Christianity
Christology and Metaphysical Warfare: One or Two Natures in One Person
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 27 January 2011
Christology in the Beginning
“Who or what Christ is?” is the problem of Christology. No one today is much interested in it, least of all, the Christian sheep, who think their beliefs would not be worth having if they required honest answers to honest questions. But it was not always so. In the first half millennium of the Christian dictatorship of Europe, it was a big big issue.
Modern Christians, certainly in the USA were shown by the Pew Poll in 2010 to be literally “no brains” when it came to their knowledge of their own religion—many could not answer the most elementary questions about Christianity, questions anyone ought to know before they could sincerely call themselves Christian. And plenty of these “no brain” Christians claimed it did not matter that they knew nothing about their religion so long as they continued to profess Christianity to ensure they were saved!
Theology, Christology, Christian history, church attendance, and even reading the bible are simply a waste of time when, just by taking the name of Christ, you are saved whatever else you may or may not do. It is the extreme consequence of taking what Paul taught instead of what the one Christians call God taught when He chose to appear on earth as a man.
And that really is the source of the problem. It goes right back to the foundation of Christianity. The people who knew Christ knew what he taught and attended his church in Jerusalem. James, who has one epistle in the Christian New Testament, was its leader. But years after the crucifixion, James was murdered too, and the Jewish war, a rebellion against Roman occupation, started—remember, these first Christians were Jews! The War was lost, the Jews were suppressed, and the Jerusalem Church scattered. It was around 70 AD.
The Jewish Christians, though scattered, survived, albeit only locally and increasingly devoid of influence because Paul had seen a way to excite the interest of Hellenized Diaspora Jews—Jews living a Greek or Roman lifestyle far from Palestine. He went to Anatolia and Greece telling them that the messiah had arisen in Judea but his church was short of funds. Of course, Diaspora Jews felt guilty that they were not following proper Jewish practice, so glad of the chance to get on to God’s side, they were ready to donate to the messianic cause. Paul was only too happy to accept these donations, promising to take them back to James in Jerusalem. Like any good publican, he felt justified in taking a percentage of the donations for himself. Eventually, he turned out to have had Roman citizenship, either because he had taken enough from the donations to buy it, or he was a Roman agent all along!
Paul realized also that Hellenization offered the chance to conflate ideas from the Eastern Mysteries—the dying and rising god familiar to Greeks and Romans—with the fondness of some gentiles for the Jewish tradition that their God was a god of history. So he recruited these “godfearers” attached to many synagogues to his new idea that the Jewish messiah in the shape of Jesus Christ was a dying and rising god—much to the anger of traditional synagogue Jews, especially when he equivocated about the need for circumcision as the brand mark of a Jew, the objection even sympathetic gentile men had to becoming a full Jew rather than a synagogue associate. Paul was rebuked over his reluctance to circumcise, but we know it was dispensed with, opening the gates to the uninhibited gentile recruitment that led to Christianity splitting from Judaism. By claiming to be an envoy of the Jerusalem Church, Paul aimed to build up his own following, and he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
Paul disappeared from history during the reign of Nero, shortly before James was murdered and the Jewish War began, but the following he had built up himself, and consolidated from earlier independent messianic Jewish churches, accepted his amalgamation of Attis and Mithras with Judaism because it filled a gap, and fulfilled a psychological need, for a comforting religion for the poor, the slaves, and the women of the still new Roman empire. It was a compelling and easy notion to believe for those who had been denied access to the “respectable” religions of Rome—God had come to earth in the form of a man to die a cruel death on behalf of the meek and the poor, and through that act and mutual love they would be granted eternal bliss in heaven. And all that was required was to believe in Christ. It was scarcely what Christ taught, but it was a whole lots easier to do.
Was Christ Man or God?
Even easy things do not always remain easy. Many of the converts to Paul’s new religion had many questions that no one had yet worked out any answers for, and which complicated an otherwise simple belief. The main one was itself a simple and natural question—“If Christ was God incarnated as a man then what was his nature (physis) during his incarnation?”. Was his nature that of God or that of a man? Did he remain God or was he a man like any other? It was a question that reverberated for centuries, indeed reverberates still, and led to the invention of Christian theology. Of course it had never arisen before because believers in the dying and rising gods of old realized that their stories were myths, but this myth actually happened in history! The Jewish God is the God of history, is He not?
Christians today no longer puzzle about it, dismissing it as a mystery of God, as they do with anything that is impossible and even manifestly false. A few, the more intellectual Christians, make a career of theology to get comfortably paid for doing nothing useful like struggling with such questions, rehearsing them from time to time in learned theological journals, and even drawing on modern scientific discoveries like quantum mechanics to “explain” them—that is, to baffle the sheep enough for them to go away scratching their heads but thinking that God’s mysteries can indeed be explained by those clever enough.
But once, not long after Christianity gained respectability in Rome, the issue became so inimicable to the fragility of Christian love that Christians took to savagely killing each other over this metaphysical, even mythical, question.
While Christian congregations, those whom the shepherds are pleased to call the flock, are ready to accept blessed mysteries rather than making their heads hurt by using a little thought, a few of us try to think about it, albeit with skepticism, and a few more, mainly Christian shepherds continue to think about it as theologians. It is not as though it is unimportant. God is supposed to know how it feels to be a suffering human being through appearing on earth as Christ, a man. But, if God really were a mortal man for thirty odd years, as Christians believe God sustains the universe, what sustained it in that time? Then again, God was merely human, even a helpless infant in those years, so why didn’t the cunning and callous Devil take the chance to kill God and take over permanently? Then again, if God left the world unattended for those thirty or so years, and no one noticed anything in particular change—the universe carrying on quite well without Him—don’t Christians have to admit that God is unnecessary, or doesn’t even exist?
On the other hand, if God remained God while seeming to have become a man, the whole story with its Passion and crucifixion was a sham, a divine trick. God could not, as God, have truly experienced what it was like to be a man suffering. The fundamental raison d’etre of Christianity—that God suffered exactly as a human does, and so fully understands us—cannot be true. The basic “truth” having gone, what else can be discarded and what else believed? Of course, one might say that God has unrestricted power and so can experience the human condition without having to be a human, but that too can only mean the whole caboodle is a pantomime, indeed the sort of pantomime that religious charlatans commonly use to get a following, and that the religious followers always think is miraculous, so even God thinks it right to gull credulous people.
Most Christians, then, prefer just to believe—without having to dwell over such hard questions—that Christ could just be, just be God and man at the same time. For Moslems in particular, and the Jews too, this is impossible to accept. Indeed many modern Christians trying to justify their position on this issue, would certainly have suffered dire consequences at the hands of their fellow Christians had they lived in the early days of the Universal Christian Church when various synods literally battled it out for supremacy in this regard.
Answers in the Bible?
Monotheistic fundamentalists always turn back to yet another god for answers—the bible! Of course, the bible is utterly contradictory, very often on crucial issues, so ultimately fundamentalists really fall back upon the tortuous special pleading of their pastors, who are able to find answers to unanswered questions in one part of the bible by reference to any other suitable albeit objectively unrelated part. Why one bit should answer the other, no one knows except for some imagined euphony or assonance, no one knows, but Christians take it to be the Holy Ghost perched on the minister’s back.
Anyway, the synoptic gospels cannot be clearer that Jesus denies he is God, but in the fourth and last gospel to be written, Jesus is made to sound like a megalomaniac, and even then he says “the Father is greater than I”. True enough, though, in the megalomaniacal passages, Jesus seems to be claiming an identity with God:
Ye neither know me, nor my Father. If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also.John 8:19
I and the Father are oneJohn 10:30
He that hath seen me hath seen the FatherJohn 14:9
And the “I this, I that” vein goes on, and on, and on! Christians will read all this with admiration and, more remarkably, surprise that Jews could think that here was a man blaspheming shockingly. Jews had taken it as axiomatic that any man who claimed to be God was a charlatan, an eminently sensible attitude, one would think, especially for believers because God had been stridently insistent that only He—God—could save:
I am Yehouah, and there is none else. There is no God except Me I am Yehouah, and there is none else. There is no God except MeIsaiah 45:5
There is none besides Me. I am Yehouah, and there is none else.Isaiah 45:6
I am Yehouah, and there is none else.Isaiah 45:18
There is no God other than Me, a just God and a Savior. There is none except Me.Isaiah 45:21
Turn to Me and be saved, all the ends of the earth, for I am God, and there is no otherIsaiah 45:22
To whom will you compare and make Me equal, yea, compare Me, that we may be alike?Isaiah 46:5
I am God, and no one else is God, even none like MeIsaiah 46:9
Yehouah here in Isaiah is insistent that He and no other is God and the Saviour. It seems, given that you believe in this God, a good reason not to permit mere human beings to pretend to be God—to blaspheme—and indeed, that is probably the aim of the authors of Isaiah. It stopped mountebanks from doing a few conjuring tricks and claiming to be God to fleece the sheep, something that the Persian founders of Judaism were familiar with, and something which was potentially a cause of trouble and strife. In these passages in which He is insisting He is the only God and Saviour, God is addressing none other than Cyrus of Persia!
So says Yehouah to His anointed, to Cyrus, whom I have seized by his right hand, to subdue nations before him.
Jews were to obey only God and God’s messiah, Cyrus. Uh, oh! Wrong messiah! The Persians wanted a peaceful empire, and the Jews were to be an important part of it, so anyone claiming to be God was to be stoned to death. It was meant to deter anyone from claiming sovereignty contrary to the shananshah—the Persian king of Kings.
Of course, Christians like being fleeced. They mistake it for charity and have believed many such men in the intervening years since Cyrus, including Christ, and many imitations of Christ, any number of charismatic prophets who have stepped forward claiming to be God or His best man.
For Christians, these biblical contradictions are sure fire evidence of a blessed mystery—Christ is God and man at the same time! And John makes that case from its very opening passage. The Word was at the beginning, it was with God and simultaneously was God. It was incarnated and lived amongst us. Now that blessed mystery pales into insignificance when you are required to believe that not only was Jesus of the dual nature of God and man, but the human part died! The divine part did not die but instead used its almighty power to bring the human part back to life again.
it again sounds like a sham. If God can save Christ from death, then it could have saved him from dying, and, more to the point, it can save him from suffering. Moreover, it cannot be enough that Christ felt the suffering, if God did not save him from it, but God the Father Himself must feel the suffering—He too must experience what horrors human life can hold. Including death! But God did not die, and neither did Christ, so how can either ever comprehend the fear of suffering and death forever hovering behind the human psyche.
Jesus Wars
Christianity necessitates a schism between the gospels and reason. The gospel statements about the nature of Christ are incoherent and contradictory, so cannot be understood rationally. The Christian has to accept it as a mystery, as a pig in a poke, admitting that God must want them to remain ignorant—but that’s fine by them!
The early churches were no more united than the myriads of Christian sects today. Each bishop ran his own ship in the Hellenized Roman world, and, insofar as it had been developed at all, dogma differed from church to church, and place to place. Opinions on Christ’s nature covered a whole spectrum from human to divine. The human Christ, a material being, simply had an awareness of God that could be called divine, doubtless the work of the Holy Ghost. The purely divine Christ, a spiritual being, was a shapeshifting phantom which simply took on the appearance of a human male. Such a being is an angel, or the Holy Ghost taking on a role. Between the purely human and the purely divine were varieties of mixtures, including a type of mixture in which the kinds of being do not mix but remain wholly themselves—the solution adopted by western churches generally.
The famous Council of Nicea (325 AD) called by Constantine was meant to settle the many bitter differences among Christians so that the new imperial religion would be solid and united. But the bishops were not so ready to give up their own views for ones held by men whom they considered utterly wrong, and therefore enemies of the famous Christian “Truth”. The fury continued for another 126 years until the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD, which, dominated by Roman bishops, decided on the prescription favored there—God and man in one person—Christ was fully man and fully God simultaneously! As the western churches today hold this view, the argument seems to have been ended. It had not.
All of the many Christians who held to the view that Christ was God, could not bring themselves to dilute his divine physis by trying to imagine he could be both God and man at the same time. These Christians took the Greek name, monophysite, because they believed Christ was of “one nature”—the divine. They felt particularly ill done by because they were mainly easterners from the countries where the original Jewish Christians had fled, and where much of the earliest recruitment occurred, and including Palestine itself where Christ had lived and died. It seemed reasonable to think that the tradition among these people was more probably original than the concoctions of bishops approved by a Roman emperor for military and political reasons, just as, it seemed more reasonable to believe that the apostles appointed by Christ and friends of his, and also James, the leader of the Jerusalem Church, knew more about his living teaching than Paul who met him once only and that was in a dream.
If there is anything in all this, it suggests that the very first Christians quickly adopted the belief that Christ was God, and there is evidence for such a belief among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The archangel Michael was the leader of the hosts of heaven, and, if Christ was to return, it would be in the same role. Christ was therefore Michael, but Michael was an aspect of God, and so was God! There is room still to quarrel about the nature of Michael, the angel, if he had appeared on earth as a man, but the initial followers of Christ did not think it a matter worth bothering their heads about because Christ would be returning soon, and none of it would matter when the world came to an end. It was because it did not that the differences had time to foment.
For centuries after Chalcedon, Christians continued to fight among themselves about the nature of Christ. Christians persecuted and killed uncounted numbers of their fellow Christians over this arcane issue. This was the real persecution suffered by Christians, not anything thought of by Nero or Diocletian or any other Roman emperor, but persecution by other Christians merely because some thought Christ was a of a pure God’s nature while others thought he had to be in some measure a man:
Each side persecuted its rivals when it had the opportunity to do so, and tens of thousands—at least—perished. Christ’s nature was a cause for which people were prepared to kill and to die, to persecute or suffer martyrdom.Philip Jenkins, Jesus Wars
Not only was the rage among Christians at this early date comparable with the putative persecutions of the Roman emperors, Jenkins is unequivocal that it was much worse than anything produced by the Inquisition:
…the intra-Christian violence of the fifth and sixth century debates was on a far larger and more systematic scale than anything produced by the Inquisition…
Jenkins says neither side had better arguments than the other. Each simply tried to force their own dogma on to anyone who dissented, and eventually the warring weakened Christianity so much in the east that it was a sitting duck for the expansion of Islam. Instances were that a Chalcedonian bishop had Monophysites burnt alive proving that incineration always appealed to those who envisioned Hell fire. A little more imaginative, and unpleasant in quite a different way was to be a Monophysite made to live with lepers whose illness was severe and active, their “hands festering, and dripping with blood and pus”. Chalcedonians also forced kicking and screaming Monophysite nuns to take the Chalcedonian mass, consuming the hybrid body of Christ they despised, and thereby being deemed to be Chalcedonian themselves.
Meanwhile Monophysite monks were trashing Jerusalem, pillaging, burning, killing, and eventually murdering the Patriarch (Pope) of Alexandria in the Cathedral. Nothing much has changed in Christian Jerusalem over the years. Each Saturday, at the ceremony of the Holy Fire, Christians monks of different denominations still incline to return to their pre-pious youthfulness by brawling robustly in the bar room style of old western movies:
As Tom Lehrer ought to have sung: “the Armenians hate the Greeks, the Syriacs hate the Armenians, the Orthodox hate the Catholics, and everyone hates the Copts”.Jonathan Beckman
Just two years before Chalcedon, a synod at Ephesus, famously called the Latrocinium (“Robber Council”) was taken over by Monophysite monks, allegedly supported by soldiers, demanding that the Patriarch of Constantinople, Flavian, should be “slaughtered”. They battered him so severely that he did die a short while later. Christians! Do as you would be done by! Evidently, they expected others of like mind—other than an esoteric disagreement over an impossible metaphysical question—to murder them. Following their principles, they tried to murder the others first.
A Human Side? Not Today!
Though early Christians were strongly inclined to deify Christ, many saw it as basic that the humanity of Christ was paramount. Incarnation had to have had a purpose, and the idea that it let God feel for humanity was appealing. So, what was to become the established view of the church? It adopted the idea that the nature of God and man could co-exist as equals in one person—one body. Others saw this as divisive, symbolically and actually. The one person with two natures sounded to them like an homunculus, an impossible being, a compromise which could only make God seem ridiculous. So, feelings were strong.
Even today, a snippet of a film showing ants crawling on a cross outraged Christians who have always been ready to deify the cross as well as God, Christ, the Holy Ghost, the bible, The Blessed Virgin Mary, angels, Satan, demons, and saints, to mention only what is obvious and broad categories. But how does this excessive sentimentality manifest itself from the reality of the cross being a rude wooden structure, dripping in human blood, built solely to carry the weight of a man nailed in suspension upon it to kill him by slow and savage torture, and doubtless crawling with ants throughout? To normal people, the original cross is in far worse taste than an animation of a few innocent ants! Absurd values, though, is all too often what Christianity gives people rather than a moral outlook.
Christ at times was angry, was distressed that a friend had died, he was embarrassed, he wept and he bled more than once. He knew about lust and warned against it, but never tried it himself according to modern Christians, again too easily angered that a depiction of Christ should show a singularly human trait. Christians today are heretics. Most do not know or like the churches’ understanding of the nature of Christ, preferring the Monophysite one. Christ today is God, and even His cross is God by association! To suggest the cross is a couple of bits of wood, and that Christ was ever going to think about sex is a sacrilege for Monophysite Christians. Indeed, even in the Roman Church, Christ is so much a god that His mother has to be a goddess—she is far too perfect ever to have been human, so what else could she be?
In the end, the Chalcedonian view came out top because it was the Roman, and so the western, view. Most Monophysite churches were absorbed into Islam, but Islam had run out of its conquering gusto by the time it had reached France, and the Catholic view was preserved. Then, of course, the Catholics, seeing a danger from the Cathars, whose world view is incompatible with anything other than a Monophysite one, they turned loose the barbarously greedy wolves of the French nobility, to destroy them in their own homes and churches, followed up by the “dogs of the Lord”, the Dominicans, to mop up the remains of the heretical faith. Thus the Christianity we know survived, while views closer to those of the original Christians of the east disappeared by accidents of history. That, maybe, is why Christians call their God the God of history.
Now, the established “two person” Christology is losing out. Christians like blessed mysteries when there is nothing better, but otherwise they always prefer the simplest answer available. How can two entities live inside a single person without it suffering from some psychological disorder—multiple personality syndrome, at the least, or even schizophrenia? Yet the even simpler solution, that Christ was just a man, conceivably exceptional or even remarkable, maybe, but a man nonetheless, is quite unacceptable because they want a God!
The rejection of Christ as a man is essential to the pleas of modern Christians that they cannot be expected to emulate a God. If they cannot be expected to emulate Christ, then they do not have to take any notice at all of his words and deeds as prescribing how people should behave.
It suits Christians today, who, at best, want to love only their families and best friends, meaning they do not have to make any but the slightest effort to be good at all. “Love one another” should be no hardship for parents towards their children and vice versa. What is hard is loving other people, including your enemies. Few modern Christians can even comprehend that let alone try to do it.
It also suits the greedy leeches called pastors who promise the flocks an easy salvation just by professing Christianity and paying them the fee. Whatever the inerrant bible says about Christ’s humanity, he is really God, so whatever he did on earth is irrelevant to salvation. Or that is their hope.
