A bit of Christology: communication of attributes

In The Nature of Doctrine George Lindbeck put forth a novel argument regarding in what sense Christian doctrines are true. Doctrines are not true in a first order sense, that is, they don't tell us anything directly about God's nature. Rather, doctrines are second order speech about God. They reflect on the proper use of Christian scriptures, liturgy and prayer. Doctrines, Lindbeck argues, are a kind of grammar of faith. Just as the rules of grammar make no sense isolated from the language they regulate, Christian doctrines don't make any sense apart from the scriptures and liturgy they regulate.

This understanding of doctrinal truth allows for seemingly contradictory dogmatic assertions from competing religions to stand as true. The doctrine of the Trinity or the Muslim Shahada are true or false, not in relationship to each other, but in relationship to the communities whose speech they're trying to regulate.

Lindbeck cites Athanasius's extensive writings on the Nicene Creed as support for his argument. Indeed, you can boil down a lot of what Athanasius writes to one basic point: taken properly, the Father-Son metaphor means "like begets like," and not, as the Arians took it to mean, that one Person is prior to the Other.

But I think that where you get this in spades is in the next century and the Christological controversy. It's fascinating to me that the Church hammered out its final answer on the divine and human nature of Jesus Christ by arguing over whether you can call the Virgin Mary "The Mother of God."

So, without further ado, this is what I wrote up about said controversy and the communication of attributes, that is, the idea that one can attribute human predicates like suffered and died to the divine subject, the Son of God...

            This paper will study the Christological controversy with special reference to the communication of attributes, the principle that both divine and human attributes can be assigned to the person Jesus. It will consider how the daring rhetoric of Melitus and the theological grammar of Athanasius set the stage for the controversy, as well as how a variety of fifth century Christians--Nestorius, Cyril, and Pope Leo--drew upon the tradition to answer the question of the relationship of the divine and the human in Jesus Christ.

            “He who made all things is made fast on the tree. The Master is insulted. God is murdered. The King of Israel is destroyed by an Israelite hand” (Melito, Homily 96, Norris 46). Though Melito of Sardis was addressing the relationship between the Old and New Testaments, his startling rhetoric was a harbinger of different issues. A “murdered God” is the communicatio idiomatum in the raw. While the sermon’s white hot anger against the Jews troubles 21^st century readers, some of his nearer contemporaries might have been more troubled by the fastening of a human predicate to a divine subject. It would fall to later theologians to rule on the admissibility of this bit of Christian rhetorical excess.

            Nestorius believed himself to be a faithful interpreter of Nicene orthodoxy when he both denied the legitimacy of the term Theotokos (“Mother of God”), and upheld a “two-fold” Christology (Nestorius, First Sermon Against the Theotokos, Norris 129). Nestorius believed that the incarnation joined the divine and the human as two persons are joined when one stoops to lift up another who is lying down (First Sermon, Norris 125). Nestorius’ “conjunctive” Christology was faithful to his mentor Theodore’s, who likened the union of God and humanity in Christ to the human marriage bond (Theodore, On the Incarnation, Book VIII, Fragment 7, Norris 120).

            Nestorius feared that a communicatio idiomatum would blur the bright white line between divine and human attributes that Athanasius drew at the height of the Trinitarian controversy to secure the Son’s full divinity. The word Theotokos, Nestorius argued, did blur that line. Any talk of “God’s Mother” implied that the Logos had a starting point, which was to repeat the Arian error of claiming that the Logos, while divine, was nevertheless created. Nestorius likely would have balked at Melito’s sermon, but not because of its anti-Semitism. God was not murdered, Nestorius might have said. The man Jesus, in whom the Logos dwelt as in a temple, “the crucified flesh” to whom “God has been joined” was murdered (First Sermon, Norris 129-30).

            In fact, Nestorius’ Christology represented an undesirable hardening of Athanasian thought. In Book III of Orations Against the Arians, having once again distinguished between things proper to Jesus Christ’s divinity and his humanity, Athanasius nevertheless states, “Furthermore, the Logos bore the weakness of the flesh as his own, since the flesh belonged to him,” and, “It is well that the prophet said ‘He bore’ and did not say ‘He cured our infirmities [Matt. 8:17], lest, as one outside the body, he merely cured it as he has always done… In fact, however, he bore our weaknesses… in order to show that he became a human being on our account and that the body which bore them in him is his very own” (III.31, Norris 90). If it is permissible to speak of the Logos bearing weakness, then clearly a communication of attributes can be faithful to Nicene orthodoxy provided that such talk is not used to render the Logos passible and thus less than consubstantial with the Father.

            Nestorius’ nemesis Cyril demonstrated greater faithfulness in applying the tradition to new problems. In his Second Letter to Nestorius, Cyril was at pains to stress his conviction that the Logos is not capable of suffering, change or diminishment. “We do not say that the Logos became flesh by having his nature changed,” he wrote (Second Letter, Norris 132), adding that “It is not that he actually experienced death as far as anything which touches his [divine] nature is concerned; to think that would be insanity. Rather it is that, as I said earlier, his flesh tasted death” (Second Letter 134). Cyril sounds like he agrees with Nestorius. Why were they nemeses?

            The problem, as Cyril saw it, was Nestorius’ minimalist union of the divine and human natures. “The one Lord Jesus Christ must not be divided into two Sons” (Second Letter, Norris 134). Cyril believed that reading Nestorius might lead one to conclude that two persons, a human Jesus of Nazareth and a divine Word of God, have scooted in together on same throne at the right hand of the Father. Cyril affirmed a fuller unity of Jesus Christ than Nestorius by arguing that each nature claims and penetrates the other without both natures mixing into some compound of the human and the divine that is neither (Cyril, Letter to John of Antioch, Norris 143). “[I]n an unspeakable and incomprehensible way, the Logos united to himself, in his hypostasis, flesh enlivened by a rational soul, and in this way became a human being and has been designated ‘Son of Man’… Furthermore, we say that while the natures which were brought together into a true unity were different, there is nevertheless, because of the unspeakable and unutterable convergence into unity, one Christ and one Son out of the two” (Second Letter, Norris 133). Cyril’s search for the unity of Jesus Christ out of his human and divine natures was faithful to the spirit of the previous century’s defenders of the Council of Nicaea, who sought to uphold both the unity of the Godhead and the distinctiveness of the Three Persons.

            Cyril’s Christology thus allows for a full communication of attributes between the two natures. One does not have to be so careful as to say, “The Logos, and only the Logos came down from above.” One is free to say, “Our Lord Jesus Christ is from heaven and from above”  (to John, Norris 143), not in the sense that a human body descended from heaven, as some of Cyril’s opponents misunderstood him to say ( to John, Norris 142), but with the understanding that there is One subject of both divine and human predicates. It is scripture that authorizes such linguistic freedom. 1 Peter 4:1 speaks of Christ suffering “in the flesh,” and Christ himself, in the mouth of the prophet, prefigures his passion, saying, “I have given my back to the whips” (to John, Norris 144). Cyril argued that if everyone can read these texts and not erroneously conclude that the scriptures teach that a passible divinity, then one ought to be able to take his words in the same spirit.

            With regard to the related linguistic issue, the Theotokos, Cyril denied that the term meant that the Logos began to exist in Mary’s womb. Rather, “the holy fathers… boldly call the holy Virgin ‘God’s mother’… because the holy body which was born of her… and to which the Logos was hypostatically united, is said to have had a fleshly birth” (Second Letter, Norris 134). Just as Athanasius clarified the meaning of the Father-Son metaphor to mean like begets like, Cyril clarified the term Theotokos to mean that from conception Jesus was united to the eternal Logos, not that the Logos is temporal. Given Cyril’s many caveats about divine immutability, it is unfortunate that Nestorius did not accept the legitimacy of Cyril’s language.

            At first Pope Leo I’s Letter to Flavian would seem to be an attempt to steer the consensus back toward a Nestorian appropriation of Athanasian thought, given its stress on attributes peculiar to the divine and human natures. But the letter was occasioned by Eutyches’ teaching that after the incarnation, the divine nature overwhelmed the human nature in Christ, so Leo was forced to spend much of the letter arguing for the presence of both humanity and divinity in Jesus Christ, “each form [carrying] on its proper activities in communion with the other” (to Flavian 4, Norris 150).

            When Leo finally turned to the communicatio idiomatum, if anything he upped the ante on the doctrine. The unity of the two natures allows for a mixing and matching of subjects and predicates (to Flavian 5, Norris 151). Leo did not cry out about a “murdered God,” but he did conclude that one can speak both of a Son of Man coming down from heaven and a Son of God who was crucified and buried. Why else would the resurrected Jesus have tarried on earth 40 days before his ascension were it not “in order that the characteristic properties of the divine and human natures might be acknowledged to persist in him without separation?” (to Flavian 5, Norris 152).

            Recognizing that “it was equally perilous for people to believe that the Lord Jesus Christ is simply God and not a human being, or a mere human being and not God” (to Flavian, Norris 152) the early Church steered safely between the rock of docetism and the hard place of Ebionism. But future generations would need to thread finer needles. They would have to state precisely how an omnipotent, omniscient, immutable deity could unite with a mutable and finite human being. Athanasius’ method, to divide in order to unite, showed the way. He distinguished between divine and human attributes in order to unite the Logos to the Father. Cyril and Leo, after carefully affirming the immutability of the Logos, boldly attributed human predicates such as “was born,” and “was crucified” to Jesus Christ, for he is the One, undivided subject of every verb in the second article of the Creed. Those who take care with the grammar of faith find that the Word frees them for daring proclamation. But Nestorius lost sight of the goal. In his zeal to hold the Son and the Father together, he could not hold the Son together in himself.

Works Cited

Athanasius. “Orations Against the Arians: Book III.” The Christological Controversy. Ed.

            Richard A. Norris, Jr. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980. Pp. 83-101. Print.

Cyril of Alexandria. “Letter to John of Antioch.” The Christological Controversy. Ed. Richard

            A. Norris, Jr. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980. Pp. 140-5. Print.

                        . “Second Letter to Nestorius.” The Christological Controversy. Ed. Richard A.

            Norris, Jr. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980. Pp. 131-5. Print.

Leo I, Pope. “Letter to Flavian of Constantinople.” The Christological Controversy. Ed. Richard

            A. Norris, Jr. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980. Pp. 145-55. Print.

Melito of Sardis. “A Homily on the Passover.” The Christological Controversy. Ed. Richard A.

            Norris, Jr. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980. Pp. 33-47. Print.

Nestorius. “First Sermon Against the Theotokos.” The Christological Controversy. Ed. Richard

            A. Norris, Jr. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980. Pp. 123-31. Print.

Theodore of Mopsuestia. “Fragments of the Doctrinal Works.” The Christological Controversy.

            Ed. Richard A. Norris, Jr. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980. Pp. 113-22. Print.