring “Christ-bearer”. Cyril of Alexandria answered that this split Christ into two sons, a man and the Word, and demanded that Nestorius accept twelve anathemas, the last of which said the Word “suffered in the flesh”. The letters and the acts of the council are translated in the Ephesus section of Schaff’s The Seven Ecumenical Councils (CCEL). In 431 the Council of Ephesus, opened by Cyril before the Antiochene bishops arrived, deposed Nestorius. He died in exile in Egypt around 451.

The Persian church took no part in Ephesus. What tied it to the Antiochene side was the fallout over the next sixty years. The Formula of Reunion (433) and then the Council of Chalcedon (451) left Theodore’s followers exposed inside the Roman Empire. In 489 Emperor Zeno closed the “school of the Persians” at Edessa, and its teachers moved to Nisibis, across the border, under the poet-theologian Narsai. The synod of Seleucia in 486, under Catholicos Acacius, set down a confession of one Christ in two natures, with neither mixture nor change, and condemned anyone who taught that the Godhead suffered (Chabot, Synodicon Orientale). From then on the Church of the East and the churches of the Roman world developed separately.

Influence

The theology took its settled form under Babai the Great (d. c. 628), abbot of the Great Monastery on Mount Izla. His Book of Union (ed. A. Vaschalde, 1915, Archive.org) gave the formula still used today: two natures, two qnome, one parsopa of Christ. In 612, during the long vacancy of the patriarchal see when Babai helped run the church, the bishops drew up a profession of faith for the Persian king Khosrow II in a dispute with the Syriac Orthodox (GEDSH, “Grigor I” (secondary)).

This Christology travelled further than any other in the first millennium. Missionaries carried it along the Silk Road to Central Asia, to India and to Tang China, where the Xi’an stele of 781 records the arrival of the monk Alopen in 635 (P. Y. Saeki, The Nestorian Monument in China, 1916, Archive.org). Under the Abbasid caliphs, catholicoi such as Timothy I (780–823) argued the faith before Muslim rulers in Baghdad. The church shrank sharply after the Mongol period. Its modern heirs are the Assyrian Church of the East and the Ancient Church of the East, which hold this Christology, and the Chaldean and Syro-Malabar churches, which entered communion with Rome from the sixteenth century onward.

Key ideas and contributors

Two natures, each real. The Word is fully God and the man Jesus is fully human, with a human mind and will. Each nature keeps what belongs to it: the Godhead does not suffer, hunger or die, and the humanity is not swallowed up. Theodore made this the centre of his exegesis. Texts such as Luke 2:52 (Jesus “increased in wisdom”) and Hebrews 5:8 (“he learned obedience”) are read as statements about the humanity.

Qnoma is not person. The key technical term is the Syriac qnoma. Babai used it for a nature as it exists concretely in an individual, not for a separate person. So “two qnome” means that the divinity and the humanity in Christ are each actual, not abstract. The one parsopa, the single face or presentation of Christ, is where the union is seen. Babai’s Book of Union is the classic statement; Sebastian Brock’s essay “The ‘Nestorian’ Church: A Lamentable Misnomer” (1996, bibliographic record, secondary) explains why this vocabulary was misread in Greek.

Indwelling. The union is described as the Word dwelling in his temple (John 1:14; Colossians 2:9, “in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily”). Critics hear this as two persons sharing a space. The church’s teachers insist the union is permanent and that Christ is worshipped as one, with no “two sons”.

Mother of Christ. The church calls Mary “Mother of Christ” because the title names the one in whom both natures meet. It does not call her mother of the Godhead, since the eternal Word has no beginning from her (Luke 1:43 calls her “the mother of my Lord”, a text both sides cite).

Nestorius as teacher, not founder. The church commemorates Diodore, Theodore and Nestorius as the “Greek doctors”, and one of its three anaphoras bears Nestorius’s name. Its own theology comes more from Theodore, “the Interpreter”, than from Nestorius. Nestorius’s late defence of himself, the Bazaar of Heracleides, was rediscovered in Syriac in the 1890s and translated by G. R. Driver and Leonard Hodgson (1925, Archive.org). In it he says he could accept the Tome of Leo that Chalcedon later approved.

Key controversies

Two persons? The charge from Cyril onward is that this Christology teaches two subjects in Christ, a divine Son and a human son joined only by honour and will. Cyril’s anathemas, the condemnation of Theodore’s writings among the “Three Chapters” at the Second Council of Constantinople (553), and the whole tradition of Chalcedonian Christology and Miaphysitism treat “two qnome” as two hypostases, which in Greek means two persons. The Church of the East answers that this mistranslates its terms, and that it confesses one Christ, one Son, worshipped as one.

Who suffered on the cross? This is the sharpest point. Cyril and later Chalcedonians said the Word himself “suffered in the flesh”, and the 553 council endorsed the formula that “one of the Trinity was crucified”. The Church of the East refuses language that attributes suffering to the divine nature. It says Christ suffered in his humanity. Its opponents reply that if the subject who dies is not the Word, the cross is a human death, not God’s saving act (Acts 20:28, “the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood”, is a text each side reads its own way).

Was Nestorius a Nestorian? Once the Bazaar of Heracleides surfaced, historians reopened the case. Friedrich Loofs, Nestoriana (1905, Archive.org) and Nestorius and His Place in the History of Christian Doctrine (1914, Archive.org), and J. F. Bethune-Baker, Nestorius and His Teaching (1908, Archive.org), argued that Nestorius did not hold the “two sons” doctrine pinned on him (both secondary). Others still judge that his language could not secure a single subject in Christ, whatever he intended. The question matters because the Church of the East’s standing has long been judged by Nestorius’s.

The name “Nestorian”. For centuries Western and Eastern writers called this church “Nestorian”, implying it followed a condemned heresy. The church rejects the label. Brock (1996) argued it is historically wrong, since the church’s theology came from Theodore and the Persian synods and was not invented by Nestorius.

Rapprochement with Rome. On 11 November 1994 Pope John Paul II and Catholicos-Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV signed the Common Christological Declaration. It confesses Christ as true God and true man in one person and accepts both “Mother of God” and “the Mother of Christ our God and Saviour” as expressions of the same faith. On the old condemnations it says that “the divisions brought about in this way were due in large part to misunderstandings.” It did not settle the status of Ephesus or of Nestorius, and full communion has not followed. In 2001 Rome went further and recognised the ancient Anaphora of Addai and Mari as valid, though it has no continuous institution narrative (Guidelines for Admission to the Eucharist). Relations with the Oriental Orthodox, who honour Cyril above all, have been slower, though Syriac theologians from the Syriac Orthodox and other churches met with Church of the East scholars in the Pro Oriente “Syriac dialogue” from 1994 onward (Syriac Dialogue 1, Pro Oriente, Vienna 1994).

What remains unresolved

The 1994 declaration shows that Rome and the Assyrian Church can now describe Christ in words both accept. The harder question is historical. Both churches still honour people the other condemned: Cyril on one side, Theodore and Nestorius on the other. Most scholars now agree the quarrel was made worse by translation between Greek and Syriac. What they have not settled is whether, once the vocabulary is cleared away, a real difference remains over how fully the eternal Word can be called the subject of a human life and death.