Christ

JOHN A. MCGUCKIN

The confession of the Christ by the Orthodox Church is inspired by the Spirit of God. Its acclamation of Jesus as Lord, Son of God, and Savior largely rises within and out of doxology (in which all the titles of acclamation are joined seamlessly so as to present varieties of “aspects” – epinoiai – on a mystery that transcends the limits of all titles and earthly words), but that confession is also present in the controversial refutation of those whom the Orthodox Church, throughout history, has withstood as falsifying his name and message with sectarian or heret­ical views. The first repository of the church’s confession of Christ is thus found in the Scriptures it prays from and the litur­gical songs and texts it composes and sings from (its liturgical books); and the second is chiefly found in its doctrinal tradition, especially as preserved in the seven ecumen­ical councils which, taken together, consti­tute a monument of Orthodox Christology. This is the sacred Paradosis which the Lord has delivered to the Orthodox Church by the medium of the Spirit (as promised in Jn. 14.26; 15.26; 16.13–14), and which is marked by three distinctive characters: first, spiritual enlightenment and discern­ment; second, biblical rootedness; third, ecclesial conciliar consensus.

The predominant “tone” of the evan­gelical picture of the Lord, which Orthodoxy has always closely adhered to, is one of Christ’s obedient confidence in God, culminating in the absolute trust of the Son who follows the path of ministry and service even to the point of the cross. The predominant tone of the apostolic let­ters, alongside the gospels, is one of trium­phant victory: Christ the Lord of Life and Death. Both the confession of the Lord as Suffering Servant, and as Victor, are equally canticles of glory, and together make up the rich harmony of the whole New Testament corpus in terms of its “Song of Christ”; for this is a rich weave, rather than a simplistic or monolithic picture. For this reason Orthodoxy under­stands that the icon of the suffering and humiliated Lord which the gospels offer is no less glorious than the Savior who

Plate 10 Contemporary icon of Christ Philanthropos. By Eileen McGuckin. The Icon Studio: www. sgtt.org

appears resplendent on Thabor or the Mount of Ascension. For Orthodoxy, the Christ of St. Mark is the same as the Lord of St. John’s Gospel. The church fol­lows the Evangelist John’s understanding that the Katabasis (the descent, or “coming down”) of the Word is not simply a Kenosis, but an epiphany of condescension. And the Anabasis, or exaltation of the Lord, is not merely a prophet’s reward of blessing (like Elijah in the Merkabah), but a return to the “bosom of the Father” which the Logos had left only “economically” to complete the incarnate ministry. The Exalted Lord is the Servant of God: the Humble Servant is the Lord of Glory. They are one and the same: “One Lord, One Christ” has been a motif of the church from the first genera­tion (1Cor. 8.6; Eph. 4.5). The formal Christology of the Orthodox Church (as distinct from its liturgical, confessional, songs and canticles which have a great poetic beauty of their own) is a long story of elaborating a defense of the evangelical icon of the Lord against a series of alternative pictures proposed, but which have been rejected by Orthodoxy as hereti­cal, that is, not conducive to salvation and not in harmony with the “truth” of Christ which the Lord and the apostles spiritually communicated. Accuracy, historical specu­lation, and good biblical concordances are, therefore, not at all enough to ensure an “accurate” synopsis of biblical or early Christian Christology: for what matters and what transpires in “seeing” Orthodox Christology is first and foremost a matter of spiritual discernment transmitted through the phronema of the church (what the Latins called mens ecclesiae – the “mind of the Church” – or the sensus fidelium – the “spiritual instinct” that governs the faithful across time as inspired in them by the Spirit of God who is the animator of the church’s confession of Jesus). The controversy surrounding each of these numerous christological debates in Antiquity, as they succeeded one another, has left behind a vast body of literature. Much of it is very complex, yet, even at its most rhetorically “precise,” the patristic language about the Lord Jesus retains the spirit of the gospels and letters, and in two strong senses. First, it is a literature that confesses the power of the Lord. That is, it is soteriological in concern. It does not speculate about Christ for the sake of intellectual curiosity. It only makes statements about the Lord to clarify aspects of how his saving power has been experi­enced. To that extent it is a christological language of action, and even when speaking what seems to be “very high” theory, the patristic theology is always one of praxis. From the beginning to the present we know Christ immediately in his energeia, and that energeia is communicated so as to be universally accessible even in the con­temporary world by the presence of his Spirit. Doctrinally speaking, this is why the Orthodox Church holds strongly to the confession that the head of the church is the Lord himself. Christ has not abdicated his regnant power over the community. He remains among it, needing no earthly vicar. The Orthodox Church has always insisted that to know Christ, one begins from the salvific effect he has on his world and his church. The “what” he has done, reveals the “who” the Master is. For the Orthodox Church, therefore, Christ is first and fore­most the Savior.

The second way in which the patristic confession of Christ retains the evangelical spirit is the manner in which it constantly reverts to doxology. The confession of the great deeds of the Lord for the liberation and purification of his people, and their ultimate theosis (deification), is essentially about praise of the energy of the Trinity’s life-giving revelation among humans and their social history. This language of praxis, for all its complexity, therefore, retained the essential character of doxology. This is how it could so easily enter into the fabric of the Orthodox liturgy at an early stage and why the Eucharistic anaphoras are full of profound christological discourses.

The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed expresses the fundamentals of necessary christological belief for all the Orthodox:

[We believe] in One Lord, Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten from the Father before all ages, Light of Light, True God of True God, Begotten not made, of one essence with the Father, Through whom all things were made; who for us and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became man. He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, suffered and was buried. On the third day he rose again, in accordance with the scriptures, and ascended into heaven. He sits at the right hand of the Father, and he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead: of his Kingdom there shall be no end.

Orthodoxy confesses “One Lord Jesus Christ.” What this means simply is that Jesus, and the Lord, and the Christ, are one and the same person. He who was the humble Son of Man, who suffered and died, is the self-same subject who was “with God in the beginning” as Word and Wisdom of the Father. It is this simple axiom that marks the heart of Orthodox Christology. It has always been a matter of great tension in Christian history, as almost all sectar­ian heresy has wished to reverse it and underscore a profound distinction between “the Lord” and “Jesus,” finding it a difficult matter to ascribe the honor of divine adoration to such an apparently humble earthly figure. The “separatists” of the past have been the Docetists, the Gnostics, the Photinians (Psilanthropists), the Arians, the Nestorians, the Eutychian Monophysites, the Monothelites the list goes on and is still active to this day. But the Orthodox Church worships and adores one Lord, who has perfectly united his humanity and his divinity. As the great Irenaeus said: “God became man, and it was the Lord himself who saved us” (Against the Heresies 3.21.1). As consubstantial with God the Father, the Son is born timelessly, eternally, from God (St. Athanasius of Alexandria, Against the Arians 1.24–25; 3.63, 66; St. Gregory the Theologian, Oration 29.2; 39.12; St. Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius 1.26, 42), and is united to the Father in the totality of the single and self­same divine essence, as well as in the irrefragably united will and love that constitutes the union of the Son and the Spirit in the being of the Father. It is this same eternal Son who is, within history, incarnated as

Jesus Christ, the Son of God on Earth, making the humanity his own; “going into the far country” (Lk. 15.13) for our salva­tion, while never leaving the Father’s side.

It is obvious, of course, that there is some christological distinction to be made between statements which are appropriate to the earthly incarnate economy of the Lord and those which apply to his state as divine pre-incarnate Wisdom (the divine Logos, or Sophia), or to his current glory as Enthroned Savior (bearing the glorified flesh still) sitting at the right hand of the Father. But this distinction is not one of person or identity; only of the economic manner of the revelation to the church. All the attributes of the divine Word apply to the Son, in all times and states; except that a proper acknowledgment ought to be made of the self-emptying undertaken by the Word, “in the days of his flesh” (Heb. 5.7).

It was St. Cyril of Alexandria, above all other fathers, who insisted that the Ortho­dox belief in the christological union meant exactly that: a union (henosis) having taken place in Christ, of two previously disparate realities: divinity and humanity. For St. Cyril, the fact that Christ confers deifi­cation on the human race through his incarnation is a reality that first happens in the Lord’s assumption of a human body. He speaks of the deification of Christ’s own flesh through the power of the indwelling Godhead. Many of his own contemporaries (and many critics of Orthodox Christology following their steps to this day) have complained that this “transfiguration of the humanity” must have meant the annihilation of authentic manhood. St. Cyril argued consistently that not only was this a false conclusion, but that his opponents’ premise (that the divinity and humanity remained untouched by one another in Christ, perfectly and mutually “intact” after the incarnation) was a meaningless and dead theology that took no account of the basic motive for the entire incarnation; namely, to render a dying race immortal. The natures, in the incarnate person, enter, on the contrary, into such a dynamic and energized relationship of intimacy that it can be described as no less than a “union.” In presenting this robust sense of transfig­urational power at the heart of the mystery of the incarnation, St. Cyril swept to the side those (such as Nestorius) who wanted to keep to a weak view of the incarnation union of natures, preferring to call it instead “an association” (synapheia).

St. Cyril pressed the conclusion (and his thought remains central to all Orthodox theology, affirmed as such at the councils of Ephesus (431), Chalcedon (451), and Constantinople II and III (553 and 681)) that while the divine and human natures preserve their integrity in complete full­ness, their interaction is the whole power behind the dynamic force of the incarna­tion’s soteriological effect (Against Nesto­rius 1.1; Letter 17; Letters to Succensus). St. Cyril often speaks of the henosis (or dynamic union) of the natures in Christ in terms that emphasize its total perfection. The natures are one in the way the perfume of a lily is one with its shape; or the way the Holy Eucharist is both earthly material (bread) and yet the life-giving power of God; or the way in which a human being’s soul is “one” with their flesh. Time and again, however, he insists that a monolithic understanding of “being one with” in the sense of “being changed into” is certainly not what he means. He wishes to connote what the earlier fathers had celebrated as the glory of the incarnation, namely its transfigurative effect on the humanity, which is thereby raised to new potentiali­ties. The fathers of the Second Council of Constantinople (553) summed up the matter once more in the tersest of terms:

If anyone says that the Word of God who worked miracles was someone other than the Christ who suffered, or that the divine Word was joined with the Christ who had been born of woman, or that he was in him as one person within another; and does not rather say that he who was made flesh and became man is the one, selfsame, Jesus Christ our Lord, the Word of God; and that both the miracles and the sufferings which he volun­tarily endured in his humanity are his: let such a one be anathema. (Acts of the Council of Constantinople: Anathematisms Against the Three Chapters, Section 3)

The same council, again with an eye for the terse synopsis, affirmed this principle of the christological union in the memora­bly dramatic phrase of Cyril of Alexandria’s: “One of the Trinity suffered in the flesh” (Third Letter to Nestorius, Anathema 10). It is therefore the faith of the Orthodox Church that the divinity of the Logos (eter­nally “God from God, and Light from Light”) is just as present in the Logos- made-flesh in the person of Jesus the Christ. Jesus is thus the “Word made man,” to demonstrate the power and pres­ence of God to humanity in the making of a new and decisive covenant. The entire presence and power of the divinity is in Jesus (the Logos “hominified,” as Athanasius liked to describe him in Against the Arians 3.30), in a direct and unlimited manner. It is precisely because of this that the Orthodox insist that one of the most succinct confessions of ecumenical faith in Jesus is the admission that the Blessed Virgin is rightly called the “Mother of God” (Theotokos) (St. Cyril of Alexan­dria, Epistle 17; Against Nestorius 1.1; St. Gregory the Theologian, Epistle 101.5. To Cledonius).

Because of the immense scope of the work of redemption that Christ accom­plished through his incarnate ministry, it follows as something fundamental, and basic to Orthodox Christology, that the Son is not in the ranks of the creatures (St. Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Synods 23); neither in his pre-incarnate state, nor in his earthly economy, when he bore the flesh that he himself had made. But the Lord’s is not a separate deity, as if alongside the Father’s. It is the single God­head of the Father which is given to the Son-Logos in the “mystical begetting” that constitutes the life of the Trinity. St. Basil described it in this way: “There is one source, and one being derived from that source; one archetype, and one image. Thus the principle of unity is preserved. The Son exists as begotten from the Father, and in himself naturally representing the Father. As the Father’s image, he shows a perfect likeness; as an offspring, he safe­guards the consubstantiality” (Homily 24.3; see also St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 29.2; St. Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius 1.36). The sharing of the same being is why the Son and Father do not constitute two gods, but are one power and being of God manifested in distinct hypostases. St. Gregory the Theologian explained it thus:

The Father is the principle of unity; for from him the hypostases of the Son and Spirit derive their being, and in him they are drawn together: not so as to be fused together, but so as to cohere. There is no separation in the Trinity, in terms of time, or will, or power. These factors make human beings a plurality, each individual at odds with one another and even with them­selves. But unity properly belongs to those who have a single nature and whose essential being is the same. (Oration 42.15) St. Cyril of Jerusalem expressed it simply to his 4th-century catechumens as follows:

He who has seen the Son, has seen the Father, for the Son is in all things like him who begot him. He is begotten Life of Life, and Light of Light, Power of Power, God of God; and the characteristics of the Godhead are unchange­able in the Son. Whoever is found worthy to behold the Son’s Godhead, attains the fullness of the Father. (Catechetical Oration 11.18)

Already in the 2nd century St. Irenaeus had put it even more memorably: “The Father is the invisible of the Son, the Son the visible of the Father” (Against the Heresies 4.6.5; see also 4.4.2).

The Son comes to work on creation not merely to teach humanity. The incarnation of the Son-Logos was for the repair and healing of a damaged world. This is one of the reasons why the mystery of salvation was accomplished in obedience under suf­fering. The pain of the world in its alien­ation from the love of God was met and “spent” in the person of the crucified and victorious one. But it is also clear that the Orthodox Church’s Christology is an aspect of its trinitarian faith, and can never be separated from this.

The fathers understood that this funda­mental repair of the cosmos was quintes­sentially the role of the Son-Logos, who had first designed the created order (putting into all things the “seeds” of “Logos- purposes” in their root being). All things were designed to accumulate to the glory of God; and this was sufficient to their ontological fulfillment. When it ceased to be so, the harmony of the world was tilted. For all the fathers, and the Orthodox tradi­tion of Christology which follows them, the Logos stooped down to his own broken world in order to heal it. Since the source of human pain had been felt most intimately in the flesh, and in the suffering of death, the incarnation of the Word of God was seen as the “stooping down” of a surgeon to a sick patient (synkatabasis). The very act of assuming flesh, living as a man within time, was understood as a personal remaking of humanity’s being: now as a new Christ-being which was forged in the person of Jesus himself, God made man, and passed on to the church as Christ’s new creation. This was the origin of the disciple’s destiny, which meant to live henceforward in the potentialities of the incarnation’s grace, and thereby in a “New Humanity,” namely assimilation to Christ, the victor over death (e.g., see St. Cyril of Alexandria, Letter to Succensus 9). The motive of healing resonates in St. Athanasius who speaks of the incarna­tion as the embodiment of God’s pity:

Our guilt was the cause of the descent of the Word, and our transgression called forth his loving-kindness, and this was why he came to us, and why the Lord was manifest among humans. Our trouble was the reason for his embodiment. Because of our salvation, he went so far in his love for humankind as to be born and be manifest in a human body. (On the Incarnation 4; see also St. Cyril of Alexandria, Letter to Succensus 9)

For St. Irenaeus, this restoration the Logos effects is felt particularly in the return of humanity to the knowledge of God, and the consequent breaking of the power of corruption that had resulted from our alienation from the divine. For almost all the fathers, the loss of the divine knowledge intrinsically brings with it a loss of the power of life (St. Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation 4–5); an enslavement to Ptharsia, or corruption of existence, since the vision of God is the “proper” ontologi­cal source of life for all human and angelic being. For Orthodox theology, therefore, the great victory of Christ is manifested above all in the restoration of life given to the redeemed race. This “life” (no mere symbol, but a powerful reality) is culmi­nated in the gift of resurrection, and in the transfigured life of the communion of the saints, but it is manifested even here and now in the church, in the form of many charisms: the conquering of the fear of death; the willingness of the saints to prefer heavenly things for earthly; cheerful self­sacrifice for the sake of others; the offering of the warm joy and simplicity of Christ to those one meets; in an overarching philan­thropy that constantly seeks out the poor to “hear” them and lift them up to the com­mon table from which they have been pushed away; in the love of poverty and humility for the sake of Christ; in the char- isms of celibacy and chastity: things which St. Athanasius describes as “unnatural” in the common world order, but as signs of “new life” in Christ (On the Incarnation 27; 29; 47–8; 51). These are, each one singly, great signs of the power of life in a human being. Taken collectively, within the body of Christ’s disciples, they are the witness of the enduring power of the resurrection in the world.

For the fathers, beginning with Irenaeus and Athanasius, and cascading into a major soteriological theme in all of their successors (especially the Cappadocians, St. Cyril of Alexandria, and the Byzantine fathers), the Word’s redemption of human­ity through the assumed body can be exactly epitomized as the “Deification of the Race.” The incarnation is thus fundamen­tally a life-giving paradox and mystery. In Christ, the church is caught up into the very life of the Trinity, and shares in its power of life.

Orthodox Christology is also highly eschatological in character. The presence of the resurrection is felt even now. That Jesus will come again as Judge of the world, his elect faithful believe in and hope on. This living belief is the sure sign that the eschatological flame of the Spirit burns in their hearts, and leads them to cry out still: “Maranatha! Lord Jesus come!” (Rev. 22.20). This continuing trust that the Lord is active for justice over the world (he will come as Judge to vindicate righteous­ness on earth), and also actively present for the continuance of his mercy on earth (for he will not leave us orphans-Jn. 14.18, 27), is the power of belief that activates the spir­itual life of all the Orthodox faithful, their moral life, and their passion for mercy and justice.

The Mystery of the Christ is not simply a matter of discourse, however; even if it is necessary to sketch out the form and shape of Orthodox teaching “about Christ” for the sake of clarifying the Tradition. Far more so, Christ is the love and heart’s joy of the Orthodox Church; its delight, its inspiration, its renewal; its endless renewal, and goal. Christ is the gift of spiritual life and illumination. It has been so from the beginning. It shall be so until the end of time; for the Lord who is the bride­groom of the church is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and end of all things. Poised in between, as an eschatological ten­sion, his church reflects the whole cosmic sweep of time, knowing it lives in the interim, and yet impatient for the fulfill­ment, by its two most distinctive prayers: the first being the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us”; the second being its eschatological acclamation: “Maranatha!”

We shall leave the final words on the Lord Jesus to the great Syrian saint, Mar Isaac of Niniveh:

O Christ who are “covered with light as though with garment,” (Ps. 104.2)

Who for my sake stood naked in front of Pilate,

Clothe me with that power which you caused to overshadow the saints,

And with which they triumphed in this conflicted world.

Divine Lord, be gracious to me, and lead me above this world to be with you.

(The Second Part (II) 5.22–3)

SEE ALSO: Arianism; Cappadocian Fathers; Council of Chalcedon (451); Council of Con­stantinople II (553); Council of Constantino­ple III (680–681); Council of Ephesus (431); Deification; Ecumenical Councils; Father­hood of God; Holy Spirit; Holy Trinity; Litur­gical Books; Parousia; St. Cyril of Alexandria (ca. 378–444); St. Isaac the Syrian (7th c.); Theotokos, the Blessed Virgin; Tradition

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Behr, J. (2001) The Way to Nicaea: Formation of Christian Theology vol. 1. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

Behr, J. (2004) The Nicene Faith: Formation of Christian Theology vol. 2, part 2. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

Gavrilyuk, P. (2004) The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGuckin, J. A. (1995) St. Cyril of Alexandria: On The Unity of Christ (That the Christ Is One). Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. McGuckin, J. A. (2004) St. Cyril ofAlexandria and the Christological Controversy: Its History, Theology, and Texts. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

Mantzaridis, G. I. (1984) The Deification of Man.

Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Nellas, P. (1987) Deification in Christ: The Nature of the Human Person. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

Staniloae, D. (1976) The Victory of the Cross. Oxford: Fairacres Press.