Thursday, November 5, 2020
John 1.18
No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.
Best work done on the issue TF Torrence, “Space, Time, and Incarnation”.
Brings about how the Greek Fathers (Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria, Gregory of Nanzianzus) and in the West, Hilary of Poitiers – realized that you cannot say God is spatially related to space (because then he is then part of creation). Rather, God’s relation to space is in terms of power. When Christ remains God while taking on our humanity in the womb of the virgin, he still retains his godness and his relationship to space in terms of power.
God is not enclosed. Christ truly takes on the body, yet his divinity is not enclosed by it.
Communication of properties: communicatio idiomatum
see: https://heidelblog.net/2013/06/the-reformed-doctrine-of-the-communicatio/
Each nature does what is proper to it. And what is proper to one nature is not directly attributed to the other nature, but to the person.
Attributes of humanity are directly attributed to the person – not to the nature of the other.
Humanity is not swallowed up or transmuted into the divinity and vice versa.
Communication of idioms is a way of helping us understand that each nature does what is proper to itself in direct communication with the person.
doctrine of anhypostasia: The quality of Jesus Christ’s humanity, such that it has its existence entirely from the hypostatic union, rather than from any independent human personhood (or hypostasis). The concept does not deny Jesus’s personhood, but denies that Jesus’s humanity has any personhood apart from the one hypostasis in which his humanity and divinity are united.
Heinrich Heppe- Reformed Dogmatics
https://heidelblog.net/2019/12/classic-reformed-theology-series/
A second influential scholar in the same period, Heinrich Heppe (1820–79), argued that there were two competing strains within Reformed theology, the Calvinists-predestinarian strain and the Melanchthonian-covenantal strain.10 Heppe regarded the latter to be a reaction to the former. Thus, in his view, German Reformed theology was “standing halfway between the Lutherans and the Calvinists.”11 Heppe’s presentation of Reformed theology became particularly important for two reasons. First, his idiosyncratic source book of quotations from a host of Reformed writers from the classical period was likely the way the most influential twentieth-century Reformed theologian, Karl Barth (1886–1968), became aware of Reformed orthodoxy.12 Second, the English translation of Heppe’s Reformed Dogmatics has been and continues to be used widely by teachers and students of Protestant orthodoxy.13 Those who relied upon these summaries, not having read the primary sources in context, often failed to recognize that Heppe’s presentation was “marred by a series of profound problems.”14
The words enhypostasis and anhypostasis are used to describe Jesus’ relationship to human nature.
The word enhypostasis is used to denote this fact. En- means the same as the English word in—Jesus was really “in” human nature and was a real human person. So, by using the word enhypostasis, theologians are saying that Jesus did possess real human personhood, but that it could not stand alone (as His divine nature could and did).
So how did the Son of God become human? If He took a human hypostasis, it would mean that He took on or inhabited a pre-existing human being—He entered an embryo that had already been conceived in Mary’s womb and that would have, had God not overruled, been born as someone else. To ensure that no one thinks this is Christian teaching, the word anhypostasis is used, an- being a negator. Jesus did not take over a human hypostasis—Jesus did not seize another human and appropriate control of that human’s nature. We could say that the humanity that He put on was impersonal.
Enhypostasia=His human personality is established in the person of the Logos. He has genuine human emotions and attributes to be what it means to be a human person.
Did the humanity of Christ? Did his divinity have a beginning?
When did his humanity takes it origin? Conception. So the humanity of our Lord was not existing before the miraculous conception.
Anhypostasia=non-personal. This is not affirming that Christ’s humanity was impersonal, rather it had no antecedent existence before the miraculous conception. His humanity begins to be through the action of God. This cuts out all kinds of adoptionism.
The 2nd Council of Constantinople 680ad: The Second Council of Constantinople is the fifth of the first seven ecumenical councils
Condemned the Monothelites (μονοθελητισμός) – The doctrine is contrary to dyothelitism, the christological doctrine that Jesus Christ has two wills (human and divine), which correspond to his two natures.
The Monothelites were a group that were essentially arguing he could not be tempted (they weren’t real) because God could not be tempted. They were essentially denying his human will. He was tempted in every way, yet without sin.
((A side issue over the statements of Pope Honorius I and his condemnation by the council arose in discussions concerning papal infallibility))
The Council was presided over by Eutychius, Patriarch of Constantinople, assisted by the other three eastern patriarchs or their representatives.[5] Pope Vigilius was also invited; but even though he was at this period resident in Constantinople (to avoid the perils of life in Italy, convulsed by the war against the Ostrogoths), he declined to attend, and even issued a document forbidding the council from preceding without him (his ‘First Constitutum’). For more details see Pope Vigilius.
The council, however, proceeded without the pope to condemn the Three Chapters. And during the seventh session of the council, the bishops had Vigilius stricken from the diptychs for his refusal to appear at the council and approve its proceedings, effectively excommunicating him personally but not the rest of the Western Church.