Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 14.djvu/660

 THEOLOGY

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THEOLOGY

xxviii, 20), and correspondingly He never calls the Father "our" Father, but "my" Father (Matt., xviii, 10, 19, 35; xx, 23; xxvi, 53). At His baptism and transfiguration He receives witness from heaven to His Divine Sonship; the Prophets of the Old Testa- ment are not rivals, but servants in comparison with Him (Matt., xxi, 34); hence the title Son of Man implies a nature to which Christ's humanity was an accessory. Again, Chi'ist claims the power to forgive sins and supports His claim by miracles (Matt., ix, 2-6; Luke, v, 20, 24); He insists on faith in Himself (Matt., xvi, 16, 17), He inserts His name in the baptismal formula between that of the Father and the Holy Ghost (Matt., xxviii, 19), He alone knows the Father and is known by the Father alone (Matt.,xi, 27), He institutes the sacrament of the Holy Eucha- rist (Matt., xxvi, 26; Mark, xiv, 22; Luke, xxii, 19), He Buffers and dies only to rise again the third day (Matt., XX, 19; Mark, x, 34; Luke, xviii, 33), He ascends into Heaven, but declares that He will be among us till the end of the world (Matt., xx'\-iii, 20). Need we add that Christ's claims to the most ex- alted dignity of His person are unmistakably clear in the eschatological discourses of the Synoptists? He is the Lord of the material and moral universe; as supreme lawgiver He revises all other legislation; as final judge He determines the fate of all. Blot the Fourth Gospel out of the Canon of the New Testa- ment, and you still have in the Synoptic Gospels the identical doctrine concerning the person of Jesus Christ which we now draw out of the Four Gospels; some points of the doctrine might be less clearly stated than they are now, but they would remain sub- stantially the same.

(C) Chrislian Tradition. — BiblicalChristology shows that one and the same Jesus Christ is both God and man. 'VVTiile Christian tradition has always maintained this triple thesis that Jesus Christ is truly man, that He is truly God, and that the God- man, Jesus Christ, is one and the same person, the heretical or erroneous tenets of various religious lead- ers have forced the Church to insist more ex-pressly now on the one, now on another element of her Christology. A classified list of the principal errors and of the subsequent ecclesiastical utterances will show the historical development of the Church's doc- trine w^ith sufficient clearness. The reader will find a more lengthy account of the principal heresies and councils under their respective headings.

(1) Humanity of Clirist. — The true humanity of Jesus Christ was denied even in the earliest ages of the Church. The Docetist Marcion and the Priscil- lianists grant to Jesus only an apparent body; the Valentinians, a body brought down from Heaven. "The followers of Apollinaris deny either that Jesus had any human soul at all, or that He possessed the higher jiart of the human soul; they maintain that the Word supiilies either the whole soul in Christ, or at least its higlicr faculties. In more recent times it is not so much Christ's true humanity as His real man- hood that is denied. According to Kant, the Chris- tian creed deals with the ideal, not with the historical Jesus; according to Jacobi, it worships Jesus not as an historical person, but as a reUgious ideal; accord- ing to Fichte there exists an absolute unity between God and man, and Jesus was the first to see and teach it; according to Schelling, the incarnation is an eternal fad, which happened to reach in Jesus its highest point; according to Hegel, (Christ is not the actual incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth, but the symbol of God's incarnation in humanity at large. Finally, certain recent (^atholic writers distinguish betwel'n llie Christ of history and the Christ of faith, thus destroying in the Christ of faith His historical reality. Tlie New Syllabus (Proposit. 29 sq.) and the Encyclical "Pa.scendi dominici gregis" may be con- sulted on these errors.

(2) The Divinity of Christ. — Even in Apostolic times the Church regarded a denial of Christ's Di- vinity as eminentlv anti-Christian 1 1 John, ii, 22-23; iv, 3; II John, 7). The early martyrs, the most ancient Fathers, and the first ecclesiastical liturgies agree in their profession of Christ's Divinity. Still, the Ebionites, the Theodotians, the Artemonites, and the Photi- nians looked upon Christ either as a mere man, though singularly enlightened by Divine wisdom; or as the appearance of an Kon emanating from the Divine Being according to the Gnostic theory; or again as a manifestation of the Divine Being such as theTheistic and Pantheistic Sabellians and Patripas- sians admitted; or, finally, as the incarnate Word indeed, but the Word conceived after the Arian man- ner as a creature mediating between God and the world, at least not essentially identical with the Father and the Holy Ghost. Though the definitions of Nice and of the subsequent councils, especially of the Fourth Lateran, deal directly with the doctrine concerning the Most Holy Trinity, still they also teach that the Word is consubstantial with the Father and the Holy Ghost, and thus establish the Divinity of Jesus Christ, the Word incarnate. In more recent times, our earliest RationaUsts endeav- oured to avoid the problem of Jesus Christ; they had httle to say of liim, while they made St. Paul the founder of the Church. But the historical Christ was too impressive a figure to be long neglected. It is all the more to be regretted that in recent times a prac- tical denial of Christ's Divinity is not confined to the Socinians and such wTiters as Ewald and Schleier- niacher. Others who profess to be believing Chris- tians see in Christ the perfect revelation of God, the true head and lord of the human race, but, after all, they end with Pilate's words, "Behold, the man".

(3) Hypostatic Union. — His human nature and His Divine nature are in Jesus Christ united hn^ostati- cally, i. e. united in the hypostasis or the per.son of the Word. This dogma too" has found bitter opponents from the earliest times of the Church. Nestorius and his followers admitted in Christ one moral person, as a human society forms one moral person; but this moral person results from the union of two physical persons, just as there are two natures in Christ. These two persons are united, not physically, but morally, by means of grace. 'The heresy of Nestorius was con- demned by Celestine I in the Roman Synod of A. D. 430 and by the Council of Ephesus, A. D. 431; the Catholic doctrine was again insisted on in the Council of Chalcedon and the second Council of Constanti- nople. It follows that the Divine and the human nature are physically united in Christ. The Mono- physites, therefore," believed that in this physical union either the human nature was absorbed by the Divine, according to the views of Eutyches; or that the Divine nature was absorbed by the human; or, again, that out of the physical union of the two re- sulted a third nature by a kind of physical mixture, as it were, or at least by means of their physical com- position. The true Catholic doctrine was upheld by Pope Leo the Great, the Council of Chalcedon, and the Fifth (Ecumenical Council, A. D. 553. The twelfth canon of the last-named council excludes also the view that Christ's moral life developed gradually, at- taining its completion only after the Resurrection. The Adoptionists renewed Neslorianism in part be- cause they considered the \\ord asthe natural Son of Ciod, and" the num Christ ivs a servant or an adopted son of God, thus granting its own personality to Christ's human nat ure. This opinion was rejected by Pope Adrian I, the Svnod of Ralisbon, A. D. 782, the Council of Frankfort (794), and by Leo III in the Roman Synod (799). There is no need to point out that the human nature of Christ is not united with the Word, according to tlie Socinian and rationalistic