In the beginning, there was a real, actual human being named Jesus, from Nazareth in Galilee. If you lived in Palestine of the 20's CE you might have heard that he was a popular sage who first appeared with the apocalyptic teacher, John, baptizing believers in the Jordan River. Although he was completely unknown outside of a very small region of Roman Judea, something happened that made him a worldwide household name in Europe, Asia, South America… to the bona fide ends of the earth. Forget Paul's ambition to bring his gospel to Spain, there's a church called the Chapel of the Snows in McMurdo Station on the shores of Antarctica!
Just who is this Jesus? How did he go from rag-tag itinerant preacher, executed as a criminal in Jerusalem, to a globally worshiped figure to whom millions pledge their allegiance (not to mention the billion-dollar religious apparatus based on that worship)?
We would like to think we have Jesus figured out: He's God or the Son of God, a divine member of a Trinity, a spiritual rescuer, a willing human sacrifice that affords us an escape from the penalty we owe for sinning against God, a kind of high priest who intercedes for us, a friend who is always there to lead and inspire, a heroic figure whose most powerful weapon was love, God visiting us in human form and so on.
There are a lot of different imagined conceptions of Jesus. Because of that, many American churches insist on spelling out a brief statement that captures the really important things to believe about him. We have an urge to get it right when we imagine Jesus, so we craft creeds and make manifestos that assure each other that our understanding is indeed the truest of truths. For example:
Southern Baptists:
Eternal Son of God
Incarnated through the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary
Perfectly revealed the will of God
Completely human, but with no sin
Perfectly obeyed God
Substituted for us in death, making provision for the redemption for humanity
Raised bodily (with a physical body) from the dead
Appeared to his disciples
Ascended to heaven
Now acts as mediator between God and mankind
He will return in power and glory to judge the world and finalize his redemptive mission
Dwells in all believers as the living Lord
Methodists:
Son of God- incarnated God
Son of man- fully human
Christ (anointed as king who saves his people)
Lord- worthy of devotion
Savior- mysteriously gives us freedom from sin and reconciles us to God, shown in his death and resurrection
Evangelical Free Church:
"We believe that Jesus Christ is God incarnate, fully God and fully man, one Person in two natures.
Jesus—Israel's promised Messiah—was conceived through the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary.
He lived a sinless life,
was crucified under Pontius Pilate,
arose bodily from the dead,
ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God the Father as our High Priest and Advocate."
Catholics:
"Jesus Christ is God the Son, who became man for us. [He] is truly God, the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son, the Eternal Word, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit always was, is, and always will be.
Jesus Christ is truly man because he has the nature of man, having a body and soul. Jesus Christ was not always man but he became man in the womb of the Virgin Mary. We call this mystery 'the Incarnation' which means that God the Son, became man, a human being like us in all things except sin.
There are two natures in Jesus, the Divine nature of God and the Human nature of man. There is only one person in Jesus, the person of God the Son. God the Son became man to free us from sin and open to us the way to Heaven and everlasting life with God." Source- Catholic Online
We're seeing some patterns here. There are definitely some common threads running through many or most statements made by churches that describe their best ideas about Jesus. Just for comparison, here are some ways other religions and sects talk about Jesus:
Islam: Jesus is the next-to-last of God's prophets, a Messiah sent to Israel with the "Injil," or gospel (now lost, but fragments of which can be detected in the New Testament). He's born of a virgin, did miracles, recruited disciples and was rejected by the Jews. He was not actually crucified, though, so there's no atonement in Muslim Christology.
Hinduism and Buddhism take approaches to Jesus that are of little use in this discussion. Suffice it to say that neither affirms any of the classical Christian beliefs about Jesus, but are interesting all the same. Hinduism is taken with the idea of resurrection as a form of reincarnation, but there's no atoning value in it. Here's an article from the LA Times archive- A Hindu’s Perspective on Christ and Christianity
In this series of articles, we've already discussed the early beginnings of the church starting with the minimal historical data we can glean from period writings, archaeological findings and other source material (see Jesus Under Construction: History versus Theology). But how did we get from there to here? While we can't recover any verifiable data that meet modern standards of historicity from the very first believers, we can search for clues in the sources that have come down to us through the centuries.
As the church matured through the 200's and 300's CE, there was apparently a lot of theological wrangling in all quarters of the growing movement. From early days, a hierarchy of leadership was functional and influential. By the time the New Testament was mostly completed, we find Paul already in conflict with church headquarters in Jerusalem- a foreshadowing of the hierarchical clashes to come. Alongside the compilation of the gospels, we have letters from Clement I in Rome addressed to Paul's church in Corinth, advising them on matters of church politics. The stage was set for deacons, priests, bishops, archbishops and metropolitans to wage high stakes battles over the meanings of the traditions and scriptures they inherited. Until well into the modern era the vast majority of everyday Christians could not read or write so we don't get any of their perspectives on all the wrangling. It's possible that the rank and file didn't give a hoot about doctrine (until their favorite priest was exiled by a bishop whose politics required a crackdown). So we are left with letters, sermons, commentaries, council minutes, and official documents written by elites in church and government.
And those bishops sure got into it. As the Christian movement exploded in popularity, by the third and fourth centuries it had left its humble roots in dusty Judea far behind. At issue was the unity of the church as it competed against diverse, established pagan religions, fended off intrigue and invaders eventually taking on an enforcement role on behalf of imperial political unity. Theology and public policy were not separate in the late Roman Empire. The tightly intertwined structures meant that power could be possessed and distributed through both church and capitol.
Authority
Before the enlightenment, the renaissance and the scientific method, reality was what the most powerful authority told you it was. Like a referee on the field, once a ruling was made by an archbishop it became the new truth for all the players. And for most, there wasn't an alternative. If you decided you didn’t agree with your bishop, there was no other church across town you could join up with. We've explored what they thought was at stake when church leaders shouldered a doctrinal cause and engaged in a war of words with those who didn't agree with their version of the truth (see A Church Full of Heretics).
There were many details of faith to iron out, but chief among them was, of course, the facts about and effects of the Jesus event.
The shift from religion being something you did to something you believed meant that correct understanding was essential. No longer did it matter so much that a ritual was performed exactly to traditional prescription, what really mattered was apprehending exact truth. This well-established priority had its origins in Hellenistic and Roman philosophical ideas such as Pythagoreanism, Platonism and the value of philosophy as a pursuit of ultimate truth. For the early Christian intellectuals, it seemed natural to imagine that salvation depended on correctly understanding the work of Jesus from a clear grasp of all the facts. Otherwise you might dishonor the God of the universe, risking God's judgement and condemnation. According to the goals of philosophy there must be one real Jesus through whom a person could access salvation, and you didn't want to be caught worshiping a false version of Jesus. Where else did this exclusivity come from? Partly from the Bible itself. Matthew 7:21-23, for example:
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; go away from me, you who behave lawlessly.’"
Well before the democratization of Bible scholarship, the sole authorities over biblical interpretation were educated bishops and their higher-ups. Permission to attach God's imprimatur to social policy neatly translated to social power as churches became centers of political and economic authority. Once Constantine threw the financial weight of the Roman Empire behind the Christians, its authority expanded even further. But we digress.
The Bible doesn’t make it easy on truth seekers
Although many fine, well-educated Christian scholars of recent times hold opinions on questions about resurrection, the empty tomb, appearances to believers, and so on, it's not a given that those opinions fit all the data we have available. The gospels, written from two to five generations after the events they record, were admittedly crafted as non-objective persuasive arguments in favor of one side of the story. The author of John is the most up front about his reason for writing at the end of the 20th chapter: "But these [signs] are written so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name."
There is no getting around the fact that the earliest written records we have were biased. There was no ethic of presenting verifiable facts and allowing the reader to make her own decisions about them. In addition, the gospels do not agree on the list of "facts" we think are nailed down and obvious. Asking a few honest questions reveals the extent to which we are willing to suspend our critical thinking skills on behalf of traditional beliefs...
Why did no one except Matthew record the "zombie invasion" of Jerusalem?
Why is there so much confusion over the existence and role of the Holy Spirit?
If the Bible is supposed to be univocal (a set of data that always agrees), why can't we square Luke's and Matthew's nativity accounts? Or the creation accounts in Genesis? Or important details in Chronicles that disagree with Kings?
In our earliest gospel, Mark, we have an ending that hints at Jesus' resurrection, but has no narrative of it. Have we lost the very end of Mark's gospel, or did the author choose to end it with two terrified women keeping their encounter at the tomb to themselves?
In the words of the young man, Mark's gospel sort of agrees with Matthew and the second ending of John- but not Luke: Jesus apparently told the disciples to meet him later in Galilee. Mark 16:6-8:
But he (the "young man" sitting in the tomb) said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.
And that's where the most ancient sources end.
There's no record in Mark of this later encounter, even in the added-on ending. It simply notes that Jesus appears to the disciples "at the table" (doesn't say where the table is) and proceeds to lecture them on their unbelief and stubbornness in refusing to believe other witnesses to his resurrection.
Luke's story can't be reconciled with either Matthew's or John's. In his version of events, a resuscitated flesh-and-bone Jesus appears to the disciples in Jerusalem, eats a piece of fish and instructs the disciples to stay in Jerusalem until they had been "clothed with power from on high." Without skipping a beat, the group then goes out to Bethany (a two mile walk to the east) for Jesus's ascension.
Matthew: The two Marys go out to see the tomb where an angel descends and moves the stone from the tomb opening. He tells them that Jesus has been raised from the dead and will meet everyone in Galilee. Jesus himself then appears and reiterates that everyone should pack their bags for Galilee where they will see him. Matthew's next scene is on a mountain top in Galilee where he gives a final command to the eleven and ascends.
John's gospel is an odd one because it appears to have two endings, one in Jerusalem and another set on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Chapter 20 ends with Jesus and doubting Thomas acting out a lesson on belief rather obviously directed at future readers who would benefit from Jesus' words to the effect that those who have not seen and believed anyway are blessed. This is immediately followed by the author's purpose for writing: to elicit continued belief for the reader.
Prior to this pericope in chapter 20, there's no mention of going anywhere. "The disciples returned to their homes," it states in 20:10. Does that mean Capernaum? Did they scatter back to their former towns and occupations? It's possible this could mark the first of three endings to John because the story abruptly picks up with Mary (again) standing outside the tomb in Jerusalem. Mary meets and talks to a risen Jesus, then relays a message about Jesus's ascension- oddly, no mention of meeting in Galilee or anywhere else.
The next encounter takes place "When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week..." in a locked room where all the disciples are gathered. The Passover festival continued for eight more days, and it made sense for them to hide out for the week. Jesus suddenly appears to the group just after dark and He breathes out the Holy Spirit on them all. Except Thomas who apparently missed out on the power to forgive sins (v. 21). A week later, according to the author, Thomas has his doubts alleviated by another visit from Jesus in the same house.
Chapter 21 picks up on the "going home" theme. We catch up with Simon Peter, Thomas the Twin, Nathanael of Cana, the sons of Zebedee and two other disciples who are not named. Finishing up a night's fishing expedition with no catch, they take advice from a "stranger" on the beach and throw their nets on the opposite side of the boat. As they are pulling in a miraculously huge catch of fish, Peter realizes the stranger is Jesus and impulsively swims to shore. More details follow concerning Peter and John which end abruptly on the beach in Galilee.
There certainly have been attempts to maintain coherence between all four gospels, but most try to argue from silence, or in other words, what was not written can make them agree. This is not usually an advisable course as it opens any text up to include anything that was even slightly possible, forget about probable.
One entertaining theory is that the contradictions in the stories are actually proof of their authenticity: "Were the gospel writers or the disciples lying, they would have presented a uniform story." This article has Mary and various other women shuttling back and forth between the tomb and the hiding disciples, ignoring the fact that Luke has the eleven disciples (including Thomas?) instead of John's ten in that first appearance, and the disagreements on when the ascension took place. The only way to reconcile the accounts is to add in story elements that aren't originally there.
These complications aren't the only ones that drove the early church bonkers.
Jesus is given a few titles by his biographers, like Son of God, Son of Man, Messiah, Lord. Doubting Thomas even seems to worship him by appealing to him as "My Lord and my God." So, if we take Jewish monotheism expressed in the Shema (“Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone") as a given, including the exclusive worship of this one God- YHWH of the ancient Hebrew Bible, how did Christians also start calling Jesus "God" as well?
Could it be a simple case of going too far too soon in honoring a truly great person? Was Jesus deified before Christendom had a chance to think it through? The Early High Christology Club (see The Theological Christ) inclines toward an incarnational point of view, inferring that it was fairly obvious to the first observers of Jesus that he must be a deity in human form. But were they right? It's not unheard of for people with a vested interest in a particular version of events to encourage or even embellish their story regardless of its resemblance to reality.
Scholar Bart Ehrman proposes that the expectations of a Jewish Messiah were radically redefined by the claim that Jesus had been raised from the dead. Jesus didn't do any of the things that the Old Testament prophecies spelled out, yet when people started talking about a raised and ascended Messiah, the word took on a markedly expanded meaning that was important beyond establishing an independent Jewish state. He writes:
There are good reasons for thinking that during his lifetime, some of Jesus’s followers thought maybe he would be the messiah. Those hopes were forcefully and convincingly dashed by his execution, since the messiah was not to be executed. But some of these followers came to think that after his death a great miracle had occurred and God had brought Jesus back to life and exalted him up to heaven. This belief reconfirmed the earlier expectation: Jesus was the one favored of God. He was the anointed one. He was the messiah.
Ehrman, Bart D.. The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World (p. 49). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
The State of the Trinity Today
Right or wrong, the story we have been handed rests on a much-debated, often divisive conundrum that we can't seem to solve. The Trinity is counterfactual and not reducible to analysis, but confusingly intimated in the New Testament. Our postmodern mindset has largely decided to make peace with the lack of clarity on the divinity of Jesus as a member of the Trinity, never mind the intense battles surrounding the church councils of the fourth and fifth centuries. What do we think about Jesus today? We often see language in church statements of faith that reflects the decisions of these early councils. Most modern protestant christologies lean toward either:
Dyophysitism- Christ consists of one substance (ousia), one type of being (hypostasis) but two natures (physis)- one divine and one human. OR…
Miaphysitism- Christ is one person (prosopon) with a single nature (physis) that is a hybrid combination of divine and human
We will address strange terminology like "Ousia" later.
There's also a slightly different view called Monophysitism which asserts that Jesus has one single divine nature (physis) that absorbed and accommodated his human nature.
These positions are all responses to the problem of how to understand the truth about Jesus and our salvation. Answering the question of how Jesus could be divine and human simultaneously had serious ramifications for the believer, at least that was what the bishops assumed in those early years.
What's so weird about the Deity of Jesus?
The questions spelled out a bit more:
How can "God the Father" be a single entity without parts and simultaneously be "God the Son?"
How can "God" assume a human body? Does that mean that a holy and perfect God can suffer and die?
Did a human Jesus become God (exaltation) or was he always God and took on a human body (incarnation)?
If Jesus is God, why does there appear to be differences between Jesus and God the Father? They even talk to each other when Jesus prays.
How can Jesus, a god-man, not know something, or grow and change (Matt. 11, Luke 2)?
How can we know that Jesus is God? Can we employ reason, or do we need some kind of direct experience?
What if Jesus was just superhuman with godlike properties? Could he still atone for our sin?
How does God the Holy Spirit fit in?
Is the idea of a Trinity at some point simply beyond human understanding? Should we stay within our limits?
To reiterate, we're trying to find out the truth about Jesus, concerning whom we have a number of literary ontological claims. We'll stay with our assumption that he was at least a real human being, and proceed on with additional claims that he was (or is) also divine.
What difference does this make?
Exploring the wide variety of conclusions made by brilliant, highly educated and serious Christians of the past can help us to relax about our own obsession with orthodoxy, and allow for some alternative beliefs about Jesus in the church. Most Christian churches today are Trinitarian- it's part of what admits you to the orthodoxy club. Ultimately, it's about exploring the data, interrogating our unexamined conclusions and arriving at a position that feels like it fits best with what we think we know. And we don’t have to agree with each other!
While faith is important here, it doesn't have to be an extreme belief in spite of evidence to the contrary. Reality has a way of eventually ruining all wishful thinking. If any reader is concerned with doing her best to map belief to truth, it becomes imperative to gather as much data about the tenets of her faith as possible. Adopting a neutral and curious stance toward challenging information might be difficult for some, especially if there is a commitment to the assumption that the Bible is a divine document, fully coherent and without error. If someone believes that when the Bible speaks, God speaks, they are stuck with having to deal with many, many internal disagreements among its authors.
If God gave human beings the capacity to reason, to draw conclusions based on all available data, why not put it to work examining the possibilities? There's an impressive body of ideas that churchgoers never access for many reasons, among which are the dynamics of group cohesion. Church leaders understandably hesitate before opening a Pandora's box of scholarly opinion that challenges traditional interpretations. What we are reluctant to acknowledge is that ultimate truth will prevail in time, so there's no real need to protect our own version of it. Go where the data lead.
From its first historical moment- the time period between 30 and 70 CE- the Jesus-initiated church began working on its core truths. What "facts" did everyone need to agree on? How did those facts explain the past and present and give guidance for the future? What were the best ways to debate other religious systems of the time? In addition to all that, what did the resurrection of Jesus mean for regular believers? Deep commitments to particular answers to these questions resulted in martyrdom and exile for some, but also charity and social advantages for others.
What we have here is a failure to communicate
In the Paul Newman movie Cool Hand Luke, the prison warden overseeing a prison chain gang uses this phrase to rationalize his abusive treatment of the men in his charge. The powerful warden sees no need for two-way communication, yet assigns blame for the "failure" to the prisoners. Sometimes, it's simply language itself that makes communication all but impossible.
Explaining what happened with Jesus turns out to be a daunting task. Most of us simply raise the white flag of surrender and leave it as a mystery, ignoring the problems with using terms like "three persons," "perichoresis," "hypostatic union" and "incarnation."
None of our late attempts at an explanation are novel. Tertullian, writing in the late second century, tried out an analogy that involved one single kingdom attended to by a king along with sub-kings. Three rulers, one kingdom. Augustine thought about it in terms of the parts of the human soul, like memory, intellect and will. Athanasius ran with the analogy of light from the sun: it can be simultaneously a source and the radiance of that source.
English isn't the only language to cause consternation even among its best native speakers. Even ancient Greek in its various forms- a very ancient and sophisticated tongue- was not up to the task of precisely defining the concepts proposed by an array of Trinitarian theories.
The Vocabulary of Trinity
Be that as it may, here are some vocabulary words everyone needs for the journey…
Ousia
"Ousia" is a very old Greek word. 700 years before Christians started wrangling about substances, Aristotle and his ancient philosopher friends used it when they wanted to talk about being in a fundamental sense. It’s a common property of all real phenomena, the essence of a thing that stays constant though expressions of that thing's way of being in the real world shifts or changes. Aristotle gets into some heavy sledding when he uses the ousia to try to explain what is meant by existence. Suffice it to say that in the hands of 4th century bishops, ousia seemed like a nice option for capturing the idea of an immutable something that must be present in order for a thing to exist. How did the term hold up?
For one thing, it was used in various compound forms for at least two centuries, but never quite won over a majority of the combatants in the arguments about Jesus and God's true nature. What was needed was a label for an intellectual category that contained the idea of "substance," or "essence," or "nature" that worked to describe those concepts as they apply to YHWH, and by extension, God's son, Jesus.
The parties involved in the debate fell into three schools of ousian thought.
1. Heteroousians
"Different Substances." The core of this system was the belief that Jesus the Son was composed of a different substance- ousia- than God the Father. And the Holy Spirit had another unlike substance as well. Different substances implied subordinate stature, or lower rank than the eternal God which meant that you were probably an adoptionist or subordinationist as well as a heteroousian.
This position is also referred to as "Anomoean," Greek for "not similar." The great conflict between Arius and Athanasius has its roots in this idea: that Christ's inner essence as a being is dissimilar from God the Father's. Arius himself is considered a heteroousian, along with a large number of bishops throughout the fourth century.
This view solves the problem of God and Jesus sharing the same divine nature in a human body. Jesus was either a special human being, or some kind of created divine being who took on a human body. It also keeps God the Father undivided and whole, easily preserving a commitment to strict monotheism.
Problems with Heteroousianism:
Eunomius, a primary proponent of Heteroousianism, wrote that Jesus was indeed of a lower rank than God the Father by virtue of having a distinct ousia. This lower rank lends to a view that points out that Jesus is a created being, generated by the eternal Father at some point. Being of a different ousia means that there was a time when Jesus did not exist, meaning that he is not eternal, and therefore cannot open access to God the Father.
How can Jesus fully know the Father and represent God to humankind if he is not of the same ousia? With too much distance between YHWH and Jesus, we cannot be sure that Jesus was qualified to represent God to human beings.
For more, visit a long refutation of Eunomius' ideas by Gregory of Nyssa.
2. Homoousians
"Same Substance." This proposal puts God the Father and Jesus in the cosmically unique category of possessing the same underlying essential "beingness" but both are still identifiable as distinct persons (prosopon). The much debated Nicene Creed stood on Athanasius's big idea as a defense against Arius (a heteroousian to the core). After seemingly unending battles over how to describe a Trinity, this position is the one that convinced the majority of the church.
This is where we get language like this in the Creed:
[We believe] in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the only-begotten Son of God,
begotten of the Father before all worlds (æons),
Light of Light,
Very God of very God,
begotten, not made,
consubstantial with the Father...
Around 320 CE, Arius and his supporters wrote a letter to his bishop, Alexander of Alexandria, hoping that Alexander would reconsider his excommunication of Arius. Being a Heteroousian, Arius's letter did little to mend things. Here's some of the language (much abridged) he used to explain his position:
[God] has begotten the only-begotten Son… [He]produced him not in appearance but in truth, giving him existence by his own will, unchangeable and unalterable:
a perfect creature of God, but not like one of the creatures,
a product, but not like one of the things produced,
but, as we hold, created by the will of God…
And God is the cause of them all for he is supremely sole without beginning, and the Son, having been begotten timelessly by the Father and created and established before aeons, did not exist before he was begotten, but, begotten timelessly before everything, alone has been given existence by the Father; for he is not external nor co-external nor co-unoriginated, with the Father, nor does he possess being parallel with the Father…
So Jesus was "timelessly begotten," yet did not exist before he was begotten?
A Homoousian in good standing would go ballistic at Arius's claim that Christ did not exist at some point as a subsequent product or creation of the Father. If, they argued, Jesus was fully God, he had to possess the exact same God-nature as the Father. So they tried to say that in the Nicene Creed.
Problems with Homoousianism
They did have a bit of a problem with the term "begotten." One solution was to frame it as something that could indicate an "eternal begottenness," or the idea that it described the relationship between God and Jesus, not the normal usage of bringing a child into existence by begetting them. But there it was in scriptures like John chapter 3.
Homoousians had to stick to their interpretation of scripture when they were sure that Christ was uncreated, eternal and to be worshiped as if he were God the Father- which of course he was. In a way.
And what happened to the ousia when Jesus showed up as a human being? Was it still there? Did it reduce or disappear? How then could the "Godness-Ousia" maintain its immutability and eternal oneness?
3. Homoiousian
"like substance." Why not just say that Jesus's nature was simply similar to God the Father's? Could it be alike enough to enable Jesus to do and be all the things said of him in the writings of the New Testament? Homoians thought so. This position held sway in the middle of the fourth century under Basil of Ancyra. Proponents tended to avoid the use of the term "ousia" and instead focused on the Father-Son relationship.
Basil contended that if a Father, certainly one like God Himself, produces Son, the only irreducible identifier of that Son is the fact that the ousia is shared. As if prefiguring the use of DNA to determine paternity, Basil argues that it's enough to know that a begetting happened in the process of the incarnation.
Problems with Homoiousianism
The observant reader will already anticipate what the homoousians are thinking. Yes- this sounds like subordination and therefore the nature of Jesus cannot be identical enough to make him as divine as God the Father.
Trying to stake out a place between the Homoousians and the Heteroousians proved too difficult and outraged both sides. The Heteros weren't too upset but were uncomfortable with the dissembling over the difference in substance. Basil's statement, "that which is like can never be the same as that to which it is like," wasn't enough.
Modalism
Was there something almost everyone agreed on? Actually, yes. With a few exceptions, most early church theologians could sniff out modalism a mile away. Any view that held tightly to the oneness of God to the extent that the other two persons of the Trinity were mere expedient manifestations of the "One" was suspect. One Ousia, one hypostasis, one eternal God- all well and good, but if you explained Jesus or the Holy Spirit in terms that said they were "modes" or manifestations of the One, you risked an anathema lobbed your way.
Oddly enough, some of the most popular illustrations we use today are pure modalism. The three states of water- ice, liquid and steam- is a good example of how one molecular thing (hypostasis or ousia) can exist in different modes depending on changing circumstances. Same with a chord of three notes, and the idea of a man being father, a son, and a brother simultaneously. We'll learn later about Sabellius, a proponent of Modalism whose name got attached to the heresy known as Sabellianism.
Hypostasis
This term arises from a compound of two Greek words, Hypo, meaning under or below and Stasis, meaning support or stand. While the term started off describing something distinct from ousia, by the fourth century they were very close to being synonymous. The fine line between them goes something like this: Ousia is the word used to identify the platonic ideal "substance" that qualifies a thing's membership in its category of existence, for example, "shoeness" is the root existential category of every possible kind of footwear. Hypostasis is the quality of being that allows us to recognize individual expressions of shoeness in random objects. Sandals, boots and slippers are all hypostases of an ousia having to do with things worn on the foot. A slipper will always be a slipper due to its hypostasis, and the ideal substance / ousia called "footwear" will always allow us to differentiate footwear from all other things.
There are many variations on these themes as philosopher-theologians struggled to untangle the nature of reality by assigning words to different ways of thinking about the physical world. All the more when we started to try explaining the metaphysical world that is unseen but believed to be equally as real.
When we get to the Trinitarian debates, things tend to shake out thusly: God has a single ousia and three hypostases or persons (prosopon). In the Nicene Creed, the terminology goes like this:
[We believe in] one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only begotten Son of God,
begotten from the Father before all ages,
light from light,
true God from true God,
begotten not made,
of one substance (ὁμοούσιον "homoousion") with the Father…
By the time we get to the Chalcedonian Definition in 451 CE, we have language that expresses a stronger commitment to "natures" (see below), with less dependence on hypostasis and ousia to differentiate between Jesus and God the Father.
[Christ is the] Only-begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures,
inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably;
the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ
Thinkers in the second century came up with the scheme that the Father, Son and Spirit are a single hypostasis and one ousia. The so-called Monarchians ( mono=one and arche=beginning or source) doubled down on the idea that we experience only one God though we address the God with three names (uh-oh! Modalism!). Athanasius, of Nicene Creed fame, was also a proponent of a single hypostasis while managing to avoid modalism.
Beside "Monohypostatics" there were Dyohypostatics (two hypostases) and Trihypostatics (not hard to guess here- three hypostases).
Nature
The Greek word we translate as "nature" in reference to identifying what makes a being or thing unique is φύσις "physis," from which we get related words like physical and physics. It's a term that tries to capture the concept of "the way something is," or what we expect a thing to be. It can be related to descriptors like Race, Species or Origin. Thayer's Greek Lexicon puts it this way in sense "D" of Physis: "the sum of innate properties and powers by which one person differs from others, distinctive native peculiarities, natural characteristics."
In Trinitarian applications, we find that God has a nature and human beings have a nature and they are not the same. So how can Jesus and God the Father share an identity? One solution was to propose that Jesus was born with two natures, not one like a normal human being. The speculation led to a variety of views on the "nature" question, like Monophysitism and Miaphysitism (above). The former claims that Jesus had, you guessed it, One Nature- a divine one only. The latter had Jesus's nature in a single blended combination of both divine and human.
Prosopon
Person or persona, coming from the stage term used for a face mask. A face reveals much about your character and emotional state, all the more when you intentionally present yourself as someone else by wearing a mask. Early on, it was used to express the notion of "self-manifestation." Having a hypostasis was one thing, but how would anyone know anything about it if there were no way to reveal it? A prosopon is the form in which a hypostasis appears, giving a window into a being's inner substance.
Once again, we have three schools of thought on this: mono- dyo- and triprosoponism. Does the Trinity operate with one, two or three personas through which God can express his will? Once again, we're struggling with the limitations of language to explain something beyond explanation.
Incarnation of Exaltation?
Now to address the supposition that Jesus is an eternal being that took on human form and then returned to his former status and appearance as deity. The most famous place this appears in scripture is in Philippians 2, where the idea of "kenosis" appears. The gospel of John's Logos theory is another example of this, although there are fair objections to the idea.
Peter in his speech in Acts chapter 2 indicates that Jesus is a man, crucified and then exalted. In verse 32 and 33 he says as much: “This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at (or by) the right hand of God…" (see also Acts 13 for a very similar speech)
Hebrews 5 talks about Jesus "in the days of his flesh," having been made perfect, God appointing Jesus as a high priest, quoting psalm 2's "today I have begotten you…" The author also points out that Jesus learned obedience through what he suffered. In Chapter 1 the writer of Hebrews contradicts this and affirms that Jesus "founded the earth and the heavens…" in contrast with angels who did no such thing.
Mark 1:11 had Jesus being named God's beloved Son at his baptism, with no material indication of pre-existence or deity. "The view that Mark does not present Jesus as divine is simply devoid of traction," says one investigator, but on close examination, none of the pertinent passages quoted in this article: The Deity of Christ in the Gospel of Mark requires the reader to unequivocally conclude that Mark depicts Jesus as God. In the first verse of the gospel, the author lays his cards out by naming Jesus as "God's messenger," a delegated role that doesn't necessarily demand that the messenger be divine.
Briefly, there's just enough material in the New Testament to prevent an incarnational view from being a slam dunk.
Begotten
Yet another confusing term that muddies already cloudy waters. Jesus and God the Father seem to be two different beings on one hand, but on the other, the Bible talks about them both in terms of eternal deity. Did God the Father exist first? Was Jesus always there in an "eternally begotten" state? In normal usage, begotten or generated made one think of how humans begin their existence through some kind of birth, carrying on some aspects of his or her parents.
In John 3:16, we have Jesus telling Nicodemus of an "only-begotten" son. The Greek construction here is monogene (μονογενῆ). The literal meaning is "an only child born to a parent," mono- meaning one or single and gene- meaning offspring or a generated kind. The metonymy came to signify something special about that child, a uniqueness or what we might call "one-in-a-million."
The God of the Jews, YHWH is supposed to be self-existent, or eternal, so how could the church discuss his non-generated status? They started with a known concept in Greco-Roman philosophy that fit the bill. We use the Greek root word "gen" in English words like Genesis and generate to label the origin or start of something. The prefix "a" usually means not or no (as in atheist or atypical). Put together they should indicate the meaning "not created."
Agennetos (ἀγέννητος) is an adjective used to signify the self-existence or the not-like-all-other-creatures dimension of the Godhead. Every creature-being except God has had a beginning, or was generated. In Genesis, it was the Word of God that poofed everything into existence. Agennetos (spelled with two nu's) was used in ancient philosophy to designate God's self-existence.
So did Jesus fall into this category too, since he was supposed to be of the same substance as God the Father? Here's where it gets even more turbulent. Let's allow Cardinal John Henry Newman explain:
The word [agennetos], Latin-ingenitus (unborn, ingenerate), was the philosophical term to denote that which had existed from eternity. It had accordingly been applied by Aristotle to the world or to matter, which was according to his system without beginning; and by Plato to his ideas. Now since the Divine Word was according to Scripture generate, He could not be called ingenerate (or eternal), without a verbal contradiction. In process of time a distinction was made between [agenetos] and [agennetos], (increate and ingenerate,) according as the letter [n] was or was not doubled, so that the Son might be said to be [agenetos gennetos] (increately generate). The argument which arose from this perplexity of language, is urged by Arius himself; who ridicules the [agennetogenes], ingenerately-generate, which he conceives must be ascribed, according to the orthodox creed, to the Son of God.
Agenetos- (with one Greek letter nu) supposedly solved the problem of agennetos being a category into which only one being could fit- God the uncreated and eternal Father. Jesus, the generated Logos-Word, could not also fit into it. Agenetos (one "n") found its way into the debate as a way to say Jesus had an uncreated beginning, but shared some features of things that are generated.
This is where all the analogies fail, like Athanasius's Sunshine picture. Making sense of statements like this takes us beyond the boundaries of coherent language: “We believe in one Unbegotten God, Father Almighty, maker of all things both visible and invisible, that hath His being from Himself. And in one Only-begotten Word, Wisdom, Son, begotten of the Father without beginning and eternal.” (Athanasius Statement of Faith 1). Trying to explain a being that was eternally begotten led some to throw up their hands and say "we will never understand the mystery!"
Church patriarch Gregory of Nyssa was one of those who advised the church that every attempt to explain the Trinity would fall short. In his letter to Ablabius, he admits that neither scripture nor reason is equal to the task of rightly explaining a core tenet of Christianity:
"The question is, as I said, very difficult to deal with: yet, if we should be able to find anything that may give support to the uncertainty of our mind, so that it may no longer totter and waver in this monstrous dilemma, it would be well: on the other hand, even if our reasoning be found unequal to the problem, we must keep forever, firm and unmoved, the tradition which we received by succession from the fathers, and seek from the Lord the reason which is the advocate of our faith: and if this be found by any of those endowed with grace, we must give thanks to Him who bestowed the grace; but if not, we shall none the less, on those points which have been determined, hold our faith unchangeably."
In summary, it would be nice if we weren't so uncertain about the Trinity or Deity of Jesus, but if we never find a good answer, it's still important to keep the traditional explanations.
Those simple statements in your church's statement of faith aren't so simple after all. There are dozens of beliefs that never made it into our current orthodoxy which leads to a lurking question: Were all those early "heretics" loved by God? If you lived in Asia Minor in the 200's CE and didn't agree with the eventual doctrinal winners; maybe you got on board with Marcellus the Modalist or Marcion the almost-gnostic... what was your fate? So many movements called themselves "Christians" whose belief systems resemble very little of what we now call correct doctrine.
There's nothing new under the sun. We're still fighting battles over correct interpretations of scripture; like how to apply Paul's writings to our modern social settings. How do ancient tribal social norms work in twenty-first century America? How do Roman Household codes and caste systems translate to our people? uncertainty about such things isn't necessarily the problem. More problematic are those who think they are certain and feel the need to persuade everyone else of their illusion.
Questions to Think About:
Is the Trinity a biblical concept? How can you find out?
How have you constructed your own ideas about who Jesus is?
For further reading:
Summary of the Early Church Councils https://journal.rts.edu/article/biblical-exegesis-fourth-century-trinitarian-debates-context-contours-ressourcement/#post-1993-footnote-67
A Summary of Trinitarian Doctrines
Gregory of Nyssa https://iep.utm.edu/gregoryn/
An Excellent podcast on the history of the church in the third and fourth centuries: https://earthandaltarmag.com/posts/the-road-to-nicea
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