Cathal BarryCathal Barry takes a look at some heresies the Church denied during the first centuries
The Church teaches that the unique and altogether singular event of the Incarnation of the Son of God does not mean that Jesus Christ is part God and part man, nor does it imply that he is the result of a confused mixture of the divine and the human. According to Church tutelage, he became truly man while remaining truly God. Jesus Christ is true God and true man, the Church teaches.
During the first centuries, the Church had to defend and clarify this truth of faith against the heresies that falsified it.
The first heresies denied not so much Christís divinity as his true humanity. From apostolic times the Christian faith has insisted on the true incarnation of Godís Son ìcome in the fleshî.
However, in the third century, the Church at a council at Antioch had to affirm that Jesus Christ is Son of God by nature and not by adoption. The first ecumenical council of Nicaea in 325 confessed in its Creed that the Son of God is ìbegotten, not made, of the same substance as the Fatherî, and condemned Arius, who had affirmed that the Son of God ìcame to be from things that were notî and that he was ìfrom another substanceî than that of the Father.
The Nestorian heresy regarded Christ as a human person joined to the divine person of Godís Son. Opposing this heresy, St Cyril of Alexandria and the third ecumenical council, at Ephesus in 431, confessed ìthat the Word, uniting to himself in his person the flesh animated by a rational soul, became manî. Christís humanity has no other subject than the divine person of the Son of God, who assumed it and made it his own, from his conception.
For this reason the Council of Ephesus proclaimed in 431 that Mary truly became the Mother of God by the human conception of the Son of God in her womb.
The Monophysites affirmed that the human nature had ceased to exist as such in Christ when the divine person of Godís Son assumed it. Faced with this heresy, the fourth ecumenical council, at Chalcedon in 451, confessed:
ìWe confess that one and the same Christ, Lord, and only-begotten Son, is to be acknowledged in two natures without confusion, change, division or separation. The distinction between the natures was never abolished by their union, but rather the character proper to each of the two natures was preserved as they came together in one person and one hypostasis.î
After the Council of Chalcedon, some made of Christís human nature a kind of personal subject. Against them, the fifth ecumenical council, at Constantinople in 553, confessed that ìthere is but one hypostasis [or person], which is our Lord Jesus Christ, one of the Trinityî.
Thus everything in Christís human nature is to be attributed to his divine person as its proper subject, not only his miracles but also his sufferings and even his death: ìHe who was crucified in the flesh, our Lord Jesus Christ, is true God, Lord of glory, and one of the Holy Trinity.î
The Church, therefore, confesses that Jesus is inseparably true God and true man. He is truly the Son of God who, without ceasing to be God and Lord, became a man and our brother.