So who was Jesus? Was he really God? Was he sort of like God? If he was God or like God was he also human in a way you or I would recognize? Do the answers to these questions actually matter? The answer to the last question is "far more than you or I could possibly imagine." The historic reality was that those questions mattered so much that people were excommunicated and even executed if they believed in the "wrong" answers. Why was that? Well, let's find out.
In the beginning (so to speak) of the Jesus movement (which was originally called "The Way" meaning it was a movement and not a religion) no one really cared about the "nature" of Jesus. What mattered was that Jesus had accomplished something on the cross. As we looked at over the past several weeks Jesus' followers believed that by his death and resurrection the power of sin and the powers of this world had been overcome. Death was defeated and resurrection awaited all who followed the Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth. Even those letters of Paul which appear to focus on the "nature" of Jesus (Romans and Philippians) do so only in a passing and cursory way. This functional view of Jesus proved to be sufficient for a considerable period of time. However as the church became more organized (in the third and fourth centuries) two very distinct groups began to not only wonder about the nature of Jesus but began to vehemently disagree about that nature as well.
The first of these two groups were the monastics. These were the monks and hermits who had withdrawn from the Greco-Roman world in order to live lives of solitude and self-sacrifice. They began to wonder how it was that anyone other than God could save humanity. In other words, how could an ordinary Jew, even a really, really good Jew save humanity by dying on the cross? They concluded that a human being could not do so, and therefore (reading John's Gospel and inferring from some of Paul's letters) they argued that Jesus must somehow be fundamentally God. The monastics, because of their informal power in the early church began to push the church to clarify its position.
The second group that began to discuss this issue consisted of the bishops of the early church. Long before there was any sense of a "Roman" church with Cardinals and a Pope, there were bishops. While initially the bishops (those priests who oversaw a number of congregations) were elected by and were accountable to the people, they slowly gained enough power to be able to do as they pleased and to set doctrinal beliefs for the congregations they oversaw. As discussions about the nature of Jesus increased in frequency and complexity, the bishops disagreed with each other and this led to divisions within the church.
Eventually these discussions led to the creation of two different schools of thought about Jesus. The first was the Antiochene (from the church of Antioch, in Syria) and the second was Alexandrian (from the church at Alexandria, Egypt). The difference between the two was significant. The Antiochene School emphasized Jesus' humanity. They saw salvation as coming from the perfect obedience of the perfect man. The incarnation in this sense was the power of God present in the perfect man that allowed Jesus to be faithful. The Alexandrian School emphasized the divinity of Jesus. Salvation was accomplished because the perfect God/man gave his life for the world. The incarnation here meant that God was fully and completely present in Jesus.
Needless to say the subtleties of these two schools can be, and often are lost, on most of us today. What is fascinating however is that the issues at the heart of this discussion are still with us. While the majority of churches have ultimately agreed with the Alexandrian school (meaning they are considered to be theologically orthodox) many others have not. Latter Day Saints, Jehovah Witnesses, United Pentecostals and others follow some form of the Antiochene School. Next week we will look at the variety of ways people talked about Jesus and the following week how this issue was resolved.
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