When it was rent by doctrinal debates, Constantine and emperors after him attempted to restore its unity, as disunity in the church undermined the unity of the empire.
There were cultural dimensions to this transition. Second Temple Judaism, from which Christianity emerged, had long been influenced by Hellenistic culture. This influence is evident in varying degrees throughout the New Testament. But as the church became a Gentile religion a deeper encounter occurred between the gospel and Hellenism. The cultural and religious background in terms of which Paul understood Jesus was Hellenistic Judaism. As the church grew in numbers, fewer and fewer members had this kind of background. More and more, the church came to be formed of Gentiles who tried to understand the gospel in relation to the values and practices of their predominantly Hellenistic ethos.
This brought a gradual shift in the questions occupying Christian intellectuals. From roughly 120 to 200 CE Christian theologians asserted that Jesus was both divine and human, but did not ponder at length how Jesus’ person was related to God, though the question was raised. As Christian theologians began to consider this, a fundamental axiom of their thinking deriving in part from their Hellenistic ethos was that the divine is absolute and impassible.2 This was both a presupposition of and a central problem for developments in Christology occurring in the first five centuries of church history and the ecumenical councils of Nicaea (325), Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451).
Appropriating Nicaea and Chalcedon Today
Of these four councils, the declarations of Nicaea concerning the triune nature of God and Jesus’ relation to the first person of the Trinity and those of the Chalcedonian Definition regarding the presence and relationship of divine and human natures in Jesus’ person have been particularly influential for subsequent Christologies. Until the Enlightenment these provided the basic presuppositions for many Christologies. Even today they are affirmed officially by most churches. Yet the differences between the Gospel portrayals of Jesus and the technical terminology of these affirmations and the equally great difference between their terminology and content and contemporary thought3 make them controversial and subject to wide-spread criticism.
The understandings of Jesus promulgated by the councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon are part of the legacy of the church’s first centuries as it struggled to understand Jesus and his saving significance. The questions wrestled with here are partly posed by the variety of Christologies in the New Testament,4 which require subsequent generations to determine their own. This means that the questions of Jesus’ relationship to God and the nature of Jesus’ person have to be asked and answered in every age. These kinds of questions and the diversity of New Testament answers to them make theology necessary.5 Part of answering them in the present is critically appraising the answers given to them in the past. The affirmations of Nicaea and Chalcedon were given partly as guides to how the New Testament, particularly the Gospels, should be read. They offer guidelines as to how an interpretative framework for understanding Jesus as the Christ should be formulated. These guidelines do not end theological discussion. Instead, they open it up by raising further questions that continue to challenge theologians today.
The questions wrestled with here were also partly posed by the challenge of inculturating the gospel in a Hellenistic milieu, a process necessitated by the church moving from being a Jewish sect to a Gentile religion. In this particular process of inculturation there were gains and losses. The inculturation of the gospel is part of the history of revelation, through which its truth continues to be revealed and appropriated. While this particular inculturation is finished, the inculturation of the gospel continues today as the church moves into new cultural contexts in the course of history.6 Western churches have now entered into a cultural context of postmodernity. Within this context two contrasting demands meet. One demand is for critical inquiry and recognition of the genuine humanity of Jesus.7 This requires that all truth claims about Jesus’ divinity be critically investigated and acknowledged as open to revision. The other demand is for recognition of the transcendence and otherness of God in relation to human finitude.8
What follows will examine the christological developments leading to the affirmations of Nicaea and Chalcedon, tracing their roots, noting their continuities and discontinuities with what can be known historically about Jesus and with the early church’s faith in him as the risen Christ. The conclusion will examine how the process leading to Nicaea is continued in a theological development begun by Karl Barth, in which the affirmations of Chalcedon became a basis for rethinking the nature of God in light of Jesus Christ.
The Impact of Jesus’ Resurrection
on How Jesus Was Understood
Jesus’ resurrection and experiences of the Holy Spirit connected to it led some Jewish-Christian groups to interpret his person in light of passages like Psalm 110:1, with the result that Jesus was seen to have a unique relationship to God and a divine status in relation to creation and salvation history.9 Through his resurrection Jesus was seen to have become God’s Son.10 The worship of these Christians became “binitarian” in that they began to worship Jesus as the risen Christ along with God.11
Jesus did not really “become a god.” Instead, he was given devotion that expressed the distinctively Christian recognition that Jesus was God’s unique emissary, in whom the glory of the one God was singularly reflected and to whom God “the Father” now demanded full reverence “as to a god.”12
Within two decades of Jesus’ resurrection this kind of reverence seems to have become widespread within the early church.
This reverence for Jesus was also expressed through titles such as Wisdom or Sophia, Christ and Lord. Some early Christians continued to view Jesus more as a martyred prophet who had been inspired by the Spirit and vindicated by God.13 Even within groups viewing Jesus as having become the Son of God there were variations in how this was understood.14 In the New Testament generally, this understanding of Jesus as having a special status and relationship to God did not displace others, such as interpretations of him as an eschatological prophet. Instead it functioned as an overarching metaphor that could be enriched and made concrete by these, but which in turn expressed a fuller understanding of Jesus’ relationship to God in light of his resurrection. This relationship is the basis of his ultimate saving significance.15 Tensions remain between these various Christologies. For the early churches that produced the writings making up the New Testament, Jesus had been inspired by the Holy Spirit. But through his resurrection he had become more than an inspired prophet and teacher. As the risen Christ he was the basis of a new relationship to God and a new experience of the Holy Spirit was available through him. Titles such as Lord, Wisdom of God, and Son of God were used to express this sense of Jesus’ transcendence and ultimate saving significance that reached beyond what notions of Jesus as an inspired teacher or prophet could express.
Developing in the first two decades after Jesus’ resurrection, this affirmation of Jesus’ distinction from and yet closeness to God sowed seeds that, through sustained debate over Jesus’ relationship to God, would eventually culminate in the doctrinal affirmations
