• Home
  • About PI
  • Sermon Resources
    • Biblical Resources
    • Theology
    • Apologetics
    • About Preaching
  • Sermons
    • Historical American Sermons
    • Patristic Sermons
      • Festal Sermons
        • Nativity of Theotokos
        • Holy Cross
        • Entrance of Theotokos
        • Christmas
        • Theophany
        • Meeting of Christ
        • Annunciation
        • Palm Sunday
        • Ascension
        • Pentecost
        • Transfiguration
        • Dormition of Theotokos
      • Lenten Sermons
        • Triumph of Orthodoxy
        • St. Gregory Palamas
        • Veneration of Cross
        • St. John Climacus
        • St. Mary of Egypt
      • Paschal Sermons
  • Webmaster Resources
  • Preachers Institute Store
  • Bible Challenges

PREACHERS INSTITUTE

You are here: Home / Sermon Resources / Biblical Resources / The High Christology of the Pre-Pauline Church Creeds

May 9, 2015 By Fr. John A. Peck

The High Christology of the Pre-Pauline Church Creeds

early jesus icon

The primitive Church was far from primitive in their understanding, and expression, of Christology.

by Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon

The most primitive confessional formulas of Christology (those preserved, for instance, in Romans 1:3-4 and Galatians 4.4) continued to shape the Church’s understanding of Jesus through the second century (Justin and Irenaeus, for instance). This pattern continued into the third century, nor was it limited to Greek writers. In the early third century, we find it, as well, in the Latin Apologist, Tertullian.

This is notable in two of his more mature treatises, On the Flesh of Christ and Against Praxeas, both works dated between 208 and 213.

Providing insights (and some vocabulary) for the later Christological development of Augustine and Leo (and, through them, the Council of Chalcedon), Tertullian argues that Jesus cannot be made up of a jumbling of two “states” that are changed by being mixed. Jesus Christ is no

“tertium quid, a confusion formed by mixing two things (ex utroque confusum)” (Against Praxeas 27.12).

The Lord’s divinity was not diminished by his humanity, nor was his humanity rendered less human by its union with the eternal Word.

Jesus Christ, in the theological vision of Tertullian, is a single and unique subject in which are found, in their integrity, both divinity and humanity.

“We see a double state (duplicem statum),” Tertullian writes, “not confused but joined together (non confusum sed coniunctum) in una persona, Jesus, both God and man.”

In testimony to this truth, Tertullian invokes the primitive creedal formula preserved in the opening verses of Romans:

“Thus the Apostle also teaches with respect to [Christ’s] each state (de utraque substantia), for he says, ‘he was made of the seed of David (factus est de semine David)’—he will be both a man and a son of man—‘he was appointed Son of God according to the Spirit”—he will be both God and Son of God'” (27.11).

Tertullian draws particular attention to the participle factus in the Christological formula preserved in the opening verses of Romans: factus est de semine David, “was made from the seed of David.” He comments on the verbal similarity between the Johannine affirmation,

“the Word was made (factum) flesh,”

and the Pauline description,

“His Son, made (factus) of a woman.”

Paul chose to write factus instead of natus (“born”), says Tertullian, in order to stress the reality, or truth, of the Incarnation: carnis veritatem (On the Flesh of Christ 20.2).

RELATED  The Wobbly Exegetical Basis of Penal Substitutionary Satisfaction

Tertullian is impressed that Paul, when he refers to Jesus’ mother, calls her a “woman” (mulier) instead of a “virgin.” The reason for this choice, Tertullian speculates, was to give recognition to (agnovit) the biological fact of Christ’s human birth:

adapertae vulvae nuptialem passionem (23.5).

Again citing Galatians 4:4 as his authority, Tertullian invokes this same concern as the reason Gabriel greeted Mary as

“blessed among women,” not ‘blessed among virgins’ (De Virginibus Velandis 6.1).

These primitive formulas of Christology continued to guide the Church during the period of the Ecumenical Councils. To refute the Arians, for instance, they were cited by

  • Athanasius (Against the Arians 3.31; Letter to Serapion 22),
  • Hilary (On the Trinity 12.48),
  • Basil (On the Trinity 12.48)
  • Ambrose (On the Holy Spirit 6.59; On the Christian Faith 1.14.94; 3.4.26; 3.9.61), and
  • Leo of Rome (Sermons 23.2).

Saint Augustine may be taken to speak for the whole Tradition on this matter when he declared that God sent His Son, ut manens Deus fieret homo,

“so that, remaining God, he might become a man” (Tractatus in Ioannem 124.5.32).

For the recognized Church Fathers, the confessional formulas preserved in Romans 1:34 and Galatians 4:4—formulas modern scholarship recognizes as pre-Pauline—amply testified that the Jesus of history was not a mixed being, partly human and partly divine. Jesus was not a tertium quid.

Although unfamiliar with the technical vocabulary developed at a later period and enshrined in the Christological councils of the fifth century (physis, persona, natura, prosopon, hypostasis, etc.), they described Jesus as both God’s preexisting Son and as a real—not merely apparent—human being. They were equally opposed to Adoptionism (God “adopted” the man Jesus as His Son) and Docetism (God’s Son only “appeared” to be human).

RELATED  Casting Out Christians

 

Filed Under: Biblical Resources, Reardon, Patrick Fr., Sermon Resources, Theology Tagged With: ambrose of milan, augustine of hippo, Basil the Great, Christology, Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon, Hilary of Poitiers, Irenaeus, Justin, leo the great, tertullian

About Fr. John A. Peck

Director of the Preachers Institute, priest in the Orthodox Church in America, award-winning graphic designer and media consultant, and non-profit administrator.
Blog; Facebook;Twitter

Preachers Institute

Recent Posts

  • Approaches to God: East and West
  • Is God a Fool?
  • It’s Time to Abuse the Devil
  • St. Mark of Ephesus and the Council of Florence
  • The Filioque in Brief
  • A Pagan Records the Slaughter of the Innocents by Herod
  • The Books Will Be Opened
  • The Apostle John and the First Letter of Clement to the Corinthians
  • Nothing Strikes Fear in the Person Whose Hope is in God
  • On the Plague
  • Marriage Perfection to Rival the Holiest of Monks
  • The Compilers of the Philokalia Answer the Opponents of Frequent Communion
  • The “Smoking Gun” of Non-Chalcedonian Christianity
  • Salvation of Christians Outside the Orthodox Church
  • On Moral Heresy

Preachers Institute Archives

Preachers Institute

The Online Orthodox Christian Homiletics Resource
Fr. John A. Peck, director
Phoenix, AZ

Find what you’re looking for

The Deep Dark Archives

Vocations in Orthodoxy

Good Guys Wear Blackwww.rolex-replica.me
rolex kopior

swiss replica watches store

replica rolex
watchessaleoutlet.com
best replica watch site 2021

Copyright © 2023 John A. Peck · Designed by John A. Peck