This chapter considers the ways in which the classical credal and conciliar formulae provide a framework for understanding who Jesus Christ is and how God saves through the Incarnate Word. These credal and conciliar formulae provide the foundation for theologies across the spectrum of Christian traditions. The chapter is broadly divided into two sections, one focusing on the fourth century Trinitarian controversies, the second focusing on the christological controversies of the fifth to the seventh centuries. For classical Christian theology, only when Jesus is known as the Word made flesh, and as one coequal to Father and Spirit in the divine life, can the work of redemption be understood.

The fourth century AD historian Ammianus Marcellinus remarked that “no wild beasts are such enemies to mankind as are most of the Christians in their deadly hatred of one another.” More to the point, the discussion of the nature of Christ drove a wedge within Christian communities in Antioch as elsewhere and ignited conflicts on a unprecedented scale. This chapter describes how the playing out of these debates had repercussions at all the levels of Antiochene society.

Beginning from Augustine’s doctrine of the totus Christus (the “whole Christ”), this chapter argues for a distinction between the “act of incarnation” (the Word’s assumption of human nature) and the “work of incarnation,” the Word’s providential dispensation of the created causes that affect and shape Her humanity.

This chapter develops a Reformed version of kenotic Christology. In the place of two discreet (substantially conceived) “natures” subsisting in one and the same “person,” this chapter posits the existence of a single composite hypostasis, constituted in time by means of what it calls the “ontological receptivity” of the eternal Son to the “act of being” proper to the human Jesus as human. It is the Son’s “ontological receptivity” that makes an eternal act of “identification” on the part of the Logos with the human Jesus to be constitutive of his identity as the second “person” of the Trinity even before the actual uniting occurs. What emerges is in the spirit of Chalcedon even if it is not according to the letter. This chapter develops this Christology, shows how it follows the spirit of Chalcedon, and defends it against possible objections.

Taking its cue from Barth, who suggested that the human humility and obedience of Jesus Christ are grounded in God’s being as God, this introduction outlines the argument of the book as a whole. The book attempts to reestablish the credibility of Chalcedonian logic on the soil of Barth’s theology through developing a “Reformed kenotic Christology.” Through the ontological receptivity of the eternal Son, the humility and obedience of Jesus are made to be his “own” in a sense that makes it clear that the subject of that human attitude and activity is also the eternal Son. The result is a pneumatologically driven two-“natures” Christology. This introduction outlines the explanation of this argument as it unfolds through the entire book and discusses the methodology used in the following chapters.

This chapter argues that there is a logical aporia at the very heart of the Chalcedonian Definition: namely, that Jesus of Nazareth contributes nothing to the constitution of the “person,” or, said differently, that he stands in no real relation to the Logos. This aporia has its origins in a twofold historical pressure: the desire to affirm a unified subject and in Gregory of Nazianzus’ declaration that “the unassumed is the unhealed.” Throughout this chapter the historical conditions for this aporia are explored in the theologies of Origen, Apollinaris, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Cyril of Alexandria. The chapter argues that the majority of the bishops at Chalcedon followed Cyril in making the preexistent Logos as such to be the “person of the union,” leading to this aporia in the Chalcedonian Definition. The chapter ends with John of Damascus’ Christology and his solution to working with the given Chalcedonian definition.

Although Egypt in the fifth century was highly integrated into the empire, it also began to develop new elements of distinctiveness. In part this trend resulted from divisions in theology and church politics that emerged around the Council of Chalcedon in 451, leading to deep splits in the church by the middle of the sixth century and the creation of competing church hierarchies. The native Egyptian language came to have its own literature and began to be used more widely in official contexts. At the same time, Alexandria remained a vibrant center of Greek culture, which permeated the rest of Egypt as well. The economic and social elite of the cities, increasingly closely tied to the imperial administration, concentrated wealth and power in their hands to a degree not seen earlier, even as most of the population continued to live in villages and work the land.