A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

carried out miracles and as human when he ate and drank with his disciples?
Were his teachings to be allocated to either his divine or his human capacity
according to their content? Did his divinity affect the degree to which he could
endure the suffering he apparently underwent for the saving of mankind? 15
When the problem had been discussed in the early Church, two opposing
parties emerged. The Adoptionists, on the one hand, believed that Jesus was
fully human but had been ‘adopted’ by God, at either his birth, his baptism or his
resurrection. But the ‘divinity’ conferred on him by his adoption in no way
compromised his humanity and he suffered for mankind on the Cross without
any lessening of the agony that other humans would feel. At the other extreme
were the Docetists, who argued that while Jesus went through the motions of
being human, he was actually divine all the time. Clement of Alexandria, for
instance, claimed that while Jesus appeared to eat and drink, he did not actually
digest the food or have any need to excrete waste! It somehow just disappeared.
The problem this approach left was whether he could actually suffer on the Cross
if his body was not subject to human feelings and pain. Without any pain, the
Crucifixion was hardly an impressive act of salvation.
There was a great deal of open ground, one might say, in the bitter debate that
followed, a hotly contested ‘no man’s land’ between these extremes. After 381,
the debate was made more, rather than less, difficult by the need to reconcile a
definition of Jesus’ humanity with Nicene orthodoxy. Arius had avoided the
problem simply by saying that Jesus was a lesser divinity and that his divinity
was never so great as to deprive him of the pain of suffering. Now this option
was no longer open to orthodox Christians, and the debate reached a new level
of intractability as a result. The wrangling that followed was intensified by the
rivalry between the bishops of ‘upstart’ Constantinople and of Alexandria, which
still festered at the loss of its ancient status in 381.
A new Bishop of Constantinople, Nestorius, took office in 428. He claimed to
be a scourge of heretics, and in his inaugural sermon before Theodosius II he
asked for imperial support in his crusade, in return for which he promised
victory in war: ‘Give me, king, the earth purged of heretics, and I will give you
heaven in return. Aid me in destroying heretics, and I will assist you in
vanquishing the Persians.’ 16 Such, however, was the confusion over what was or
was not orthodoxy and the personal and political antagonisms of the period that
very soon it was Nestorius who was declared the heretic! He had, perhaps
unwisely, entered the debate over the humanity of Jesus by suggesting that the