It was not until the fifth Christian century that the Church reached at the council of Chalcedon a definitive statement of its belief concerning the nature of Jesus Christ. This decision was preceded by a long era of controversy, first that in which against the Arians it was affirmed that the Son of God is not a created being but is of the essential nature of God Himself, and secondly that in which there was hammered out the relation between this divine, uncreated nature of the Son of God on one hand and the human nature of the Man Jesus on the other. To this latter question the Chalcedonian formula gave what was for the main body of the Church the nearest approach to an adequate answer, and it reads as follows:

‘One and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, inconvertibly, indivisibly, inseparably.… ’