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Editor’s Note: This article is part of an October 2017 series of posts on the Reformation and Protestantism written by O&H authors and guest writers marking the 500th anniversary of the nailing of Martin Luther’s 95 theses to the church door at Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. Articles are written by Orthodox Christians and discuss not just the Reformation as a historical event but also the spiritual heritage that descended from it.<\/i><\/p>\n
A<\/span> friend had written that some Calvinist detractors of Orthodoxy sought to attack us as Monophysites since we held to what they thought was a Lutheran doctrine: ubiquity, that the human nature in which Christ now lives is everywhere his divine nature is (which doctrine you won\u2019t find in the Lutheran divines). We Orthodox have to hold this, my friend’s debaters maintained, in order to believe that Christ is physically present in the Sacred Eucharist.<\/p>\n But this errs on three counts.<\/p>\n First, we humans are more than our bodies, and also, bodily deficiency doesn\u2019t make us less human: as if one were less human if bald, one-legged, blind, deaf, etc. Being composite, humans have bodies, and they are part of our human nature, but these bodies can corrupt, and even at death, while sundered from the body, we are still human. Thus, while necessarily having bodies, we are neither only our bodies, but we are not human without them.<\/p>\n Secondly, and more to the theological point, on the ubiquitarian front, in Orthodoxy there is no need for it. For the Orthodox, Christ is made present physically on the altar by the same Spirit that made him physically present in the Virgin\u2019s womb. For the Orthodox it is the presence of the Spirit that brings Christ\u2019s body to the altar, though you will also find that in a number of Fathers (including St. John Chrysostom) that the blessing of the bread and the repetition of the words of institution (“This is my body”) also effects the change, though of course St. John uses an epiclesis<\/em>. Christ\u2019s risen body, like the multiplied loaves, like his ability to appear and vanish, is not bound to space and time, though it is a body in space and time. As it needed not male agency but only the power of the Holy Spirit to be conceived in the Blessed Virgin\u2019s womb, so it needs only the power of the Spirit to come on the altars.<\/p>\n But the whole question of my friend\u2019s interlocutor errs thirdly, and more importantly, in that it would be news to the Fathers at Chalcedon that they denied the communicatio idiomatum<\/em> (the communication of what is proper to each nature to the Person of Christ, so that one may say, e.g., that “God has died”). They revolted when the Roman legates and the Imperial senate wanted to seat Theodoret of Cyr, for he had denied this doctrine in his writings defending Nestorius against St. Cyril of Alexandria. Indeed, the Fathers of the council had not seated him. Only when Theodoret had appealed to the Pope and the imperial power, asserting his agreement (falsely, it now has been shown) with Cyril of Alexandria on this matter, was he allowed to attend.<\/p>\n Further, the whole defense of Chalcedon, both during the Council and afterwards, was predicated on that doctrine, and that Chalcedon was consonant with everything that Cyril of Alexandria taught. When the Fathers took up Pope St. Leo\u2019s tomus<\/em> they balked at his formula of \u201cin two natures,\u201d for it was not Cyrillian. But the commission that investigated the tomus<\/em> came back with strong recommendations that it be adopted, all based on its consonance with St. Cyril.<\/p>\n When the bishops, some 160 of them, signed that they accepted Leo, it was with acknowledgments that “Cyril speaks through Leo,” and that St. Leo\u2019s formula did not differ from Cyril\u2019s, even though it did not use his \u201cGod-honored language.\u201d But the rub came when the final formula of Chalcedon set aside St. Cyril’s \u201cfrom two natures,\u201d for it was seen that this formula did not guard against the conclusions that Eutyches had drawn from them, and the fathers opting for \u201cin two natures\u201d (an earlier version had used \u201cfrom two natures\u201d). The \u201cin two natures\u201d language, drawn from pope St. Leo, had clearly defended St. Cyril\u2019s and the formula of union\u2019s teaching on communicatio idiomatum<\/em><\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Thus, far from denying the sharing of properties in the one Lord Jesus Christ, Chalcedon was at great pains to defend and assert this.<\/p>\n So why do my friend\u2019s Calvinist interlocutors want to deny this? It\u2019s quite simple: their theology (which was Calvin\u2019s and Peter Martyr Vermigli\u2019s) forces them to deny that most fundamental of all Christian truths: that there is but one God and one Mediator between God and man, Himself man, Christ Jesus.<\/p>\n The Reformed denied that the sharing of properties was anything but verbal, and you can read both Calvin and Vermigli on this (look up any decent discussion of the so-called extra-calvinisticum<\/em>). Vermigli goes so far as to deny that God actually shared our human nature in anything but a seeming way (videatur), or that the Logos suffered (contra<\/i> “One of the Holy Trinity suffered in the flesh,” as emperor St. Justinian put it).<\/p>\n The Reformed are in their most fundamental essentials Nestorian, and this has to be the case, for they deny that the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son, the Word, mediates and is the only mediator between God and man, and instead erect another mediator, called \u201ccovenantal righteousness\u201d or \u201cjustice,\u201d and all on account of their doctrine of covenant. (Nestorius claimed it was another fictive device called the prosopon of union.)<\/p>\n The \u201cmerit\u201d of this covenant, performed by the man Jesus, and not the Second Person of the Trinity, brings us to God. Vermigli brings all of this out in his Dialogue on the Two Natures in Christ<\/em>, ostensibly written against the Lutheran Eucharistic doctrine of the theologian Johannes Brenz to teach him what \u201cChalcedon taught\u201d but which in the end denies not only what Chalcedon taught, but also Ephesus and Constantinople I, and St. Gregory the Theologian, for it is the assumption of our nature by Christ that heals it (what is not assumed is not redeemed).<\/p>\n Note what Vermigli says (he\u2019s here actually citing and using Theoderet of Cyr):<\/p>\n In his third dialogue [Theodoret] adds, “Saint Peter in his catholic epistle says that Christ suffered in the flesh. But he who hears Christ understands not the incorporeal God the Word, but the incarnate Word. The name of Christ signifies both natures. That the Word was subjected to suffering in the flesh signifies that one nature, not both, suffered. He who hears that Christ suffered in the flesh again recognizes him as the impassible God, but attributes the suffering to the flesh alone.”<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n This quote obliterates the union that the Word has with human nature, for at best it makes it a fiction, and effectively creates, as had Nestorius, two Words. A few folios on, Vermigli cites Theodoret\u2019s citation of Eustathius, and observes that, \u201cThese words also show which properties are so much a part of human nature that they cannot be communicated to the Word.”<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> One must ask, is anything created communicable then to the Word? Can anything be assumed? What might Gregory of Nazianzus think of this theology? He already told us, we don\u2019t have to guess.<\/p>\n Vermigli then quotes Cyril of Alexandria from his letter to John of Antioch, standing him on his head by his translation:\u00a0 <\/p>\n Besides, we all confess that the Word of God is impassible even though in distributing wisely this mystery the Word seems<\/strong> to have attributed to itself the suffering that happened uniquely to the flesh. That wise man Peter says as much, \u2018Christ suffered in the flesh\u2019 for us; he did not say, \u2018in the nature of his ineffable divinity.\u2019\u201d …. From this passage it is already taken for granted that the sufferings of Christ belong to his flesh, but it speaks about the Word insofar as the Word attributes them to itself. And so they belong to the Word in the judgment and statement of Scripture, not because the Word Itself really suffered and died. <\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n And while someone might argue that it was the divine Christ who obeyed God, and thus in his divine activity is the mediator of the covenant, and not just his obedience as a man, Calvin explicitly states that there was nothing about Christ as divine that was worthy of God accepting his obedience (cf. Institutes 2.17).<\/p>\n Further, Calvin states that the actions of Christ are two, whose humanity can act independently of the divine Logos (cf. his commentary on Matthew 24; other places can be drawn, such as Calvin\u2019s statement that the person of the Incarnation comes from both natures). No, it was merely by God\u2019s good will that anything is accepted (verging here on Luther\u2019s nominalism). Thus, in Covenant theology (as supposed by Calvinists) Christ obeys the law that Adam failed to do, and by this merits us justice in his justice. The legal debt is paid, and Christ suffers God\u2019s wrath on the cross. The denial of the communication of properties turns Christ into the executor of a legal fiction like a corporation, instead of it being his personal, hypostatic union that effects salvation for us.<\/p>\n Contrary to what these Reformers wrote, the Second Person of the Divine and ever-blessed Trinity, God the Word, assumed a human nature, but was no human person. In his divine person he mediates divinity to humanity, and humanity to divinity. This is what St. Cyril saw as the great error of Nestorius, that he had posited yet another person (which then takes residence in the Trinity) arising out of the union of Christ-God and Jesus-man, a sort of legal fiction if you will, though Nestorius\u2019s doctrine was what was termed the prosopic union.<\/p>\n