" 84CD6F076EBF75325F380D8209373AE1 Christological debates during the Patristic Period: Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Arius, Athanasius, Nicene Creed, Apollinarius, Cappadocians, Andochene-Alexandria, Cyril of Alexandria to Chalcedonian definition.

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Christological debates during the Patristic Period: Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Arius, Athanasius, Nicene Creed, Apollinarius, Cappadocians, Andochene-Alexandria, Cyril of Alexandria to Chalcedonian definition.

 


The word "patristic" is derived from the Latin word "pater" meaning "father" and refers to the time of the Father and the different ideas created during this time. The term is non-inclusive; no generally accepted inclusive term has yet emerged in the literature. The patistic period is a vaguely defined entity, often considered to be the period from the close of the writings of the New Testament (ca. 100) to the definitive Council of Chalcedon (451).

 

A. IRENAEUS

Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130–202) It is believed that Irenaeus was born in Smyrna (now Turkey), but later lived in Rome. He became bishop of Lyon around 178 and held this post until his death two years later. Irenaeus is particularly known for his vigorous defense of Christian orthodoxy in the face of the challenge of Gnosticism. His most important work, Against Heresies, represents the main defense of the Christian understanding of salvation and especially the role of tradition in maintaining fidelity to the apostolic witness in the face of non-Christian interpretations.

Iranaeus writes that Christ is both God and man and uses the phrase "one and the same". The Son of God and the Son of Man lived, suffered and died. Irenaeus suggested that the divine word remained inaccessible (untouched by suffering). If he were not man, mankind would not be saved in him, if he were not God, he would not have the power to save. He developed the idea that God created man in his own image and likeness. All three elements body, soul and spirit are needed for a perfect man in the image of God. Irenaeus put creation and incarnation together; in creation the whole universe comes into being, and in incarnation it is a single human being who enters into existence and finds that he has the purity that the whole world has lost. The world that God created needs to be freed from sin, and sin has no power over the man that Mary gave birth to. When God incarnates, He becomes man. God predestined to live a sinless life from the very beginning. In Jesus Christ appears the one who possesses all that man as a creature should have, and none of what Adam brought upon himself as a result of his succumbing to temptation.

Man: Christ is God and he is also man, these are two irreconcilable truths. Very God and Very man in one with no distinction between His divinity and His humanity. At creation there were two hands of God over the world, i.e. the Son and the Spirit. Man became alienated from God because of sin, so God sent his son who became flesh and the Holy Spirit made his home in the human body and soul. Jesus Christ is true God and true man; it brings man to God and God to man. The birth of Jesus by the Virgin Mary was considered exclusively as a sign of His divinity. The Son is as God eternal, begotten of the Father from eternity. Irenaeus explains the works of God in Christ - God himself is in Christ and offers his salvation in his incarnate son, because only the creator can save people from the devil. For God appeared in Christ and through him entered into human life, precisely through his mercy and love, in order to come to man in his helplessness. If Christ were bound by sin and defeated, He would not have the power to set man free. The humanity in Jesus is the pure humanity that God created, and evil has no influence over it. If Jesus Christ were not a truly human and truly divine salvation, it would be incomplete and impossible. All salvation came from Jesus' body and blood, birth, life, suffering, death and resurrection.

 

B. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA

Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215/6) considered Christianity to be a true philosophy that never contradicted Greek philosophy but fulfilled it. He made positive use of non-Christian ideas such as Socrates and Plato. However, he synthesized every non-Christian idea but rather rejected some ideas, which is evident in his rejection of the "eternal universe" in Greek thought and his insistence on creation out of nothing by God. His positive use of non-Christian sources and/or philosophers is evident in his motto "all truth is God's truth wherever it may be found". He taught about the Logos of God; God is only knowable through his logo. God's logos is the mind of God. And he affirmed that the Logos is perfectly revealed in Jesus Christ, the word in which all truth comes. For him, Christ is the embodiment of divine wisdom. He was the divine Logos, the cosmic Spirit of wisdom and truth, who proceeded from the Father and descended in human form in the person of Jesus Christ incarnate. Through the Incarnation, Jesus becomes visible; he begat and created his own humanity. God is absolute unity, Jesus Christ is the logos that communicates and makes known the truth of the human being. The incarnation in Jesus Christ is the true and final revelation of truth. He is the highest revelation of God. He became man (God incarnate) to give the supreme revelation that through him mankind could receive his immortality.

 

C. ORIGIN

Logos and Christ

Origen begins his Christology from divine wisdom. The wisdom they claim is eternally begotten or created by God. It is understood as impersonal, but as a living hypostasis (a distinct substance in the one undivided essence of God) in which the son exists as a separate "being" alongside the father in the hypostatic union of Father, son, and spirit forming three.

Origen maintained that the Son existed in timeless eternity; this argues against the modalists and economic trinitarians that "he is not if the son is not." Origen asserts that the Son is coeternal with the Father. However, to preserve the primacy of God the father, he taught the principle of autotheos, which means "God is only and only God." He believed that the father begat the son by an eternal act: therefore Christ existed from eternity. Using John 1:1, he argues that there were two begettings of a son: one at the time of the virgin birth and the other at the time of eternity by the father. He insists that although the Logos and the father are coeternal, the logos is subordinate to the father. Origen's Christology is a katabatic approach because it proceeds from a high divine wisdom or word that was generated by the Father from eternity and moves down to the body and soul in its incarnation.

 

Union of the Human soul of Christ with Logos

The Christology of the Logos seems to find its greatest development in the writings of Origen (c. 185–254). He taught that since God is completely transcendent, the divine cannot mix with the flesh. The divine is then mediated through the soul (because the divine cannot mix with the body), and therefore the soul is the point of contact for the logos. "In the incarnation, the human soul of Christ is united with the logos. Because of the closeness of this union, the human soul of Christ becomes part of the properties of the logos. However, Origen insists that although the Logos and the Father are co-eternal, the Logos is subordinate to the Father. This connection between the Logos and Jesus makes him the true God. He explained the unification with the analogy of "iron heated in a fire". “If a mass of iron is constantly kept in the fire, it receives heat through all its pores and veins, and the fire is continuous, and the iron is never removed from it, it is completely transformed into fire, and in this way the soul. who was permanently placed in the word and permanently in wisdom and permanently in God, is God in all that he does, feels and understands”.

 

D. DISPUTES OF ARIUS AND ATHANASIUS

Arius (250-336): Arius was a Libyan Christian priest in Alexandria. He was well known in his community for his ascetic and moral teachings. He attracted many to his teachings, especially the absolute unity of the divine as the supreme perfect being. His theological teachings became known as Arianism where he affirmed the ultimate nature of Christ and was condemned by the early church as a major heresy at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD.

Athanasius of Alexandria (296 – 373): Born in Alexandria in 296, Athanasius was well grounded in secular learning and well versed in the Scriptures. He was a short, dark and poor man from a Coptic family in Egypt. He became the bishop of Alexandria. He was also a respected theologian, church father and able apologist. He is particularly noted for his conflict with Arius and Arianism. His foundation of Christology is apparently John 1:1, which he paraphrases as follows: "The Logos became man, and entered not only into man."

 

Arius:

 

1. The Son and the Father do not have the same essence (ousia).

2 The Son is a created being (ktisma or poiema), although he is to be recognized as first and foremost among created beings in origin and rank.

3 The Son was indeed the creator of the worlds, and therefore had to exist before them and before all time, yet there was a time when the Son did not exist.

4 The term "Son of God" is therefore a metaphor, an honorific term intended to emphasize rank A son among other creatures. It does not mean that the Father and the Son share the same being or position.

The independence of the Father and the humanity of Christ (or the subordination of the Son)

Arius emphasizes the very nature of God. God is the one and only source of all created things, there is nothing that does not ultimately come from God. This clearly raises the question of the relationship of the Father to the Son. The Father is considered to exist before the Son. Therefore, "sometimes the Son is not there". This decisive decision places Father and Son on a different plane and is consistent with Arius' strict devotion to the creation of the Son and his denial of the preexistence of Christ. Only the Father is "unbegotten", the Son, like all other creatures, comes from this one source of being. However, Arius is careful to emphasize that the Son is not like any other creature. There is a difference in status between the Son and other creatures, including human beings. Although Arius has some difficulty in identifying the precise nature of this distinction; The Son, he argued, is a begotten being, but a perfect creature, not like one of the other begotten beings. The implication seems to be that the Son transcends other creatures while sharing their essentially created and begotten nature. Arius also emphasized the absolute transcendence and inaccessibility of God. God, he argued, could not be known by any other creature; therefore he considered Jesus Christ inferior to God the Father. This idea of ​​Jesus Christ's inferiority to the Father is influenced by Origen's Logos Christology, which affirms the subordination of the Logos to the Father.

 

Athanasius argues with Arianism

If God had created Jesus, he could have created another extension of himself and he would not have been permanent, there would have been more sons. This is where the doctrine of the incarnation began and it is very important to know that Jesus was and is God. Athanasius replied that Jesus was God incarnate. The rationale for his argument is: (i) No life can save another life. (ii) Only God can save. (iii) Jesus Christ saves. (iv) Jesus Christ is therefore God. Athanasius followed three lines of theological reasoning to prove the ontological unity of essence (homoousios) of the Father and the Son.

He first asserted the equality of the Son with the Father (metaphysical). The point of his argument is that "if God is God, the Son must be God". If there is "a time when the Son is not", then there is also a time when the Father is not the Father; and this is contradicted because it also cancels the non-existence of the Father and the Son. So denying the divinity of the Son of God was a serious offense against the Father.

Second, his argument was soteriological. For Athanasius, the main purpose of theology was to preserve and protect the gospel of salvation. Therefore, he believes that "if the Son is not God or the Father, then salvation based on rebirth is impossible."  Because man cannot atone for human sin; only God can atone for sin and bring salvation to mankind. As such, Jesus, as God, washed away the sin of mankind.

The third argument was from the line of revelation. Only God can truly reveal God. "If the Son is not one with God as the Father, he cannot teach the true Father." Following this line of criticism, Athanasius protects the doctrine of Jesus from the errors of Arius.

 

Council of Nicaea (325)

The fourth-century Arian debate is widely regarded as one of the most important debates in the history of the Christian church. Arius' teaching provoked a hostile reaction from Athanasia. The Council of Nicaea was called by Constantine, the first Christian emperor, to settle the destabilizing Christological disagreements in his empire. Determined to re-establish doctrinal unity in the Church, Constantine convened the First Ecumenical Council—a gathering of Christians from all over Christendom whose decisions are still considered normative for the churches. Nicaea settled the Arian dispute by affirming that Jesus was homoousios (one in being or one essence) with the Father, rejecting the Arian position of the humanity of Christ enjoy the powerful affirmation of Christ. Arius and his followers were condemned, and an official creed was formulated, which reads: We believe in one God the Father almighty, Creator of all things visible and invisible; And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, begotten of the Father, only begotten, that is, of the essence of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, True God is from true God, not created, born. from essence (homoosios) with the Father, from whom all things in heaven and on earth were created, for our humanity and salvation and became incarnate, became man, suffered and rose from the dead on the third day ascended into heaven and he will come to judge the living and the dead; And in the Holy Spirit.


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