These are transcripts from a spoken lecture. The audio is attached to this lesson. If there is any confusion from reading the transcript, please refer to the audio for clarification.
We’re doing our march through the seven Ecumenical Councils of the early church of the first millennium. We’ve made our way through the Council of Nicaea in 325, the Council of Constantinople, and the Council of Ephesus, and here we arrive at the Council of Chalcedon at 451 AD.
I’d mentioned early on when we talked about terms and concepts, I talked about Chalcedonian Christology, and how oftentimes, when people talk about Trinitarianism, they’ll talk about Nicene Trinitarianism, and when they talk about Christology, they’ll mention Chalcedonian Christology. The reason, as we said, is because those are named for certain Ecumenical Councils. Nicene Trinitarianism being named for the Council of Nicaea, even though it really involves Nicaea and Constantinople, and then the Council of Chalcedon here that we’ll talk about today.
The reason Chalcedon is typically pegged as the council to name when talking about Christology and Orthodox Christology is because, as we’ve seen, there’s sort of this progression that’s happening in the conversation. It was at Constantinople that this issue of whether or not Christ is fully human really first emerged. We saw that Apollinaris had suggested that maybe Christ doesn’t have a human mind. That’s how an incarnation is accomplished, that really the rational spirit is removed from the human person, and the Logos or the Word of God enters and fills that spot. And we saw the problems with that proposal. One of the main problems being the insistence that Christ, in the Incarnation, is taking on our nature in order to heal and restore it.
