Scripture and God in Christianity

humanity. It was impossible to deny his humanity as, according to the Gospels, he has been a historical
reality. But how to interpret the relationship between his divine and human nature? "The
difficulty of thinking of Christ", writes McGiffert, "as both divine and human had always been
recognized and had led to docetism on one side and adoptionism on the other. The acceptance of
the real deity of Christ made the problem all the more insistent." 656 The Fathers before the fourth
century were not conscious of this problem. Now, after the settlement of the dogma of Christ's
divinity at the Nicene Council, the problem became more acute and drew more attention. "A few
decades after Nicea", says Elert, "the theme of the formation of dogma shifted completely....Now
the theme is not the pre-existent Son of God, but the incarnate one. Not the relation of God to
God is now at issue, but the relation of God to man in the person of the earthly Christ who dwelt
among men." 657
It was Apollinarius (d. 390), bishop of Laodicea and a close friend of Athanasius, who proposed
a somewhat rational solution to this complex problem. Apollinarianism, observes Kelly, "was in
fact the most subtle and thoroughgoing attempt to work out a theory of Christ's Person in the
fourth century, and carried tendencies long accepted in the Alexandrian school to their logical
limit." 658 As said earlier, according to Athanasius and in the Nicene Creed, the proper divinity
was safeguarded to ensure redemption. It was strongly held that only the true Son of God could
reveal God to man. Apollinarius, following this Word-flesh Christology, argued that this act of
redemption would not be possible without the deification of the man Jesus Christ. Therefore, he
contended that Jesus has only one theanthropic or divine-human nature as at incarnation the Logos,
a divine spirit or mind, was combined and united with the human body and soul and since
then became the active personal element in Jesus while relegating the human element comprised
of the body and soul to the secondary level or passive level. The frankly acknowledged presupposition
of this argument, observes Kelly, "is that the divine Word was substituted for the normal
human psychology in Christ." 659 He believed that if the divine is separated from the human in the
Christ, the salvation would be imperiled. "He could not redeem us from our sins, revivify us, or
raise us from the dead. How could we worship Him, or be baptized into His death, if He was only
an ordinary man indwelt by the Godhead? " 660 In his confession he summarized this theme, "We
declare that the Logos of God became man for the purpose of our salvation, so that we might receive
the likeness of the heavenly One and be made God after the likeness of the true Son of God
according to nature and the Son of man according to flesh, our Lord Jesus Christ." 661 In this
process of complete fusion or union the human, the historical Jesus and his humanity was " swallowed
up into the divinity", 662 and was completely transformed by the divine Logos. He used to
delight in speaking of Christ as "God incarnate", "flesh-bearing God", or "God born of a
woman". He concluded saying "One and the same is the body and the God, of whom it is the
body, not that the flesh has been changed into that which is incorporeal, but that it has a property
which is from us..., in accordance with the generation from the Virgin, and that which is above
us..., in accordance with the mixture or union with God the Logos." 663 He affirmed that Christ's
flesh was "divine flesh" or "the flesh of God" and was proper object of worship. It was a virtually
a clear docetic tendency implying that Christ was not a real man but only appeared as a man.
It means that Christ in his incarnation retained his divine soul, nature or ousia and did not adopt a
human rational soul or nature. It is because of this denial of a human rational soul in Christ, says
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