Marcellus’s solution was to say that there was only one hypostasis, who was Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In his view, the Christ and the Spirit were eternal with God, but only because they were resident within him from back into eternity and came forth from the Father for the purposes of salvation. In fact, before Christ came forth from God—when he was resident within him—he was not yet the Son; he could be the Son only when he came forth at the incarnation. And so before that time he was the Word of God, within the Father. Moreover, on the basis of his interpretation of 1 Corinthians 15:24–28, which says that at “the end” of all things, Christ will “hand over the kingdom to God the Father,” Marcellus maintained that Christ’s kingdom was not eternal. Ultimately, God the Father is all sovereign; Christ will deliver his kingdom to the Father; and then he will return to be resident within him.
This view obviously toed the line on the major Christological issues of the second, third, and early fourth centuries. Christ was God, he became man, and he was only one person. And it was not a modalist view. But other church leaders thought it sounded too much like modalism and condemned it as a heresy. The matter was discussed and finally decided at the Council of Constantinople in 381. That is when the line was introduced into the Nicene Creed that is still said today, that “his [Christ’s] kingdom shall have no end.” This line was added to demonstrate the theological rejection of the views of Marcellus. Other church leaders disagreed with this rejection. And so the debates continued.
Apollinaris
Apollinaris (315–392 CE) was too young to have attended the Council of Nicea, but as an adult he became a friend of Athanasius and was appointed bishop of the city of Laodicea. Like Marcellus before him, he claimed to be a true supporter of the form of orthodoxy embraced by the anti-Arian creed of Nicea. But he was consumed with the question of how Christ could be God and human at one and the same time. If Jesus was a god-man, then was part of him God and another part of him a man?
We are a bit handicapped in knowing exactly how Apollinaris expressed his views, since very little of his writing survives. What he was later accused of teaching was that the incarnate Christ did not actually have a human soul. Like others at his time, Apollinaris appears to have understood that humans are made up of three parts: the body; the “lower soul,” which is the root of our emotions and passions; and the “upper soul,” which is our faculty of reason with which we understand the world. Apollinaris evidently maintained that in Jesus Christ, the preexistent divine Logos replaced the upper soul, so his reason was completely divine. And so, God and human are united and at one—there is only one person, Christ—but they are united because in the man Jesus, God had a part and a human had a part.
One result of this view was that Christ could not develop morally, or in terms of his personality, since he did not have a human soul but instead the divine Logos. This more than anything else is what led to the condemnation of the Apollinarian view. If Christ was not fully human, in every respect, he could not set an example for us to follow. We are not like him, so how can we be like him? Moreover, if Christ was not fully human, then it cannot be clear how he could redeem the entire human being. In this understanding, Christ’s salvation would extend to the human body but not to the human soul, since he didn’t have a human soul.
Or so the opponents of Apollinaris argued. He and his views were condemned at the Council of Constantinople in 381, and even though in light of earlier controversies he seemed perfectly orthodox, he was not allowed any longer even to worship in a Christian church in public.
Nestorius
As a final example of a controversy that emerged from the conquest of orthodoxy, I turn to a later figure whose views came to be attacked, even though he himself wanted nothing more than to represent the orthodox views of the faith. Nestorius (381–451 CE) was a leading Christian spokesperson of his day who was appointed to the prestigious position of bishop of Constantinople in 428 CE. The controversy surrounding Nestorius and his views relates to an issue I have not yet addressed. Once it came to be affirmed that Christ was God by nature, from back into eternity, theologians began to ask what it meant to say that Mary was his mother. Mary herself, of course, came to be exalted as a person of unique standing, and legends and traditions about her proliferated. Theologians who considered her role in the salvation brought by Christ began now to call her Theotokos, which means “one who gives birth to God” but came to mean, more roughly, “the mother of God.”
This term was in wide use by the time of Nestorius in the early fifth century, but he came to object to it, publicly. In Nestorius’s view, to call Mary the mother of God sounded too much like Apollinarianism—that Mary gave birth to a human being who had the Logos of God within him instead of a human soul. Nestorius believed that Christ was fully human, not partially so, and also that Christ was fully God, not partially so. Moreover, the divine and the human cannot intermingle, since they are different essences. Both the divine and the human were present in Christ at the incarnation.
In stressing this view that Christ was both fully God and fully human, Nestorius came to be seen as someone who wanted to argue that Christ was two different persons, one divine and one human—with his human element tightly embracing the divine so that they stood in a unity (much like a “marriage of souls”). But by this time orthodox Christians had long maintained that Christ was just one person. In the end, Nestorius’s enemies attacked this “two-person” Christology by arguing that it divided Christ and thereby made him a “mere man” rather than some kind of “divine man.” As a result, Nestorius and his views were condemned by Pope Celestine in 430 and by the ecumenical Council of Ephesus in 431.
My point in looking at these three later heresies is not to give a full survey of Christological discussions of the fourth and fifth centuries. It is rather to illustrate the fact that once Christ was declared to be God from back into eternity who had become a human, all the problems of interpretation and understanding were not solved. Instead, new problems were introduced. And once these were resolved, yet more theological issues came to the fore. Theology became more nuanced. Views became more sophisticated. Orthodox theology became even more paradoxical. Many of these issues were not finally resolved in any “official” way until the Council of Chalcedon in 451. But even that “resolution” did not end all disputes about God, Christ, the Trinity, and all related topics. Disputes would rage for many centuries to come and in fact continue in our own day.
Conclusion
IN NONE OF THE Christian controversies I have discussed in this epilogue was there any question of whether Jesus was God. Jesus was in fact God. All of the participants in these debates had a “Nicene” understanding of Christ: he was God from back into eternity; there never was a time when or before which he did not exist; he was the one through whom God had created all things in heaven and on earth; he was of the same substance as God the Father; he was in fact equal with God in status, authority, and power. These are all quite exalted things to say about an apocalyptic preacher from rural Galilee who was crucified for crimes against the state. We have come a long way over the three hundred years since Jesus’s death.