Understanding the Union of Divinity and Humanity

Sub Dn. Timothy Grace explores the profound teachings of the fourth ecumenical council and its significance in affirming the two natures of Christ. He delves into the ramifications of this doctrine on salvation, human nature, and how Christians should live. This sermon weaves theological understanding with practical spiritual guidance, emphasising the balance between divine and human elements in both personal lives and the life of the Church.

Transcript

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today we commemorate the holy fathers of the fourth ecumenical council, the council where the doctrine of the two natures of Christ in one person was affirmed at Chalcedon near Constantinople in the year 451 AD. As we sing in one of the hymns from Vespers for the feast today, O philanthropic Word, boundless and indescribable, having become incarnate for our sake, the solemn assembly of the wise fathers proclaimed you as perfect God and perfect man, complete, dual of nature and of deeds, and also dual of will, and that you yourself are one in person. Wherefore, having known you as one God with the Father and the Spirit, we worship you in faith, blessing them.

We see this hymn affirm the two natures in the one person of Christ. This is something I’m going to be repeating several times over the course of this sermon today. We see that this council, as all of them, was more than just a statement on Christ. However, it was also an affirmation of what humans need to be saved. On top of that, the realities it shows us about Christ indicate how we as people of God should live. There are profound ramifications that I'd like to explore today.

Now we'll hear in the synaxarion a little bit later the details of this event, but in a nutshell, what took place was a need to clarify in response to harmful ideas and heresies about the natures of Christ. On the one hand, you had the Monophysite heresy, meaning one nature, which saw Christ's humanity swallowed up by his divinity, much like a teaspoon of honey or sugar would dissolve in a glass of water. On the other hand, you had the Nestorian heresy, which saw a sharp division between the two natures of Christ, the human and the divine in the one person.

To counter these, many church fathers, more than in any other council, around 600, gathered and decided on what we have believed ever since—what we know as the Chalcedonian definition. According to the OCA, what was decided was that Jesus of Nazareth is one person or the technical term here is hypostasis, in two natures, human and divine, united. And there are these four important adverbial phrases: without change, without confusion, without division, and without separation. He is fully human. He is fully divine. Perfect God, perfect man. As God, he is of one essence with the Father and the Holy Spirit. And as man, he is of one essence with all human beings.

So this was what the council decided and finished with. The fathers of this council did not go to the bother of traveling to meet up just to win an abstract theological debate, but to safeguard the salvation of humanity. Christ has to be fully divine to save and he had to be fully human to save us when he took on our human flesh. But this confirmation in the council was not just about Christ's natures, but ours too. Our human nature needed healing because Christ came not only to conquer sin and death. That's something all Christians would agree on. But something that makes us Orthodox unique is our emphasis on the fact that he came to heal our human nature by taking it on himself. Our salvation consists of being remade in the person of Christ through the Holy Spirit.

This means the uniting of our human nature with Christ's divine nature. It happens as an act and a gift of God's grace. Just like Christ is the Son of God by virtue of being God the Father's only begotten Son, we are made into children of God by adoption. The significance of this is that the unity of the divine and the human can occur not only in the person of Jesus but in every human being. Through participating in the life of the Trinity, we can have our entire human natures, wills, minds, and activities divinized, interpenetrated with the power of God, made by grace what God is by nature, so Orthodox theology tells us.

Moreover, another corollary of the outcome of this council is that we recognize that the church also has a divine element and a human element. The divine element is the presence of the Holy Spirit in the sacraments, guiding the actions of the people and invoked in prayer. The human element is the human beings that are part of it. All of us here now. Both are integral. The theologian Vladimir Lossky makes clear that when this balance is upset, things go awry. God, in his ineffable condescension, chooses to work with us. He chooses to work with this human element in the church that we may cooperate with him. The image we get throughout the scriptures to really make this clear is like a marriage, husband and wife becoming one flesh, humanity, divinity joining as one.

We see then that these tendencies in these major heresies we're speaking of, whether Monophysite or Nestorian, can also take place in the life of the church too. Allow me to explain. Just like the Nestorians wanted to separate out the divine and the human in Christ, sometimes there is a tendency in us Christians as well to separate out the human and divine elements in our own lives. As Lossky states, it's possible to fall into the trap of having on the one hand the heavenly and invisible church alone true and absolute, and on the other earthly churches imperfect and relative mere human societies.

This mentality can be reflected in the thinking that compartmentalizes our religious duties to some parts of our lives, while the rest of our life takes place without God's involvement at all. The human and the divine have been totally separated. This introduces cleavage between these two elements in our lives when there should be wholeness, a unity. We might go to church on Sunday, then we go about our other days without giving God a thought. Or we might pray in the morning and the evening, but make decisions about our time, money, possessions, actions, conversations without bringing God into the picture.

This might also be seen in churches which might get involved in social programs and temporal problems, or only the political dimension of society's issues, but without a corresponding spiritual element too. This is not the Orthodox way. In fact, what attracted me to Orthodoxy was how it takes social issues seriously but does so in a theocentric way—that is, a God-centered way. We don't separate out such things from the life of worship and prayer. So the danger here is that Orthodoxy gets relegated only to some parts of our lives and not impacting all of them.

On the other hand, sometimes we might act just like the Monophysites who saw Jesus' divinity swallowing up his humanity. That is, see in the church, in the words of Lossky, a divine being whose every detail is sacred, where human cooperation has no place, the human has been lost in the divine. With such a mentality, we might tend to magnify the tiniest detail. Whether a song is sung in one or another melody, whether an icon has been painted according to a certain technique, seeing these things as divine significance, or where the solution to any problem is simply to pray and do nothing more.

Have you heard of the expression that that person is so heavenly-minded they’re no earthly good? That’s what we’re talking about here. If it's too much in the divine way, then we spend an excessive amount of time reading about spiritual things and neglect some of our daily duties or acts of love and charity to the people around us because we are preoccupied with our private spiritual lives. In these churches, there is little engagement with the problems of the real world.

St. Paul wants none of that. That's why in his epistle to Titus, he is mandating Titus to preach to the people of Crete to apply themselves to good deeds. He says, "I desire you to insist on these things so that those who have believed in God may be careful to apply themselves to good deeds. These are excellent and profitable to men." And later, he says, "And let our people learn to apply themselves to good deeds so as to help cases of urgent need and not to be unfruitful."

What he does tell them to avoid are, I quote, "stupid controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels over the law, for they are unprofitable and futile." This takes place today. If we emphasize the divine too much, then we go into the deep end arguing over theological and spiritual matters and getting into quarrels and dissensions over them.

St. James says something similar in his epistle when he says that if a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, "Go in peace, be warmed and filled," without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? We cannot lose our human, practical touch. This is what we see in the saints. St. Paisios says we need to avoid all forms of fanaticism. If we lose this simple, grounded, humble approach, it's easy to emphasize too much the divine.

There's a good example my theology professor liked to explain to illustrate this, from the sayings of the desert fathers, one Abba Lucius countered a particular heresy of the Mealianism. He met one day with some Mealians. Mealians, like the Monophysites, wanted to emphasize the divine to such an extent that all they did was pray. Sounds good, right? They believed in unceasing prayer and were against possessions and work because they thought work would distract from prayer. One day, Mealians visited Abba Lucius, and he asked them, "What is your manual work?" They said, "We have no manual work, but we do as the apostle says, pray without ceasing." He said, "Do you not eat?" They said they did. He said, "When you are eating, who prays for you then?" He said, "Do you not sleep?" They said, "Of course, Father, we sleep." He said, "When you are sleeping, who prays for you then?" He said to them, "Forgive me, but do you do as you claim?" He said, "I sit down and pray while I do my work, plating my baskets, and say, 'Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.' Is this not prayer?" They said, "Yes, Father, it is prayer." He says, "I make thirteen pieces of money. I leave two outside my door for almsgiving to the poor, and the rest I use to pay for my food. The poor who take my money pray for me while I eat and sleep. By grace of God, I fulfill the precept to pray without ceasing." The Mealians went away ashamed.

This is what we see—a simple balance still very prayerful. Of course, we have nothing against prayer, but it incorporates a practical dimension of work and a compassionate dimension of almsgiving and charity, such as the Orthodox way. The solution for us is a oneness, a synergy of all these things. As we progress in theosis, the healing of our nature, we move more into inner unity rather than fragmentation. Unity rather than extremes of one or the other. We are to avoid all extremes and fanaticism. We have to engage with the real human problems of this world but do so in a divine manner.

There are many things we can do. Here's a short list. We can look to the life of Christ and the saints and see how for them prayer, services of the church, asceticism, love for others, and mercy were all one, all in unity. We can think about advice from St. Ephron of Essex. He recommends developing the habit of praying before making any decision throughout the day, no matter what. That's a habit to work on. It's not easy, right, to remember God throughout the day. If possible, especially for important matters, pray three times and then act.

Try to cultivate a feeling of doing all activities under God's watch and for his sake. Here's a good line—act as if it all depends on you, but believe and trust as if it all depends on God. That’s a good way to ensure doing your end of the bargain, but placing the outcome ultimately in God’s hands. Consider your balance between love of God and love of neighbor, see which is falling short. Avoid any dualist thinking: this part of life is spiritual, this part is not, this is for God, this is for me.

You might like to balance your lofty theological reading with reading Proverbs or Wisdom of Sirach to stay grounded and practical. These are ways to bring the power and assistance of the Holy Spirit into our situation, no longer dealing with them merely humanly, but divinely. Make life more interpenetrated with the divine, such cooperation with God that in words of Timothy Patitzus the theologian, there be no clear separation between acting and God’s acting in our lives.

So we might come closer to saying with St. Paul, "It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me."

We see the council of Chalcedon affirmed Christ’s human and divine natures, done to keep safe a doctrine of Christ saving us. Following on from this, as a church collectively and in our lives, we need a human and divine approach to things. We need a church fully human, alive to the real and hurting world here and now, exercising her utmost for ailing humanity, but also fully divine, devoted to prayer and sacrament, cultivating the mystical life. May God help us correct our imbalances, make changes necessary to fulfill St. Maximus the Confessor’s words to reunite created nature to the uncreated through love, causing them to appear in unity and identity through grace in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.