"The Incarnation" by Frank Sheed

The Incarnation | Frank Sheed | From A Map of Life
 
The human race then had broken its right relation of friendship with God: men had lost the way because they had lost the life (without which the way cannot be followed) and the truth without which the way cannot even be known. To such a world Christ, who had come to make all things new, said, "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life." In those three words–way, truth, life–Christ related Himself quite precisely to what man had lost: as precisely as a key fits a lock. In the precision of that threefold relation, we are apt to overlook the strangest word in the phrase–the word "am."

Men needed truth and life: what they might have expected was one who would say "I have the truth and the life": what they found was one who said "I am the truth and the life." This strange word forces us to a new mode of approach. If a man claims to have what we want, we must study what he has. If a man claims to be what we want, we must study what he is. With any other teacher the truth he has is our primary concern–the teacher himself is of no importance save as the bearer of truth, and his work is done when he has given it. With Christ, the teacher is primary: He cannot simply give us the truth and the life, and then have done with us. He can only give us Himself, for He is both. This point must be insisted on, not as a figure of speech, but as a strict fact. It is a map we are making, not a poem; and what is now being said, mysterious as it is, is strictly and literally rue. Our study of the road of life has brought us to an examination of truth and life: we cannot understand the road if we do not understand them. But if Christ is the truth, then we must understand Him: if He is the life, then He must live in us.

Obviously, then, our map-making cannot progress till we are clear about Who and what Christ is, because the road we are to travel depends even more on what He is than on what He did.

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Comments

[Jackson]

Sheed writes:

"So God the Son can say not only 'I am God with a human nature to act in' but in the most absolute fullness of meaning He can say 'I am man.' He does not simply act as man: He is man–as truly man as we."

What would be the heresy which responds like this?:

"Part of the definition of man is that he has one nature, and only one nature. Anyone who has both a divine and a human nature is therefore not truly human. Therefore Christ was not truly human, but quasi-human at most."

[Carl E. Olson]

Sounds like a variation on either Monarchianism or Arianism.

[Brian Schuettler]

It sounds like your question, Jackson, goes to the heresy of Monophysitism. BTW, this is a great way to learn more about Church history and Doctrine!

But the first heretical view that comes to mind, however, would be Apollinarianism. This view held that the one person of Christ had a human body but not a human mind or spirit, and that the mind and spirit of Christ were from the divine nature of the Son of God. Since this view did not believe that Jesus has a human mind and spirit, it in effect denied that Christ is fully and truly man. Following it's own internal logic, it presented Christ as a sort of half-man which is made complete by the divine nature. Thus, Apollinarianism was rejected by several church councils, from the Council of Alexandria in A.D. 362 to the Council of Constantinople in A.D. 381.

A second heretical view is called Nestorianism, a view which did at least acknowledge that Jesus is fully God and fully man. However, it denied that He was only one Person. This view taught that there were two separate persons in Christ as well as two natures. The biblical teaching is that Christ is only one Person, and therefore the church rejected this belief as well.

A third heretical view is Monophysitism, which taught that Christ only had one nature, rather than two. This view held that the human nature of Christ was taken up and absorbed into the divine nature, so that both natures were changed somewhat and a third kind of composite nature resulted. An commonly used analogy would be if we put a drop of ink in a glass of water: the mixture resulting is neither pure ink nor pure water, but some kind of third substance, a mixture of the two in which both the ink and the water are changed. Similarly, Eutyches, one of the main advocates of this view, who lived 378-454, taught that Jesus was a mixture of divine and human elements in which both were somewhat modified to form one new nature. This view is also unbiblical because it demolishes both Christ's deity and humanity. On this view, Christ is no longer truly and fully God and truly and fully man, but is some entirely different kind of being that resulted from a mixture of the two natures.

An excellent source text for these interesting questions is Jaroslav Pelikan's THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION: A History of the Development of Doctrine Volume 1 THE EMERGENCE OF THE CATHOLIC TRADITION (100-600) University of Chicago Press 1971

[Brian Schuettler]

And, of course, as Carl pointed out, there is Arianism. Arianism really goes against a trinitarian formulation of God and represented the greatest challenge to the true teaching of the Church, only rivaled later by Luther et al.

[Carl Olson]

Here is a list of Christological heresies from Kenneth Whitehead's book, One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic.

[Jackson]

Thanks guys. Monophysitism was what I was thinking of -I think. I really need to bone up on these heresies. It seems it would be easy to unknowingly get swept away by one.